Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction 0415703344, 9780415703345

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Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction

“This project is clearly indispensable for philosophers and linguists alike. Tamar Sovran’s novel contribution adds greatly, from an original cognitive linguistic point of view, to the conceptual analyses by well-known philosophers such as Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The reader may be surprised to realize that beneath the different philosophical debates over each of the major concepts being discussed, there is a common basis for some consent. This is a great novelty, the importance of which cannot be overestimated”.  —Amihud Gilead, Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel This book addresses major contemporary issues in the philosophy of language and theoretical semantics through an analytical study of meaning relations in English and Hebrew. It links the philosophical tradition of conceptual analysis with recent theories and methodologies in cognitive semantics. It applies the tools of relational semantics to explore the relations between cognate words in abstract frames and elucidate their infrastructure and the metaphorical and perceptual models that constitute them. It analyzes the structure of several areas of the abstract lexicon that encompass the lexical realization of concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘similarity’, ‘difference’, ‘negativity’, and ‘norm’. The final chapter deals with the role of abstraction in poetic metaphors by ascending the scale of abstraction. The comparison of abstract concepts in Hebrew and English shows that the structure of the abstract lexicon reflects human preconcepts in the spatio-temporal and logical dimensions, as well as the basic pragmatic human preferences for identity and stability, containment and class membership, vectors, directions, and values. Tamar Sovran is Professor of Semantics in the Hebrew Culture Studies Department of Tel Aviv University, Israel.

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9 Lesbian Discourses Images of a Community Veronika Koller 10 Structure in Language A Dynamic Perspective Thomas Berg 11 Metaphor and Reconciliation The Discourse Dynamics of Empathy in Post-Conflict Conversations Lynne J. Cameron 12 Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Tamar Sovran

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Tamar Sovran

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Tamar Sovran to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sovran, Tamar.   Relational semantics and the anatomy of abstraction / By Tamar Sovran.    pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Linguistics ; 12)   Includes bibliographical references and index.  1. Semantics  2. Semantics—Mathematical models.  3. Modality (Logic) I. Title.   P325S68 2013  401'.43—dc23  2013014052 ISBN: 978-0-415-70334-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-79472-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of my sister, Nira Rapaport

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

ix xi 1

2 Background and Method

10

3 Similarity

21

4 Difference

47

5 Negativity

65

6 Truth

83

7 Norm

97

8 Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor

123

9 Conclusion

151

Notes References Index

155 165 181

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Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

FrameNet: Similarity, frame-frame relations Tentative subgroups of similarity nouns Shades of similarity—the emergence of structure The polysemous nature of dimyon (similarity) in Hebrew The Hebrew root d.m.y and its derivations The systematic ambiguity of ‘the same’ in English The systematic ambiguity of the Hebrew ‘oto (the same) ‘The same’ for one or for many The use and the meaning of ‘as’ Shades of ‘difference’ Pairs of components: logic and space-time Logic, space-time, and what else? An odd word-sorting thought experiment The real experiment Sample results Truth table for negation Truth table for conjunction Concepts related to ‘norm’ Between ‘normal’ and ‘normative’ Subdomains in the frame of ‘norm’ Above and below the line of ‘norm’ Specifications of the realm of COUNT The realm of NONCOUNTs Boundaries and categories Modifying abstract entities

29 32 33 36 37 38 39 39 43 52 55 56 72 73 74 84 85 103 103 105 119 143 144 145 146

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Acknowledgments

This book benefited from many individuals: teachers, colleagues, friends, and family. My interest in philosophy of language and semantics was inspired by two great scholars whose loss is still felt—the late Yehoshu’a Bar Hillel and Amos Tversky. Two living scholars are still a source of ­inspiration for me: Avishay Margalit and Ray Jackendoff. I am deeply grateful to Amihud Gilad, Maya Fruchtman, Elda Weizman, and Dalia Gavriely Nuri; I value very much the steady support and encouragement I have received from all of them. My colleagues in the Hebrew Culture Studies department at Tel Aviv University provided me with their professional and personal ­friendship. My students have always been a source of intellectual challenge and new ideas. I thank the publishers and editors for their kind permission to use and revise my earlier articles. I am very grateful to Esther Singer, my devoted and talented editor, and to the skillful editors at Routledge for their professional and pleasant cooperation. My family has always been a source of joy and comfort. My husband, Benjamin; my sons Roy, Yair, and Iddo; my daughters-in-law, Einav and ­Avital; and my sweet, dear grandchildren, Uri, Amir, Noga, and Romy— I offer you this volume as a gesture of love. CREDITS Elsevier for permission to revise and use my 1992 article, “Between Similarity and Sameness”, published in the Journal of Pragmatics 18(4): 329–344 and used here in Chapter 3. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Łodz University Press for their kind permission to use my article in the volume edited by Professor Lewandowska-Tomaszczykin, 1998: T. Sovran, “Is there a Semantic Field of Negativity?” In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Lexical Semantics and Philosophy (pp. 89–99) published in Łodz University Press and revised in Chapter 5.

xii Acknowledgments Presses Universitaires de Nancy for their kind permission to revise my article “Polysemy and Semantic Frames—A Diachronic Study of TRUTH” in Hebrew, published in 2004 in Verbum 26(1): 89–100 and revised in Chapter 6. Parts of Chapter 7, ‘Norm’, are based on my 2004 chapter, “From vanity to grace—a case study of metaphorical frame contacts”, which appeared in a volume edited by D. Diskin Ravid and H. Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot: Perspectives on Language and Language Development (pp. 73–86), Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 8 is a revised version of my 1993 article, “Metaphor as ­reconciliation—The logical-semantic basis of metaphorical juxtaposition”, Poetics Today 14 (1): 25–48, Duke University Press.

1

Introduction

This book is a study of meaning relations in abstract areas of the lexicon. Meaning relations shed light on the structure of the lexicon and are especially helpful when dealing with the abstract, less accessible parts of the lexicon, where concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘similarity’, ‘difference’, ‘negativity’, and ‘norm’ are found. People use words like ‘truth’ or ‘difference’ to convey ideas. They probably have some idea of what these words mean, but what these words refer to in the world, their status in the mental lexicon or in actual verbal interaction, is not very clear. Unlike ‘monkey’, ‘car’, or even ‘fear’ or ‘support’, there is no direct, ostensive way to point to the reference of these words; that is, there is no way to designate the objects or events in the real world to which they refer. Abstract words appear to have a special status, and understanding their meaning is a challenge. Is there a class of words for abstract ‘concepts’? If so, how can this class be determined? What does this class include? What is its structure? How is it constructed? Finally, what is its place in the lexicon? 1.1  CONCEPTS AND CONCEPTUALIZATION The compound ‘abstract concept’ raises yet another question: what does the word ‘concept’ denote? Answers to this question vary and depend on the discipline and the scientific orientation of those who opt to employ this word, or avoid it. For instance, Pustejovsky and Boguraev, the editors of Lexical Semantics: the Problem of Polysemy (1997), did not include an entry for ‘concept’ in their index. On the other hand, Language in Mind— Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, edited by Gentner and Goldin-Meadow (2003), has more than thirty index references for ‘concept’, ‘conceptual’, ‘conceptualization’, and related subjects such as ‘category’, ‘knowledge’, ‘cluster/group/domain’, and ‘representation’. This difference is related to the nature of Gentner and Goldin-Meadow’s book, its explicit exploration of the relations between language and thought, and the fact that most of the contributors are psycholinguists who have either a cognitive or a developmental background in psychology.

2  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Jackendoff is a theoretical linguist, not a psycholinguist, yet one of his recent books (2011) has index entries for ‘concept’ and ‘concept-word meaning’ and several index references to ‘conceptual structure’. The book opens with the question: “What is the connection between your language and your thought?” Jackendoff’s earlier seminal book Foundations of Language (2002) deals extensively with ‘concepts’, the ‘conceptual system’, ‘conceptual integration’, and ‘conceptual structure’ in primates as well as humans. Jackendoff describes his undertaking as “looking at thought through the lens of language” as it relates to “inference, background knowledge, perception and action” (273). He claims that conscious attention to language and thought developed in humans, along with the ability to categorize and reason. This linguistic view owes much to Chomsky’s focus on mental abilities and competence, but goes beyond the Chomskyan agenda by widening the scope from syntax to other areas of mental activity, and particularly to conceptualization, which has traditionally been associated with semantics. In his wide-ranging study of the Architecture of the Language Faculty (1997a), Jackendoff suggested replacing the traditional account of the semantic layer of language with an explicit description of the ‘conceptual system’, its unique structure, and its mode of functioning through a description of its interrelations with other cognitive functions and modalities, such as syntax, sensory perception, logic, and action. Developmental studies provide empirical support for this view of mental functions and conceptual organization. In her book The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought, Mandler (2004) showed that even two month olds can categorize and conceptualize natural kinds and artifacts, a crucial precondition for the development of human intelligence and human language.1 Cognitive scientists Sperber and Wilson view the notion of ‘concept’ in a very different way. They begin their article entitled “The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon” (1998, 1) with the statement that “There are words in language we speak and concepts in our mind . . . Mental concepts are relatively stable and distinct structures in the mind, comparable to entries in an encyclopedia or to permanent files in a database. Their occurrence in a mental representation may determine matching causal and formal (semantic or logical) relationships”. This type of statement elicits no debate because it is so general. Rather, the difference between Sperber and Wilson and other thinkers concerns the status they assign to concepts. Sperber and Wilson are committed to their own inferential view of meaning as part of their Theory of Relevance. The meaning of the lexeme ‘open’, for example, varies across contexts: opening a bottle of wine is different from opening a washing machine in normal everyday use, and the latter differs from the way the machine is ‘opened’ by a plumber when it needs to be fixed. Since context and inference play such a crucial role in Relevance Theory, and since the role of concepts in mental representation cannot be ignored, Sperber and Wilson assign a higher degree of instability to the notion of ‘concept’.

Introduction  3 Sperber and Wilson primarily take issue with Fodor’s encoding theory, dubbed ‘mentalese’, which assumes that concepts and propositions are represented in the mind as innate primitives. Fodor (1975) claimed that humans are endowed with a rich system of concepts that comprise ‘mentalese’. This mental source guarantees young children’s acquisition of a language ability that relies on matching new sounds they hear with the innate concepts they possess in their minds. Specifically, Fodor stated, “It may be that the resources of the inner code are rather directly represented in the resources we use for communication” (1975, 156). Fodor’s theory has been severely criticized for ignoring the growth and changes in individuals’ language and the dramatic changes in scientific knowledge over generations. His theory leads to the absurd conclusion that all scientific innovations have some representations in the minds of every human being, including those of much older generations (Churchland 1978). Such debates do not center on whether concepts exist, but rather, on their degree of stability, their dependency on inferences, and their tendency to vary and be sensitive to varied contexts. Although contemporary linguists, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and others are interested in the relations between language and thought, they do not always agree about the nature of mental representations or the conceptual system. However, they all accept its existence as a theoretical basis of inquiry. Lyons (1977) put an asterisk (*) after terms such as refer (3) reflexivity (5), use, mention (6) collocation (241), inalienable (312), and many others to show his cautious attitude toward technical terms, which are sometimes not technical at all but rather theoretical, and as such may gloss over profound disagreements. This typographical device has theoretical importance in that Lyons uses it to inform his readers that an asterisked term may have different meanings and uses in different contexts, studies, and theories. This commendable effort to deal with notions based on their ordinary use in nontheoretical contexts and then explore how different views affect this use and load it with new meaning is adopted here. Thus, the word concept* can be seen here as a theoretical notion that draws on the basic intuitive idea that ‘truth’ and ‘difference’ are concepts, whereas ‘monkey’ and ‘spoon’ are not. The clear-cut cases are easy to detect, but there are also gray areas where it is hard to tell whether something is a concept or not. This characteristic may in fact be immanent to the nature of language and communication. At the same time, it can lead to misunderstandings, as well as to a rich span of theoretical explanations 1.2  ABSTRACT CONCEPTS In some contexts, ‘abstract’ is considered the opposite of ‘concrete’, the opposite of what can be sensed and touched. In other contexts, it is understood to be the result of generalization and hence denotes the general (vs. the particular) (Rosen 2012).2 The notion of ‘concept’ immediately evokes some

4  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction kind of abstraction. Besides the traditional philosophical occupation with concepts since Plato’s days, there is growing interest in abstract concepts in cognitive psychology, neurology, and brain research in general. Research on concept formation in experimental cognitive psychology starts from the premise that abstraction is immanent to any symbolic and semiotic system, and primarily to language. A toddler may hear the term ‘grandpa’ applied to two very different individuals—one thin, tall, and blue eyed, and another individual who is short with curly hair and sings beautifully. To make the picture even more complicated, she is read a storybook about Peter and the Wolf with a different protagonist who is also called ‘grandpa’, whose picture is quite different from the living family members the child encounters. Unless infants are credited with the ability to abstract and generalize, there is no way to explain the rapid process of language acquisition where names are attached to people, objects, actions, events, or properties. This is also true for type-token relations and the idea of replicas and representations. A very young child is shown a goose in the yard. It is noisy, angry, much bigger than she is, and perhaps frightening. Later on, she is presented with a toy goose, which is soft and pleasant, in the bath. To make things even more complicated for her, she hears the sound ‘goose’ in front of a two-dimensional colored picture in a storybook. It is understood that the child realizes she is surrounded by replicas and representation. Yet this idea demands the ability to abstract and generalize. The brain appears to have exactly the right amount of tolerance and flexibility, as well as innate bootstrapping mechanisms along with a set of preconcepts that make the child such an excellent learner of the language despite these obstacles. The process is so natural and fast that it is very easy to overlook or underestimate its importance.3 Abstract concepts can be studied from a developmental point of view by looking at the stage of development in which words denoting more abstract concepts emerge, and the stage at which speakers become conscious of them. Lexicographers have also tried to demarcate the area of the lexicon abstract notions occupy. Each research area has its initial hypotheses, unique methodology, merits, and limitations. The point of view adopted in this volume is a linguisticsemantic one based on trends in the philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics. It explores the questions of meaning, use, and the structure of abstract concepts within and through language itself. It aims to examine the inner structure and the meaning relations of abstract notions through the study of lexemes related to each abstract concept in question. Intuitive knowledge is the first step, but it is assumed that a careful semantic analysis of meaning relations should lead to a better understanding of the notions of concept* and abstraction*, as well as insights into the building blocks of the conceptual system despite the limitations of the human mind studying itself. The final decades of the twentieth century witnessed a rapidly expanding interest in mental representation. The general idea that language mirrors thought has opened up new fields of research. The field of cognitive science has

Introduction  5 developed enormously in recent years. The philosophy of language, psychology, neurology linguistics, communication studies, theoretical anthropology, artificial intelligence, and computer science are all involved in a search for a fuller grasp of thought and cognition. In such a scientific atmosphere, it is no longer considered marginal or misguided to study conceptual structures based on actual language use (Langacker 1988, 2008, 2010; Barlow and Kemmer 2000). Language is the main tool for conveying thought; therefore, linguistic methodologies are likely to contribute to the study of concepts beyond its automatic and unconscious use. 1.3  LANGUAGE, COGNITION, AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS Legitimate doubts may be raised about the fruitfulness of such an agenda, given the possible circularity of studying language through language. A metaphor used by Otto Neurath—a member of the Vienna Circle—on the need to rebuild a ship while sailing in it is worth quoting: We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. (in Quine 1960, 3) Studying language through language use may be criticized as being a vicious circle. Nevertheless, recent studies of meanings and meaning relations, especially from a cognitive-linguistic point of view, are supported and can be tested by many experimental and theoretical studies in related fields (Langacker 1991, 1999b, 2001, 2008, 2010; Jackendoff 1997a, 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011; Goldberg 1995; Sovran 1994, 2000a; Sweetser 1990; Cienki 1997); hence, at least part of the circularity is eliminated. Circularity can also be circumvented by differentiating logical circularity, which is considered futile, from hermeneutic circularity. This latter circularity has been a commonplace technique in philosophy since the days of Plato and Aristotle. In this case, a notion is taken as the starting point. It may be vague and commonsensical, but probing into its nature and context, identifying relations with its cognates and applications, is expected to yield a better understanding of this notion in the end. Nevertheless, there are several caveats to this procedure: such lines of research, including the present one, should be assessed according to their explanatory power and fruitfulness. In addition, each step should be justified and should not conflict with current accepted and tested knowledge. Finally, the procedure should lead to a new level of understanding of the original issue. Thus, the real test is whether this inquiry can lead to new and richer insights into

6  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction abstraction, the structure of the lexicon, and the ways the lexicon expands, evolves, and functions. Conceptual analysis is not a recent innovation. Much philosophical effort has been invested since antiquity in probing the meanings of concepts such as ‘friendship’, ‘justice’, ‘reason’, ‘self’, ‘cause’, or ‘nature’, to mention only a few. Recent developments in linguistics have paved the way for the elaborate study of concepts. Let us look at a recent example: the late philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit (2011) dealt with the social concept of ‘considerateness’. Her study opens with the claim that: To get a better grasp of considerateness is to get a better grasp of what it is not. It must be differentiated from the notions that are its closest neighbors in our conceptual scheme, as well as from those notions that clearly contrast with it. Altruism, sacrifice, supererogation, gift giving, kindness, politeness, chivalry—all of these and possibly more come to mind as belonging to the first group; selfishness, rudeness, disrespectfulness, and ‘tit for tat’ are included in the second. (Ullmann-Margalit 2011, 213) There is a general consensus that is it both warranted and acceptable to look at notions and concepts as they come to mind and define them as “neighbors in our conceptual scheme”, to use Ullmann-Margalit’s words. The present study also adopts the basic assumption that meaning relations are insightful and can serve as first step toward discovering structure in the lexicon. It draws on advances in conceptual approaches by cognitive linguists (Jackendoff 1997, 2002; Langacker 1991, 1999, , 2008, 2010; Lakoff and Johnson1999; Johnson and Lakoff 2002; Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Fillmore 1977a, 1977b, 1982, 1985, and Fillmore and Atkins 1992, 2000; Sweetser 1990; Cienki 1997; and others)4 who employ different methods and have different hypotheses, explanations, and foci in exploring the conceptual schemas through their reflection in actual language utterances. In line with the Embodiment Thesis (Sweetser 1990; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Johnson and Lakoff 2002), and with Jackendoff’s tripartite architecture (Jackendoff 1997a, 2002, 2011) and Barsalou’s (1993, 1999) notion of situated concepts, this volume shows how abstract notions are constructed on the basis of actual perceptual experiences and models. It does so by analyzing meaning relations of words in the semantic domains of ‘truth’, ‘similarity’, ‘difference’, ‘negativity’, and ‘norm’. It also adheres to the basic assumptions of Fillmore’s Frame Semantics (1982) that language use and meaning relations are highly informative. Much can be learned from analyzing relations in a certain semantic domain and studying polysemous words, metaphors, idioms, and collocations. We often hear the following meta-utterances concerning language use: ‘in other words’, ‘it’s just on the tip of my tongue’, ‘watch your tongue’, ‘your words hurt me’. Such utterances point to the reflective nature of human language. They display speakers’ awareness of the use of appropriate

Introduction  7 words, and their awareness of the power of words. However, this awareness does not say much about the structure or the function of language utterances, words, and concepts. Much of our language use is automatic and unconscious (Jackendoff 2011). A more systematic exploration of meaning relations is needed. The study of meaning relations within fields, frames, domains, and subdomains is a promising first step. Since the second half of the twentieth century, and to a great extent due to the Chomskyan turn (Kasher 1991) and more recent developments in the cognitive sciences, cognition and mental representations have become legitimate topics of scientific inquiry. Linguistic semantics, and especially conceptual and cognitive semantics, have become permeable to findings from related areas in psychology, sociology, neurology, computer science, and artificial intelligence (AI), and have benefitted from their empirical findings (Sovran 1994). Recent developments in conceptual semantics and cognitive semantics have discovered regularities in the use of language, including abstract concepts, and have contributed to a better understanding of what makes language an effective tool for thinking, expressing and conveying thoughts, and communicating with others. These findings are supported by neurolinguistic experiments (Jung-Beeman 2005, Jung-Beeman et al. 2004, Stringaris et al. 2006). As shown throughout this book, lexical semantics, cognitive semantics, and conceptual semantics can provide a unique view on concepts and conceptual structure. 1.4 PRESENTATION Chapter 2 overviews several theories and pays special attention to the new field of cognitive semantics. It paves the way for applying ideas, theories, and methodologies to the analysis of meaning relations in the abstract areas of the lexicon. Chapter 3 focuses on the concept of ‘similarity’ that has elicited major philosophical, as well as psychological, controversy. It examines how English similarity words such as ‘like’, ‘resembles’, and ‘as’ and their Hebrew parallels form open-ended flexible concepts. The nature of ‘similarity’, which is seen here as a cluster of relations, is one of the prime reasons for the logical and psychological difficulties encountered in previous analyses. Their very nature enables similarity words to function successfully in conceptual systems as adjusters and tools for creating categories, by enlarging the scope of knowledge and expanding the mental lexicon. Chapter 4 traces meaning relations, minimal differences, and subgroups of cognate words that express various shades of ‘difference’. It analyzes the semantic relations between adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs such as ‘other’, ‘exception’, ‘strange’, ‘opposite, ‘change’, ‘apart’, ‘diversion, ‘deviation’, ‘exclusion’, ‘nonconformity’, ‘incompatibility’, ‘disagreement’, ‘dissent’, ‘discordance’, ‘dissonance’, ‘disharmony’, ‘contrast’, ‘contrariety’, etc. ­Subcategorization of the

8  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction lexical items in the frame of difference reveals an interesting affinity between pairs such as ‘identity’ and ‘continuation’ versus pairs such as ‘difference’ and ‘discreteness’ or ‘valence’ and ‘direction’. It points to the affinities between spatio-temporal and logical notions. However, in addition, a third dimension of evaluation and preference is shown to exist. This leads to conclusions about the status of logic as regards other human-cognitive endowments that enables humans to deal with the outside world. It has implications that support the main claims of cognitive linguistics. Chapter 5 discusses ‘negativity’. The topic of negation has been studied from many angles over the last few decades (Horn 1989, Horn 2011).5 Its syntactic, pragmatic, and morphological nature has been the subject of much research in logic, linguistics, philosophy, and developmental psychology. Less attention has been paid to the semantic variants of the general notion of ‘negativity’ and the meaning relations between words such as ‘broken’, ‘absent’, ‘disappear’, ‘no’, ‘hell’, ‘poison’, ‘scapegoat’, and others. This chapter examines the hypothesis that there is a Neg-element common to these and other lexemes, though its sources require further study. Various methods are suggested for grouping and sorting the various lexemes that include this element. The final analysis points to four sources of ‘negativity’ in four layers that comprise the conceptual system; the first three are the somatic-experiential level comprising psychological signals and thresholds, interactional elements, and the culture-dependent Neg-element. The most interesting and least transparent layer is the fourth, which is a prelogical conception of ‘existence’, ‘identity’, ‘function’, ‘stability’, and their counter Neg-elements. The analysis provides an explanation for the evolutionary human bias toward the positive, as well as the logical and mathematical everyday algebra of pluses and minuses, as reflected for example in the phrase ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Chapter 6 discusses the central status of ‘truth’ in logic and philosophy and in everyday speech, while highlighting its conceptually vague and referentially precarious status. The chapter explores the long history of shifts and changes in the meaning of 'emet (truth) in Hebrew that accounts for its present polysemous nature. In particular, it shows how shifts in cultural foci affect the meaning of a concept and the meaning relations between lexemes and phrases that express it. The origins of the Hebrew word for truth are shown to be rooted in the early Canaanite concrete domain of building, which shifted toward belief and trust with the emergence of monotheistic ideas, and later, to a more scientific reliance on evidence and proof in response to a new interest in nature, cosmology, philosophy, and other sciences in the medieval era. These meaning elements are dominant in the modern meaning of ‘truth’, in both Hebrew and English. Chapter 7 on ‘norm’ responds in part to a growing interest among cognitive scientists in social cognition. It analyzes the leap from normal to normative; from the descriptive to the prescriptive by examining a vast range of language phenomena including the Latin etymologies of ‘norm’ as

Introduction  9 a ruler, various Hebrew adverbial metaphors from the domain of ‘norms’ such as khashursa (literally: in line), beseder (literally: in order), khaya’ut (literally: as fit), khidva’i (literally: as wanted, desired, or needed). This chapter examines the idea of norms as thresholds through tendencies to use the English construction ‘over-x’, as in ‘overdose’, ‘over-baked’, ‘overdue’, ‘over-­disciplined’, and many more of this kind. Here again, the data show the role of models and metaphors and actual experience in the physical world in constructing the abstract concept of norm. It shows how health, sanity, and functional instruments lend their structure to the abstract concepts of norm in politeness, ethics, law, work relations, and political and social behavior, as well as in aesthetics. Chapter 8 examines the role of abstraction in metaphor. It constitutes a further step toward understanding the role of abstraction in the mental lexicon. It discusses the nontrivial relations between abstraction and creativity. The chapter develops a model of decoding poetic metaphors, drawing on the assumed computational nature of the process by uncovering the semantic relations between elements that comprise literary creative metaphors. The main idea of the chapter is that ascending the scale of abstraction serves to link the semantically distant components of poetic metaphors. The chapter aims to reveal this unconscious procedure and elucidate the general semanticlogic functions that enable them. The unique ‘deviant’ nature of innovative metaphors and the nonautomatic process of their interpretation helps reveal mediating functions such as FRAC (the function of breaking and fractioning), INTENS (the function of intensification), or LOC-NOM (the mapping from spatial locations to definition and categories), for example. Thus, overall, the chapters provide insights into the way language is structured and layered: from the perceptual to the social, cultural, and logical and their mutual relations, and sheds light on the place and status of abstract concepts in the actual and mental lexicon.

2

Background and Method

2.1 CONCEPTUALIZATION For generations, philosophers have engaged in a long, unresolved debate on the ‘furniture of the world’; namely, should reality be understood as consisting merely of spatio-temporal particulars such as material objects, or are there also ‘universals’ in ‘reality’ such as concepts or abstract mathematical objects like numbers or groups? I avoid the debate between Nominalism, which argues that mathematics, for example, is about spatio-temporal particulars, and Platonism, which maintains that mathematics is about abstract entities outside of space and time. Rather, the position adopted here is closer to conceptualism, which considers mathematics as well as language and logic to be about constructs of thinking. This is one of the main innovations of the cognitive revolutions in recent times. Cognitive linguistics, which emerged in the last third of the twentieth century, owes much to the heyday of philosophy of language, and primarily to Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein, the mathematicians and logicians who searched for order and structure in language. However, cognitive linguistics was and still is faced with several entrenched philosophical and scientific beliefs. Cognitive linguistics—including the present study—does not share logical positivism’s rejection of metaphysical notions such as ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘eternity’, ‘good’, ‘just’, ‘cause’, ‘self’, and others because of their lack of direct referent in the world. Such notions were rejected by the Vienna Circle as devoid of meaning and hence were considered misleading and seen as an obstacle to the progress of science toward a true understanding of the world. As we shall see in detail in the following chapters, concepts including the above list are treated as human constructs and hence are worthy of study given their place in human thinking. Another more specific obstacle cognitive linguistics has needed to resolve is the treatment of metaphor, polysemy, homonymy, idioms, etc., which were seen at best as literary ornaments and at worst as obstacles to a parsimonious proper description of language. These two issues shared an ideal concept of language as a neatly ordered, logical device where each sign has a clear-cut parallel in the world. In a very different approach, cognitive linguistics treats language as a constantly

Background and Method  11 evolving human device that serves human needs for communication, thinking, and expressing thought. Metaphors, idioms, and polysemous words are understood in this framework as key features of language structure and evolution, and hence as legitimate issues for research and insightful windows into both language structure and language change. Cognitive linguists have abandoned a logical mathematical orientation to the study of language and have started to pay attention to its pragmatic, social, psychological, cultural, and neurological features (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Kövecses 2005, 2010; Gibbs 2006, 2008; Giora 2003, 2007a; Stringaris et al. 2006, Wilson 2011, and many more). Thus, metaphors are no longer classified as ‘dead’ versus innovative. Both are seen as cognitive tools for understanding and expressing the outer and inner world in scientific or poetic contexts. There is a constant effort, though with different tools and methods, to reveal the organizing principles of the complex yet structured conceptual system as materialized in language. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics tend increasingly to adhere to the idea of ‘construction’ as the best way to understand language and thought. This provides linguists not only with a coherent theoretical framework but also with a set of strategies to study the nature of language and thought. Many cognitive linguists, such as Langacker (2008), Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Fillmore (1982), Talmy (2000), Sweetser (1990), Grady (1997), Goldberg (1995), Fauconnier and Turner (2002), and Wierzbicka (1992, 1996) to mention only a few, share Jackendoff’s basic view, which I adopt here as well; namely, that the ‘world’ is not a set of real objects penetrating our minds in mysterious ways. Rather, it is ‘constructed’ by the senses and cognitive conceptual tools. All words and concepts are constructed from a small set of preconcepts or schemas or operators. Although there is some disagreement about the nature and function of these preconcepts and the ways they can be detected, theorists share the assumption that such prerequisites are crucial for thinking, understanding the world, and using language properly. Empirical studies in cognitive psychology have investigated the way people conceive and process abstract words. Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger, & Stowe (1988) found that lexical access is faster for concrete words than for abstract words. Word comprehension is faster for concrete words than for abstract words (Schwanenflugel & Shoben 1983, Schwanenflugel & Stowe 1989). People do better on memory tasks using concrete words than on tasks that include abstract words (Wattenmaker and Shoben 1987). Barsalou has studied abstract concepts extensively (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings 2005, Yeh and Barsalou 2006, Wu and Barsalou 2009). Barsalou and his colleagues have explored the different ways people handle abstract and concrete words by looking at the content of abstract concepts as compared to the content of concrete and intermediate concepts, and their relation to event and situation concepts. In these studies, participants were asked to list properties that are typically true of words such as ‘truth’, ‘freedom’, and ‘invention’. This was contrasted to three concrete concepts, ‘bird’, ‘car’, and

12  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction ‘sofa’, and to three intermediate concepts, ‘cooking’, ‘arming’, and ‘carpeting’. The results showed that situational availability played a major role in these differences when the presence versus absence of a relevant situation was manipulated. Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings (2005) claimed that an abstract concept refers to entities that are neither purely physical nor spatially constrained; they also point to the fact that the meanings of words are not established in isolation. In accordance with Fillmore’s Frame Semantics, they posited that the meaning of a word is not a stand-alone package of features that describe its associated category. Instead, words are typically understood as represented against background situations. When a situation is not available, a concept is difficult to process. Studying abstract concept processing has led to the conclusion that abstract concepts focus on social events and introspective content, while also including less central content about physical settings. Nevertheless, Barsalou and Weimer-Hastings (2005) maintained that the content of abstract concepts is grounded in situations and that concrete and abstract concepts share common situational content. These findings support Goldstone and Barsalou’s attempt (1998) to reunite perception and conceptualization through the theory of situated and embodied conceptualization. The study of cognition and the mental lexicon is the main area of inquiry of cognitive science. Toward the second half of the twentieth century, advances in science prompted the study of mental processing in a number of different fields. Cognitive psychology and a new linguistic approach to mental competence were inspired by new discoveries in computer science and artificial intelligence. New technologies such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) have paved new ways to study the neurology of language processing. An understanding of the complexity of human cognition calls for a combination of different methodologies, and cognitive science emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as an umbrella for these related disciplines. One watershed for this process was the founding of the Journal and the Society for Cognitive Science in the late 1970s. The different branches of cognitive science all postulate that a broad range of mental processes is computational in nature and that these processes operate on mental representations. However, there is less consensus about the nature of these mental representations or the methods that can best reveal their structure. One of the ongoing debates is about the relations between language and thought. Are languages inherently different, and thus shape modes of understanding the world? This is a new version of the Whorfian hypothesis discussed in Levinson (2003) and Deutscher (2011). Alternatively, are there universal basic cognitive skills that underlie and enable all the languages of the world to express and convey thoughts and establish social organizations? The intermediate view, adopted here as well, suggests that the focus of inquiry should be on which aspects of language are universal and which vary across the world’s languages. The present study thus ­analyzes

Background and Method  13 meaning relations in certain parts of the lexicon, mainly, its abstract areas, which tend to be less specific and less content-bound, and thus are more likely to be proven through future experimental research to constitute an underlying universal stratum of the mental lexicon. In particular, meaning relations and structures are compared and contrasted in two distant ­languages—English and Hebrew—with the hope that further cross-­linguistic research will follow.1 2.2  COGNITIVE SEMANTICS It is widely accepted that the actual lexicon as well as the mental lexicon are structured, and that this structure can be revealed by studying actual utterances in which speakers encode their understanding of the world. Works in cognitive linguistics have put forward various theoretical constructs to explain the nature of the regularities revealed in the lexicon. These theoretical constructs have been dubbed schemes (Langacker 1991) image schemas and idealized cognitive models (Lakoff 1987), scripts (Schank 1991), frames (Fillmore 1982), fields (Lehrer 1974, Lehrer and Kittay 1992), and domains (Langacker 2008, Clausner and Croft (1999). Fillmore (1977, 1982) argued that concepts are related in such a way that understanding any one of them involves understanding the system and its place in it: “In Frame semantics a word is understood with reference to a structured background of experience, beliefs, or practices, constituting a kind of conceptual prerequisite for understanding the meaning” (Fillmore and Atkins 1992, 77). Fillmore claims that to understand the meaning of the words of a language, one must first have knowledge of the conceptual structure, or semantic frame, which provides the background and motivation for their use in discourse. The study of the meaning and function of a lexical item should proceed from a description of its underlying semantic frame. It should characterize the way in which this item highlights aspects or instances of the frame through the linguistic structures that are built up around this lexical item. Clausner and Croft (1999) stressed the similarities between the various trends in cognitive semantics: Despite differing theoretical views within cognitive semantics there appears to be a consensus on certain fundamental theoretical constructs: (i) The basic semantic unit is a mental concept; (ii) concepts cannot be understood independently of the domain in which they are embedded; (iii) conceptual structures represent a construal of experience, that is, an active mental operation; and (iv) concept categories involve prototypes and are organized by (at least) taxonomic relations. Although ‘concepts’, ‘domains’, ‘construal’ and ‘category structure’ go by different names, the basic constructs are essentially the same across researchers in cognitive linguistics.

14  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Croft and Clausner argued that image schemas are a subtype of a domain and that they are structured and function like domains or frames. They go on to describe the way concepts are organized in frames and domains. Leading thinkers in cognitive linguistics, such as Langacker (1991, 1999, 2008), Jackendoff (1997, 2002, 2007, 2010), and Lakoff and Johnson (1999) share a basic attitude toward thought and language that guides their research and will also be adopted here; namely, that the world is not an objective ‘thing’ that mysteriously enters our minds and is reflected in the way language is used. Rather, the ‘world’ is constructed by the conceptual system that takes its input from sense perceptions and shapes them into concepts and words,2 and shares mental tools with other modalities of the mind besides language. Orientation in space, sound and pattern recognition, figure and ground, movement, gestalts, schematic organization of perceptual data, coding and decoding, grasping of causal relations etc., are examples of the basic cognitive toolbox needed for comprehension and functioning in the world. Some of these mental tools have been shown to be functional before language is used (Mandler 2004; Gopnik 2009, 2011; Carey 2009, 2011). It follows that words and concepts are complex constructs whose complexity can be analyzed to suggest how cognitive tools process and shape perceptual data. This analysis has led to two research orientations. The first is research that examines the actual use of language utterances, words, constructions, idioms, etc. and generalizes them by organizing principles and structures (Langacker 1988, 2008; Barlow and Kemmer 2000). The second approach is that of decomposition of complex units such as concepts, domains, or fields that can be decomposed to determine their constituent components and the relationships between these constituents. There is not much consensus about what these components are, as will be seen later. Most leading theories in cognitive and conceptual semantics claim that regularities and structures can be found, and should be identified in actual language use. Langacker’s (1991, 1999, 2008, and 2010) works dwelled on schemas and the mechanism of profiling using basic psychological elements, such as figure and ground, landmark, and trajectory. Lakoff (1987) referred to idealized cognitive models that have some affinities with the psychological theory of prototypes, for instance, the prototypical sense of being a bachelor. The pope is a very remote instance of this concept due to his nonprototypical position in the conceptual arrangement of family relations. Coleman and Kay (1981) discussed the preconditions for the prototypical ‘lie’, which consist of a lack of correspondence between the speaker’s utterance and the state of affairs, the speaker’s awareness of this lack of correspondence, and the intention to deceive. Sweetser (1987) anchored the concept of ‘lie’ in the general frame of communication by claiming that it is a nonstandard case of communication, and that its deviance calls for specifying the unique terms that motivate this deviation from Grice’s basic principle that communication is based on trust and the fact that normal discourse is based on telling the truth.

Background and Method  15 2.3  IN SEARCH OF STRUCTURE Jackendoff (1983, 1997, 2002) formulated an elaborate system of affinities between various semantic domains in the lexicon he termed the ‘thematic relations hypothesis’. He argued that certain semantic fields of content share the same basic relations with other content fields. This affinity is reflected in the invariance of prepositions in these semantic domains: “I moved your chair to the other room” is the spatial analogy of “I moved the meeting from Monday to Wednesday”. These have analogs in the social realm in sentences describing possession and commercial transactions: “I sold him the house”, “She left him a fortune of one million dollars”. The same thematic relations between objects (or people’s) locations and ownership exist in the realm of social relations and conversation, as in “John gave Bill a present” vs. “John gave Bill a promise” (Jackendoff 1983, 188–211). Such structures attest to the parsimonious nature of language and its relationship to memory span and learnability characteristics (Pinker 1984). Lehrer (1974) was one of the first linguists to study the features and the structure of semantic fields such as cooking, containers, and natural water reservoirs. She highlighted the differences as well as the similarities between fields and frames (1993). Lehrer and Kittay (1981) showed the theoretical and methodological idea of semantic fields could be applied to the study of poetic and discourse metaphor. Kittay (1992) argued that a semantic field encapsulates the linguistic conventions of a community of speakers. The conventions form an intermediate stratum between the individual’s conceptual system and the established knowledge of a certain group of people at certain periods. Because conceptualization is dynamic, it makes sense to trace changes over time in a certain frame or field. This type of diachronic study sheds light on the dynamic process of conceptualization. Chapter 6 traces such changes in the concept of ‘truth’ throughout the lengthy documented history of written Hebrew. Barsalou (1992, 1993, 1999) pointed to the dynamic aspect of semantic fields and the fact that a field is context and task sensitive. Different arrangements of word relations can be evoked in different contexts for different functions. Sovran (1994) provided empirical evidence from a range of disciplines, including psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, neurolinguistics, and lexicography, for the existence of organizing principles in the actual and mental lexicon such as ‘clusters’, ‘frames’, ‘fields’, and ‘networks’ of close and related words and concepts. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) early definition of metaphor drew heavily on mapping structures from source domains to target domains. For instance, many languages express quantity in concepts of height in which ‘more is up’. The more recent version of Johnson and Lakoff’s (2002) and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) theory of the embodied mind is more specific in depicting the directions of mapping from content domains based on spatio-temporal orientation and bodily experiences to abstract, less accessible domains such

16  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction as emotions, social relations, cognition and discourse, morality, economics, philosophy, and mathematics. Fauconnier’s idea of mental spaces (1994) and Fauconnier and Turner’s Theory of Blending and conceptual integration (2002) exemplify another attempt to shed light on general subconscious processes of concept formation. Blends are considered the result of two concepts, two ‘mental spaces’, integrated into a third concept that contains some properties of both original concepts. Commonalities between the two original concepts provide the basis for an emerging third concept that is different from either of the two original ones. One common and typical example of such integration is metaphor. With the growing consensus that language is a human device tuned to meet human needs, and that the world is perceived as a host of impressions absorbed by the senses and filtered by mental faculties, there have been fewer efforts to look for clear-cut boundaries for categories or sharp definitions. Questions such as how much one should cut a table leg for it to stop being a table, or what is the exact point at which a ‘bush’ is no longer a bush but rather a ‘tree’, are seen as fairly unproductive. Instead, more work has gone into finding the structures that underlie notions and concepts, regardless of the fuzziness of their demarcations. The rise of the internet and the compiling of online corpora have enabled research on a large body of instances and have contributed to the study of the structure of the lexicon and indirectly to the study of the mental lexicon. A parallel development is the growing interest in discourse and pragmatics regarding the role of context and circumstances in human communication (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Wilson 2011). Recent pragmatic theories have analyzed the open-ended nature of words and concepts and the role of inferences and sensitivity to context in understanding conversational utterances. These theories focus on discourse processes and communicative interactions rather than on the nature of the lexicon or its structure. As discussed earlier (Chapter 1), there is a lack of consensus between cognitive pragmatics and cognitive semantics about the degree of stability of the lexicon. However, they share the same goal of better understanding human communication, although from different standpoints. I consider the analysis of semantic relations to be one of the main avenues of exploration for the study of regularities and structure in the lexicon. Meaning relations between cognate words can be shown to produce subgroups of close words and, eventually, a better understanding of what links these subgroups and how their instances are related but different. Metaphors and idioms, as well as polysemous words, are also tools for a better understanding of meaning relations and structure in that they connect words, sometimes in a surprisingly unexpected way, from distant areas of the lexicon. A diachronic view of etymologies, especially in an ancient and documented language such as Hebrew, can also be a precious source of hidden information, as is Hebrew’s transparent morphological structure made up of three consonant roots that indicate meaning relations that can be

Background and Method  17 hidden in other languages. Such connections between groups or subgroups of words in domains (semantic fields or frames) are sometimes surprising, unexpected, and therefore illuminating. Although abstract concepts are considered less situation-bound and less affected by idiosyncrasies of specific languages, their own structure relies heavily on the metaphorical and idiomatic utterances that express them. The following example illustrates how looking at the meaning relations between well-known pairs of color words leads to interesting insights about the structure of the lexicon.3 The pair ‘black vs. white’ suggests itself immediately. When asked whether there are other contrasting pairs of color words, people suggest ‘pink and light blue’, ‘pink and gray’, ‘blue and red’, and some may add ‘yellow (or green) and red’. A more theoretical look at the structuring axes that order these pairs indicates that the pair ‘blackwhite’ is situated in vision and in the physics of light waves. ‘Pink vs. (light) blue’ implies traditional, perhaps less stable, social and gender views as in choices for clothes for baby girls or boys, which is in the process of change. ‘Pink vs. gray’ is rooted in idiomatic folk concepts of worldviews, characters, and emotions signifying the optimistic (rosy-tinted) glasses of some people vs. the gray, gloomy, dull approach to life of pessimists. ‘Yellow vs. green’ is sometimes opposed metaphorically to ‘red’ and refers in some cultures to emotions of envy vs. love. The contrast symbolized by the pair ‘red vs. blue’ is rooted in its function as conventional signs for hot and cold on equipment.4 Black vs. white appears to be a stable opposition that has to do with physics and the way light waves strike the eye. Baby girls in many places are still dressed in pink and little boys in light blue apparel. One can wear ‘pink’ glasses or be gloomy and see the world in dull, gray colors. This reflects the emotional and interpretative way we look at the world; however, it is rooted in physical properties as well as in associations since ‘pink’, for example, can be associated with the color of blossoms as opposed to gray, gloomy rainy days that blur one’s vision. Culture via language and literature has fixed these oppositions and by extension the emotions and attitudes that are attributed to them. In many bathrooms, the blue faucet is for cold water and the red is for hot water. These are conventions, as are the letters H and C, but again, they have a connection to the physical world in that blue is the color of the (cold) sea and red and orange are the colors of fire. This small corpus of pairs of color words provides a glimpse of the physical, emotional, social, and cultural modes that govern our thinking and our behavior, and hence, the structures of the conceptual system. Comparing closely associated words revealed the axes of their relations and a more abstract order of the way people relate to their surroundings and inner worlds. The same method is applied here to several abstract parts of the lexicon to discover their organizing and, at times, hidden infrastructures.

18  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction 2.4 HYPOTHESES This volume analyzes certain areas of the abstract lexicon. It is based on seven overarching hypotheses. The first two are: a. The lexicon is structured. b. The lexicon is comprised of lexical domains. These theoretical structures are sometimes called fields or frames, or domains (Clausner and Croft 1999). Regardless of terminology, they all attempt to account for the ways the lexicon is structured, which governs groups and subgroups of meaning.5 Speakers are able to sort and group words according to closeness of meaning. This ability is part of what is considered mastery of a language. There may be disagreement about the criteria for sorting words, because sometimes words can be grouped according to more than one ordering principle. Thus, the third assumption follows from the first two: c. Relations are informative. Much can be learned from examining the meaning relations of cognate words. When subdomains are discovered, an organizing criterion apparently demarcates domains and subdomains of meanings. ‘Car’ and ‘ship’ are intuitively grouped into one meaning domain (or field, or frame), and a ‘palm tree’ belongs to the superordinate domain of ‘pines’ and ‘oaks’. Thus, naturally, a simple organizing principle emerges that tells vehicles from trees and human artifacts from natural objects. Further sorting differentiates fruit from ornamental trees. Frames and domains have increasing layers of intrarelations. d. The abstract lexicon is structured as well. Although the abstract part of the lexicon is more problematic and less transparent, the assumption here is that it exhibits ordering principles, as do the other parts of the lexicon. Analyzing meaning relations between domains and subdomains of abstract words can thus be informative. e. Metaphors, idioms, models, and polysemous words are informative and are basic to human thought and human language. When a semantic domain is studied systematically, whether in the abstract or concrete parts of the lexicon, idioms and metaphors are constituent elements of the domain. The word ‘tree’ appears in the domain of herbage, which is a part of the more inclusive domain of vegetation. Yet it is used metaphorically in the frame of ‘kinship’ in the compound ‘family tree’ and is closely related to words such as ‘pedigree’, ‘lineage’, or ‘tribe’. The Hebrew

Background and Method  19 word of tribe is shevet—meaning, originally, ‘a branch’ and a later ‘a tribe’. In this frame, ‘tree’ appears in a borrowed metaphorical sense. It has fewer meaning relations than in its original literal frame. However, a systematic study of metaphorical relations in a frame and between frames sheds light on the mechanism of abstraction which is consistent with the notion of the Embodied Mind put forward by linguists and cognitive psychologists (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Johnson and Lakoff 2002; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, & Krauth-Gruber 2005). Two more detailed principles of structure can be derived from the above. The first: f. Subdomains are related. Meaning relations of subdomains where lexemes are quite close to each other reveal further abstract organizing principles. Minimal differences between close, almost synonymous, words in a domain are usually described by meanings of features.6 ‘Features’ (or ‘sememes’, Vakulenko 2005) help describe shades of meaning. Consider the difference between two lexemes of ‘difference’ (Chapter 4); namely, ‘replacement’ and ‘variation’.7 Although both words indicate ‘difference’, the feature of [+preserved identity] helps explain some of the differences in use and meaning of these two words. If a teacher is replaced by another, the difference evokes a different identity, whereas variations on a musical theme, although different from each other in many musical respects, preserve a line of continuity in their relations to the theme and thus do not replace it. The notion of semantic-distinctive features is treated here as a useful intuitive device that yields fine distinctions. When features keep reoccurring in the analysis of minimal differences in domains and subdomains, they point to superordinate principles that constitute the basic structure of the domain. Such features include, for example, direction, value, identity, continuation, polarity, and membership. These recurring ­features themselves can be further divided into subclasses. In the above example, direction and continuation are related to space and time, whereas identity, inclusion, value, and membership are logical notions. Surprisingly enough, these features show certain affinities or pairings that say something important about how experience is comprised of both sensory-motor spatiotemporal experiences together with basic, perhaps innate, logical concepts. The pairs ‘continuation’ and ‘identity’ and ‘membership and inclusion’ reveal some hidden properties of human cognition.8 g. Perceptual models can be detected through metaphors and idioms. Language speakers detect the dual relations in metaphors between the source domain and the target domain as in the sentence “Don’t push me to do things that I do not want to do”. The word ‘push’ belongs to the domain of physical contact and force dynamics, whereas the target domain concerns relations between people where talk, attempts to convince, or perhaps

20  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction e­ motions are involved. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and Talmy (2000) showed convincingly, speakers, let alone linguists, are able to point to the regularity of systematic relations (the mapping) between domains such as force dynamic and emotional states or social interactions. One of the goals of this volume is to discover structures in the abstract lexicon through actual language use that reflect conventions and hidden knowledge of speakers and writers. Understanding the immediate environment and the function of the body in and on this environment precedes the metaphorical extension of concepts toward more remote and abstract areas of experience. This is known as the Embodied Mind hypothesis, which posits that concept formation is dependent on sensorimotor experience as the basis for creating a complex worldview. The extended rich conceptual system can eventually include concepts of philosophy, discourse, science, etc., and their models and metaphors will be discussed in several chapters. Ordered pairs and subdomains, as well as metaphors, idioms, models, and polysemous relations, serve as tools. Linguistic research is geared to start from the actual performance of real speakers and writers, from real instances of language in use to achieve a better understanding of the basic structures of language, and the mechanisms that govern its operation. A small set of basic cognitive concepts and notions produces elaborate structures at every level of language use. Words and concepts emerge out of human experience. Therefore, understanding the relations between words and concepts should yield an understanding of the experiences and situations that engendered this conceptualization. Semantic fields, frames, or domains are the products of conventions created by communities of speakers. They guide the individual’s proper use of words and point to the meaning relations between words and between concepts. As will be shown, the notions of ‘difference’, ‘continuity’, ‘detachment’, ‘membership’, ‘identity, ‘direction’, ‘value’, and others are crucial formative-meaning elements that organize the words in domains and determine the differences and the nuances between their members. Thus, analysis proceeds in steps: 1. Start the study from actual instances of language use. 2. Look for conceptual building blocks. 3. Look for (synchronic and diachronic) meaning relations. 4. Look for metaphors and models and for the experiential basis that underlies the abstract lexicon. 5. Account for the mechanism of abstraction. Convention, comparison, decomposition, the search for the models and metaphors, and the search for experiential basis and structure are the main methodological and theoretical principles that guide the present study.

3

Similarity

Relations such as ‘similarity’ or ‘difference’ are abstract by nature. They do not refer to objects, but rather to the mental activities of observing, comparing, and reasoning. In some sense, everything is similar to or is like everything else. Yet words like ‘similar’, resemble’, and ‘like’ and their cognates are useful in normal discourse and are applied automatically. Nevertheless, similarity elicits puzzling logical and philosophical questions. These longstanding issues are explored here by a semantic analysis of the use of similarity words and their meaning relations. The analysis shows that ‘similarity’ is a cluster of notions. The main challenge is to find out what unifies similarity subtypes; in other words, the common mechanism that underlies them and justifies subsuming them under one general, although vague, concept. This chapter shows how similarity words contribute to the flexibility of the conceptual system and its ability to expand. The puzzling nature of the concept of similarity is shown to be rooted in these specific cognitive functions.

3.1  GOODMAN’S CHALLENGE—THE PHILOSOPHICAL PUZZLES From the standpoint of logic, similarity is a relation. As such, it is expected to have some regular logical properties, as relations normally do. However, as Quine (1969, 114–138) pointed out, this is not the case, since any standard logical property assigned to the relation of similarity can be challenged. For instance, is similarity symmetrical? In other words, if A is similar to (or resembles) B, does it follow that B is similar to A? The answer is sometimes positive, but sometimes, perhaps more frequently, negative. Although infrequent, one can further inquire whether similarity is transitive: Does ‘A is similar to B and B is similar to C’ imply that ‘A is similar to C’? Can we assign reflexivity to similarity? What does it mean to say that A is similar to itself, or that A resembles itself? (except in figurative uses, of course) Other difficulties, such as those having to do with quantification, were raised by Goodman in his well-known “Seven Strictures on Similarity” (1972, 437–447). Along with other questions, Goodman asked whether a

22  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction twin is more similar to his twin brother than to his own photograph. Aside from determining how to answer this question advantageously, there is the more general issue of whether any known method of measuring similarities exists. Any object or event can be similar to any other object or event concerning some of its attributes, out of the infinite number of possible attributes, as long as there is no criterion for choosing what constitutes a relevant attribute. Thus, it seems crucial to establish such a criterion. Here, however, we are caught in a dilemma: either everything is similar to everything else, or else a relevance criterion should select for salience and order relevant aspects and properties. These and other arduous questions about similarity led Goodman several decades ago to abandon all hope of finding any theoretical explication for the relation of similarity. The above are only a few of the troublesome queries philosophers have noted about similarity. Nevertheless, one cannot deny the importance of similarity in sorting, categorizing, and abstracting, and hence, in concept formation. A certain procedure of abstracting from particular experience is required to construe a generic concept of a ‘dog’ or an ‘apple’, for example, or from a particular instance of dancing to the concept of ‘dance’. One response to Goodman is to accept his challenge without accepting his negative conclusions. His own examples of photos, metaphors, duplicates, and twins hint at a specific relation, and suggest looking at a larger inventory of examples in more than one language. Examining semantic relations between words that point to similarity and resemblance, in other words, in the domain of similarity words,1 may be a promising direction. As discussed in the Introduction in the simple example of color words, this approach might lead to the discovery of the inner structure of this abstract domain. 3.2  SIMILARITY JUDGMENTS—PAST AND PRESENT The mid-twentieth century marked a turning point in linguistics and led to the first steps toward the emergence of cognitive studies. One of the interesting conclusions of Chomsky’s early overall criticism of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior (1957) was the idea that the stimulus-response mechanism itself presupposes an innate ability to observe similarities or resemblances between stimuli. Chomsky (1959) argued that “We cannot predict verbal behavior in terms of the stimuli in the speaker’s environment, since we do not know what the current stimuli are until he responds” (32). Furthermore, since according to Chomsky, we the observers “identify the stimulus when we hear the response”, it follows that “the talk of ‘stimulus control’ simply disguises a complete retreat to mentalistic psychology”. Quine (1960) made this point more explicit by noting that infants must have standards for observing and identifying stimuli: “We must credit the child with a sort of prelinguistic quality space . . . . The finest distinctions that the child can be got to make . . . . are called discrimination thresholds” (82–83).

Similarity  23 Both Chomsky and Quine thus argued for an innate, prelinguistic ability to discriminate and identify for discerning and sorting, which involves measures of closeness and sameness. It implies that behaviorists would be forced to recognize the initial and crucial status of sorting, and hence of similarity, in any process of learning, even in the simplest behaviorist stimulus-response pair, let alone in more complex models of categorizing and abstracting. Since this early debate, behaviorism has ceased to dominate the psychological, philosophical, and scientific arenas. Rosch’s theory of prototypes (1973) was a step toward acknowledging the inner, perhaps innate, competence of recognizing similarities. She found that people use similarity to judge the distance of a given item from the prototypical item or items in a category. However, this does not explain how the process takes place. Later studies on categorization showed that the same prototypicality principle is used to form abstract categories, for example, by computer programmers (Adelson 1985). The late psychologist Amos Tversky (1977) made this issue the core of his research on similarity judgments. He tested the role of distinguishing features versus common features in similarity judgments and showed that such judgments are consistent and predictable. According to Tversky, similarity judgments are based on computing the common versus the distinctive features of the objects under comparison. These judgments tend to be asymmetrical and are context-bound, as shown in cross-cultural experiments on similarity. In one such study, participants were asked to judge the similarity between Austria and three other countries. In the first experiment, the countries were Sweden, Poland, and Hungary. Of the informants, 49 percent stated that Austria is similar to Sweden, 15 percent said it is similar to Poland, and 36 percent thought Austria is similar to Hungary. In a second experiment, where Austria was compared to Sweden, Norway, and Hungary, 60 percent of the informants thought that Austria was similar to Hungary—as though Sweden and Norway formed a unit against which the other two were judged. These results show that context and pragmatic considerations can alter the judgment of similarity by affecting the diagnostic value of the items. Obviously, the notion of one country being similar to another can be criticized since it is unclear how participants defined this similarity. To partially overcome the artificial nature of such judgments, in later experiments (Gati and Tversky 1984), participants were asked to do something that is closer to a natural judgment of similarity; namely, to point to similarities between pictures of landscapes and verbal descriptions of meals, trips, people, etc. The results of these different types of tasks showed that visual similarities between landscapes or schematic faces apparently rely more heavily on distinctive features, whereas in similarity tests between verbal stimuli such as descriptions of trips, meals, or people, common features play a larger role. These differences suggest that similarity is not as simple a relation as could have been concluded from early experiments. Later studies on categorization used Tversky’s analysis of similarity (Medin and Barsalou 1987, 460).

24  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Researchers challenged the theoretical status and the nature of similarity. Medin and Wattenmaker (1987) claimed that “the most serious problem with defining similarity in terms of common and distinctive attributes is that no constraints have been provided on what is to count as a feature or attribute” (21). Sometimes, they argued, “entities may seem to be similar precisely because they are members of the same category” (26). Hence, “what is needed is some independent method of measuring similarity uncontaminated by people’s knowledge about category membership” (26). Recent theoretical and empirical studies in the development of the lexicon credit young infants with the mental prerequisites of preconcepts that enable them to master the complexity of languages and reality, including types of similarity relations (Mandler 2004; Gopnik 2009; and Dromi 2009). Barsalou and his colleagues (1993, and 1999) argued that simulation is a basic computational mechanism in the brain that supports a broad spectrum of processes from perception to social cognition. Simulation is defined as a re-enactment of physical and mental states acquired during experience. The features of simulation are stored in long-term memory and re-activated as representations.2 These features form an architecture in which the simulation features are inserted into a context, called a situated conceptualization. These conceptualizations represent “entrenched knowledge” that can be used to form abstract categories and make predictions as an inference engine: During perceptual experience, association areas in the brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor areas to implement perceptual symbols. The storage and reactivation of perceptual symbols operates at the level of perceptual components. Through the use of selective attention, schematic representations of perceptual components are extracted from experience and stored in memory (e.g., individual memories of green, purr, hot). As memories of the same component become organized around a common frame, they implement a simulator that produces limitless simulations of the component (e.g., simulations of purr). Not only do such simulators develop for aspects of sensory experience, they also develop for aspects of proprioception (e.g., lift, run) and introspection (e.g., compare, memory, happy, hungry). Once established, these simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences. These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and abstract concepts. . . . Productivity results from integrating simulators combinatorially and recursively to produce complex simulations. Propositions result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations. Abstract concepts are grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. (Barsalou 1999, 577)

Similarity  25 Barsalou thus anchored conceptualization and categorization in situated perceptions and in the activation of areas of the brain. He considered simulation and hence ‘similarity’ to be part of the more basic operation of repetition in brain activity governed by what he termed ‘simulators’. Although empirical support for Barsalou’s claim were reported in studies on perception, action, working memory, conceptual processing, language, and social cognition, a heated debate followed the extensive presentation of his theory and methods (ibid. 1999, 610–658) involving psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, and cognitive linguists. This controversy demonstrates that the old puzzles concerning similarity and simulations are far from being resolved. Chomsky’s challenge to Skinner’s behaviorism has been recast here in a new, more elaborate context that inquires into the ability to move from one situated brain activity to another, similar, or closely related situation. Another approach is suggested here, which I term “the relational semantic argument”. It is based on the fact that language itself can reveal structures that underlie language use through the study of meaning relations. This semi-introspective, semi-phenomenological, yet linguistically systematic method views the problem of ‘similarity’ through language per se, through relations between cognate lexemes or ‘operators’ of similarity. It may provide new answers to the traditional questions, or at least help reformulate them and pave the way for further empirical study. 3.3 MEANING RELATIONS–SEMANTIC FIELDS, DOMAINS, AND FRAMES Before turning to the semantic analysis of meaning relations in the domain of ‘similarity’, the term ‘domain’ must be clarified. Intuitively, a domain relates to the fact that words such as ‘similarity’, ‘resemblance’, ‘like’, and ‘as’ belong to the same semantic cluster. Mastering this knowledge is part of mastering English or any other language. It helps retrieve ‘similarity’ cognate words in sentences and in compiling thesauri. Trier (1931) described this idea using the metaphor of semantic fields to echo metaphors in physics such as ‘gravitation fields’ or ‘magnetic fields’. The concept of semantic fields was dominant in the heydays of structuralism. Philosophers, linguists, and anthropologists found it a fruitful theoretical as well as methodological tool for discovering structures in societies as well as in language (Trier 1973; Leech 1974; Lyons 1977; Lehrer 1974, 1993). Studies of groups of terms, notions, and concepts of kinship or cooking have yielded interesting insights about various societies, cultures, and languages. Kinship terms helped discover complex systems of social organization concerning marriages, inheritance, and prohibitions on sexual and marital relations, etc. (Leech 1974, 24–30). For example, the fact that Arabic has two different terms for ‘uncle’—one for the mother’s brother and one for the father’s brother—concerns ancient traditional tribal laws of marriage, incest laws,

26  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction and land ownership. English, as well as Hebrew, does not make this distinction because it has no impact on daily life for English- or Hebrew-speaking societies. However, in Biblical Hebrew, ‘uncle’ (dod) means beloved and the plural noun dodim means love-making (cf. the Song of Songs, verse 1: 16 and verse 2: 2, 8, 10, 16). The poetic Hebrew term ‘et dodim implies being ready for marriage. Because there are no historical connecting links, one can only speculate how the older meaning of ‘love’ and ‘loveable’ were metonymically assigned as the language developed to include a possible candidate for marriage; namely, the father’s brother. Yet, in some areas, as will be shown below, the connecting links do exist, although their discovery demands some effort. Studying the lexicon of various tribes and cultures has led to a better understanding of people’s worldviews and social organization. The polysemous nature of words and historical surveys provide perspectives on hidden relations between concepts such as ‘emet and ‘truth’, which is dealt with extensively here (see Chapter 6). Recognizing the semantic domain—or semantic field—to which a term, a lexical unit, or a concept belongs relies on native or acquired knowledge of the language, as does the recognition of synonyms or partial synonyms. Anthropologists and linguists use this specialized knowledge to identify metonyms, metaphors, and systematic metaphorical mappings of semantic domains. The older notion of semantic field was recently replaced by the term ‘semantic domain’ or ‘semantic frame’ (Nerlich and Clarke 2000). The concept of ‘frame’ is employed theoretically as part of Fillmore’s Frame Semantics (Petruck 2011) and as a practical tool in lexicography. It is well known that different languages organize parts of their lexicons in different ways. However, it is assumed here that there is some parallelism among languages in certain areas involving direct sensations, spatial orientation, and logical relations. This is not a commonly accepted view and is one facet of the ongoing debate about the validity and scope of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the extent of language variation (Deutscher 2011). My working hypothesis is that languages vary greatly, but they also show certain affinities and resemblances. Certain common traits emerge through analysis and comparisons between Hebrew and English, and at times, differences help clarify the problematic nature of a word or a concept in one of the languages or the other. Kittay (1992) suggested a definition that incorporates both the universal and specific aspects of culture dependency. She considers semantic fields to be the manifestation of linguistic conventions in a community of speakers. This captures the public, as well as the normative, aspects of languages. She shows that to function in a community of speakers, an individual needs to know, for instance, how to use the word ‘arthritis’ as a doctor, a patient, a parent, a nurse, or a pharmacist. Here, Kittay claims, there is no room for creativity or innovation since complying with convention is mandatory for communication and normal social behavior in that community. No one is at liberty to change radically a word or its pronunciation. If a word is used in an improper context, the speaker may be mocked or misunderstood, and

Similarity  27 at best, the addressees may look for a hidden metaphorical or humorous meaning in an innovative, nonstandard use of a word, as in poetry or jokes. This facet of language is public and hence normative. Thus, individuals enter the community of speakers by mastering the language rules at the phonetic, morpho-syntactic, as well as semantic and pragmatic levels. Fillmore’s theory of Frame Semantics and its realization in the lexical project FrameNet contribute to a better understanding of the nature of semantic relations. 3.4  IS THERE A FRAME OF ‘SIMILARITY’? Fillmore’s attack on the idea of a checklist of components, markers, or sememes (1977a, 1977b, 1978) developed into a cognitive semantic theory known as Frame Semantics. It bears some resemblance to Schank and Abelson’s (1977) idea of scripts and scenarios. A script and a frame have certain commonalities in that a script is defined as an ordered sequence of events that form a prototypical framework stored in long-term memory, the most well-known of which is the ‘restaurant’ script that codifies the sequence of actions from being seated, ordering, eating, to paying the bill and leaving. The ‘dentist’s office’ is another such script. Scripts thus store normative linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. Fillmore’s main claim was that the description of a word’s meaning must be related to human needs and experience; it should refer its semantic frame; that is, the cognitive model that organizes experience and is reflected in the organization of dictionaries and lexicons. This is how Petruck (2011, 1) described the gist of the theory: A semantic frame is a representation of an event, object, situation or state of affairs whose parts are identified as frame elements and whose underlying conceptual structure speakers access for both encoding and decoding purposes. Thus, the semantic frame, parts of which are indexed by words that evoke the frame (Fillmore 1985) is a cognitive structuring device used in the service of understanding. Fillmore’s theory aims to shed light on the organization of semantic information in the lexicon (Fillmore 1978). ‘Buying’, ‘selling’, ‘goods’, and ‘money’ belong to the semantic frame of commercial transactions, and their varying status is reflected in the syntactic roles (subject, object, theme, beneficiary, etc.) they play in actual sentences. Fillmore (1994) and Fillmore and Atkins (1992, 2000) elaborate on these issues and discuss ways of dealing with meaning relations. The most innovative contribution of the theory is that of FrameNet, which is characterized as follows: The FrameNet project is building a lexical database of English that is both human- and machine-readable, based on annotating examples

28  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction of how words are used in actual texts. From the student’s point of view, it is a dictionary of more than 10,000 word senses, most of them with annotated examples that show the meaning and usage. For the researcher in Natural Language Processing, the more than 170,000 manually annotated sentences provide a unique training dataset for semantic role labeling, used in applications such as information extraction, machine translation, event recognition, sentiment analysis, etc. For students and teachers of linguistics it serves as a valence dictionary, with uniquely detailed evidence for the combinatorial properties of a core set of the English vocabulary. . . . [T]he data is freely available for download; it has been downloaded and used by researchers around the world for a wide variety of purposes. (About FrameNet)3 The discovery of frame elements is based on analyzing syntactic and semantic relations in actual corpus sentences taken from the online British National Corpus. FrameNet classifies ‘similarity’ as a count noun and also a mass noun, and lists cognate words such as: like (v), like (prep), parallel (n), resemblance (n), resemble (v) etc. The three examples below illustrate Fillmore’s special notation and annotation.4 a. T-NPway-(1) There is a [Degreestriking] SIMILARITYTarget [Entitiesbetween Wolff’s way of talking about children and the views we saw put forward by Hobbes, Locke, and Kant]. [DimensionINI] b. T-NPway-(1) As a scientist by training, I see an interesting SIMILARITYTarget [Entitiesbetween the way in which knowledge is developed in science and in educational research]. [DimensionINI] c. resemblance Wshow-T-(1) However , [Entity_1the small atapuerca cranium 5] [shows]Supp [Degreeclear] [Dimensionfacial] RESEMBLANCESTarget [Entity_2to Petralona] , while a larger facial fragment (AT-404 ) displays a resemblance to the cheek region of Steinheim. The capitalized words are defined as frame elements. Their syntactic status and combinations constitute various shades of meaning in the frame of similarity. Based on such analyses, the notion of similarity is defined in FrameNet as follows: Two or more distinct entities, which may be concrete or abstract objects or types, are characterized as being similar to each other. Depending on figure/ground relations, the entities may be expressed in two d ­ istinct

Similarity

29

frame elements and constituents Entity 1 and Entity2 or jointly as a sin­ gle frame element and constituent Entities. The similarity may be based on appearance, physical properties, or other characteristics of the two entities. However, no such Dimension has to be specified explicitly. The Entities may be like each other to a greater or lesser Degree. Rather than specifying the Dimension of difference, a Differentiating fact may be mentioned. Notice that although similarity presupposes the notion of a judge who assesses similarity, that judge is not part of the frame of similarity.5 The project provides further analyses and information, including a list of lexical units relating to similarity, which is very much like the list found in thesauri: alike, a, differ, v, difference (count).n, difference, n, different, a, discrep­ ancy. n, discrepant, a, disparate, a, disparity, n, dissimilar, a, dissimilarity (mass) .n, dissimilarity, n, distinct, a, distinction, n, image, n, like, a, like, n, like, prep, parallel, n, resemblance, n, resemble, v, ringer, n, similar, a, similarity (count) n, similarity (mass) n, spitting image, n, take after, v, unlike, a, unlike, prep, variant, n, vary, v, very image, n. (ibid.) Each lexical unit of similarity and dissimilarity words is annotated according to the same principles that guide the analysis of the main entry shown above. FrameNet also places similarity in the wider context of frameto-frame relations, as shown in the following chart in Figure 3.1:

Inherits from : Gradable attributes, Reciprocity Is Inherited by: Be in agreement on assessment, Diversity Perspective on: Is Perspectivized in: Uses: Is Used by: Correctness, Distinctiveness, Imitating, Typicality Subframe of: Has Subframe (s): Precedes: Is Preceded by: Is Inchoative of: Is Causative of: See also: Figure 3.1

FrameNet: similarity, frame-frame relations

30  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction 3.5  ‘SIMILARITY’ AS A CLUSTER OF RELATIONS FrameNet provides a much better grasp of ‘similarity’ than any restricted dictionary with its one-line definition or thesauri lists where there is no analysis of meaning relations at all. It presents a clearer lexicographical, semantic, and syntactic view of the uses of similarity words in English by pointing to the syntactic and semantic interplay between the frame elements. Yet some stubborn puzzles remain, and in particular, the longstanding enigma of ‘concept’: what binds similarity words (called ‘lexical units’ in the FrameNet project) to each other? Is there one unifying concept of similarity? Do its cognates (resemblance, likeness, sameness, etc.) share the same air of vagueness? Speakers intuit some differences in meaning; for instance that resemblance, more than similarity, seems related to sight, whereas sameness is linked to precision and seems to convey the relation to identification that all the others lack. A closer contrastive look may help clarify the meaning relations, minimal pairs, and minimal differences of similarity words. This is a complex task since these items are not easily recognized, and only some appear in the list of lexical units in FrameNet. Cognate words in a certain semantic content domain or frame or a semantic field can be extracted from printed and online corpora, dictionaries, thesauri like Roget’s and online thesauri, as well as through the FrameNet project, text analysis, and informant questionnaires. Related similarity words found in thesauri are the nouns: resemblance, similitude, sameness, likeness, affinity, comparison, duplication, repetition, twin, double; the adjectives: very, image, similar, resembling, parallel, akin, close, analogous, etc., and verbs: agree, match, compare, accord, emulate, reprint, duplicate. This list is not identical to the FrameNet list, although the lists partly converge. The analysis in the following sections focuses on comparisons and detecting meaning relations rather than on syntactic status in a given sentence. It also draws on comparisons between distant languages, such as Hebrew and English, to explore the hidden meaning relations between similarity words. Much can be learned from this type of comparison: when people use one word instead of another one close to it in meaning in standard communication, they rely unconsciously on their tacit knowledge of the ‘place’ of this word in their mental lexicon and the fact that the chosen word is more suitable in a certain context. This is the hidden knowledge we are after when we compare cognate words. The minimal differences between the words and their grouping in subgroups of meanings shed light on the semantic relations between these words and their subcategories of meaning. More generally, this type of analysis helps detect the inner structure of the domain of similarity words. This analysis of meaning relations is guided solely by the simple empirical assumption that speakers have the intuitive ability—as part of their knowledge of their language—to sort words according to their comparative degree of closeness. This is part of the implicit general knowledge of how to use words in appropriate contexts. In Wittgenstein’s terms, this is described as learning gradually how to play the appropriate language game, like children or novices, and learn the rules as we go (Kittay 1992, Grandy 1992).6

Similarity  31 When presented with three words like ‘cat’, ‘trip’, and ‘car’, even out of context, people have no trouble relating ‘car’ to ‘trip’. They assign these terms to one category and create a different one for ‘cat’. As Barsalou has shown, such assignments and groupings of words are context and task dependent. However, apart from varying contexts and tasks, there is a general context-free understanding of words that plays a role in assigning them to domains and subdomains or groups and subgroups based on their frequent, general, commonly accepted use. However, this task is not always easy: when the triple contains ‘car’, ‘wall’, and ‘cat’, people may form three groups since no two seem to be straightforwardly closer to each other. I use this assumption about the closeness of words in the lexicon as a tool to provide a better understanding of words in an abstract domain. Furthermore, intuitive notions of relative closeness and distance of meanings are not restricted to the concrete lexicon of familiar words. One is able to associate ‘fear’ and ‘tremble’ and categorize ‘rest’ or ‘joy’ as belonging to different content domains. Even when assignments are difficult, they remain insightful and productive. When asked to group words such as abstract nouns, informants first hesitate but eventually, they exhibit the same ability. Let us examine the list of similarity words above to find the immediate subgroups they form.7 The first difference between the nouns that emerges is the division between general similarity nouns such as ‘similarity’, ‘likeness’, and ‘resemblance’ and more specific nouns that have more specified content, such as ‘copy’ or ‘picture’, which can be understood as objects of which similarity is an overt feature. Further analysis shows degrees of distance from the general, almost content-less center of the domain toward ‘approximation’, ‘correspondence’, ‘agreement’, and ‘analogy’, each of which has a more specific context and use. Duplicates are objects characterized by similarity and even sameness, but instances of duplication can vary from ‘reproduction’ to ‘twin’ to ‘copy’.8 Acts of simulation, such as mimicking, aping, and imitation, exemplify modes of production of similar objects or events. A model or a reconstruction stands for slightly different objects or events that present a certain kind of similarity or resemblance to the original. The following list presents the initial subgrouping of basic similarity nouns. It is the result of sorting words from the above list according to their relative distance. The ability to sort words in such groups is part of the basic mastery of a language. After grouping the general words such as similarity and likeness into one group, one can easily detect the more informative couple ‘closeness’ and ‘nearness’ that refer to distance as well as to similarity. Thus, they refer to the element of approximation that sometimes is associated with similarity. ‘Twin’ and ‘kinship’ refer visual similarity, which is often found in identical twins, and to the more general idea of relatedness exemplified in kinship relations. Both shed light on similarity that is different from ­‘analogy’ or ‘model’, which exhibit other shades of similarity. The result of this grouping procedure is the list in Figure 3.2. Comparing and classifying cognate words show variations within a domain. Close, almost synonymous words have specific shades of meaning when contrasted with their cognates, thus revealing certain aspects of the

32

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction a. general: similarity, likeness, b. analogy: resemblance, sameness, equivalent c. approximation: closeness, nearness d. correspondence: parallelism, parity, counterpart e. image: picture f. duplicate: : copy, reproduction, twin g. agreement: compatibility, affinity h. familial likeness: twin, kinship i. reconstruction: model Figure 3.2

Tentative subgroups of similarity nouns

inner structure of the domain. Adding verbs and adjectives to the process of classification of nouns in Figure 3.3 yields a close list of subcategories, although there are three major exceptions and reservations. First, strong similarity (near-identity) can also be depicted negatively, using such idi­ oms as ‘not tell apart’, ‘not tell one from the other’. Second, idioms and constructions modify and exemplify similarity relations; these include ‘remarkably like’, ‘strikingly like’, ‘for all the world like’, ‘as like as can be’, ‘same but different’, ‘pretty much the same’, ‘as like as eggs’, ‘like two peas in a pod’, ‘as alike as two scapegoats’ (based on Biblical Hebrew: Leviticus 16: 8), and ‘as alike as two drops of water’ (French). Third, similarity may be expressed by grammatical elements, such as prefixes and suffixes: quasi-, semi-, pseudo-, and -ish, like, -oid, -(u)lar. These, together with idioms such as ‘of the same hue’, ‘of a kind’, etc., show how similarity is the basis of generalization and that type-token belong to the domain of similarity. Copy and forgery, reconstruction, analogy, type-token relations, and mistaken identification suggest themselves as subdomains of the evasive content domain of similarity. A further analysis of the higher-order meaning relations between the subgroups is illustrated in Figure 3.3. Let us look at the different subtypes of similarity in context, as they occur in naturally produced sentences:9 Similarity o f duplication: They sell hundreds of copies of this book (record, etc.) Identical twins who look exactly the same.

Similarity From A to B

From A to A'

1. repetition

2. copy, forgery,

33

duplication, imitation

From A to A ?

Similarity

3. reconstruction

From A to A f 4. mistaken identification

One-many

From A to B

5. type/token

6. representation

From A to B 7. analogy, parallelism Figure 3.3

Shades of similarity—the emergence of structure

Similarity by mistaken identification: You look so much like your sister, you had me confused. Similarity by copying and/or deceiving: This is a copy/a forgery of the original painting. Similarity o f reconstruction: Some of the reconstructed buildings in Warsaw’s Old Town have been rebuilt to look like the originals. Analogy and comparing: More Structural Analogies between Pronouns and Tenses (the title of a paper by A. Kratzer 1998)10 Abstraction and representation, type/token relations: I want a different (another) apple! Why? They are all the same. Why did Obama use twenty-two different pens to write a single sig­ nature?11

34  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction It could be claimed that the subdomains of similarity illustrated above only reflect different causes or sources of similarity. According to this argument, there is one unvarying relation of similarity, but the reasons for creating this relation, or the ways to determine it, can vary. If this is the case, what is the invariant content or meaning of this unvarying relation? This leads back to the dead end of the logical puzzle mentioned earlier and results in no better understanding of the relation of similarity. One way out is to look at the cases above as subtypes of similarity; in other words, as related but different. A possible caveat—one mentioned by Wittgenstein—is that there is a loose relation of family resemblance between the members of the group of similarity relations. However, this does not preclude an analysis of the subtle ways in which duplications differ from reconstructions on the one hand, and from analogies and type-token relations on the other. More generally, the issue of why and how all are subsumed under one general notion and under the term similarity still remains open. It is productive in some cases to see the differences between subtypes as qualitative rather than quantitative. At least some of the problems stem from the fact that all the subtypes were treated by Goodman, Quine, and others as though they were one unitary concept without considering their different shades of meanings. The alternative qualitative view of the nature of similarity subtypes may help resolve the quantification conundrum: two photos of the same person can bear a greater or lesser resemblance to that person, but there is no way to compare similarities of photographs to resemblances between people; comparing similarities across subtypes is simply wrong, if not impossible. In the case of the photos, a separate assumption about relations of representation, and hence, some sort of identification and duplication that would diminish the problem of crossing types, is needed. A photo represents a person, and as such, it is considered to preserve important features of that person’s looks while not incorporating others, such as absolute size, gestures, and movement. The resemblance between twins does not rely on representation; hence, we look for other features, mostly those omitted in the previous comparison. Admitting the existence of subtypes of similarity avoids some of the difficulties associated with this concept, but other questions remain unanswered. The most important involves the unifying feature that ties these various judging activities together and associates them conceptually under one notion intuitively dubbed ‘similarity’. A closer look at the above subtypes shows that they all display a certain tension between oneness and separate individuation. This tension can take two different directions, depending on the starting point: 1. The unifying aspect: Similar (A' A'', A''', A'''' . . .). Here, the unifying feature derives from the type or cause of duplication. Poor sight, genetics, or plastic surgery can all be responsible for unification in mistaken identification. Identical twins sometimes look like the same

Similarity  35 person, due to an identity by duplication of genetic features. The unifying elements in copy and forgery are the skills of the artist or the copying machine, the forger’s talent, and the ignorance of the beholder. Memory, design, and intention play the same unifying role in reconstructions. The fact that the outcomes—the entities compared—are always plural (at least two), with a separate individuation, points to the characteristic of the relation of similarity, which is lacking in the identity relation; namely, the greater emphasis on the element of plurality. This element plays a larger role in the remaining subtypes, as shown: 2. The separating aspect: A is similar to B. The objects or events are definitely separate and individuated. The activity involved in determining similarity here can involve bridging, approximating, and observing closeness, for example, resemblance, as in: “These twin brothers look very much the same” or “They (two) have the same (one) nose”. The same grammatical features are found in analogy: “There is a certain analogy between the two countries’ policies”. In these contexts, the impact of difference is much stronger, as opposed to the weaker, artificial intentional effort to unify. The final remaining subtype, that of type-token relations, seems to depart from both modes discussed above. It is hard to tell whether the abstracting unifying element in type-token similarities plays a more predominant role in the relation than the aspect of plurality and the individuation of the tokens. As a supposedly innate faculty, the human ability to construct type-token relations based on the combination of a plurality of tokens, or unification by types and categories, may be two facets of the same cognitive process. As mentioned in the Introduction, infants should be confused by the adult use of words, yet they manage to bootstrap themselves from type-token generalizations and master the fact that the sound ‘grandpa’ is uttered when two totally different people are present. Gradually, the child learns that these two instances or contexts where the noun is uttered have additional names and have a separate unity (Dromi 2009). Children understand the reason for assigning each instance the same title ‘grandpa’, an understanding that involves a complex knowledge of the concept of family when much older. The same is true for animal words, such as dog, cat, or rabbit, which are uttered in at least three different contexts: (a) in the presence of the living creature; (b) when looking at a page depicting a two-dimensional object (a book) while mimicking the noises the creature makes, while repeating its category name; and (c) when soft, small, stuffed toys are presented to them. Children may find the third instance confusing since the toy has a shape and colors similar to those of the living creature and in the picture book, but are these similarities enough to overcome the huge differences? This line of thought led the young Chomsky (1957) to his well-known attack on Skinner’s behaviorism. Chomsky assumed that infants have

36

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction

an innate (or a very early) readiness to deal with such polyvalent situa­ tions and the open-ended nature of names and concepts. We must credit human infants, and perhaps other living creatures, with a certain innate type-token device and some understanding of the notions of represen­ tation and generalization that enables categorizing and mastering the correctness of proper names, natural kind names, and other linguistic ele­ ments. They all require an innate pre-concept of similarity (Wierzbicka 1996, Sovran 1992). Nevertheless, some of the above-mentioned subtypes of similarity rela­ tions seem partially contradictory. This creates a thorny problem for any strict method of logical formalism based on the falsity of ‘p and not p’. Similarity relations demand that the compared objects be one and the same in some sense, but at the same time, many and different. The delicate and versatile equilibrium between these contradictory elements accounts for the variety of similarity relations and contexts. Language is richer and more flexible, and hence, less clear and unambiguous than logic. In addi­ tion, various types of similarity are by no means arranged on a scale. They are qualitatively different, so that as a general concept, similarity defies quantification; however, within the items compared in each subtype, it allows for quantification, at least for ordering scales, if not actual quantification.

3.6 SIMILARITY WORDS Analyzing the characteristics of nouns and prepositions that express similarity can be illuminating. Hebrew has an interesting connection by morphological-derivational and semantic relations between ‘similarity’ and ‘imagination’. This emerges in the polysemous nature of the general Hebrew word for similarity, dimyon (see Figure 3.4). The old Biblical word dim yon (similarity) functions in Modern, revived, Hebrew as the main term for similarity. The poetic Psalm (17:12) compares the wicked to a beastly lion: the English translation chose the adjective Dimyon/: Imagination

Dimyon2: Similarity

yesh lo dimyon (imagination)

'eyn kol dimyon (similarity)

mefutah

beynekhem

lit. He has a developed imagination

Figure 3.4

lit. There is no resemblance between you two

The polysemous nature of dimyon (similarity) in Hebrew

Similarity

37

like: “He [the wicked] is like a lion that is eager to prey, a king of beasts lying in wait”, while the Hebrew texts uses an abstract noun: Ve-dimyono ke- arye y ikh sof litrof And-similarity -his as a lion eager to prey Influential nineteenth-century thinkers and poets such as Ahad Ha’am (A. Ginzburg) and Bialik introduced a new use of the noun dimyon as ‘imagination’ on the basis of certain ancient poetic instances (from around 500 BCE onward) where it is unclear whether the abstract noun means similarity or the mental power of detecting similarities, or even imagining. Some Modern Hebrew writers, mainly philosophers, feel uneasy with the polysemous nature of the term and have tried to coin new neutral abstract terms based on the same tri-consonant root like dom ut or damyut, by add­ ing the suffix of abstraction -ut to the new derivations, which has recently come into greater use. However, even this deviation from the polysemous dimyon preserves the meaning relations between the two notions by main­ taining the same root, which in Hebrew is a marker of close meaning relations. Since Hebrew consonantal roots systematically preserve kernels of meanings and meaning relations, it is useful to take a deeper look at the distribution of meanings of the root d.m.y. (Figure 3.5). The semantic range of variation of the words derived from this root is quite large: it ranges from comparison, close identification, hesitation and

ledamot

to imagine

lehadmot

to simulate

dmut

image, character, silhouette (contours or blurred vision)

dome

similar, resembling, close (dom e m e’o d >very similar, much the same)

dmuy-

like, has the shape of a ... (dmuy-beytsa > egg-like) (lit. it-seems to-me). I think so, I’m not sure.

nidme li nidme lekha!

(lit. it-seems to-you (m.)). That's what you think. (colloquial) That's how it appears to you. (In spoken Hebrew, with a certain intonation indicating a speech act of disagreement and dismissal: It is not true).

Figure 3.5

The Hebrew root d.m.y and its derivations

38

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction

mistake, appearances, and contours, to shapes and vague identifications that are not too far removed from imagination. This echoes the English relation between imagination and image. Hebrew preserves some missing links that help reveal the ties between imagining, seeing, noticing shapes, images, and contours, and successful or mistaken identification. These features can be seen as mere accidents occurring in the long life of a language. However, the repetition of ties between the vague idea of similarity and mental ability to imagine occurs in other operators of similarity, in both English and Hebrew, as well in some other languages. The following figures compare the English ‘(the) same’ with its Hebrew parallel (o to ; see Figure 3.6. The English construction ‘the same’ displays a systematic ambiguity between identity and similarity. By constantly overlooking type-token boundaries, ‘the same’ may refer either to two identical items or two items, two items of the same sort, or two tokens of the same type, depending on their tendency to appear as tokens or duplicates. Compare ‘buildings’ and ‘persons’, where iden­ tity and uniqueness is robust, to ‘names’, ‘smiles’, ‘words’, and ‘dresses’, which may have duplicates. The Hebrew term foto has another grammatical and semantic ambiguity with an even stronger tendency toward demonstrating, identifying, and referring, since the original meaning of eoto is the third-person masculine pronoun in the definite accusative (see Figures 3.7 and 3.8)

(1) They wore the same dress. (Same style, same color, two very similar dresses) (2) They wore the same dress. (One dress, two different occasions) (3) They have the same smile. (Two people, one (?) smile) (4) "Tomorrow, same time, same place!" (Two days, one place, one time) (5) I saw the same person twice that day. (One person two occasions) (6) In the restaurant: "I'll have the same as her". (I’ll have what she is having) (Two identical servings) Figure 3.6

The systematic ambiguity of ‘the same’ in English

Similarity 'otoi= ’the same’

r0t02 = 'him'

foto

yesh

lanu

there-is to-us

the same

ta'am. taste.

ret hayeled

ra’iti I saw

the boy.

ra'iti 'oto. I saw him. (3rd person form of the definite accusative of the preposition ’et)

Figure 3.7

The systematic ambiguity of the Hebrew eoto (the same)

(1 )anahnu garim We

live

befoto

binyan.

in-the-same

building.

(One building)

We live in the same building

(2) yehs

lanu 'oto

me'il.

To-us the-same

coat

(Two coats)

We have just the same coat (Very similar, identical two coats)

(3) yesh To-us

lanu roto

shem.

the-same

name

(One name? type/token?)

We have the same name

Figure 3.8

‘The same’ for one or for many

39

40  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Glinert (1989, 101) states that in Modern Hebrew, ‘oto (the same) can be complemented by a (missing) comparative clause; for instance, “the same car as you (m.) have” (‘ota [f.] mekhonit kmo sheyesh lekha). It seems clear that the existence of the original ambiguous Hebrew comparison contexts of ‘oto helped it absorb the familiar pattern of ‘the same’ from such European languages as German, Yiddish, and English, which are known to have affected the revival of Modern Hebrew. Historically, the Hebrew word ‘oto (and its feminine form ‘ota) show a very interesting shift in meaning and function. It is worthwhile examining the stages that mark the transition of ‘oto from its demonstrative function and status to its new function in comparison and analogy. No Modern Hebrew speaker can imagine his or her speech without ‘oto (the same) or ‘oto davar (the same thing); by contrast, it is much more difficult to find such usages in more formal written language in texts written three or more decades ago, except those that quote the direct speech of young people, as in A. B. Yehoshua’s (1977, 1978) novel The Lover. There, a fifteen year-old girl talks about her teacher who “explains the same thing (‘oto davar) a hundred times” (34). No such expression is found in the higher registers of the other characters in the novel, or in most other novels written in higher register, let alone in poetic or biblical style. Even a search as far back as the Mishnaic period (around 200 BCE) only shows isolated occurrences of ‘oto in a context of comparison, as opposed to its extensive, common use as an accusative. Nevertheless, in these early texts, its meaning is quite clearly still referential: cf. “From a field of this sort (me’oto hamin) from a field of another (‘aḥer) sort (Mishnah, Bikurim 1.7). This kind of ambiguity appears in a handful of more recent modern texts: “His eyes had the very same (‘ota) expression of hatred which frightened me earlier in the meeting” (Smilanski 1934, 42).This usage is worth comparing to John Lyons’ remarks on the relationships between demonstrative pronouns and definite articles: In the Indo-European languages what are now distinguished as the definite article, the demonstrative pronouns and the third-person pronouns are all diachronically related and were classified as articles (as also was the relative pronoun) by the earlier Greek grammarians (Lyons 1977: 646). Broadly speaking, there are two ways by which we can identify an object by means of a referring expression: First by informing the addressee where it is (i.e. by locating it for him); second, by telling what it is like, what properties it has or what class of objects it belongs to (i.e. by describing it for him). Either or both kinds of information may be encoded in the demonstrative and personal pronouns of particular languages (ibid. 1977: 648). Hebrew exhibits a parallel situation: here, the third-person-masculine definite accusative of the preposition ‘et acquired another derived use through the influence of Germanic and Slavic languages and mainly Yiddish for equating or classifying two separate items under one type. The evolution of Hebrew again highlights the referential origin of acts of classifying mediated by ­equating (the

Similarity  41 first ‘oto, ‘him’, in identifying; a second ‘oto for equating two items in comparing; and a third ‘oto, meaning one of the same type in generalizing). The original demonstrative or emphatic ‘oto, when used in comparisons, initially carried the entire weight of comparison, and thus, gradually lost its referential or emphatic function. At a later stage, mainly in the spoken language, the antecedents of comparison dropped out, and ‘oto took on the full meaning of ‘the same’, in addition to its older meanings and functions. An interesting developmental fact is seen in the following (pers. observ.): A two-year-old girl is pointing to an apple that another little girl named Gal is holding, and she says incorrectly: “‘‘Oto le-Gal ‘oto li” meaning literally: “The same for Gal the same for me”. It is clear from the context that she is asking for another (similar) apple. The example shows the beginning of a switch from a referential use of ‘oto, as indicated by the irregular repetition, which hints at its original status as a demonstrative, to the regular standard use of comparing where ‘oto ‘the same’ is not repeated. The grammatical transparency of the child’s mistake reflects an uncertainty in her understanding of the two meanings of ‘oto, but at the same time, shows the possibility of using this word in two different yet related ways. Clearly, the child has not yet completely mastered the more abstract, more recent, Hebrew meaning of ‘oto ‘the same’; that is, its standard modern use in adult speech for comparing and equating. Another peculiar etymological fact about Hebrew and English is that the Hebrew term for ‘like’—kmo—is assumed to be composed of two deictic elements ke and ma (what), whereas the Old English origin of ‘like’ is lie, meaning the ‘body’, which has a deictic element that does not emerge in its modern uses in comparisons and evaluations. The English root places this common similarity word in the realm of referencing and pointing rather than in the mental activity of comparing. In Hebrew, these two deictic elements result from a bleaching to form kmo, although there is a certain leap from the two deictic elements of ke and ma, to kmo whose main role is to indicate the abstract operation of comparing and finding similarities or differences. As will be seen in the next section with ‘as’, these etymologies exhibit a certain void, a nonspecific action of comparing. They suggest the roots of comparing may lie in pointing and pointing together, as in the notion of ‘approximation’—another similarity word. More will be said about this leap from basic pointing to the more complex mental act of comparing and observing similarities. At present, it suffices to note the source of ‘similarity’ in simpler notions. 3.7  THE GRAMMAR OF ‘AS’ ‘As’ is one of the most useful similarity words in English. It is worth inquiring why ‘as’ is repeated in expressions like ‘as soon as’; ‘A is as big (/hungry/ foolish) as B’, etc. The repetition seems to be redundant, since comparing and abstracting relations do not require repetition, and their logical form is xRy

42  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction and not Rx–Ry. Repetitions are characteristic of identifying elements such as articles and demonstratives. They are repeated and attached to every occurrence of the names they precede. Compare, for example: ‘x is bigger than y’, or ‘x is the opposite of y’, to ‘This x and this y’, ‘an x and a y’, ‘my x and your y’, etc. If ‘as’ is an operator of similarity and hence stands for an abstract relation, why is it repeated as though it were an article or a demonstrative? The distinction between two and one, comparing vs. referring, identity and abstraction vs. comparison, is reflected here again and concerns the original etymology of ‘as’ and its deictic nature as from its earlier form ‘all-so’–‘thus’; cf. German also–‘thus’. ‘As’ acquired its new comparing function over the centuries and changed its pronunciation, but the repetitive use is a faint reminder of its former deictic referring function. als: ‘as’. As in “So ruhig als ein Gott and als ein Gott so Schrecklich” (Ewald von Kleist, Gedichte 2.106) also: ‘thus’. As in Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche) German presents the same duality between the related words als and also, which are used for comparison and substitution, respectively. An illustration of the tension between duality and separateness (in comparing), and unity and identity (in referring), is found as well in the semantic distribution of ‘as’ in English (as shown in Figure 3.9). Examples (1) and (2) exemplify the common, normal use of ‘as’ in a semiidiomatic manner, which ignores the redundant repetition. In (3) to (6), ‘as’ is not repeated, and its meaning inclines toward equating something (an action) with a standard, or to denoting coincidence (by equating points of time). ‘Do so’, ‘also’, ‘when’, and ‘just’, as acceptable paraphrases for the meaning of ‘as’ in these instances, emphasize the referring element in its meaning. These elements are even clearer in usages (7) to (11). In (8), the meaning of the sentence remains the same with or without the ‘as’; this a­ naphoric use of ‘as’ hints at its immanent deictic nature. ‘I am told’ (and this is a fact to refer to) and ‘as I am told’ are only slightly stylistically different. ‘As’ therefore does not add or subtract from the referring power of the parenthetical expression. In (12), the enumeration is by no means comparison or uncertainty; it is much closer to referring. However, to balance the picture and to support the previously observed relations between similarity, comparison, images, and imagination, ‘as’ is used in (13) (substitution, role) but even more so in (14), in fictional contexts where the substitution is not real; in (14), role playing relies heavily on the imagination. Once more, meaning and usage span these otherwise tenuously related poles of identifying, equating, substituting and uncertainty, and imagining, on the other hand. These contexts cross the boundary between different cognitive levels as well as between appearance and ‘reality’ and are suggestive of the constructed aspect of ‘reality’: reality as conceptualized by human perceptual and conceptual faculties.

Similarity

43

’As’ for comparison (1) I’ll come as soon as possible. (2) She is as stubborn as a mule. ’As’ for referring through comparison and standardlj (3) Do as you are told!

(Do so)

(4) I’ll take this one as well.

(Also)

(5) As the sun rose, we started to climb the hill.

(When)

(6) "Winston tastes good like (as) a cigarette should” (Just so) ’As’ in parentheses and in various modes of referring (7) As far as I know, he wasn’t sick.

(Hedge)

(8) John, [as] I’m told, will be there in the afternoon. (Indirect information) (9) As a rule, this firm does not employ teenagers.

(It is the rule)

(10) As to your last remark, let me ...

(Reference)

(11) As opposed to your claim ...

(Reference by opposition)

(12) Warm colors such as red, yellow ... (Reference by enumeration) ’As* in role playing, substitution, and imagination (13) I’m telling you this as a friend

(Role)

(14) With Liv Ullmann as the daughter and Ingrid Bergman as the mother. (Role, image) Figure 3.9

The use and the meaning of ‘as’

3.8 THE ROLE OF SIMILARITY IN CONSTRUING CONCEPTS In his original, insightful book Sense and Sensibilia (1962), John Austin dealt with the nature and the importance of words like ‘like’ and ‘real’ and their characteristic use. He wrote: “Like is the great adjuster-word, or alter­ natively put, the main flexibility-device by whose aid, in spite of the limited scope of our vocabulary, we can always avoid being left completely speech­ less” (1962, 74). Is this another case of a vicious circle; namely, analyzing similarity by relations of ‘similarity’ and difference, closeness, and distance

44  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction between word meanings? The answer lies in breaking the circle by showing that it is a hermeneutic circle rather than a logical one, which uses the defined in the definition. In a hermeneutic circle, one starts from a vague, intuitive state of knowledge, moves carefully from one set of sound data to another, by justifying each step logically. The outcome should by no means contradict established knowledge but is expected to draw a clearer, broader, and deeper picture of the initial problem at hand. With this idea of the hermeneutic process in mind, do we now have a better understanding of ‘similarity’? Can we avoid Goodman’s desperate conclusion to leave it to commonsense altogether? Or rather, can we now show how its problematic, flexible, and somehow illogical nature serves important roles and functions in concept formation and communication? When a person points to the sky and says that a strange object is like a shoelace, the similarity operator does two things: it draws the attention of the addressee to an object’s existence and shape, but at the same time, it suspends judgment about the nature of this strange object: it is not a shoelace and is only ‘like’ one. This leaves room for a new level of understanding to emerge. Coordinates are drawn in the mind of the addressee, but at the same time, the identification process is open to determining the true nature of the object. The dual nature of ‘like’ and its cognates helps achieve this twofold goal of pointing without commitment to a fixed name, or fixed definition and incorporates an invitation to adjust knowledge and render it more accurate. The tension between a fixed starting point and loose ends is what knowledge and science need to maintain their dual nature of flexibility and reliability, connected yet open to adjustment and change. More broadly, the above analysis provides a clearer view of the place and functions of the concept of ‘similarity’ in language and thought, as well as the process of acquiring new concepts and that of scientific growth. The very problematic duality illustrated by similarity words is in fact their main property; in other words, their flexibility, which actually helps cognition to preserve both its conservative and creative nature. It helps us leave the safe terrain of known, labeled, categorized terms, and expand our knowledge and language to newly discovered areas without yet fully committing ourselves to new labels and terms. Derivational and semantic relations between similarity words, their etymologies, and the characteristics and functions of similarity words such as ‘like’, ‘the same’, ‘as’, and others show that similarity is related to both the referring and naming device, as well as to abstraction, comparison, grouping, categorizing, and type-forming cognitive processes. Oddly enough, similarity seems to have roots in both imagination and creation, as well as in precision, identification, and recognition. The following is a summary of the assumed role of similarity in cognitive processes, as inferred from the above observations and analyses: a. Human-made, as well as natural duplications and reconstruction are recognized through similarities that are extremely close to identity.

Similarity  45 b. The type-token (probably innate) device is highly useful in abstraction, categorization, and representation (re-presentation). c. There is a posited evolutionally developed human ability to find and form analogies that might exist in other living creatures as a means of survival since it enables organisms to repeat safe, proven experiences and avoid hazardous ones. d. Human failure associated with poor sight, hesitation, exposure to silhouettes, contours, and images accounts for the tension between what is considered to be reality and what is perceived as appearance. Many studies on categorization since the emergence of prototype theory (Rosch 1977, 1978, Lakoff 1987) have raised the unresolved issue of the boundaries of categories. Adelson (1985), Pinker and Prince (1996), and especially Barsalou (1987) argued that “categories tend to have graded structures rather than rigid, fixed boundaries. Concepts originate in a highly flexible process that retrieves generic and episodic information from long-term memory to construct temporary concepts in working memory” (Barsalou 1987, 101). Similarity is relevant to such processes in more than one way: “An exemplar’s similarity to the central tendency of its category determines its typicality. . . . A second factor that determines an exemplar’s typicality is how similar it is to ideals [and goals] associated with its category” (ibid, 105). The concept of similarity is interwoven in cognitive processes. Thus, relational semantic analysis corresponds to findings in cognitive psychology that show an immanent duality between identification and precision vs. uncertainty, creative imagination, and ad-hoc labeling. Deictic elements are used for referring and demonstrating, whereas other devices are used for sorting, naming, and representing. These aspects of uncertainty and their open-­ endedness contribute to the acquisition of additional knowledge. The former are necessary for the construction of a consistent systematic worldview; the latter for maintaining its flexibility and the ability for change and expansion. The process of refining and adjusting, in which similarity operators play an important role, never stops. Developmental studies (Mandler 2004, Gopnik 2009, Dromi 2009) have shown the rich conceptual endowment in infants that enables them to structure their experience through adult dialoguing. Further experiments may probe the nature of this dual role of similarity, the immanent duality found in similarity operators, and clarify how this duality qualifies them to fill the gap between what is already known and what is to be added and structured into the conceptual system. The semicontradictory qualities of ‘similarity’ account for the difficulties philosophers and logicians have encountered when trying to deal with it with their conventional tools. However, these much-unexpected qualities support the more flexible and less logical and rigid view of the ways categorization and conceptualization develop and interact in children and in adults. Similarity is an abstract relation. Studying its peculiar nature sheds light on the process of abstraction itself. The affinity of linguistic findings in

46  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction terms of syntax, relational semantics, idiomaticity, and etymology points to the structured yet surprising nature of the conceptual organization. These findings call for further empirical study of the cognitive tools and the undiscovered mental mechanisms involved in conceptualization and abstraction. The following chapters use the same tools to study semantic relations in the domain of ‘difference’, which is a counterpart to ‘similarity’, and the nature of another abstract operator: the semantics of ‘negativity’, which is also believed to play a crucial role in categorization, concept formation, and abstraction. They may shed more light on the architecture of the abstract areas of the actual and mental lexicon.

4

Difference

‘Difference’ is generally considered the opposite of ‘similarity’. However, this general concept does not reveal much about its nature or about its importance in the conceptual system. The chapter analyzes the semantic relations between ‘difference’ and its cognates, such as ‘diversity’, ‘variety’, ‘otherness’, ‘separateness’, ‘exception’, ‘opposite’, ‘alternative’, ‘replacement’ and more. It shows that these shades of ‘difference’ are crucial for concept formation, as well as for understanding reality. Specifying inner relations between ‘difference’ words leads to the discovery of the role of more abstract relations that constitute the concept of ‘differences’ and take part in the formation of other crucial concepts. Three general dimensions of cognition emerge: (1) the spatiotemporal dimension; (2) the logical dimension; and (3) a surprisingly deep pragmatic level of human preferences and values. Basic visual models, image schema, and metaphors constitute the various kinds of ‘difference’ and make up the cognitive map of ‘difference’ and its nuances. The findings shed new light on the relations between logic and language.

4.1  MEANING RELATIONS AND ‘DIFFERENCE’ The noun ‘difference’ can be found in two main contexts: that of logic, which will concern us here, and the loaned meaning of social relations of disagreement and dispute. This derived latter sense appears in the following the OED 1844 quote from R. W. Emerson: “Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive”. The logical concept of ‘difference’ is abstract; the adjective ‘different’ is conceived as the opposite of ‘similar’ and the ‘same’. ‘Difference’ concerns the ability to compare and separate and notice the way individual things or events are identical, similar, or at variance. Here again, as in the case of ‘similarity’, there is no simple way to denote ‘difference’. Dictionaries specify several meanings of types of differences. One is the quality of being unlike or dissimilar, as in the following example: 1. There are many differences between jazz and rock.

48  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction In other contexts, ‘difference’ is sometimes associated with deviation, divergence, and departure, as in the statistical notion of ‘deviation from the mean’. In mathematical terms, it refers to the ‘remainder’, the number that remains after subtraction. ‘Difference’ is sometimes understood to reflect a significant change: 2. His support made a real difference. The FrameNet project does not deal with the lexeme ‘difference’ as a separate entry, but rather indirectly through the semantic and syntactic elements that constitute the semantic frame of its counterpart ‘similarity’: “The compared entities between which the differences are discovered or pointed at, and the degree of difference expressed by adverbial quantifiers such as ‘very’, ‘not at all’ ‘slightly’, etc.”1 However, this does not lead to a better understanding what ‘difference’ really means. The alternative relational semantic proposition presented here is to group cognate words that are close in meaning to ‘difference’ or bear some relation to it from thesauri and corpora, and then specify their interrelations. Dividing them into subgroups of related words and observing minimal differences2 between very close words should then reveal hidden axes of meaning relations that constitute the actual and mental lexicon. Most thesauri, both electronic and otherwise, list the following adjectives, nouns, and verbs in their entries. Here is a selection from Roget (1977):3 other, opposite, apart, strange, otherness, distinction, contrast, diversity, variety, variation, variance, divergent, novel, original, unique, modification, permutation, change, shift, deviation, separateness, alteration, discontinuity. Roget’s Thesaurus is a useful reference book for stylistic purposes. However, Hüllen (2009, 144–198) sees beyond this practical use. He views this thesaurus as “a collection of extremely high numbers of words that have never been brought together in a more theoretically-oriented investigation into lexicology and semantics”(6). Hüllen claims that Roget may provide a way to “find out what the structure of the vocabulary of a natural language, understood to be a mental lexicon, is” (ibid). This core idea is complemented here by the main idea of Relational Semantics; namely, that meaning relations are illuminating because they shatter the automaticity of the regular use of words. Words that are very close in a given semantic domain; that is, minimal pairs, can reveal fine differences and form a delicate web of higher order meaning relations. This echoes and exemplifies Saussure’s (1966 [1916]) famous observation that each word has a value that is somehow dependent on its status in the system and is connected to the other words in the network. Probing for minimal pairs of cognate words and forming subgroups based on the intuitive knowledge of closeness of meaning, as well as the search for metaphors,

Difference  49 models, and etymologies can all shed light on the organizing principles of a given semantic domain. The use of these words in context, their restrictions, and their mutual alterations shed additional light on meaning relations by pointing to changes in meaning and use over time. Compare the following: 3. There was a certain change in the firm’s policy. 4. The firm tried a different policy. 5. The firm altered its old policy by a new one. 6. The firm adopted the opposite policy. ‘Change’ is general and implies some sort of continuity and succession. Something that undergoes a change still remains itself, while ‘different’ and ‘alter’, to a greater extent, imply alteration, replacement, and hence discreteness. In example (5), the difference concerns replacement; hence, with a new ‘identity’ or ‘direction’ of the firm’s policy. ‘Opposite’ represents duality and polarity, and can serve as a metaphorical extension for the social meaning of ‘difference’ as conflict and dispute. It is reflected in the political term ‘opposition’ and in the quote from Emerson about ‘difference of opinions’. Comparisons of close ‘synonyms’ help to group words that belong to a certain semantic frame into subgroups, as seen earlier in Chapter 3. The process of forming subgroups begins by choosing two seemingly more distant yet transparent words in the semantic frame, for instance, ‘deviation’ and ‘contrast’. The next word chosen should be examined in comparison to these two. It can be judged as closer to one of the two, a synonym, or almost a synonym,4 or can appear is distant from both. If the new word does not show some sense of close relation to either one of these two, it forms a new subgroup. Synonyms or near synonyms suggest themselves intuitively as the examination of the list of words proceeds; for example, the pair ‘discordance’ and ‘disharmony’ or the pair ‘opposition’ and ‘contrast’.5 The following sections in this chapter will show how the structure of the semantic frame emerges from this examination of meaning relations between lexemes. Another intuitive notion that comes to mind during this process is that of ‘meaning components’.6 Minimal differences between two synonymous words are sometimes said to have a ‘meaning component’. For instance, the salient components of the lexeme ‘separateness’ are [+distance] and [+individual], whereas the salient component of the lexeme ‘variety’ is [+plural]. Further observations will be discussed in the next sections. 4.2  SHADES AND SUBGROUPS OF ‘DIFFERENCE’ The following list of nouns related to difference from Roget’s Thesaurus will serve as a basis for grouping: separateness, discreteness, distinctness, distinction, dissimilarity, variation, variety, heterogeneity, diversity, deviation, divergence, departure, disparity,

50  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction inconsistency, incongruity, unconformity, incompatibility, irreconcilability, disagreement, dissent, discordance, dissonance, disharmony, contrast, opposition, contrariety, otherness, distinction, contrast, variety, variation, variance, modification, permutation, change, shift, deviation, heterogeneity, deviation, disparity, discordance, dissonance, contrast, opposition, contrariety, separateness, alteration, discontinuity. The list of adjectives includes the following items, some of them directly related to verbs: different, unlike, dissimilar, distinct, distinguished, discriminated, discrete, separated, separate, disjoined, wide apart, variant, varying, diverse, several, many, deviating, departing, inconsistent, incompatible, irreconcilable, at odds, dissonant, contrasting, poles apart, poles asunder, worlds apart, differential, individuating, separative, distinctive, contrastive, characteristic, peculiar, idiosyncratic, other, another, else, not the same, not the type, of another sort, unique, rare, special, peculiar, sui generis. Roget’s list of adverbs includes: differently, diversely, in a different manner, in another way, otherwise, in other respects, otherwise, other than, on the other hand, contrarily. Below is the list of verbs that denote activities in the real world and verbs that denote the mental activity of observing differences and distinctions. Some verbs suggest the metaphorical secondary sense of disagreement: separate, divide, discriminate, modify, change, individualize, individuate, diversify, atomize, disjoin, mark out, mark off, set apart, differentiate, distinguish, vary, diverge, stand apart, deviate from, depart from and disagree with, disaccord with. This is not the complete list, but it is rich enough to apply the idea of relating lexemes by subgroups of closely related words. The main idea that underlies forming subgroups is that the mastery of a language, which expresses itself in the automatic choice of words in real-life speech and writing, can serve as a tool that reveals the hidden organization of the mental lexicon. Normally, people do not stop to ask why they chose a particular word over another in a certain context. However, linguistic analysis does two things at the same time: it looks at the larger frame to which a certain lexeme belongs and tries to find its unique place in relations to its closer or more distant lexeme in the frame. This idea guides the search for frame elements and frame structures in Frame Semantics and FrameNet, as seen in Chapter 3 on similarity. However, FrameNet is a lexicology-oriented

Difference  51 project, whereas the analysis in this volume is more theoretically, philosophically, and structurally oriented in search of axes of meanings and hidden organizing principles.7 Comparisons and relations are informative and illuminating. When a word stands in isolation, it is understood functionally, or at best, by its dictionary definition. The long attack on definitions (Wittgenstein 1958, Rosch 1973, and their followers) underscored the importance of looking for alternative ways to specify meanings, as will be done here: Note that the word ‘distance’ as well as ‘frames’ and ‘axes’ are necessary spatial metaphors for understanding and expressing the structure—another semi-metaphorical term—of the lexicon in the spirit of recent Embodied Mind theories (Johnson 1987, 1993, 2007; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2005). Certain words in this frame or domain of ‘difference-words’ are very general, such as difference, otherness, and distinction, and provide less information on the infrastructure of the frame. Each has its specific hue and may be used in a slightly different context. A passage from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale8 links difference to comparison: 7. You shall see . . . great difference betwixt our Bohemia, and your Sicilia. (1623 I, i, 3) The following 1919 quote from the Times Literary Supplement emphasizes uniqueness: 8. The German himself is vaguely aware of otherness . . . . He finds that the language of his self-justification has no validity beyond the German frontiers. (27 Feb. 104/2) ‘Distinction’ implies an act of distinguishing as well as the fact that two things, events, or parts are distinct and different, as in the 1668 quote from Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie16: 9. The distinction of it [sic. comedy] into Acts was not known to them. This first general group of words suggests a sense of uniqueness and the act of comparing and distinguishing. The second subgroup highlights the aspect of plurality (group 2 in Figure 4.1) associated with difference and founded on the notions of variety, mixture, heterogeneity, dissonance, disharmony, etc. Another meaning associated with ‘difference’ is that of individuality and separateness rather than the mere fact of plurality. The nouns ‘separateness’ and ‘discreteness’ and the adjectives ‘distinguished’, ‘discrete’, ‘separated’, ‘disjoined’, ‘other’, and ‘another’ emphasize the distance between individual items. The spatial metaphor of ‘distant’ stands for the logical abstract idea of ‘difference’; it visualizes and exemplifies it. Whereas the notion of

52

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction 2. plurality variety heterogeneity diversity disharmony

1.general difference otherness unlike dissimilar distinct

3. separateness alternative discreteness

Difference

5. Contrast opposition contrariety irreconcilable poles apart

4. deviation divergence departure

Figure 4.1

6. Individuality and exclusion not the type o f another sort sui generis

Shades of ‘difference’

plurality emerges from a bird’s eye view of a heterogenic group, the idea of separateness stems from focusing on each individual member of a group and discerning each member’s separateness and individuation. Deviation points to the ways differences are created. All the above do not share the strong relation of contrast and polarity, which are the two extremes of one axis (Israel 2004, Hoeksema 2011). Clearly, chot’ is different from ‘cold’, but they share a unifying element because they are points on a scale of heat, where gradually incrementing a certain quality (warmth) to the cold anchor will eventually render it hot. It will thus be altered, but in a specific way. Another shade of meaning is associated with exclusion. It involves the image schema of a container in which the different item is the one that is excluded. This schema is hinted at in the English prefix ‘ex’ and the Hebrew (and related Arabic) root of the Hebrew adjective harig—exceptional, implying the exclusion from a group, an ‘exit’, or ejection from the imagined frame

Difference  53 or container, which illustrates the logical notion of a class. All the above provide strong evidence for the fascinating complexity of the concept of ‘difference’. Treating it as the mere opposite of ‘similarity’ is hence too shallow. We need to probe deeper into its nature and structure, to discover its building blocks and their function in the conceptual system. 4.3  CONTEXT AND LOGIC Lexemes belonging to one semantic frame and to subgroups of this frame can be examined in terms of their syntactic and semantic relations in natural sentences. The shades of meanings discussed above can lead to valid predictions by replacing the words in a given frame in sentences and testing the acceptability of the outcomes. Sentences can be considered as syntactic laboratories to assess semantic cohesiveness which authorize the usage of one word from one subgroup but forbid the usage of another word from a different subgroup. For example: 10. You should buy another shirt of the same type. The above is a perfectly acceptable English sentence. The variants below sound odd if not incorrect: 11. You should buy a separate shirt. 12. You should buy a contrary shirt. 13. You should buy a divergent shirt. A slight change renders some of the sentences acceptable again: 14. You should buy a different shirt in a different color, perhaps in a contrasting color. The word ‘another’ belongs to the subgroup of separateness and cannot be replaced by a word from the deviance or contrast subgroups without affecting the acceptability of the whole sentence. Horizontal relations between words in a sentence depend on their meaning components, and this is why mismatches are forbidden. The contextual test of replacing words in sentences validates the earlier grouping into subgroups and helps predict the effect of mismatching words from different subgroups. It also shows how sentential cohesiveness is dependent on word meaning components. This illustrates Frege’s principle of compositionality, which states that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meaning of its constituent words (Janssen 2001). Another way to test subgroupings of words appeals to logic. Intuitive subgrouping of the words according to their closeness of meaning draws on important logical relations between the higher-order features of these words

54  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction and may help uncover the logical infrastructure of the frame. In this way, the slight differences between nuances and variation of ‘difference’ lexemes suggest recourse to the logical notions of identity, type or class membership, and contrast and their connections with the notions of consequence, continuity, separateness, and inclusion. Plurality implies separate identity: in a group of x, y, z, each is unique, and hence, y is unique, peculiar, special, etc. Deviation implies variation as well as consequence and continuity (x, x', x''). Here, each x retains its individuality while undergoing aspectual changes. Contrast implies separateness, polarity, and opposition on a common scale (x is the opposite of y). Exclusion implies class membership and types (x belongs to the x type, whereas y is excluded). These logical features refer constantly to notions of ‘difference’: a. continuity and consequence vs. discreteness b. identity (individuation, uniqueness) vs. otherness c. class inclusion—membership, types d. opposition, polarity, contrast, value A closer look at (a) and (b) reveals a striking parallel between the logical notions of identity and individuation that yield ‘differences’ and their sensual spatio-temporal parallels. Continuity is the sensed counterpart of identity, without ignoring the fact that individuation and hence discreteness also play a role in constituting identity. Cognitive psychologists have suggested that spatial discreteness is acquired early and that individuation can be paired with the sensation of discontinuity. Imagine a toddler crawling toward a staircase. Her immediate reaction is to stop, or to be alarmed by her parents trying to stop her. The step she is facing is lower, and she no longer senses the floor if she reaches out. Later on, she will learn to turn around and go down the stairs backward. The sensed discontinuity will be associated with the idea of a new ‘stair’.9 The recurring elements or components that constitute the subgroups of ‘difference’ lead therefore to higher degrees of abstraction in the search for building blocks, axes, and structure. These include continuity, consequence, and identity that constitute the unique shades of difference in ‘change’ or ‘variation’; otherness, discreteness as in ‘other’ and ‘replacement’; containment, and membership as in ‘exception’, and ‘irregularity’; and vectors, directions, and values in ‘polarity’ and ‘opposition’. What is striking is that each logical notion has a spatio-temporal parallel: identity is associated with continuity, and otherness is linked to individuation and discreteness. Membership is linked to containment, inclusion, and exclusion, whereas contrast and polarity values are associated with vectors and directions. This is depicted in Figure 4.2. A closer look at the table reveals that it is possible to assign values to at least some of the features. People do not hesitate when asked to assign either a plus or a minus10 to the notion of ‘identity’. Similarly, they do not

D ifference

55

logic Distric Distric Identity

otherness

membership

Distric value

space/time

consequence

discreteness

containment

direction/ vectors

Figure 4.2

Pairs of components: logic and space-time

hesitate to assign a negative value to the counterpart ‘otherness’ or to the broken continuity when compared to the positive ‘identity’ and ‘conse­ quence’. What about containment? We sense our body and our mind as a container (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999) and tend to assign a positive value to inclusion rather than to exclusion. This is captured in the Latin etymology of ‘property’, both as a trait and as a land: pro-per-ty: for itself. In a wider sense, the words ‘belong’ and ‘mine’ relate to the idea of posses­ sion as containment. Containment appears as an extended idea of identity. ‘Containment’ as ‘belonging’ covers such notions as family, group, tribe, nation, and race, which may imply exclusion and alienation as the negative poles. The last pair in Figure 4.2 refers to direction, and more abstractly and generally to the mechanism of value assignment. North and south are neither positive nor negative. They can be reversed once one turns in the opposite direction. Pairs of oppositions exhibit this duality of values. Direction in space and value in logic are expressed in relative plus and minus signs rather than the more fixed values of plus or minus in the other pairs. Identity and consequence or continuity are positive, as are contain­ ment and membership. In the pair ‘otherness’ vs. ‘discreteness’, the terms are opposites of identity and continuity, and hence are assigned a negative value. Spatio-temporal and the sensed oppositions are wide and narrow, high and low, black and white, and many others. The most prominent pair

56

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction logic Identity

otherness

membership

value

space/time

consequence

+ Dis

discreteness

+

containment

direction/ vectors

-/+

Figure 4.3

Logic, space-time, and what else? Distric

of oppositions in logic is true and false. Hence, the logical parallel to ‘vec­ tor’ is ‘value’.11 Recall that these elements were discovered through the analysis of vari­ ants of ‘difference’. They did not appear in pairs. Organizing them into pairs led to the construction of two axes: that of logic and that of the sensed space or environment. However, once they were ordered in pairs, another dimension appeared. The orthogonal dimension of ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs in Figure 4.3 thus calls for further explanation. Beside the neat affinity between pairs of meaning components in the spatio-temporal vertical axis and the logical horizontal axis in Figure 4.2, a third dimension emerges out of assigning these components positive and negative values. This diagonal line connects the value signs in Figure 4.3. When given no other context, the pair ‘identity’ and ‘nonidentity’, as shown also by their morphology, are considered to be positive vs. negative. The same is true for their spatio-temporal counterparts— succession and dis­ creteness. The unique identity of an object is preserved when there is no break in its spatio-temporal continuity. Note that when we want to assign a negative value to ‘identity’, we have to be explicit in presupposing the negative value of the reference group, as in: ‘I dislike my ‘identity’ as an immigrant, and I wish I could change it’. Such presuppositions do not exist in the context free case. The utterance ‘dislike my identity’ sounds extremely

Difference  57 odd. The same holds true for ‘exclusion’: ‘in’ has an entrenched image in our cognitive system connected to the sign ‘plus’, whereas ‘out’ or ‘excluded’ is automatically related to the minus sign in the default normal cases.12 To change these values, we need to assign a negative value to the ‘container’ and thus alter the value of ‘in’ to negative. These observations concern the fact that logic, cognition, and the lexicon reflect a basic pragmatic stance, the human tendency to grasp the world from a unique point of view that stems from humans’ makeup and needs. Living creatures, their health and well-being, and the notion of ‘continuity’ and ‘completeness’ exhibit individuality and identity. The sense of self-identity, of being separated from others, the sense of continuity of the self and the ability to identify objects, which develop early in life, connect the sensed ‘continuity’ with the logical notion of (positive) ‘identity’. The sensed ‘break’, ‘edge’, and ‘distant’ perceived by touch and sight are therefore understood as the counterparts, and in some sense, negative—though crucial building blocks of the worldview including ‘identity’ and ‘object’. This observation is supported by considerable linguistic and psychological evidence (Clark 1973, Givon 1978). Thus, the simple ‘game’ of sorting ‘difference’ words into subgroups, with no pre-theoretical presuppositions, and the intuitive notion of meaning components yielded these observations. It helped detect the striking affinity between the spatio-temporal and the logical, which are intimately interwoven and constitute the vocabulary of ‘difference’. More impressive is their interplay with a third basic feature; namely, human preference, which basically is pragmatic. Together, they dominate the construction of human experience, as reflected in the domain of ‘difference’, and form a crucial tool for understanding the world. This ‘preference’ or ‘value assigning’ procedure deserves a closer look. 4.4  THE THIRD DIMENSION OF VALUE ASSIGNMENT Why is ‘broken’ or ‘shattered’ considered the opposite of ‘whole’, ‘entire’, ‘complete’, ‘integral’, or ‘perfect’? This question may appear trivial since this observation is so natural and requires no second thoughts. Why is ‘continuity’ initially more positive than ‘discreteness’ and ‘discontinuity’? Here again, presuppositions are needed to convert the signs. Only when a lecture is extremely boring can a ‘break’ be welcome. Of course, no everlasting continuity will be assigned a positive value because it is motionless, lifeless, and dull. But continuity has the connotation of stability and survival in the human context. ‘Identity’ depends on ‘otherness’, without which it would not exist. However, between the two, ‘identity’ is viewed as positive, while ‘otherness’, especially in the interpersonal arena, can sometimes mean a threat. This intuitive value assigning has deep roots in the evolution of mankind and the need for survival. It is attested in the very early specialization of babies in facial recognition, and in their identification

58  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction of friendly or angry expressions. The ability to identify and discriminate seems to be a crucial prerequisite for survival (Fridlund 1994; Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004). ‘Continuity’ is associated with firmness of surface, and a sense of support, both physical and emotional. The idea of containment gives rise to the sense of belonging and a wider sense of identity, not just of the individual but also as a member of a group. These basic primitive needs may explain the automatic positive value that people assign to ‘identity’, ‘consequence’, ‘containment’, and ‘membership’. It may also explain why questions about the negative value of ‘broken’ and the positive value of ‘complete’ and ‘perfect’ sound odd and redundant. The human ability to process the world is limited physiologically. We see only what is in front of us. Thus, ‘front’ gets priority whereas ‘back’ lends itself to negative notions such as ‘drawback’ and ‘backward’. This relativity accounts for the ability to assign values whether positive or negative. The intersection of the bottom row and the right-hand column in Figure 4.3 shows exactly this: the plus/minus with their indecisiveness or relativity. It refers to the mechanism of assigning values. The table in Figure 4.3 shows how ‘polarity’ and ‘contrast’ are alternatives in the arrangement of objects and events, and how the basic contrast between plus and minus accompanies basic notions such as ‘identity’ and ‘inclusion’ and their counterparts ‘otherness’ and ‘exclusion’. Recall the famous ‘algebra of relations’: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the friend of my enemy is my enemy, etc. The variations and interplay among these constituting features create several composite notions of ‘difference’ and are responsible for the richness of this part of the lexicon. Thus, ‘change’ preserves the identity of the changed object but implies ‘otherness’ in some respects which are not related to the core identity of the object. ‘Oppositions’ that imply the existence of a bridging dimension are somehow more closely related to each other than mere ‘variations’. If a plan is improved, it is changed, but if it is replaced, it becomes an alternative plan. A ‘dry’ object can become ‘wet’ by pouring water on it, but it remains the same object. If the same ‘dry’ object becomes ‘broken’, for example, the change is not a direct result of the degree of humidity. Thus, ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ are oppositions, but ‘dry’ and ‘flat’ are not and they can co-exist. This argument is fairly abstract. The starting point in itself was abstract since ‘difference’ is an abstract relation. The various shades of this concept point to a higher level of abstraction where the logical notions ‘identity’, ‘group membership’, and ‘value assigning’ function as conceptual building blocks together with their perceptual counterparts of consequence, containment, and polarity. This parallelism between the purely logical notions and their perceptual counterparts give rise to the third dimension—that of preference and tendencies. This third dimension may be conceived as a deep pragmatic dimension that is no less characteristic and crucial to human cognition and its interface with the world. This abstract level is manifested in perceptual visual models as will be seen in the following section.

Difference  59 4.5  PERCEPTUAL MODELS The image schemas of the straight line with its salient feature of continuity, as well as the image schema of a container with its salient property of containing exemplify important features of ‘difference’. A straight line is continuous. When it is cut, its continuity is broken and the segments visualize the idea of separate individuality:  

One continuous straight line:

Two individual separate segments:     The two segments also visualize the ideas of plurality, gap, and alteration. Deviation and variation are visualized by the straight line’s ability to deviate and create

The idea of exclusion can be visualized by the image schema of a container:

Note that the logical parallel of ‘containment’ implying membership in a group is almost inseparable from the visual model of a container. This is seen in the symbol logicians and mathematician use for groups:

{

{

The space captured between the brackets visualizes the imagined container. Members of the group are included, and nonmembers are excluded. Here the separation between the logical representation and the perceptual

60  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction image is almost nonexistent. The remaining feature of ‘difference’, namely, the ideas of polarity and contrast, is visualized by a vector, a line that has two poles.

These visualized models of continuity, plurality, discreteness, containment, and exclusion are the experiences and embodied parallels of their logical counterparts, namely identity, individuation, class membership, and exclusion, as well as the mechanism of value assignment itself. This parallelism is shown in the vertical and the horizontal axes of Figure 4.3, where the ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs match the initial pairing between the logical axis and the spatio-temporal perceptual axis. Isn’t this what we were looking for in the first place: a higher order of the organization of the conceptual system? But more is gained from this discovery. It accounts for the roots of abstract concepts in human experience: the way certain notions stem from a need to understand the environment; for instance, to identify edible fruits from poisonous ones, friends from foes, or stable surfaces from shaky ones. The mechanism of value assignment reflects the evolutionary needs for stability, self-identity, and ability to discern good food from poison, and dangerous animals and enemies from associates and friends. Human evolution and basic human needs for survival as individuals and as groups are the initial sources of value assignment. The perceptual and conceptual basis is intertwined with human needs and preferences: basic needs for self-protection, self-appreciation, identity, and the sense of belonging. The architecture of concepts and axes displayed above is supported by further psychological and linguistic evidence, as shown in the next section. 4.6  ACQUISITION, ETYMOLOGIES, AND GESTURES Empirical experiments with infants point to the importance of continuity, position in space, and modes of movement to the ability to individuate objects. “Human adults experience physical objects as entities that persist over time, even though perceptual encounters with objects are usually brief and intermittent. One principle that seems to be central to adults’ apprehension of identity is the principle of continuity” (Spelke et al. 1995, 113). Babies’ ability to discriminate and individuate objects is dependent on the organization of objects in space and their mutual relations. When two objects are very close to or touch each other in a three-dimensional space, whether they are seen horizontally next to each other or one behind the other, they are perceived as one object. They are only perceived as two different objects when there is a space between them. Space between objects and separate motion

Difference  61 are crucial for individuation. “Four-month-old infants’ perception of object identity over occlusion is reliably affected by information of the continuity or discontinuity of object motion” (ibid, 135; Spelke 1985, 96). Smoothness of motion is parallel to the continuity of immobile objects. Spelke and her associates tested adults and found an impressive parallel between their perception of objects and that of the babies. “When adults were shown the present events and were asked explicitly about the number of objects that produced them, their judgments were affected systematically both by the continuity principle and by the smoothness principle. More deeply, however, the findings with infants and with adults were similar. The events for which infants most clearly apprehended object identity were those for which adults’ identity judgments were strongest and most consistent”(Spelke et al. 1995, 138). The parallelism between spatial continuity and logical identity, and between discreteness and individuation, is shown in language use, in etymologies, idioms, and metaphors as well. Roget’s ‘difference’ entry includes words that have roots in perception and in the spatio-temporal dimension, although the list was part of the higher category of abstract relations. Nouns such as ‘separateness’ and ‘discreteness’ refer both to abstract and perceived relations and states. The verb ‘discern’ stems from the Latin particle dis, meaning ‘off’, ‘away’, and cernere, meaning ‘separate’, ‘sift’. The noun ‘difference’ stems from the Latin differre, which means ‘to set apart’. The idioms ‘poles apart’, ‘poles asunder’, ‘worlds apart’ also refer to a metaphorical distance in the mind. The Hebrew word for difference is hevdel from the root b.d.l.13 It is an abstract noun that denotes a relation, as in the question “Haim yesh hevdel bein mo’aḥ gever lemo’aḥ ‘isha?”, which translates as “Are there any differences between the male and the female brain?” Biblical Hebrew captures a transparent spatial use of the root b.d.l. in Genesis (1: 7) in the description of the creation of the sky (the firmament): “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so”. The Hebrew word for divided is yavdel stemming from the same root that is the main way of expressing the logical relation involved in discerning differences. In the same chapter (Genesis 1: 14), God makes a difference between day and night by creating the sun and the moon with the same root: “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide (lehavdil) the day from the night”. Another Biblical story describes God’s intention to punish Korah and his associates, who challenged Moses and Aaron’s leadership. God tells Moses and Aaron: “Separate yourselves from among this congregation, that I may consume them in a moment” (Numbers 16: 21). The Hebrew verb for ‘separate yourselves’ is hibadlu. It has a spatial meaning—‘distance and separate yourselves’, but it also highlights the differences between the legitimate leaders and the sinners who are about to die. In speech, when a living person’s name is mentioned immediately after a dead person’s name,

62  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction speakers of Hebrew add the parenthetical phrase yibadel leh. ayim—may he be set apart for long life. Note that the English word ‘apart’ has both a spatial and a logical sense. When Hebrew speakers want to avoid any comparison between two very different people or situations mentioned in a conversation, they add the common phrase lehavdil elef alfey havdalot. Its literal meaning is: to separate by thousands and thousands of differences. The English parallels are ‘not to mention them in the same breath’ that refers to separation in speech and in time, but also ‘kept poles apart’, with its spatial metaphor of distant poles. The Hebrew term for the offside position in football that denotes a situation where a player is placed closer to the opponent’s goal line than both the ball and the second-to-last defender is mazav nivdal. Ner Havdalah is the candle lit at the conclusion of the Sabbath to separate the holy day of Saturday from the secular days of the coming week. The above Hebrew examples that denote individuation by separation in speech, space, and time are at odds with English etymologies. When Sweetser (1978, 450) described the general metaphorical pattern that “ideas are things” and “the mind is a container”, she observed that “categorization is mentally putting concepts into sets, which are delimited areas of our mental space; thus two objects which are distinguished or differentiated from each other are mentally ‘separated’ by being put in different sets. (cf. “I can’t tell them apart.” Or “I can’t tell one from the other”), where ‘from’ marks separation” (450). Sweetser’s argument is supported by both historical diachronic etymologies and parallel synchronic live metaphorical patterns. She claimed that although English speakers are not aware of the Latin origin of prefixes and verbs, lively metaphors still give spatial meanings to the forgotten Latin origins of con-, in-, dis-, and others. The above evidence from language use reflects the developmental-cognitive mechanisms that enable babies as well as adults to use the sensed experience of sight and touch of objects in place and time to constitute the abstract logical concepts related to ‘difference’.14 The new research domain focusing on gestures provides an additional viewpoint on the relations between logical utterances and the visual, almost unconscious gestures that accompany them (Kendon 2004, Sweetser 2009). Like metaphors in speech, many gestures portray metaphorical utterances, although the speakers are unaware that they are doing so (Cienki and Müller 2004). Gestures sometimes portray etymologies and frozen metaphors with which speakers may not even be familiar. For instance, speakers who enumerate several items or speak about choices or opposing issues move their hands from one side of the space in front of them to the other (Librecht and Inbar 2012). They use the space to mark differences and thus echo the early developmental stages of noticing movement and individuating objects (Spelke 1985, Spelke et al. 1995). At the same time, the gesture hints at the parallelism noted above (Figure 4.2 and Figure 4.3) and discussed here between ‘difference’ as a logical relation and its spatio-temporal correlates of ‘separation’, ‘gap’, ‘distance’, ‘off’, ‘apart’, etc. My argument goes beyond

Difference  63 the linguistic interest in these important language phenomena. All the above, and many other examples, with more evidence from other languages, especially distant ones, shed light on the structure of the mental lexicon. The data from studies of early acquisition support and confirm the parallelism between the perceived spatio-temporal dimension and the logical dimension. These findings echo the argument suggesting inner ties between the development of the individual (ontogenesis) and the historical evolution of languages (phylogenesis). 4.7  THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS Based on the analyses presented above, the abstract concept of ‘difference’ emerges as part of a wider system of relations between the senses and the logical apparatus. This is suggested by various kinds of evidence: distant languages, etymologies, metaphors, co-speech gestures, and developmental studies. The semantic relations between lexemes of ‘difference’ revealed parallels between perceived and the abstract, the spatio-temporal, and the logical dimension. In addition, this chapter emphasizes the importance of the mutual support from neighboring disciplines and methodologies, including semantic relations, a contrastive study of etymologies and metaphors, the developmental study of language acquisition, and the new area of gesture studies. But it also provides grounds for an argument against truth as the sole criterion for meaning. The intimate connection between truth and meaning has a long history, from Frege through Davidson and Montague, Partee and their many successors. Truth-model semantic theories were recently challenged by competing alternative theories of meaning in cognitive semantics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Fillmore 1985; Langacker 1999, 2008, 2009).15 The presentation of ‘difference’ provides a new argument against the dominance of logic (and truth) in semantics and its claim for exclusiveness in dealing with meaningfulness. The three axes in Figure 4.3 and their intimate relations pose a formidable obstacle to any linguistic theory that prefers to rely solely on logic as its main criterion for meaning. As cognitive linguistics has claimed from the outset and as has been shown here, language, cognition, and semantics are more complex than in truth-models or other formal theories. The search for objectivity and hence the tendency to adopt logical tools is understandable since objectivity is one of the main pillars of science. However, human cognition and language as seen through the prism of the triple axis analysis of ‘difference’ cannot be reduced to just one of the parallel and connected axes, the axis of logic. As shown here, logical concepts and mechanisms such as ‘identity’ and ‘otherness’, ‘class membership’, and ‘value assignments’ are intimately related to perception and experience. Moreover, these are also subject to the deep pragmatic dimension of human needs and preferences, which are by no means formal and are not dominated by ‘truth’.

64  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction This dimension is intrinsically subjective and ‘biased’. ‘Truth’ itself is very much dependent on human needs, as will be seen in Chapter 6. This does not mean giving up scientific methods or reliability, but rather that a different, more sensitive methodology is required, where the coherence of findings and explanations and the mutual support of various methodologies of related human-oriented disciplines should replace the search for the exclusive ‘bluebird’ of truth and logic. I believe that the above findings constitute a strong argument in favor of the openness of cognitive semantics, where semantic relations, etymologies, perceived experience, gestures, and metaphors, which truth model theories are reluctant to handle, play a crucial role. The analysis of the abstract concept of ‘difference’ has shown how informative meaning relations can be. The intuitive notions of minimal pairs and meaning components led to the discovery of higher-level meaning components, such as [+identity], [+containment], [+exclusion], [+/–direction] or [+/-value], and so forth. They have been shown to be elementary building blocks of more abstract concepts and their arrangement reflects a built-in order in the actual and the mental lexicon. The interplay of these building blocks shows how intimately the abstract is related to the experienced as well as to the needed and preferred.

5

Negativity

The topic of ‘negation’ has been studied from many angles over the last few decades. Its syntactic, morphological, and, recently, its pragmatic structures have been researched extensively in linguistics, as well as in logic, psychology, and psycholinguistics. Less attention has been paid to the semantic variants of the general notion of ‘negativity’ or to the meaning relations between words such as ‘broken’, ‘absent’, ‘disappear’, ‘no’, ‘lack, ‘hell’, ‘poison’, ‘scapegoat’, and others. This chapter examines the hypothesis that there is a Neg-element common to these and other lexemes, and that this element has a special status in the actual and mental lexicon. Various methods are suggested for grouping and sorting the lexemes that include this element. The result of the analysis of meaning relations among Neg-words is the discovery of four sources of ‘negativity’; that is, four layers in the conceptual system: the somatic-experiential level comprising psychological signals and thresholds, the interactional social level, and the culture-dependent level of Neg-element. The most interesting and least transparent is the fourth layer: a prelogical conception of ‘identity’, ‘existence’, ‘functioning’, and ‘stability’ and its counter Neg-elements. The analysis provides an explanation for the human bias toward the positive. It helps explain the logical and mathematical everyday algebra of pluses and minuses as reflected in the saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

5.1  ASPECTS OF NEGATION “Negation is a sine qua non of every human language but is absent from the otherwise complex system of animal communication . . . It is the digital nature of natural language negation, toggling between 1 and 0 (or T and F) and applying recursively to its own output that allows for the essential properties of our own linguistic system”. This is how Horn introduces a collective volume entitled The Expression of Negation (2011, 1). The last chapter is a thirty-page comprehensive bibliography compiled by Horn, who for many years has studied the various morphological, syntactic, logical, and quantitative aspects of negation. Horn paved the way for a growing body of research on the pragmatic aspects of negation with what is now a watershed

66  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction example: “She is not happy she is ecstatic” (Horn 1989, 431–432), where he draws attention to metalinguistic negation and the negation of presuppositions. Horn’s extensive works have dealt with Aristotelian negation and contradictions, double and multiple negations, hyper- and hypo-negations, prefixes such as ‘un-’, scalar negation as in ‘almost’, prohibitive negation in ‘stop’ and ‘abstain’, etc. The articles in the Horn volume provide additional angles on topics related to ‘negation’, including typology, diachrony, acquisition. and metaphors, as well as negation in various languages such as French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese, some of which will be further discussed below. Boucher and Osgood (1969) referred to the difference between [E+] (E plus) elements and [E –] (E minus) elements in vocabulary, and showed that positive [E+] elements are more productive, are used more frequently, and appear earlier in the process of language acquisition. Following Jespersen (1917), Zimmer (1964) discussed the morphological irreversibility of negative affixation, such as ‘well–unwell,’ and ‘sick’, but never *‘unsick’. In fact, he found it is hard to conceptualize negatively formed negations such as *‘unvanish’ or *‘nonabsence’.1 Studies in psychology have documented the longer delays in reaction time of young and adult informants when answering questions formed negatively or ones requiring a negative answer. Clark (1976) found that it takes longer for an informant to answer the question “Is the apple outside the basket” than the reverse question “Is the apple inside the basket”, even when the apple is actually outside the basket. These findings suggest that the informants derive the negative form from its positive counterpart. Clark classified negative questions into three groups according to the type of delaying effect: (a) regular negative questions, as in “is this sentence false?”, “Is there a chair in the room?”; (b) negation in quantifiers: “Are there fewer apples in this basket?”; (c) hidden negations with words such as under, behind, outside, etc. Givon (1978) argued that such data are an indication of a general demarcation between figure and background, between what is known and between what is new and is said. Dimroth (2011) specified the stages of acquiring various uses of negation in early childhood from nonexistence through failure and rejection, prohibition, inability to the higher abstract levels of negation such as the epistemic negation, as in ‘I don’t know’, normative negation as in ‘it ( = horse) can’t go on a boat’, and inferential negation (2011, 43). Recent psycholinguistic studies have dealt with the way negation markers evoke reactions in hearers. Giora et al. (2005) summarize them as follows: “The consensus among psycholinguists is that a negation marker is an instruction from a speaker to a hearer to suppress the negated information. Accordingly, a negation marker reduces the levels of activation of the negated concepts to the extent that eventually they are no more accessible than unrelated controls and significantly less accessible than equivalent positive concepts . . . Folk wisdom, however, would have it otherwise . . . The

Negativity  67 belief here is that what is negated prevails” (Giora et al. 2005, 234). Their experiments show that suppression of negated items is not obligatory but optional (ibid, 238) and that one use of negated sentences is to introduce new information without asserting it (ibid, 239). They also show that in discourse, ‘X’ (‘sharp’, for example) and ‘not X’ (‘not sharp’, respectively) are not simple antonyms; that is, ‘not sharp’ does not mean ‘blunt’. They suggest that ‘not’ in ‘not X’ should be classified as a modifier rather than as a suppressor, which suggests the opposite of X. The lucid title of this study underscores the delicate relations of the main negating element ‘not’ with the allegedly negated content: “Negation as positivity in disguise”. Recent developments in pragmatics and especially the flourishing of Relevance Theory have encouraged more sensitivity to context and inferences. Carston (1994) focused on the metalinguistic function of negation and its echoic or corrective uses, as well as the humoristic or ironic tone sometimes attached to it, as in the sentence quoted from Horn (1992): “This birthday card is not from one of your admirers, it is from two of your admirers. Happy birthday from both of us” (ibid, 312). Carston emphasizes the fact that some uses of negation refer to the truth value of propositions, but others operate as metalinguistic negations that can echo and retain the original utterance, but negate certain of its components on a metalinguistic level, such as pronunciation, choice of words, etc. These observations are, however, at odds with the general line of thought of Relevance Theory, which emphasizes the inferential aspects of discourse and the role context plays in this inferential processes. Polarity exemplifies a unique aspect of negativity. Israel (2004) explored the broad pragmatic scope and variety of polar expressions in regular use. He claimed that, contrary to expectation, “polarity, the opposition between negation and affirmation, seems to be both simple and symmetrical, and yet its behavior in natural language is neither” (722). Israel raises the question of the relation between the logic of negation and the pragmatics of polarity. The answer to this question has radical implications regarding the relations between semantics and pragmatics, and language and thought. Hoeksema (2011) also explored polar expressions as part of his study of the interplay between the lexical meaning and global conditions on expressions.2 He deals with the distribution and constraints on ‘ever’ and ‘any’, ‘none’, and their German and Dutch counterparts, which are transparent about their polar meaning. He widens the scope to less transparent constructions that evoke polarity such as ‘the likes of which’, ‘in sight’, and ‘not all that’.3 Sweetser (2006) discusses the effect of various negative uses in literary works. Negative statements in everyday discourse as in literature evoke both the negated proposition and its negation. Expressions such as “not to mention the fact that . . . ,” or “Too bad you have never . . .” produce ambivalence, and double meanings, and call for ironic or humorous interpretation. Sweetser applied Fauconnier’s (1994) notion of mental spaces:4

68  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction negative statements or scenes in a novel or in a play invoke contradictory spaces simultaneously and account for their complexity and artistic effect. As seen even from this brief description, negation has been studied from various angles, initially from a logical, morphological, and syntactic perspective and more recently in terms of psycholinguistics, pragmatic, and literary theories. The least studied is semantics, perhaps because of the philosophical and methodological complexity of studying the less-regimented aspects of the evasive notion of ‘negativity’. 5.2 NEGATION AND NEGATIVITY—THE SEMANTIC AND CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVE Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996) initiated a cognitive approach defined as “a new angle on some conceptual and linguistic aspects of negation, in particular negativity incorporated in words and texts” (1995, 7). It explored deeper levels than syntax and morphology to “cover the negation incorporated in words, discourse or knowledge frames” (ibid). Lewandowaska-Tomaszczyk uses the common term ‘negation’ but also several more abstract derived forms such as ‘negatibility’ and ‘negativity’. Her survey analyses the status and function of negative judgments, negative states of affairs, negative parts of objects such as ‘wholes’, implicit negativity in ‘bump’ and ‘valley’, and negative states as ‘depression’. She deals in great detail with the semantics of negative verbs such as ‘break’, ‘close’, ‘erode’, ‘fake’, ‘forge’, ‘empty’, ‘uncover’, and ‘discourage’, negative speech acts such as ‘refuse’, ‘doubt’, ‘deny’, and negative particles such as ‘x-less’, ‘x-free’, ‘quasi-x’, etc. Lewandowaska-Tomaszczyk then presents a cognitive analysis of the negative elements of changes and processes involving force and violence, and the termination of actions. She compares Polish expressions to English ones and points to many common features that construe the sense of ‘negativity’ in both languages. In particular, she examines the relations between ‘semantic prosody’ and conceptual negativity (ibid, 187–218). This is, to the best of my knowledge, the widest and most inclusive semantics and conceptual analysis of the general concept of ‘negativity’ in unexpected areas of experience and language. Lewandowaska-Tomaszczyk concludes that “negative elements enter a number of scalar hierarchies in natural language such as scales of assertion, certainty, manipulation in force dynamics and, connected with the latter, the degree of control, freedom, and independent action” (1995, 220). She maintains that “positive linguistic elements are more informative than negative ones. They are more focused, refer to a smaller range of phenomena and are more determinate in boundaries of their reference. However, the degree of informativeness of Neg-elements also makes them an indispensable tool for human communication” (ibid). I extend Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s approach to the semantics and the conceptual status of ‘negativity’ in its overt and covert appearances.5 This

Negativity  69 chapter aims to expose the mechanisms of abstraction in the evasive abstract Neg-element. It focuses on the semantic and conceptual idea of ‘negativity’, which should not be equated to the common notion of ‘negation’ as it is used in spoken and written English. Like Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, my goal is to deal with a higher abstract notion; namely, negativity rather than negation. The immediate semantic and lexical context where the abstract idea of ‘negativity’ is most often found is its realization as a meaning component in pairs of polar antonyms: good-bad, pretty-ugly, clean-dirty, etc. The second member of the pair, the marked member, usually carries the meaning component [+neg], which is sometimes reflected in a morphological affixation, as in ir-regular, dis-like, un-tidy, mis-understood, etc. Langacker (2006) analyzed the Neg-element in oppositions such as the existence of objects vs. their absence, duration vs. interruption, uniformity vs. exceptionality, as well as discreteness vs. continuity and norms and their violations. They all imply that the Neg-component is secondary and derived. But, as in LewandowaskaTomaszczyk’s survey, this Neg-element also appears as a meaning component in other less obvious areas of the lexicon. I will refer to this abstract Negelement as ‘negativity’. The equally uncommon Hebrew term is shlilut, which again is not identical to the common notion shlila—negation. Medieval Jewish writers like Halevy and Maimonides who were influenced by Arabic philosophers and translators of Greek philosophical texts queried the nature of the world and coined a new abstract Hebrew term when they described the metaphysical phenomenon of the appearance of the universe: a ‘being’ springing out of a ‘nonbeing’. They termed the latter ‘negativity’, or nothingness: shlilut. This new Hebrew term was constructed on the basis of an existing three-­ consonant root sh.l.l associated with denial, negation, rejection, and spoils of war. It has the affix ut, a common Hebrew device used especially in medieval texts for creating abstract nouns from adjectives, participles, and existing nouns. From ma (what), they formed mah-ut—essence, from eikh (how) the formed ‘ekhut—quality, and from the root associated with ‘finding’ m.ts.’. they formed the abstract noun metsi’ut—reality, everything that is out there, that exists and can be found. The innovated abstract term shlilut, as opposed to the other abstract lexemes mentioned above, is not in use in Modern Hebrew. The very nature of this lexeme seems to fit its use of denoting this abstract element of ‘negativity’ concealed in various lexemes in various areas of the lexicon. In fact, Hebrew lexemes derived from the root sh.l.l are used to describe negative aspects of actions in verbs, adjectives, and nouns. The verb disagree is sholel, a dubious character in a moral judgment is tipus shlili, the logical relation of p and not p is shlila, shlilat rishayon is the cancellation of a driver’s license, and shlilat zkhuyot is deprivation of rights. The English usages of the adjective ‘negative’ are also versatile. A negative is made in the traditional process of developing photos, a negative answer is the reverse of affirmation, and there is a negative influence in moral

70  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction judgments and negation in logic and others. These preliminary facts raise questions about this presumably general concept of ‘negativity’, as well as about its semantic nature and status. Is there a semantic frame of negativity that unites all these lexemes in each language? Traditional semantic fields or frames are intuitively grouped around a central concept linking concepts, as suggested in the metaphorical term ‘frame’ or implied in the older metaphor taken from the field of electromagnetics on which Trier’s (1931, 1973) term ‘semantic field’ was based.6 Speakers see no special difficulty in determining intuitively what belongs to a certain field such as the field or frame of color terms or the frame of commercial transactions. ‘A pond’, ‘a lake’, and ‘a river’ are easily placed in a semantic group (Lehrer 1974) that does not include, for example, ‘joy’, ‘pleasure’, and ‘happiness’, which form their own field or frame of ‘emotions of mental activity’.7 Is ‘negativity’ a center of a possible semantic field or frame?8 Although the nature of this group of Neg-words is fuzzy, there are good reasons to construct this group and examine its nature and its unifying elements. A pure Neg-element appears in the domain of logic and mathematics, but it is possible to see the negative element in the expression ‘a negative type of a person’ as a metaphorical extension of the core meaning. The Neg-element appears also, as mentioned earlier, in the relation between antonyms and polar pairs. They are found in all kinds of semantic areas of the lexicon. The Neg-element, or the concept of ‘negativity’ with its metaphorical derivations, cuts across the common division of the vocabulary into semantic domains. Two Hebrew collocations, r’a v.a mar meaning ‘bad and bitter’ and mar hamav.et—‘the bitterness of death’, associate the tangible adjective ‘bitter’ mar with one of the most common negative adjectives, ‘bad’, and with the utmost fear-inspiring and traumatic idea of death. The English expression ‘a bitter person’ carries a Neg-element as well. Centuries and decades of literary and poetic writings based on human perceptual and emotional experiences have associated bitterness with negativity and death with a bitter taste. This is not just a cultural construct; it has biological and evolutionary origins: newborn babies wince when they taste bitter medicine or even a drop of lemon juice (Rosenstein and Oster 1988). This is a universal bodily reaction and so are newborns’ facial expressions associated with pain, rejection, aversion, and fear. The phenomenon of the embodied Neg-elements that are linked to verbal and nonverbal reactions through idioms and metaphors is explored more fully in the following sections. All the above allow us to assume hypothetically that that a Neg-element forms a super-semantic domain where ‘negativity’ lexemes from various, sometimes distant, semantic areas of the lexicon can be grouped. As in other sciences, working hypotheses must comply with several restrictions: they need to be compatible with what is already known, not contradict it, and provide a new insightful explanation for facts that are already part of established knowledge. Thus, the ­hypothesis of the existence

Negativity  71 of a semantic group of negativity lexemes is tested below for its compatibility, its explanatory power, and its ability to offer new insights and perspectives. However, first we need to explore the difficulties of retrieving this group. or at least an exemplary part of this group of English and Hebrew Negwords. Once such a list is established, a further analysis can specify what unites these words; namely, the nature of ‘negativity’ and what subgroups can be defined. This again requires a search for the underlying mechanism of abstraction involved in the abstract concept of ‘negativity’ and an attempt to specify its status and role in the conceptual system. Retrieving lexemes with Neg-elements is not a simple task, but it is rewarding and illuminating. Assuming that an abstract Neg-element exists, we need to ask what part of the vocabulary is marked by this ‘minus’ sign. How can such words be associated in a systematic way? 5.3  IN SEARCH OF NEG-WORDS As discussed above, several attempts have been made to characterize words, particles, and expressions with Neg-elements. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s survey provides a rich list of types of negations: negative states of affairs, negative parts of objects, implicit negativity in ‘bump’ and ‘valley’, and negative states as ‘depression’ together with a group of negative verbs such as ‘break’, ‘close’, ‘erode’, ‘fake’, ‘forge’, ’empty’, ‘uncover’, and ‘discourage’; negative speech acts such as ‘refuse’, ‘doubt’, and ‘deny’; and negative morphological particles such as ‘-less’ ‘-free’, ‘quasi-’, etc. Is this list complete and exhaustive? Herbert Clark’s psychological experiments (1976) yielded another list of types of negative words. These include denial of truth and of existence, negation of quantifiers (‘less’, ‘fewer’, and ‘none’) and what he termed ‘hidden negation’ as in ‘behind’, ‘under’, ‘except of . . .’ and the like. Dimroth’s (2011) developmental descriptions partially overlap with some previously cited Neg-concepts such as existence, failure, rejection, prohibition, inability, denial, inability, and lie. Do these lists comprise an inclusive or at least a representative list of Neg-words and Neg-concepts? None of the above-mentioned studies has formulated a systematic way of retrieving words and expressions with Neg-words beyond common knowledge and the scholar’s intuitions or analysis of children’s behavior. There are several means of collecting Neg-words. The Hebrew tri-consonant root system captures an immediate relation between lexemes that share the same root. Hence, we can start with the derivations of the root sh.l.l: shlili (adj.)—negative, undesirable, adverse; shollel (v.)—denies, deprives, rejects, deprives, pulls out; shlila (n.)—deprivation; shalal (n)—spoil, booty, plunder, loot. This is a large semantic range of Neg-words that can be further extended by homonyms and collocations such as shlili (adj.) > r’a (adj.)—bad > garu’a (adj.)—worth. We can proceed by other negative-root

72  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction derivations: gore’a (v.)—lessens, diminishes, subtracts > nigra’ (passive)— deteriorates, deducted, > gera’on (n)—deficit > migra’at (n)—defect, deficiency, fault, shortcoming, and so on. Another route can lead from r’a (adj.)—bad to the collocation r’a v.amar—lit. bad and bitter. This leads to the above-mentioned collocation: mar hamav.et—lit. the bitterness of death. This method delves into the areas of mathematics and measurements, economics, wars, human taste, traits, relations, desires, aversions, morality, and fears, as in the reference to war and death. This is an impressive list of subjects; however, the whole process is tiresome and does not guarantee the expected result of a complete and exhaustive list of Hebrew Neg-words. Do we really need a full list of Neg-words to understand the nature of ‘negativity’? What should count as a representative list of Neg-words that will reveal some if not all its characteristics? An alternative method consists of using informant questionnaires in which participants are asked to sort words from a list of randomly chosen words in the dictionary and identify the words with Neg-elements. The idea is based on the hypothesis that speakers of a language have a certain, perhaps vague, idea of ‘negativity’ and can recognize this feature in words in their native language, as well as in a second learned language. This skill is assumed to be part of their mastery of the language. A common philosophical and scientific way of testing hypotheses is by conducting what is known as a Gedankenexperiment (Cohen 2005). This ‘thought-experiment’ examines a hypothesis that is considered a counterintuitive assumption that yields absurd consequences. It thus may serve as indirect proof of the opposite intuitive assumption. Imagine now a thought experiment in which you are given a three-columned questionnaire with a three-column table headed by the signs [^], [#], and [?] and a list of eighty words randomly selected from the dictionary. The list includes words such as ‘easy’, ‘lack’, ‘random’, ‘frame’, ‘failure’, ‘honey’, ‘good’, ‘print’, ‘less’, and others. Your task is to sort the words such that each word will find its place in the one column, as seen in the following table (Figure 5.1).

Distric

Distric

Distric

Figure 5.1  An odd word-sorting thought experiment.

Negativity  73 Distric

Distric

Distric

Figure 5.2  The real experiment

In this odd thought experiment, one is faced with a real obstacle and can imagine that any other informant would face the same problem. How can I sort these words into columns? What should be the criterion for this sorting task? We can safely assume that the reason for the difficulty in fulfilling this task is that the three signs [^], [#], and [?] lack any meaning whatsoever, and provide no clue to solving the sorting task. Because they are meaningless the experiment will certainly fail. Now consider a second table, as seen in Figure 5.2. The same list of words can now be sorted with no hesitation, and no further instructions are needed, as was actually the case in the real questionnaire. This experiment was carried out in Hebrew. A list of eighty words randomly chosen from the dictionary was given to forty linguistics students and ten professors. No explanation was given during the test to avoid contaminating the natural ability of informants to respond to the signs.9 The resulting lists were quite similar, except for a few minor disagreements between the [+] and [?] and between the [-] and [?] rows. The affinity and closeness of the respondents’ answers showed that the signs for minus and plus are indeed meaningful. When a third unsigned default option is given, people found the task sensible and easy, and could resort to the question mark column whenever they had doubts whether the plus or the minus was suitable for a given word. Words such as ‘frame’, ‘ground’, ‘town’, or ‘word’, for instance, have no immediate positive or negative value associated with them. This is not the case for ‘pathetic’, ‘poison’, ‘honey’, ‘success’, and other words that are usually associated with a positive or negative experience, even when no context is provided. Recent linguistic studies have shown that part of the lexicon is composed of antonyms, and overt and covert polar pairs (Carston 1994, Israel 2004, 2011). English adjectives such as ‘bitter’, ‘broken’, ‘soft’, ‘sweet’, ‘absent’, and ‘strong’ are assigned a negative or positive value, even when no context is available. See Figure 5.3.10

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Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction

Distric

+

? Distric

lack

easy

frame

failure

honey

town

less

good

word

Figure 5.3

Sample results

Informants were encouraged to write comments about their solutions or hesitations. One comment was striking. The Hebrew for ‘roof’ is gag. It was one of the eighty words randomly selected from the dictionary. One infor­ mant commented: “I wanted to put gag (roof) in the ‘plus’ column, because it is nice to have a roof over your head. But I get irritated when my boyfriend tells me ‘tavo’i besheva gag!’—literally: ‘be there at seven roof’, meaning: ‘at seven sharp’”. Gag—roof, is metaphorically used to express limits; namely: don’t be late. So, the informant wrote, “I decided to finally write gag in the question mark column”. This comment both sheds light on the speaker’s frame of mind and hints at language processes. The common use of gag is rooted in the everyday experience of having a home and a shelter (Sovran 2013b). The fact that the roof is the edge or the limit of the house yields its metaphorical use as a restriction. English exhibits a similar process in its use of ‘tops’, which extends from the spatial realm to denote limit and maximum, such as ‘I can lend you 100 dollars tops’, or, in another context of superiority, ‘She is tops in her field’. The English parallel to the metaphorical restrictive sense of gag is ‘sharp’, another metaphorical extension from a sensory experience with knives, for example. It refers to an exact point or limit in time: ‘Be there at seven sharp’. Several informants hesitated about the Hebrew word p a ’ar, which means gap. Most of its uses are in negative contexts. It is also true for English as in social gap, racial gap, generation gap, etc., implying inequality or misunder­ standing, if not hostility. All the informants except two put it in the ‘minus’ column. One explained the classification by referring to a positive use of a word derived from the same root, which made her unsure: hikshavti lo befe pa‘ur (participial form of the same root p.’.r)— ‘I listen to him with my

Negativity  75 mouth wide open’. One positive use of a lexeme of this root together with many negative associations puzzled her. This suggests the impact of context and language habits on the decision to assign positive or negative values to a certain word. This may reflect an unconscious debate in the minds of the participants, where positive and negative uses are evaluated.11 This questionnaire, in addition to other methods, yielded an initial intuitive list of words that educated native speakers associated with the minus sign. However, in the final list, only words that all informants considered negative were included. This list formed the basis for an exploration of the semantic relations among the members of this group of words. Subdomains were defined by the simple intuitive12 criterion of relative semantic distance. Related words suggest themselves intuitively because they are usually acquired in the same context of experience and are later used in such similar contexts: children are encouraged to smell flowers rather than talk to them, whereas the opposite is true of their relation to dogs. Thus, infants may learn to associate flowers with the sense of smell, and animals with the sounds they make. Later on, flowers are associated in certain cultures with romance or gravesites. It is argued that the lexicon is acquired by associating words with contexts of use (Dromi 2009; Sovran 2006). This enables the semanticist to detect relative distances between words. More proximal words also have a statistical probability of appearing in related contexts, as shown by the computer counts of words in a given text. Subgroups of lexemes, along with their differences and interrelations, can shed light on the hidden structures in the abstract part of the lexicon. For instance, ‘sorrow’, ‘pain’, and ‘absence’ have a Neg-element; however, ‘sorrow’ is closer to ‘pain’ than to ‘absence’. The latter, together with ‘nonexistence’ and perhaps ‘less’ and ‘missing’, could form a new subdomain. ‘Denial’ may be grouped with ‘refuse’, and together, they will form a new subgroup. Should ‘hell’ be grouped with the first group of ‘bodily reactions’ or with the second more abstract one that seems to lack specifications, rather than having some kind of variation of abstract negativity, per se? It is clear that ‘hell’—though exhibiting a Neg-element in it—is quite distant from all the above. Thus, it should form a new subdomain together, perhaps with ‘impure’, ‘devil’, ‘doomsday’, and ‘scapegoat’. Biology, human feelings, and technology, as well as mythology and religion, are specific content domains. The following sections examine inter-relations between four groups of Negwords in search of an infrastructure that organizes them, differentiates them, and unifies them as a general group of Neg-words. 5.4  LEVELS OF NEGATIVITY The words associated with physical aversion and negative emotional feelings are fairly transparent concerning the nature of their Neg-component. ‘Pain’, ‘painful’, ‘aversion’, ‘despair’, ‘fear’, and ‘sorrow’ all denote states,

76  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction situations, or causes of uneasiness and dismay that people in general would like to avoid or minimize because of their emotional or physical discomfort and distress. They are opposed to words that denote pleasant sensations and suggest the existence of certain thresholds determined by the body and the psyche concerning what is bearable and what is painful, and hence rejected.13 The Neg-element here is clear and stable, and not easily shaken or denied. It is rooted in the somatic and psychic experience of each individual. The very early terms for pain and distress are learned when parents comfort their babies and tag the situation as associated with the words pain, wound, sorrow, and the like. Thus, grownup informants find it easy to put these words in the ‘minus’ column. Masochistic and or ascetic practices are the exception to the regular reaction toward pain or stress, and they require special conditions or justifications because they are irregular and rare. The characteristics of words such as ‘assault’, ‘rape’ , ‘disdain’, ‘robbery’, ‘violence’, ‘crime’, and ‘deprivation’ are different. Although these Negwords denote situations of discomfort, rejection, or threat, the Neg-element has an additional element of interactivity compared to the first group. The victim of ‘assault’, ‘mockery’, or ‘deprivation’ has no difficulty associating these words with negative feelings. But this does not necessarily hold true for the aggressor, who may find sadistic pleasure in his or her actions. Violent acts by individuals and armies are sometimes justified for moral reasons. Gavrieli-Nuri, a cultural critical-discourse scholar, calls this rhetorical and discourse mechanism “a war neutralizing dialogue” (WND) (Gavrieli-Nuri 2012). Efforts to neutralize or justify violent acts point to the less stable status of the Neg-elements in them. In an article on euphemism written in 1946, George Orwell wrote: [P]olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.14 There are dual or multiple viewpoints involved in social interaction Neg-words that give them an aura of ambivalence and thus room for manipulation. The instability of the Neg-element is even more apparent in a third subdomain. The characteristics of this group of words reflect the open nature of languages and its cultural versatility. This group includes words such as ‘hell’, ‘impure’, ‘devil’, ‘doomsday’, ‘scapegoat’, and ‘dirt’.

Negativity  77 Their association with ‘negativity’ is gradually built up through beliefs, mythologies, culturally inherited concepts, and worldviews. What is considered ‘impure’ by one group of people at a certain time in a certain part of the world may not be true of another tribe, cult, or culture. They both share the concept of rejection, taboo, or prohibition, but they apply it to different content and patterns of behavior, as in the case of norms (see Chapter 7). In the modern expression ‘This child is the scapegoat of the family’, only the negative general element is retained from the Old Testament culture-dependent story. The original placing of the community’s crimes on a randomly chosen goat that is thrown from a cliff as a symbol of the atonement and purification of the community has been long forgotten. The parallel English idiom is ‘black sheep’, which is rooted in genetics in the fact that black sheep are rare and stand out in the flock. Lack of acquaintance with the original custom impedes full understanding of the notion. However, some important meaning components are preserved, mainly that of negativity, which derives from the original context of sins, death, and destiny. This third layer is built on the foundation of the other two layers, bodily reactions and social interaction. For example, ‘hell’ is a cultural mythical construct in many cultures depicting the gloomy fate of sinners in the afterlife. It is the place where sinners, thieves, murderers, heretics, and other offenders receive their ultimate punishment. Some sins, of course, are asocial in nature. Hell is often depicted as deep, dark pit or a very hot furnace; hence, the association with extreme bodily suffering and excruciating pain. The cultural dependency and the elaboration and complexity of myths and stories are responsible for their somewhat artificial nature, and for the instability of their Neg-element as well as their relatively late stage in the process of language acquisition. Groups of people, geographically and temporally distant from each other, created the notion of doomsday or hell. These notions all share the element of rejection, threat, or a certain general Neg-meaning component, even though their actual content varies. The instability of the Neg-element, as compared to the first group, is suggested by the fact that jokes about one’s private pain or distress are rare, whereas jokes about life after death and even about hell abound: ‘People go to hell because they like it there’, ‘Criminals are more innovative than the righteous’ or ‘The devil has all the good tunes’. The Negelement associated with hell or doomsday is built on the basis of notions borrowed from the first two groups, the body and social interactions in ethics, and morals making up religious beliefs in sins, crimes, punishment, and burning, agony, and pain. These are complemented by variations attributed to imagination. Similarly, ‘impure’ can mean various things in various cultures or subcultures, but it retains a sense of aversion and repulsiveness. This might even be extended to ‘dirty’ and ‘ugly’ in their literal as well as their metaphorical senses. The Brazilian folk saying ‘The dirt vitamin’ justifies the fact that although babies crawl in a dirty environment, it might protect them from getting sick. The possibility of a humorous reversal of the negative

78  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction effects of dirt into the positive outcome of immunization is another example of the instability of the Neg-element in folk cultural notions. Three subdomains of negativity have been discussed so far that exemplify various degrees of distance from immediate physical and psychological states. The basic notions of negativity mirror sensations and feelings of pain and discomfort through human interactivity with possible harmful negative effects, and cultural and mythological conceptual constructs are used by cultures to characterize crime and punishment, preference, and rejection. The further one gets from the first physical layer, the less stable the notion of negativity becomes. However, another subgroup of words poses a challenge to this three-layered description, as discussed below. 5.5  THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF IDENTITY AND DISTINCTION A relatively large set of Neg-words does not fit into any of the three subdomains described above. Prima facie, they have no common feature and they do not form a semantic group. What is common to ‘absence’, ‘denial’, ‘broken’, ‘substitute’, ‘forgery’, ‘deviation’, ‘redundant’, and ‘less’, apart from having a Neg-element? They do not seem to belong to any content domain. What then makes informants assign a Neg-value to them? What kind of negativity characterizes them? The answer can be found in their positive counterparts. The opposites of ‘absence’, ‘deviation’, ‘missing’, ‘broken’, or ‘shaky’ are associated with existence, completeness, functioning, norm, originality, stability, and related notions. They all refer to aspects of general and abstract notions of existence, identity, stability, continuity, and authenticity. These basic aspects of being can be extended to completeness, functionality, and even to norms and success. A broken object deviates from a whole, complete, and functioning object; forgery and substitution reflect another deviation from the idea of completeness and identity, as do ‘deviation’ and ‘redundancy’. This fourth group of Neg-words can now be seen as exemplifying the negation of different aspects of ‘being’ and ‘functioning’. This description helps detect what ‘absence’, ‘denial’, ‘substitution’, ‘deviant’, and ‘redundant’ have in common. ‘Absence’ negates the ontological core of being; ‘denial’ does so on a cognitive epistemological level; ‘substitution’ and ‘deviation’ reflect the opposite side of authenticity and duration; whereas ‘redundant’ refers to the normative, somehow arbitrary quality of identity.15 Not only can things and their uninterrupted authenticity be negated, so can their continuous unshaken identity and their normative functioning features constituting their identity as we want them to be. The negative element here is the opposite of the desired and needed, the authentic, the distinct, and the identified. The only question remaining is why the authentic, distinct, and identified aspects are marked by the plus sign rather than the minus sign. One possibility is a hidden connection between the notions

Negativity  79 of ontological identity and that of norm and preference, as seen in the Negelements opposed to ‘completeness’, ‘functionality’, and ‘success’. Much effort has been invested by anthropologists, psychologists, and economists in understanding the pursuit of these basic human needs in modern times (Easterlin 2003). Is it possible to imagine another world in which consistency, completeness, and identity are marked negatively and their opposites refer to the preferred and the positive? This seems extremely counterintuitive; its absurdity can be supported by both a linguistic and a psychological argument.

5.5.1  The Arguments from Language It is no linguistic coincidence that in many languages, expressions of appraisal of abilities and talent are borrowed from the part of the lexicon that concerns sensory and conceptual success, as in the English expressions ‘She is brilliant’, ‘He has a sharp mind’. The Hebrew adjective ḥarif means hot and spicy but also scholarly, intelligent, and perceptive. Note also the double meaning of the English ‘distinction’ as an intellectual process and an appraisal. We encourage infants to exercise their senses, first sight and sound by decorating their cribs, and then touch and taste and smell by presenting them with a variety of objects and food. Language attests to this effort in praising adjectives with expressions such as ‘sharp mind’, ‘bright and brilliant student’, and the like. The success of the senses in perceiving the world has an immanent positive sense. There are systematic polysemic Hebrew words whose original meaning is neutral, but these words have acquired positive meanings: Metsuyan—excellent, meyuḥas—dignified, ḥashuv— important, be-seder—okay, and ma'arikh—appreciates were originally related to observing, thinking, ordering, and organizing the perceived world. The positive sense is a later one. Metsuyan originally meant stated, signed, noted, and demarcated; meyuḥas meant assigned to or associated with, and be-seder originally meant ‘in order’ and only later became the standard speech act of acceptance and affirmation meaning ‘all right’. Mental acts of thinking and understanding have acquired a positive sense (Sovran 2000, 2013a). This systematic change from observing, understanding, thinking, and ordering to appraisal and positive acceptance and confirmation is yet another sign of the celebration of the human faculty to sense and understand the world. Languages manifest this bias toward the positive in other ways. As early as 1927, Jespersen noted the morphological asymmetry between ‘unwell’ and *‘un-sick’, ‘unhappy’, and *‘un-depressed’, etc. (ibid, 206). Hebrew and Chinese, and various other languages, apply a positive pole of two adjectives in how questions, such as ‘How long is this table?’ rather than *‘how short is this table?’ The same is true in naming the whole dimension by the unmarked positive word, as in ‘The width and length of the table’ (YarivLaor and Sovran 1998, 202).

80  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction

5.5.2  The Argument from Survival Another angle explains the bias toward the positive. Let us imagine a situation where one is asked to choose between entering a dark room or a well-lit one, an empty room or a room that has something in it. Most people in normal situations prefer the illuminated and furnished room. A preference for the dark will need an extra explanation referring to fatigue or depression. And, although the room can be full of snakes or spiders, the most frequent preferred option in a context-free situation is a full room. We all share the belief reflected in the above-mentioned appraisal metaphors that the ability to sense, to distinguish, and to tell a from b; namely, to exercise our sensory and intellectual faculties is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. We all inherently share this bias toward the existing and toward what can be sensed and perceived. We ascertain the world as we know it via our senses. We expect the sensed world to respond to this need for understanding and labeling things by exhibiting consistency and stability, without which no discrimination and distinction, no causality and rules, can be formed and no sensory and intellectual activity is possible. Our Homo sapiens ancestors had to be equipped with a certain ability to identify ripe fruits from unripe ones by the color and taste of the fruit. The human brain has developed inferential and interpretation skills that helped identify useful food. There has always been an expectation that what was tasty and nutritious will prove so again, and that tools that are useful in hunting will not fail in a new hunt. These are the expectations that the world will continue to show a certain degree of stability, that the senses that perceive and organize the perceived world will succeed in their tasks and will enable prediction and control (Deutscher 2011, 268). At the same time, there is the expectation that the senses can discern accurately by relying on the equilibrium between identity and difference—the positive from the negative, good food from bad, as well as friends from foes, predators from prey. The bias toward stability and consistency is rooted deeply in the human need for mastering the world for survival. It is no wonder that human languages reflect this need by associating the existing, the identified, and the authentic with the positive. However, the bias toward the positive should not cloud the crucial role of the two elements that aid in the understanding of the world: its consistency and stability, as well as its versatility and mobility, where ‘the negative’ also operates in accordance with human needs and preferences.

5.6 CONCLUSION The simple task of classifying words into those associated with the ‘minus’ sign and those associated with the ‘plus’ or neutral signs led the discussion to anthropology and human evolution. This has to do with the nature of the query, the fact that positivity and negativity are basic and general elements

Negativity  81 of language and thought, and that they are rooted in basic levels of human behavior and understanding. The notions in the fourth list: ‘less’, ‘absence’, and ‘deviation’ and their cognates are general, abstract, and distant from immediate human experience of preference and rejection. Because they lack a specific semantic content, they can refer to anything in the world. They can describe its very existence, continuity, and normative function. The general and formal aspects of these notions account for the semi-mathematical rules they display: pluses and pluses yield plus, minuses and minuses yield plus, etc. ‘Reducing’ and ‘damage’ are two Neg concepts, but when juxtaposed, they yield a positive expression such as ‘reducing the damage’. The combination of ‘perfection’ and ‘complete’ both share the plus component and yield a positively marked construct such as ‘complete perfection’. This association of words, according to semi-formal quasi-mathematical rules, refers once more to the fact that under the transparent layer of language that mirrors human preferences lies another deeper layer. This prepsychological stratum of language and thought connects basic human preferences with intellectual needs for orientation, reflection about the external world, and means of organizing these sensory data. The so-called objective basis for understanding the external world is motivated by these deeper and less-transparent basic human needs. Words that at first did not seem specifically related to human needs and experience, but rather seemed formal and objective, were shown here to be rooted in a prior and deeper layer of human needs and preferences, and thus form a certain algebra of experience. We have already encountered this level in the analysis of ‘difference’ (Chapter 4). ‘Negativity’ and ‘difference’ are intuitively and theoretically close. There is no identity without a concept of ‘limit’, which separates one entity or individual or state of affairs from another. The concept of limits implies individuation and identity, but at the same time, ‘otherness’, which has a strong Neg-element in it. As much as humans need stability and identity, these two have no conceptual reality without their negative counterparts. We sought reasons for the bias toward the positive, which manifests itself in many levels and in distant languages such as Hebrew, English, and Chinese. Probing this bias and the nature of negativity revealed organizing principles of the domain, and pointed again to an unexpected, deep pragmatic facet of human thought and language. This chapter opened with a hypothetical assumption about the existence of a general semantic concept of ‘negativity’. It was based on people’s ability and willingness to assign a minus sign to words and concepts. It proved the fruitfulness of assuming the existence of a Neg-element in a large section of the lexicon. We now need to ask whether this hypothesis is compatible with prior knowledge, and whether it adds anything to what is known about language and thought. The first stage of this study was based on a few minimal empirical assumptions; mainly, the presupposed ability of language speakers to classify words into those having or lacking a Neg-component. The second stage operated on the basis of the principles of relational semantics

82  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction and involved categorizing and sorting lexemes according to basic closeness between cognate words grouped into subdomains. The result of this search was a graded description of the ways in which language reflects (a) bodily and psychological reactions, (b) social activities, and (c) human culturalmythical creativity, which are all related to preference and rejection. The fact that these three are reflected in language came as no surprise. It is well known that human languages fulfill a basic need for expressing feelings and thoughts, and communicating and establishing social and cultural institutions. The last list of general words that refused to form a semantic group, suggested another layer of meaning where the Neg-element and its parallel positive component hint at some characteristic aspects of human intellectual activity. It pointed to the human need for distinguishing, identifying, and labeling things by names. Humans expect the world of objects, events, and other humans to be consistent, to function, and to follow norms. Rather than a neutral unbiased area of general experience related to everything in the world, this area lends itself to rules analogical to mathematical and logical laws. However, it is shown here that this part of human experience is also rooted in a prepragmatic level where negativity and positivity play their mutual role. The main finding of this study concerns the stratification of language, as reflected by the cross-domain element of negativity and the relations between these layers. Negativity sheds light on language as a mirror of transparent physical, psychological, social, and cultural human experience. But, it digs deeper into the ontological, philosophical, logical, mathematical, and technical aspects of existence where the more abstract concept of negativity is found. It concerns the core of human intellectual power and primary demands for exercising this power. Negativity in this layer is subtle and versatile; it has various basic as well as more elaborate manifestations, such as ‘absence’ and ‘denial’ versus ‘deviation’, ‘redundancy’, and ‘malfunctions’. The whole line of argument hints at a delicate interplay between logicalformal-general aspects of language and thought and their deep pragmatic sources. What then is negativity? Negativity is not the center of a regular semantic content domain, mainly because of its general nature and its vast scale, which accounts for the conceptual difficulty to ascribe it to a unique domain. Thus, in this respect, there is no (regular) semantic field or semantic frame of negativity. Yet meaning relations and subdomain divisions manifest themselves here as well and can serve as a source of understanding of the ways concepts are structured. Some notions, such as ‘negativity’, ‘change’, ‘difference’, etc., operate across common semantic divisions. Their analysis through semantic relations provides another perspective on the stratification of language and a better grasp of the anatomy of abstraction.

6

Truth

The word ‘truth’ is polysemous in several languages and can range over distinct, almost opposite, meaning domains. It is related to beliefs, loyalty, and trust and is often associated with religious sentiments. But it is also tightly connected to epistemological and discourse procedures of ‘telling the truth’, verification, and proof. Previous chapters were based mainly on de Saussure’s idea of paradigmatic synchronic meaning relations. Here, the complementary Saussurean notion is brought to the fore: the diachronic aspect. The long history and the polysemous nature of ‘truth’ in Hebrew reveals how its meaning has evolved and sheds light on shifts in cultural foci. The chapter discusses the ways new meanings emerge from lifestyles, needs, and interests that lead to changes in the overall conceptual system. The Hebrew abstract concept of ‘truth’ evolved from actual experience in the real perceptual world to less accessible areas of emotions, belief, cognition, and discourse.

6.1  THE PROBLEM OF ‘TRUTH’ Defining ‘truth’ is not an easy task. However, normal speakers use ‘truth’ and understand it in certain contexts where it seems to make perfect sense. Consider, for example, the website caption: “Scholars for 9/11 Truth Exposing Falsehoods and Revealing Truth”,1 which contrasts ‘truth’ with the abstract concept of ‘falsehood’. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the English word ‘triewþa’ and ‘trewthe’ to 893AD. Truth appears in the context of sentiments such as love and mercy in Chaucer (1390): “On hir, which hath on me no mercy ne no rewthe that love hir best, but sleeth me for my trewthe”. The OED specifies several definitions in several contexts: The character of being, or disposition to be, true to a person, principle, cause, etc.; faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, constancy, steadfast allegiance; Belief; a formula of belief, a creed; one’s faith or loyalty as pledged in a promise or agreement; a solemn engagement or promise, a covenant; Faith, trust, confidence; belief; a formula of belief, a creed; disposition to speak or act truly or without deceit; truthfulness, veracity, sincerity; formerly sometimes in wider sense: honesty, uprightness, righteousness,

84

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction virtue, integrity; conformity with fact; agreement with reality; accuracy, correctness, verity (of statement or thought).

A superficial, somewhat vague connection can be detected between loyalty in the domain of human relations and conformity with fact. Other meaning relations between the various domains where ‘truth’ is found are less obvi­ ous. The need for proof and verification in the realm of reason is almost diametrically opposed to the sense of trust and belief. It is odd that the same word (lexeme or concept) evokes such different semantic frames. The fact that one abstract, polysemous concept ties these domains together calls for further explanation.

6.2 THE CENTRALITY OF ‘TRUTH’ IN PHILOSOPHY AND LOGIC Western philosophy has dealt with the concept of truth since the Greeks. Post-Structuralist, postmodern, and deconstructionist thinkers challenged the centrality of ‘truth’, as well as its usefulness, and have suggested a relativistic point of view that the notion of ‘objective truth’ is either a naive myth or a machination functioning as a means of oppression. Clearly, the concept of ‘truth’ and its cognates are not immune to such criticism. But this criti­ cism may be a sign of the emergence of a new frame of thought that both contributes and rebuts preceding conceptual frames. Much attention has been invested in the philosophy of language to developing theories of truth. ‘Truth’ is one of the key terms in modern as well as traditional logic, and is the major operator in determining the soundness of syllogisms, especially through ‘truth tables’, where any com­ bination of true or false statements in a formal proposition is assigned its truth value (Frege [1885] 1950; Pierce [1868], 1930, 58; Wittgenstein [1922]1961). In formal logic, if p is a statement, it can be either true or false: Fido is a dog vs. Fido is not a dog. Hence, its negation can be either true or false accordingly. The truth table will then take the following form, as shown in Figure 6.1.

p

~p

T

F

F

T

Figure 6.1

Truth table for negation

Truth

85

Here, the truth of a statement is negated by its opposite false statement. A more complicated truth table is that of a conjunction, such as ‘and’ (A), of two statements P and Q. The truth table is the following, as shown in Figure 6.2.

P

Q

PAQ

T

F

F

F

T

F

T

T

T

F

F

F

Figure 6.2

Truth table for conjunction

This truth table specifies that only when two statements (sometimes referred to in propositional calculus as ‘propositions’) are true will their conjunction also be true. Falsehood of one of them will render their con­ junction false. Nevertheless, formal propositional logic may not mirror the real world. Although in formal logic, the order of P and Q is irrelevant in that whether P comes first or Q comes first does not alter their truth value, certainly “Gunther lay on the bed and died” is not the same as “Gunther died and lay on the bed” (Goddard 2000, 42). This type of problem echoes Grice’s questions in his famous Logic and Conversation (1975) and high­ light the difficulties in parsing the logical components of a language and relating them to perception and social knowledge. The German mathematician G. Frege examined the relationships between truth and meaning and paved the way for the flourishing of the philoso­ phy of language in the twentieth century. Theoreticians who followed Frege dealt with the ways in which the ‘truth’ and ‘reference’ of words contrib­ ute to the meaning of a whole sentence. Some referred to metalanguage to capture objective meaning in a universal way. Montague (1970, 1973) for instance, devised his Model Theoretic Semantics (truth-model semantics) in an attempt to model natural-language semantics in terms of the metalan­ guage of truth conditions (Partee 1996). This movement is still developing in an effort to deal with language in a logic-based formal manner, along with the development of generative grammar that views linguistic knowledge as a system of modules governed by principles operating over primitives.2 Philosophers have dealt with the notion of truth as a separate philosophi­ cal issue since Plato and Aristotle. Various approaches and theories of truth

86  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction also emerged in twentieth century philosophy to deal with the difference between the formal logic of truth and truth-conditional semantics, where truth conditions relate to the proposition expressed by the sentence rather than the sentence itself. The Correspondence Theory of Truth (Russell 1910; Wittgenstein 1922) is based on the idea that true sentences (propositions) are bearers of truth values since they reflect the state of affairs in the real world. Ramsey (1931) developed the notion of ‘redundancy’ and argued that if a sentence is true, stating that ‘it is true’ is redundant; hence, ‘truth’ is a redundant addition to true sentences. At the turn of the twentieth century, Russell and Frege engaged in an important debate about the logical basis of mathematics. As one possible solution to the paradoxes involved in the logic and mathematics of set theory, Tarski suggested a theory of truth. His famous paper The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages ([1931] 1956) about the relations between sentences and the world is known as the theory of ‘disquotation’ and was aimed to solve the liar paradox. According to Tarski, a sentence is true in that it corresponds to a state of affairs. Hence, linguistic meaning is rooted in the way a statement relates to reality. However, because words in a language are defined using other words in the language, truth can only be determined by appealing to a metalanguage that can be objectively defined—such as the system devised by Frege. However, this seemingly simple solution is still fraught with difficulties: “A bachelor is an unmarried male” is a classic example of words defining other words that fails on several accounts. It is not complete as a definition (is someone with a bachelor of arts degree an unmarried male with a degree?) and can be semantically redundant and hence inefficient in communicating information, such as in “The Pope is a bachelor” (Lakoff 1987). Alternatively, another philosophical suggestion—the Coherence Theory of Truth—draws its main idea from seventeenth-century rationalism that claimed (Rescher 1973) that a sentence (proposition, judgment, belief) is true when it is part of a coherent system. Here, truth is conceived as a characteristic of coherent relations within a system.3 The problem of metaphor has also posed a challenge to formal truth theories (Partee 1996; Kittay 1987) and has led to various solutions from excluding metaphors from the set of truth-bearing linguistic entities (Davidson 1978), to pragmatic solutions (Searle 1979), as well as to linguistic-semantic and syntactic-algorithmic solutions (Sovran 1993, 1997, 2000).4 The very influential cognitive theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) rejects the Western correspondence theory of truth and depicts it as based on the mistaken literal understanding of the metaphor ‘thinking is seeing’. They claim that this misunderstanding of its status as a metaphor led to the search for ‘truth’ outside, in the world, instead of realizing that language is an instrument that shapes the worldview. It does so not by mirroring the state of affairs in the world by ‘true’ sentences (as the early Wittgenstein thought), but rather by constructing our view of the world through a web of metaphorical mappings and inferences.

Truth  87 A different aspect of the role of truth in communication is found in Grice’s influential pragmatic theory. He suggested that one of the four maxims that govern human communication is the principle of quality: “Do not say what you believe is false, do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence” (Grice 1975] 41). A further debate between Coleman and Kay (1981) and Sweetser (1987) on the nature of a ‘lie’ revolved around whether prototype theory or frame semantics dealt better with the status of ‘lying’ and ‘telling the truth’. Whereas Coleman and Kay defined three characteristics of a typical lie revolving around the intention to deceive, Sweetser evoked Grice’s principles and frame semantics’ basic assumption about the positive status of ‘telling the truth’ in reciprocal human communication, and the specific condition that may allow deviations for the sake of another positive purpose. Thus, the concept of ‘truth’ is at the core of various, at times conflicting, directions of thought and theory. Recent postmodern theories have challenged the centrality of ‘truth’ and ‘verification’ in philosophy and in science, suggesting that hermeneutic procedures and relative, personal interpretations should replace what is considered to be ‘the deluded aspiration’ of reaching nonexistent ‘objective truth’ with its harmful oppressive consequences.5 We are left with a puzzling question: What is ‘truth’? Can semantic research provide new answers? 6.3  ‘TRUTH’ AS A POLYSEMOUS CONCEPT A dictionary entry is considered polysemous if one word has various meanings that are different yet related. The linguistic definition of polysemy is highly disputed (Geeraerts 1994, Fillmore 1994, Goddard 2000, Sovran 2013a). From the Frame Semantics point of view adopted here, a word is considered polysemous if it evokes distinct (though conceptually or historically related) frames or domains of meanings. A frame, as discussed in earlier chapters, is defined by Fillmore (1977, 1982; Fillmore and Atkins 2000) as a system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any one of them requires understanding the entire system. “In Frame Semantics a word is understood with reference to a structured background of experience, beliefs, or practices, constituting a kind of conceptual prerequisite for understanding the meaning” (Fillmore and Atkins 1992, 77). Fillmore further claims that “an account of the meaning and function of a lexical item can proceed from a description of the underlying semantic frame to a characterization of the manner in which the item in question, through the linguistic structures that are built up around it, selects and highlights aspects or instances of the frame (FrameNet 2000, About FrameNet).6 English and French dictionaries, for instance, carry detailed entries for ‘truth’ and vérité. Viewed from a frame semantics angle, they seem to evoke the epistemological frame of ‘conformity to facts’, which is associated with

88  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction the process of ‘verification’ and with the philosophical correspondence theory of truth. But, they also refer to the social and religious frames of ‘confidence’, ‘faithfulness’, and ‘loyalty’. Dictionaries associate truth with ‘truthfulness’ and ‘verification’ but also with ‘trust’, ‘faith’, and ‘belief’. A tension appears here between two main frames: (1) that of knowledge and procedures for obtaining true knowledge by verifying and confronting propositions with reality; (2) the conceptual frame of belief, trust, confidence, faithfulness, and loyalty, which is less cognitive and more connected to human emotions, dispositions, and feelings. How do we account for this duality? Intuitively, the connections between the two seem to suggest that believing in something or someone means taking them (or their words) to be true and hence trustworthy. Yet the notion of ‘verification’ denotes something that has to do with knowledge and logic, and is associated with doubt rather than with belief and (sometimes blind) trust. There seems to be a contradiction between the skeptical attitude that demands the resolution of doubt by asking for proof and verification, as in law or in science, and a feeling of faith, confidence, or loyalty. The conceptual distance between the two frames can be slightly lessened if one is seen as resulting from the other. Nevertheless, the two frames of belief and trust vs. verifying and making words ‘correspond’ to facts, remain distinct. Each has a separate structure of meaning relations. What then causes a single polysemous word to evoke such distinct semantic and conceptual frames? The answer may be found in the historical study of how meaning evolves and frames are constructed. The long history of the Hebrew language, with its pre-Biblical Semitic roots, its Biblical and post-Biblical worldview, and the various influences it has absorbed from different cultures over the course of time provides insights into the connection between these two frames by pointing to missing links or stages. 6.4  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE Scholars of the history of the Hebrew language commonly refer to four cardinal periods, in each of which one main group of literary texts is considered to represent the canonical language: (a) the Bible, (b) Mishnah and Talmud, (c) medieval philosophy and poetry, and (d) the Enlightenment and modern literature.7 The Biblical period runs from the sixth century BCE, and the Mishnahic8 period is dated around the second-century CE. After that time, most works written by Jews were composed in languages other than Hebrew, due to the scattering of the Jews, and their schools all over the Mesopotamian and the Mediterranean area. The languages of Jewish literature became Aramaic and Arabic. Starting in the eleventh century, an enormous amount of Hebrew translation of philosophical texts written in Arabic was carried out by the Ibn Tibbon family, who lived in Islamic and Christian Spain. This layer of Hebrew was heavily influenced by the vocabulary and syntax of Arabic, as

Truth  89 will be shown in the following section. This medieval period is considered the third stratum. The last layer is even less homogeneous than the three that preceded it. Modern Hebrew emerged with the revival of writing in every area of life and thought in the nineteenth century, as part of the Enlightenment movement led by Moses Mendelssohn. This period also includes modern spoken Hebrew, a phenomenon about 100 or so years old related to the revival of autonomous cultural Jewish life in Israel. Thus, in general terms, there are four central periods and linguistic testimony from the canonical texts of each era. One important morphological fact should be noted at the outset: most Hebrew words have a three-consonant root, which hints at meaning relations between words of the same root, such as h.aver (a friend), h.evra (society), h.ever (group), and other derivations of lexemes of the same root h..v.r. with suffixes and prefixes.9 The root of the word ‘truth’ (‘emet in Hebrew) originally had three consonants— ‘emet. The final weak nasal consonant n was dropped and the feminine suffix t replaced it, creating over time a new root ‘emet. This historical, morphological fact plays a crucial role in the meaning shifts described below. Ancient texts show how this (now missing) n consonant connects ‘emet to its original family of the same root: ‘amen (as in English usage), ‘emuna (belief), ne’eman (loyal), ‘emun (trust). ‘Emet is also related by root and meaning connections to ‘uman (master, craftsman) and ‘umanut (craftsmanship),’imun (training), ‘omen (tutor), ‘oman (artist) and ‘omanut (fine art).10 6.5 FROM BUILDERS TO BELIEVERS—THE MONOTHEISTIC TURN In his 1985 article in Hebrew entitled “The Beginning of Hebrew: Some Semantic Considerations”, S. Morag described the position of ancient Hebrew among the northwest Semitic dialects. He defined the crucial semantic shifts in word meaning in the Hebrew dialect by comparing meaning changes in words and roots in Biblical Hebrew to their cognates in close Semitic languages, such as Aramaic, Canaanite, Moabite, and Phoenician. Among other examples, Morag deals with the word ‘emuna, belief. Several passages in the Old Testament tell the story of how Abraham’s family moved from Babylon to Canaan (Palestine), from an Aramaic-speaking area with its pagan environment to the Hebrew dialect and monotheism. Some of the original Semitic words or roots were still used in the text to describe the new environment but started to convey a somewhat different meaning. The change in belief and culture was accompanied and attested by linguistic changes. For example, there are a few places in the Old Testament where the root ‘a.m.n. and its derived nouns ‘omna (supporting pillar) and ‘emuna (now understood as belief) mean the stability and firmness of real objects such as buildings or raised hands. The clearest reference is in Kings II, 18: 16: “At that time did Hezekiah cut off the gold from the doors of the temple of

90  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction the Lord and from the pillars (‘omnot) which Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid, and gave it to the king of Assyria.” ‘Omnot here are in a transparent building domain. Exodus 17:12 reads: “But Moses’ hands were heavy and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon. And Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands [. . .] and his hands were steady (‘emuna) until the going down of the sun”. By raising his arms and keeping them steady, Moses helped the Israelites to win the battle.11 The Hebrew root is ‘a.m.n. The Old Testament, of course, is replete with occurrences of this root in abstract religious contexts. Morag goes on to show this same trend in other words where a monotheistic shift occurred when Canaanite words such as pdut (salvation) and nifla’ot (wonders, miracles) came to be used solely to denote God’s capacity for salvation and miraculous acts. The notion of ‘emuna is hence polysemous. It evokes various frames: it refers to stability, firmness, loyalty, and is sometimes contrasted with lies and deception: 1. to’avat ‘adonay siftei sheḳ’er, ṿe’osei ‘emuna retsono (Proverbs 12: 22) Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord: but they that deal truly are his delight. The concept of ‘emuna is also positioned as one of God’s attributes and as the polar mirror image of evil, ‘el ‘emuna, which literally means ‘the God of belief’: 2. ‘el ‘emuna v.’ein ‘av.el (Deuteronomy 32: 4) He is the rock; his work is perfect, for all his ways are judgment, a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right he is. In Biblical Hebrew, the word ‘emuna refers to belief in God. This component (believing) is still dominant in Modern Hebrew but is not restricted to religious belief: 3. ko ta’asun beyir’at ‘adonay be’emuna ‘uvelev shalem (Chronicles II 2 19: 9) Thus shall you do in the fear of the Lord, faithfully, and with a perfect heart. The word emunim denotes fidelity: ‘ed ‘emunin (Proverbs 14: 5) a faithful witness (who will not lie); ‘ish ‘emunin (Proverbs 20: 6) is a faithful man, and shomer ‘emunim (Isaiah 26: 2) refers to the ‘righteous nation which keeps the truth’.12 Loyalty and fidelity are expressed in Biblical Hebrew as well as Modern Hebrew by the adjective ne’eman. While in Modern Hebrew, this may refer to a husband, a friend, or a dog, in Biblical Hebrew, one can still find the element of concrete stability and firmness of buildings, hearts, and witnesses of the Lord and a characteristic of God himself:

Truth  91 4. yated tḳu’a bemaḳom ne’eman (Isaiah 22: 25) The nail that is fastened in a sure place. 5. zar’o le’olam yḥye, ṿekis’o kashemesh negdi, keyare’aḥ yikon le’olam ṿa’ed bashaṿaḳ ne’eman sela (Psalm 89: 36–37) His seed shall endure forever and his throne as the sun before me. It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as a faithful witness in heaven. Selah. 6. ha’el hane’eman shomer habrit ṿeḥesed le’ohavaṿ. (Deuteronomy 7: 9) He is God, the faithful God, who keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him. The component of stability and firmness derived from the material Canaanite culture is now placed in the monotheistic contexts of God and his believers. The root ‘a.m.n in the hif’il verb pattern became the main verb for believing from this time on. Yet, in some occurrences, it preserves the component of concrete firmness rather than destruction and lack of (divine) support. The root is used in two different morpho-syntactic patterns: he’emin in the active hifi’l pattern to denote believing, and ne’eman in the passiveadjectival form, nif’al, as ‘being established’ and ‘loyal’: 7. ‘im lo ta’aminu lo te’amenu (Isaiah 7: 9) If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established. Believing is also understood as a mental state of acceptance of people’s words as true. Here, one can begin to sense the next shift in the semantic frame from religious faith to a social and cognitive frame of meaning. Jacob is told that his long lost son Joseph is alive, and he refuses to believe it: 8. ṿayafag libo ki lo he’emin lahem (Genesis 45: 26) And (Jacob’s) heart fainted, for he believed them not. In various places in the Old Testament, the verb denotes the same meaning of belief and trust (Habakkuk 1: 5: ‘You will not believe though it is told you’). The word ‘amana means a pact, a treaty, or a covenant in Biblical Hebrew as well as Modern Hebrew (see also example 6, above). Amen, in Hebrew as elsewhere, stands for consent, approval, and agreement. In Modern Hebrew, a ‘yes man’ can be termed as ‘omer ‘amen’—the one who says Amen and agrees with whatever you say. Thus, the word ‘emuna as well as its root ‘a.m.n. retain the old Canaanite component of firmness, stability, establishment derived from the building frame but take it to new areas of meaning, especially in depicting the relationship between believers and God, as well as to moral frames where stability in witnessing, keeping promises, and loyalty is highly praised.

92  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction These meaning shifts become more subtle when nominal constructs are concerned. The feminine noun form ‘eme (n) t (truth) occurs in the Old Testament in various binomial construct noun forms, which leave much room for a variety of meaning relations between the construct’s two components. This semantic-syntactic fact, together with the morpho-phonetic change, the deletion of the weak nasal final consonant from the root,13 helped accelerate the process of meaning shift from the concrete meaning of firmness and actual stability of buildings or objects in the world to the more abstract sources of divine support and emotional,14 as well as moral stability. ‘Emet appears in binomials, such as a man of truth, truth and perfect heart, truth and righteousness, way of truth, witness of truth, sentence of truth (truth in justice), a God of truth, a law of truth, peace of truth, and lips of truth:15 ‘ish ‘emet—a faithful man (Nehemiah 7: 2); derekh ‘emet— the right way (Genesis 24: 48); ‘ed ‘emet ṿene’man—a true and faithful witness (Jeremiah 42: 5); mishpat ‘emet—true judgment (Ezekiel 18: 8); ‘el ‘emet—Lord God of truth (Psalm 31: 5–6); toratkha ‘emet—thy law is the truth (Psalm 119: 142); shlom ‘emet - assured peace (Jeremiah 14: 13); sfat ‘emet—lip of truth (Proverbs 12: 19). The English translations of ‘emet in these binomial constructs range from ‘true’ and ‘truth’ to ‘faithful’, ‘right’, ‘establish’, and ‘assured’. This versatility again shows how the ancient Semitic components of firmness and stability are used in the new context of belief and moral behavior, thus changing their main meaning component. This can be interpreted societally by the fact that a monotheistic religious community relies on God and his law as a source of stability and certainty. The moral person who followed this faith would never lie and could be considered a trusted witness and a man of justice. The ‘true path’ is the moral path given by God through his Law. The metaphorical shift from building to the moral frame may be attributed to the changed focus of interest of a religious society devoted to moral behavior, as exemplified by the divine law and by God’s own deeds of protection and salvation. The shift from one source of reliability to another seems evident: from concrete stability to the abstract source of assurance that the religious person draws from his faith. Morality is the product of this faith. Morality demands trustfulness and firmness of behavior and of laws. ‘Emet is also used in opposition to lying and is related to believing what is said or what one hears (see also example 8, above): 9. ‘emet haya hadavar ‘asher shamati be’artsi al dvarekha ṿe’al ṿokhmatkha (Kings I 10: 6) It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy act and of thy wisdom. 10.  ṿedarashta ṿeṿakarta ṿesha’alta heitev, ṿehine ‘emet nakhon hadavar (Deuteronomy 13: 14)

Truth  93 Then shalt thou inquire, and make search and ask diligently and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain. The Queen of Sheba in example (9) hears about King Solomon’s wisdom, and after visiting him, she realizes that what she heard was an established fact. ‘Emet here has to do with verifying. This is even more striking in the example (10) from Deuteronomy, where discovering the truth involves inquiry, investigation, and search. This suggests the beginnings of the second shift toward knowledge, cognition, proof, and verification. This meaning component continues to dominate the meaning of ‘emet (truth) even today.16 6.6  TOWARD SCIENCE AND VERIFICATION Hebrew medieval literature is by no means homogeneous. It includes moralistic writings, philosophical essays, Biblical commentaries, grammatical research, and liturgical and secular poetry. However, the main innovations in words and meanings occurred in the scientific and philosophical writings influenced by Greek thought through Arabic translations. Important scientific, theological, and philosophical texts were composed by scholars such as Abraham ‘Ibn Ezra, ‘Ibn Saruk, and Yehuda Halevy (all of whom lived in Spain between 900 to 1200 CE). Maimonides’ monumental A Guide for the Perplexed, which presented his philosophical thought, was written in Arabic (1190). It was influenced by Aristotle yet independent of his thought. For this explosion of original thinking to have any influence on the Hebrew language, his works had to be translated into Hebrew. A family of Jewish translators living in Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the ‘Ibn Tibbons indeed translated more than 150 works into Hebrew to enable Ashkenazi scholars in France and Germany, who knew no Arabic but could read Hebrew very well due to their rabbinical education, to read the great Spanish masters’ works. This had enormous impact on the future development of Hebrew. The concept of ‘truth’ in medieval philosophical and scientific Hebrew centers on verification. New nouns and verbs moved away from the former frame of belief. For instance, ‘amita that means ‘truth’, ‘axiom’, ‘proof’. Rashi, the great Bible and Talmud commentator (France, eleventh century), uses the phrase: 11.  leha’amid davar ‘al ‘amitato (Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 99:2)   Lit: make the issue stand on its truth|   Trans: find the truth of the matter When used in the plural, the new word ‘amitot means axiomatic caveats, unshakable truths, especially in the context of believing in God and his good deeds. In his only book written in Hebrew, ‘hayad haḥazaḳa’ (The Strong Hand, a fourteen-volume commentary on the six books of the Mishnah),

94  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Maimonides is skeptical of the ability of the human mind to understand divine truths: 12. Ṿa’amitat hadavar ‘ein da’ato shel ‘adam mevin, Ṿelo yekhola lehasigo ‘uleḥoḳro And this (divine) truth (and proof) is beyond studying and inconceivable to human knowledge and mind. Samuel ‘Ibn Tibbon (1150–1230) translated from Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed: 13.  Da ki ‘amitat hanevu’a hu shefa shofe’a me’et hashem yitbarekh   The truth (essence, the existence) of prophecy is a divine flowing. Maimonides deals with basic theological and epistemological matters concerning the ability to understand phenomena such as prophecy. The human mind in this scientific era looked for scientific proof, something firm to support belief. Yet what is this truth? Judah Ben Solomon Alharizi—a Jewish Spanish medieval poet, thinker, and translator—wrote a glossary to explain some of the difficult words and concepts in Maimonides’ work: 14.  ‘Amitat hadavar hu ‘etsem nafsho  The truth of a thing is its essence. This is suggestive of the influence of Greek-Arabic philosophy on Jewish thinkers who attempted to reconcile new logical philosophical achievements with their own traditional monotheistic beliefs. The concept of truth is a good candidate since its polysemy covers much of this philosophicalreligious combination: belief, confirmation, stability, support, verification, and true knowledge. There were also earlier scattered references to ‘truth’ in the context of verification in Biblical literature. When Rashi—the great medieval commentator—deals with one of them he uses a new verb stemming from the new secondary root ‘e.m.t. where the dropped final consonant n is totally forgotten: in the story in Genesis about Abraham’s wandering, it is said that Abraham conceals the fact that Sarah is his wife from Abimelech, the King of Gerar. When the king discovers the deception, Abraham admits that she is his half-sister, the daughter of his father but not of his mother. Rashi comments: 15.  kedei le’amet ‘et dvara heshivo ken  To verify (support) his (former) words, he thus answered. The context is that of a conversation where things that are said can be either true or false and the truth value can be checked and verified. Rashi uses the new verb form le’amet (to verify) as a way of adding credibility to Abra-

Truth  95 ham’s earlier lie that his wife was his sister. Using verbs derived from ‘emet in various morphological patterns (binyanim) became very common. Samuel Ibn Tibbon translates a very crucial and typical saying from M ­ aimonides’ introduction to the Guide for the Perplexed as follows: 16.  sheyit’amet lekha ha’emet bidrakhaṿ shelo yipol ha’emet bemi ḳre  Lit: that the truth about his (God’s) ways will be verified to you and not fall [on you] by chance. The context suggests that the best way of getting at the truth is the systematic way; this may weakly echo the original component of firmness. Me’umat is a passive form. It occurs several times in Medieval Hebrew and is opposed to a jocular utterance. It should be recalled that many innovations in Medieval Hebrew, especially in philosophy and theology, were heavily affected by Arabic. Derivational moves that are natural in Arabic entered into Hebrew text, but still sounded alien and not always perfectly comprehensible. Modern Hebrew follows the trend of Medieval Hebrew where ‘truth’ is concerned. The main meaning domains where it is used are general discourse—opposed to lies, and juridical contexts of witnesses, evidence, verification, and science. People verify (le’amet) information, rumors, and, above all, scientific discoveries and theories. 6.7 FROM CONCRETE BUILDERS TO SCIENTISTS AND THINKERS—THE ROAD TO ABSTRACTION The Hebrew concept has come a long way from pre-Biblical times to our era. The starting point of support and firm building seems quite remote from current meanings of ‘truth’. However, the diachronic analysis reveals the intermediate stages: a pillar of a building supports the building. Parallel support and firmness is needed in a person’s inner moral or religious life. The metaphor ‘pillars of one’s belief’ depicts this analogy. However, this state of mind seems on the surface to be at odds with doubt, and with uncertain knowledge that needs verification. In other words, no verification was needed to support the firm belief (‘emuna) in a true God and in his ‘true’ moral law (torat ‘emet), which reflect metaphorically the Canaanite concept of firmness of pillars. This leaves etymological traces in Hebrew. Thus, changes in meaning point to a profound change in focus, norms, and worldview. Since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—the age of reason—we have lived in a scientific, cerebral, conscious culture. People who may trust in God in their private lives still seek other evidence and support for their scientific theories. Descartes suggested we live in an ‘era of doubt’. Yet the word ‘emet and the concept of truth still exist despite great changes in meaning. Has ‘emet come to mean the opposite of firmness and stability? This appears not to be the case, because the kernel of meaning of ‘emet denoting

96  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction stability and firmness has been preserved, although it is now used in different contexts. From this point of view, the change in meaning has not been so radical: support and firmness are needed in buildings, moral behavior, and religion as well as in science. The change is in the source and nature of support. In eras dominated by religious faith, God and faith functioned as the main source of stability, and this was extended to morals and justice. A skeptical scientific age seeks other sources of certainty. There is much dispute and disagreement among scientists about criteria beyond experimental verification for adopting new theories (Livnat 2012). Thus, contemporary philosophical attacks on the foundation of the scientific endeavor, and mainly at the concept of truth, are not surprising. ‘Truth’ may be seen from this historical perspective as having a formal ‘wrapping’ of support and firmness, which allows the inward content to vary according to changing conditions, norms, interests, and conceptual frames. 6.8 CONCLUSION Truth as a polysemous concept in many languages evokes at least two separate frames: the frame of belief and the frame of verification.17 They are quite distant, if not at times contradictory. Proof is an answer to doubt, whereas believing and trusting seem firm and removed from doubt. The way the Hebrew concept of ‘truth’ has acquired these two meanings based on the Canaanite original building concept helps clarify the two facets of truth. The original element of firmness and support is present in all contexts. It is present in trust, belief, and loyalty and is desirable when seeking proof and evidence. In secular scientific eras, the divine gradually loses its primary and exclusive status as a source of firmness. Science is based on reason and inference, logic, facts, and reliable proof. Social relations and discourse show the same need for trust and truthfulness in a court of law, for example, as in everyday discourse. The cognitive element of truthfulness is more dominant today in Modern English and Hebrew, yet the old meaning components of firmness and trust still play a role in understanding the conceptual status of ‘truth’. Thus, it is likely that these elements of firmness and support will not fade even when new meanings of ‘truth’ emerge, because they are so deeply rooted in human needs and desires. Explanations and reasons for changes in meaning can be provided from a historical perspective, but it is almost impossible to predict future shifts in the meaning of any concept, including ‘emet and truth. However, some indications of such shifts can already be detected in current-day postmodern thinking. This is reflected in the common saying, ‘everybody has his own truth’. This is perhaps suggestive of the start of a challenge to firm adherence to the rationality and objectivity of the scientific era. Yet the old kernel of ‘firmness’ is sensed, even in this saying that emphasizes subjectivity and polyvalence.

7

Norm

The two adjectives ‘normal’ and ‘normative’ are morphologically related. However, ‘normal’ is descriptive whereas ‘normative’ is prescriptive. This chapter discusses the leap from the descriptive to the normative by examining a vast range of language phenomena, including the Latin etymologies of ‘norm’ (a yardstick) and various Hebrew adverbial metaphors from the domain of ‘norms’, such as kashura (lit. in line), beseder (lit. in order), kaya’ut (lit. as fit), and kidva’i (lit. as wanted, desired, or needed). The meaning relations between cognate lexemes in English language thesaurus entries for ‘norm’, such as ‘order’, ‘in order’, ‘average’, ‘usual’, ‘ordinary’, ‘right’, ‘sane’, ‘convention’, etc., help reveal the structure of the semantic frame of ‘norm’, its subdomains, as well as the inter-relations between subdomains. The idea of ‘norms as thresholds’ is then introduced by analyzing tendencies to use the English prefix ‘over-x’, as in ‘overdose’, ‘overbaked’, ‘overdue’, and ‘overdisciplined’. It is shown that models, metaphors, and actual experience in the physical world play a key role in constructing the abstract concept of ‘norm’. Health, sanity, and functional instruments can all lend their structure to abstract concepts of ‘norm’ in such areas as politeness, ethics, law, work relations, and political and social behavior, as well as aesthetics.

7.1  WHAT IS THE DENOTATION OF ‘NORM’? Abstract nouns such as ‘fear’, ‘care’, ‘difference’, ‘wit’, ‘tribe’, etc., are not easy to handle. They differ from nouns with clearer denotations such as ‘chair’, ‘car’, ‘flower’, ‘dog’ or ‘department store’, or even ‘birthday party’, that have exemplars to which one can point. With some effort, they can perhaps be defined in the traditional Aristotelian manner by referring to the higher category they belong to, and by stating what differentiates each of them from the other members of the class. A chair can be defined as a piece of furniture consisting of a seat, legs, back, and often arms, designed to accommodate one person, while an armchair would start the same way but the specification would be changed to ‘has side structures to support the arms or elbows’.

98  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction The philosopher Wittgenstein was radically critical of this approach and discussed its failure to ‘define’ abstract concepts such as ‘game’ or ‘number’ (1953, ƒ66–67). As an alternative, he coined the notion of ‘family resemblance’ between the members of a class. This notion obviated the need to determine a property common to all games, for example, that would justify their being called ‘games’. Wittgenstein argued (1958,~18) that “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods, and this is surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses”. This evolutionary view of language can be applied to the evolvement of concepts, and contrasts with a strict definition based on categorizing the content of a concept via the elusive common property of its members. Wittgenstein argued that this is how we play ‘language games’, and that language games adhere to ‘forms of life’. Wittgenstein’s astute observations had considerable impact on the conventional views of the nature of language and meaning. He compared a concept to the center of an old city that acquires new meanings as the years go by, some of which are quite distant from the center. Only a ‘family resemblance’, that is, looser relations than category memberships in the traditional theory of definition, relates them to each other. Children learn to play the ‘language game’ without relying on definitions but rather by learning how to play the specific language game in any language and in various contexts and registers. It is not surprising that researchers in psychology and in linguistics have developed similar theories or that there is a vast literature on experiments conducted to account for the way people understand the world by forming concepts. Eleanor Rosch’s influential Prototype Theory (Rosch and Mervis 1975) suggested that the way people actually go about concept formation is radically different from the necessary and sufficient conditions of Aristotelian logic. Her work led to numerous cognitive linguistics theories that draw on psychology and human behavior, rather than on the strict demands of traditional logic. These theories emphasize the crucial role of frames (Fillmore 1982, Petruck 2011), metaphors, and image schemas (Lakoff 1987) in concept formation and in creating categories for understanding the world. The fruitfulness of this view is attested in most of the chapters in this volume. Thus, in keeping with this reasoning, this chapter is not designed to seek out the definition of ‘norm’, but rather, how the various meanings and uses of the polysemic noun ‘norm’ relate to each other, and its relations to cognate words. This implies looking at meaning relations between the words in the semantic domain of ‘norm’ and trying to detect the basic relations, as well as the metaphors, in this domain. One of the first questions concerns the meaning relations between the noun ‘norm’ and its morphological neighbors: the adjectives ‘normal’ and ‘ normative’, the

Norm  99 verb ‘normalize’, etc. More specifically, what characterizes the leap from ‘normal’, which is descriptive and refers to facts, to ‘normative’, which is prescriptive and concerns preferences, instructions, commands, and rules? The conceptual and semantic analyses are expected to shed light on these questions.

7.2  ETYMOLOGY, CONTEXTS, AND USE A traditional source for cognate words is Roget’s Thesaurus. Roget’s pioneering nineteenth-century endeavor manually arranged words through their meaning relations.1 It paved the way for the more recent idea of network semantics (Hüllen 2009). Some of the ideas behind the semantic arrangement of Roget’s Thesaurus underlie more recent philosophical and linguistic views of semantic domains fields and frames (Kittay 1992; Fillmore and Atkins 1992, Clausner and Croft 1999, Nerlich and Clarke 2000). Thus, entries of Roget’s Thesaurus can be used as a starting point for grouping words in a semantic domain and analyzing their mutual relations.2 In the 1977 index of Roget’s Thesaurus, ‘norm’ is referenced to the following entries:3 average, convention, ethics, pervading attitude, rule, standard, straight line, vertical, normality, mediocrity, prevalence, propriety, sanity, usualness, natural, orderly, ordinary, orthogonal, right, sane, typical, normative, usual, normalize, make uniform, order, organize, standardize, normally, customarily, generally, naturally. This is a starting point for a pretheoretical association of words that seem to be related somehow to ‘norm’. A closer look at this list of lexemes reveals several general themes such as uniformity, frequency, and the straight line. The latter derives from the etymology of the word ‘norm’. In Classical Latin, norma is a square used by carpenters and masons to make right angles. Twelfth-century French already used norme in a metaphorical manner to refer to a standard or pattern for practice or behavior. Mettre norme à meant to regularize something.4 The normal distribution is a statistical notion. It refers to the tendency of random events to be centered around a central value. The normal distribution is bell-shaped and is often called the ‘normal curve’ because most of the data are concentrated in the central region and fewer data are found at the extremes. Height, for instance, falls into a normal curve where most people fall in the middle with average height, and few people fall in the tails of the curve representing the very short or the very tall.5

100  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction The sociologist Eva Illouz has recently examined the norm of secrecy justified by security needs in Israel and its effect on individuals’ behavior (Illouz 2013). She claims that norms are invisible but powerful entities. They exist in every social group and are at the foundation of most people’s behavior. Even if they are not always conscious, they compel us to act in predictable ways. They command us to take a lost wallet back to its owner; to offer our seat to an elderly person; not to cut ahead in line. Norms are the quiet voice inside that compels us to be good, honorable, or reputable. (Illouz, Haaretz, January 23, 1013) She says that sociology tries to answer how different people behave in similar and predictable ways, even when no one visibly forces them to do so: The answer is simply through the norms they learn and absorb from their environment. More than that: Through their capacity to observe its norms, people make themselves into competent members of a group. When they internalize a group norm, people acquire built-in sensors that help them figure out without much thinking what is allowed or forbidden, moral or immoral. This is also why normative change is intriguing: what makes some norms become irrelevant or new ones emerge? . . .  Powerful norms are thus so routinized that they become invisible; they act like a frame within which we organize our behavior and feelings. We do not see the frame, but it constrains our actions and shapes what we “instinctively” view as permissible, worthy, and a source of pride or shame. (ibid) Illouz is aware of the relative aspect of norms. She queries: Why are there countries in which bribes are common, and others where bribery is considered a despicable infringement of public trust? Why is it that in some countries, a politician caught lying must resign, while in others, such as our own, lying is seen as a routine component of public affairs? (ibid) The answer to these two questions, according to Illouz, is: “Not that some countries have norms and others don’t, but rather that in both contexts, it is different institutions that shape their respective norms” (ibid). In 1986, Daniel Kahaneman and Dale T. Miller published a watershed article entitled “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to its Alternatives”. It tested people’s expectations and their surprise when faced with deviations from their predictions: Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars.

Norm  101 Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normality of a stimulus is evaluated by comparing it with the norms that it evokes after the fact, rather than to precomputed expectations. Norm theory is applied in analyses of the enhanced emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, of the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior, and of the role of norms in causal questions and answers. (1968, 136) ‘Normality’ and ‘norm’ are thus associated with similarity of experience stored in memory. Similarity implies conformity to norms or to normality. There are many other contexts in which theoretical notions of norm are found including sociology, economics, artificial intelligence, mathematics, and philosophy. There have been several philosophical efforts to differentiate norms from rules. One recent example is the way Fisch and Benbaji (2011) employed the words ‘normative framework’ in the context of reason, belief, and self-criticism. They examine the character of reason and the ability of individuals to distance themselves from the normative framework in which they function so they can be self-critical and innovative. What can explain the morphological ties between the adjective ‘normal’ and ‘normative’? So far, we have encountered ‘normal’ and ‘norms’ in association with frequency and typicality. However, ‘normative’ and ‘norms’ are related to rules, laws, regulations, and code of behavior. This suggests that there is a conceptual leap between ‘normal’ as a descriptive notion and ‘normative’, which evokes prescription and enforcement, or at least will and counsel. This, together with the major role of ‘norm’ in various contexts of human life, calls for further analysis. In the next sections, this is done by: (a) studying meaning relations in the semantic frames of ‘norm’ and its cognates; (b) examining several models and metaphors that associate lines and order; (c) looking for indirect evidence for norms and thresholds in the use of the English prefix ‘over’ in the ‘over-x’ construction and the Hebrew prefix yeter in the x-yeter construction; (d) uncovering the hidden idea of ‘norm in the Hebrew polysemous word ḥinam and its relations to other lexemes derived from the root ḥ.n.n; (e) detecting the idea of a ‘norm’ in the negative verb ‘leak’ compared to the neutral or positive verbs ‘stream’ and ‘flow’. 7.3  MEANING RELATIONS AND SUBDOMAINS Words and concepts emerge out of human experience (Fillmore 1977b, 1985, 2006). Thus, understanding words and concepts can be seen as understanding the experiences and the contexts that yield these conceptualizations. FrameNet is based on a large corpus of annotated sentences

102  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction from the British National Corpus. It is the most advanced computer-based semantic project dealing with semantic relations and the structure of the lexicon. As we have seen, the goal of Fillmore’s online project FrameNet is to analyze meaning relations and syntactical combinations between elements of a semantic frame. However, ‘norm’ is not one of the 1,100 analyzed and annotated frames. Although the lexical units ‘normal’ and ‘normally’ are found in the FrameNet index, they have been assigned to two separately annotated frames: the index of lexical units indicates that the adjective ‘normal’ can be found in the typicality frame, whereas the adverb ‘normally’ has been placed in the still unfinished frame of frequency.6 The association of ‘normal’ with ‘typical’, ‘frequent’, and ‘regular’ is based on annotated corpus sentences such as: “Everything is completely back to normal now” or “The new factory, which will begin normal production early next year, will employ about 1,000 people”, or “Deciding when and how to return border and port security to more normal operations”. A list of lexical units from the frame reinforces the meanings of typicality and frequency: ‘always’, ‘common’, ‘constantly’, ‘daily’, ‘frequent’, ‘frequently’, ‘generally’, ‘usually’, etc. However, ‘normative’ in its prescriptive sense is not (yet?) incorporated in the project. Hence, to determine the infrastructure of this semantic domain, which on the surface does not show much structure, several steps are necessary. The first step involves assigning related words to subgroups, based on the language mastery of native speakers who can recognize relative closeness or distance between words, although they are seldom aware of this ability and they might not always agree on these grouping and divisions because although there is a certain consensus about the core meanings of a lexeme, its meaning might be affected by different exposure to different texts and contexts.7 In some cases, the decision is not easy; however, synonyms or quasisynonyms (closely related lexemes), present themselves quite clearly.8 Further analysis demands looking for differences as well as relations between subgroups, and interrelations of meaning, especially between minimal pairs in each group, and finally looking for polysemous words, metonyms, metaphorical patterns, and models that are sometimes hidden in the etymologies of words and their history of use. ‘Regularity’, ‘usualness’, and ‘standard’ have a common element of repetition, which is explained by ‘convention’. They seem closer to each other than to ‘uniformity’ or ‘order’. The latter two, however, are not very close to each other, so should be separated. ‘Average’ is somewhat different from all of them and so are ‘uniformity’ and ‘order’. ‘Standard’ shares some features with ‘rules’ and ‘rights’, which belong to the semantic frames of ethics and law, but is more general and is found in other more general frames such as work relations or production. ‘Sanity’ seems quite remote from all the others and should form a subgroup of its own. Its appearance in the entry ‘norm’ demands an explanation. These groupings are shown in Figure 7.1.

Norm

103

uniformity average regularity usualness standard convention

straight line

Norm order sanity

model ethics, rights

Figure 7.1

Concepts related to ‘norm’

With the idea of a ‘straight line’ in mind, and the etymology of ‘norm’ as a carpenter’s tool, further divisions come into focus. They appear to adhere to the above- mentioned duality between the descriptive, informative sense of ‘normal’ and the prescriptive, obligatory sense of ‘normative’, as shown in Figure 7.2.

normality order generality custom

Standards right proper behavior

sanity Figure 7.2

Between ‘normal’ and ‘normative’

104  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction There seems to be a curious leap from the sense of regularity and uniformity in the meaning of ‘norm’ associated with the adjective ‘normal’ to its other senses related to rules, ethics, and law that are indicative of the ‘normative’. This recurrent leap from normal to normative seems both crucial and intriguing. In Hebrew, the noun klal has two meanings. The first is ‘total’, ‘all’, ‘totality’, ‘entirety’, as well as ‘community’, which accords with the descriptive subgroup of generality and usualness. It is morphologically related to the common Hebrew quantifier kol, meaning ‘all’, ‘everybody’, and to klil, which means ‘wholesome’, ‘complete’, and ‘flawless’. The words derived from Hebrew root k.l.l. concern inclusion and integration. The second and later meaning of the very same word klal is ‘rule’, ‘principle of behavior’, ‘grammar’, etc. It has been in use since the time of the Mishnah, the six volumes of religious and social code redacted in the third-century CE. Rules are sometimes summarized after a Mishnaic disputation by the phrase ze ha-klal, meaning ‘this is the rule’, which reflects its prescriptive regulative sense. In these same volumes, the phrase yotse min haklal, which means ‘an exception to a rule’, (lit. out of the rule) is also used. Here, the phrase functions like the English adjective ‘extraordinary’, which refers to something that is strikingly not usual or expected. As is the case in English, in Modern Hebrew, this adjective has become a positive expression of appraisal that means ‘exceptionally good’. A similar duality exists in the Hebrew question eikh ‘omrim, uttered when someone is not sure about the right usage or a pronunciation of a word. The literal translations is “how (do people) say?” similar to the French comment dit-on?, with an unspecified general plural form. Despite this literal meaning referring to common usage, most of the time, the speaker is looking for the right answer; that is, for a prescription, the normative answer. A similar duality is found in the English use of ‘should’. Compare: “the bus should be here at 7 a.m. (or: any minute)”—this is the regular time for its arrival—with an order from the bus company to a bus driver that he and the bus “should be here at 7 a.m.” (Jackendoff, personal communication).9 Thus, overall, the related lexemes in Roget’s entry for norm can be grouped as follows. The concepts of order and regulation form the center of the frame. Nature in general and human health in particular exhibit these regularities. Laws of Nature can be inferred from understanding the order of things. The other meaning of ‘rule’ is related to legitimacy and acceptance in the social arena. In all these contexts, order is associated with functioning systems, whether this is the body, tools, or social institutions. Functioning systems show regularities and enable prediction. However, this does not fully clarify the ways in which ‘normal’ is related ‘normative’. Models, metaphors, and several uses in context will provide the missing links in the next sections; see Figure 7.3.

Norm

105

nature rules acceptance

regularities orediction

legitimacy

order function

Distric Distric tools

health and sanity

description Figure 7.3

Distric Distric society

prescription Subdomains in the frame of ‘norm’ Distric

7.4 MODELS AND METAPHORS—LINES AND ORDER Recall that the Latin origin of ‘norm’ is a mason’s instrument, a type of yard­ stick that enables builders to align parts of a construction. The etymons of several Hebrew adverbs from the semantic domain of ‘norm’ are insightful as well in that they ease the tension between ‘normal’ and ‘normative’, and hint at why sanity is included in Roget’s entry for norm. 1. Ka-shura Lit: as—in the line Meaning: all right, approved, as it should be. The online Historical Dictionary o f the H ebrew Language Academy attests that the first written abstract quotation in which ‘lines of fences’ in ka-shura were replaced by the abstract notion of desirability and approval dates to 300 CE. This is the first instance where the two particles ka (‘as’ + definite article) and shura (a line) are united in a new lexeme grammaticalized

106  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction to form an adverb of approval. The material context of fences and rows disappears, and shura loses its meaning as a line and is replaced by the affirmative normative utterance meaning ‘in order’, ‘all right’. The content noun shura (line), together with the preposition ka (as), became one adverb that is used in higher registers of Hebrew to express confirmation and satisfaction. This is a historical feature in Hebrew that ties ‘normative’, as in English and Latin, to the model of a straight line and hence to the normative subframe: ‘as it should be’. Thus, it is worth delving deeper into the ‘straight line’ implied in the Latin and old English ‘norm’, as well as in the Hebrew word order (be-seder) and line in the adverb ka-shura. The visual, geometric, and mathematical characteristics of a straight line suggest simplicity, predictability, and strictness. Any dot on a line has a single value as expressed in the formula for a straight line: y = ax + b. It is simple and hence predictable, as opposed to some curved lines or a broken line that can go in unexpected directions. No wonder that in several languages the straight line is seen as a model and a metaphor for honest people and good conduct: ‘straight as a ruler’ in English and adam yashar (lit. straight and honest man) in Hebrew.10 Other Hebrew adverbs of approval and confirmation shed further light on ‘norm’: 2. Be-seder Lit: in order, meaning: okay 3. ka-ra’uy Lit: as being seen (related to ra’uy: suitable, fit, chosen) Meaning: as it should be, as well as concerns seeing and choosing) Both are common, and particularly beseder is frequently used in everyday Hebrew speech and in written texts. The adverb below is highly stylistic and is based on an Aramaic verb: 4. Ki- de-va’i Lit: as one desires it Meaning: well done, okay, fine.11 All four adverbs mean almost the same thing and are used for approval and acceptance within an acceptable norm of behavior. They all mean ‘all right’, and sometimes even ‘perfect’. Their etymologies and structure reveal their original sources: the straight line and elements of order, sight, and choice. The elements of choosing (in ka-ra-‘uy) highlight the fact that norms, in addition or perhaps despite their prescriptive power, can be relative to a society, a tribe, or culture. They have a tacit element of choice. On the other hand, the notion of a line and order are related to the fact that once a norm is established, it impacts social behavior, politeness, morals, etc. The ‘frozen’ metaphorical elements shed light on the evolvement

Norm  107 of concepts from simple sensory-motor experiences to elaborate abstract concepts that concern emotions, behavior, and obedience. The yardstick, the straight line, and the concept of a line, or more generally of order, contribute to the prescriptive aspect of the concept of ‘norm’ whereas sight and desire, which imply ‘outlooks’ and ‘points of view’, refer to the open and relative features of various kinds of norms and the fact that they are culture-bound. The leap from factual regularity, custom, convention, and repetition to prescriptive rules and laws, in other words, the leap from the ‘normal’, sane, and regular to the ‘normative’ and obligatory still needs to be explained. One plausible hypothesis is that regularity and functioning imply prediction and control. The relations between ‘sanity’ and ‘norm’ require more specification and justification. This view is developed in the following sections with additional linguistic evidence. Meanwhile, it suffices to point out that ‘sanity’ is suggestive of mental health and accepted normal behavior determined by the social establishment.12

7.5  CONSTRUCTIONS REVEAL HIDDEN NORMS

7.5.1 The English ‘Over-X’ Construction—Excessiveness and Thresholds Much attention has been paid to the English word ‘over’, its various literal and metaphorical meanings, as well as its idiomatic usage in various syntactic constructions. Some of the best-known works are those by Brugman (1988), Lakoff (1987), Tyler and Evans (2001) and Dowbor (2008).13 ‘Over’ is depicted in these studies as having many meanings, uses, and nuances: (a) as a position above or higher than, as in ‘a sign over the door’, ‘a hawk gliding over the hills’. It can also mean: (b) above and across from one end or side to the other as in ‘jump over the fence’, to the other side of, across, as in ‘strolled over the bridge’; (c) across the edge of and down, in ‘fell over the cliff’; (d) on the other side of: ‘a village over the border’; (e) upon the surface of: ‘put a coat of varnish over the woodwork’; (f) through the extent of, all through: ‘walked over the grounds’; (g) through the period or duration of: ‘records maintained over two years’; (h) until or beyond the end of: ‘stayed over the holidays and many more’. The meanings that concern us here are not the spatio-temporal ones, but rather, some of the more abstract ones, such as: (i) degree, quantity, or extent: ‘over ten miles’, ‘over a thousand dollars’.14 Lakoff’s theory of Idealized Cognitive Models - ICM (Lakoff 1987, 416–461) is an attempt to provide a general description of this variety of meanings. He argues that the various meanings of ‘over’ can be accounted for by idealized conceptual spatial schemas that highlight aspects of states of affairs in reality. He presents schemas for the ‘above sense’ (425), the

108  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction ‘covering sense’ (426), the ‘reflexive schema’ (430), and the ‘excess schema’ (433). The latter is the most closely applicable to the concept of ‘norm’. Lakoff provides such examples as: ‘the bathtub overflowed’ and ‘don’t overextend yourself’, where an additional image of a container is implied. Lakoff describes image schemas and metaphors as being created effortlessly and unconsciously. They shape our perception of the real world in concrete as well as in abstract areas. The prefix ‘over’ and the notions of ‘excessiveness’ and ‘thresholds’ are associated with the concept of ‘norm’, at times through the container image ‘schema’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) makes an interesting historical comment in its discussion of ‘over’ as a prefix, as in ‘overdose’ or ‘over-simplification’:15 The sense ‘in or to excess, too much, too’, is now a leading sense of over- in combination with verbs, adjectives, nouns, and adverbs. In modern English very common with a negative (especially in adjectives and their derivatives), as in not over-brave, not over-obliging, not overpleased (in, e.g., ‘he was not over-pleased with the result’), in which not over- is used by litotes for ‘not quite enough’, ‘somewhat deficiently’; not over-wise = somewhat lacking in wisdom. ‘Too much’ and ‘enough’ and their cognates imply that some kinds of threshold or norm have been transgressed. The question is the nature of these norms that are hinted at in these uses of ‘over-x’ constructions. The image schema of being above something and exceeding it was apparently abstracted to suggest an imaginary ‘line’ corresponding to the expected, normal situation (Sovran 2008).16 Being above or below this line is sometimes undesired and negative. Examining the contexts for these norms in the OED examples can reveal which of these give rise to this norm line and the nature of the container that can no longer hold its real or metaphorical superfluous material. The body, health, biology, mental attitudes, tools, and systems suggest themselves at first glance: 5. Do not overheat and over-sweat17 your patient, do not overfeed or underfeed him. (W. M. Holcombe, On Treatment Diet, & Nursing Yellow Fever 1860–1869, 18) 6. If the over-tension produced within the bladder is only slight, the valve may be forcible opened with a needle. (New Phytologist 1928, 27: 280) 7. An over-susceptibility of neurons might be an additional factor in the true psychoses. (Science 1955 5, 5 Aug. 229/1) 8. Diseases affecting blood, for example, anemia due to overlactation or obstinate vomiting, hypertension, etc. (Emerging Markets Datafile; Nexis 1999 Dec. 3) All these examples refer to the normal state of the body and the organs or to the ‘normal’ emotional state of the psyche. This may be why Roget’s

Norm  109 Thesaurus includes ‘sanity’ in the entry for ‘norm’. Medicine, anatomy, and physiology are more obviously related to ‘norms’ and the normal functioning of the human body. The realms of psychology, education, and human social, ethical, fiscal, and political activities are less absolute. The following examples taken from OED are suggestive of lines, thresholds, or norms with various degrees of strength and consensus in the contexts of family life, emotions, education and social behavior, cooking, winery, gardening, meteorology, ethics, law, gender, economics, finance, politics, and government. The negative connotation of certain elements in these examples implies that norms that need to be specified are violated when an activity is excessive or exaggerated. 7.5.1.1 Family Life, Emotions, Education, and Social Behavior Quotations from the OED:   9. Cease! No more! Thou hast an over-nimble tongue. (W. B. Yeats, Dublin Univ. Rev. June 1885) 10. The wife may feel that the husband is far too strict and that he overdisciplines the children. (Marriage & Family Living 25, 1963) 11. I never wanted to overdress, overfeel, or overact. I just wanted to be the real thing, so to speak. (I. Howe & K. Libo, “How we Lived”, 1979 vi. 261) 12. He loved his mother dearly but there was something overemotional about her. (A. Tyler, Dinner at Homesick Restaurant iv. 1982, 114) 13. Parents often ‘overanswer’ questions because they interpret them as much more complex and profound than they actually are. (Family Planning Perspectives 32, 2000, 258/2) 14. Trying to over-explain may anger your colleagues. If they confront you, admit you were wrong and promise it won’t happen again. (Glamour 2002, July 32/1) All the above sentences employ explicit negative expressions that function as clues to the fact that a norm was violated. ‘No more’, ‘but’, ‘never’, ‘wrong’, and their cognates indicate a negative attitude toward excessiveness and crossing an expected more or less formal and accepted line. This line derives from norms of behavior and is rooted in expectations on the part of the speakers that are presumably shared by the readers. The emotional, social, family life, and other areas of human behavior are replete with restrictive norms. 7.5.1.2  Cooking, Winery, Gardening, and Meteorology Examples in the areas of cooking and gardening use the ‘over-x’ construction with negative expressions that indicate the violation of shared conventional or other norms.

110  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction 15. He made his first mistake in overfilling his pit. He made his second in over-pluming his Christmas pudding. (Pall Mall Gazette 1887, 26 Dec. 2/1) 16. The result will be a tendency to ‘overseed’ cold clouds and reduce precipitation. (Science 1974, 10 Mar. 910/3 17. Restaurant cooks oversalt and overpepper the food they serve to the invaders. (D. V. Coers, John Steinbeck as Propagandist 1991, iv. 88) Adding quantifiers and intensifiers such as ‘a bit’ or ‘quite’ to ‘over-x’ adjectives such as overbaked imply a measure of distance from the expected result. Alternatively, people may have different tastes and hence different norms: something might be overcooked for one person but not for another. Restaurant and garden critics, however, pontificate about the norms for good food, as the following examples illustrate. 18. The superb baked quality the pinotage grape often achieves is not overbaked here. (Guardian 1995, 11 Nov. [Weekend Suppl.] 55/2) 19. Do not overmix or the muffins will be tough. (BBC Good Food 1999, July 41) 20. Add water until the bedding is as moist as a wrung-out sponge. (Be careful not to overmoisten!). (Chicago Tribune (Nexis), 2002, 18 Apr. 1 C) The next example uses the prescriptive imperative ‘don’t’ and the negative metaphorical verb ‘rob’. The sentence thus captures the idea of the norm of ‘do’s and don’ts’: 21. Don’t overchill rosé wine—you’ll rob it of its flavours and perfumes. (Montreal Gazette (Nexis), 2002, 29 June G4) 7.5.1.3  Economics, Finance, Politics, and Government This realm also lends itself to normative uses of over-x. 22. Manpower was a lively issue, anti-Government parties claiming that the Government had overcommitted itself in this respect. (Far Eastern Survey 1943, 12 228/1) 23. In the United Kingdom we also have been over- importing in 1951. (International Affairs 1952, 28 327) The normative ‘should’ and the warning of ‘don’t’ are present in the following two examples. 24. We should not live in luxury, nor be over-thrifty. (E. F. Osborn Philos. Clement of Alexandria, 1957 viii. 101)

Norm  111 25. Don’t invest in something you don’t understand. Don’t over-borrow against the assets, even for a sure thing. (Daily Telegraph 1994, 13 Dec. 27/2) A more recent example expresses an objection to weapons in the hand of individuals: 26. Those who see the idiocy of our overweaponed culture. (Tampa (Florida) Tribune 2002, [Nexis] 30 Oct. 14) 7.5.1.4  Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and Style Norms of good taste are debatable. This feature was discussed in relation to the etymology of some Hebrew adverbs and will be pursued further below. The OED quotation below is funny and a bit paradoxical: 27. The excellent translation sometimes errs on the side of over-­accuracy. (International Affairs 1940, 19 [Review Suppl.] 134) In the examples below, the critic in (28) seems to believe in a balance between logic and emotions in a play, whereas the musicologist in (29) compares the performance to a metaphorical grammatical norm of ‘phrasing’ and ‘accentuating’. 28. Occasionally Williams seems to make Shakespeare over-logical. (English Studies 1966, 47 299) 29. If anything the conductor over-accentuates at the expense of broader phrasing. (Gramophone 1977, Jan. 1160/1) Metaphorical adjectives are frequently used when discussing music. This may go back to the etymology of ‘norm’ as a builder’s instrument. Yet the norm itself of how to perform a piece of music depends as much on the musicologist’s knowledge of style, musical period, conventions, etc., as on individual taste. In other instances related to embellishment, a room is described as overfurnished, and a poem as overdecorated. An author is condemned metaphorically for his ‘strong temptation to overseason paragraphs with pungent, spicy detail’. Here, the metaphors come from cooking. Short lines of a poem are described as having ‘over-frequent, over-obvious rhymes’, which ‘create a jingly effect’, whereas some authors are criticized for having ‘polished and polished, and, often, wrecked good pieces by overpolishing them’. Actors are advised ‘not to overrehearse or rehearse too close to a performance’. In these examples, the speaker has a fixed idea about the nature of a given prescriptive norm. However, these norms are not necessarily shared by all. We saw that this dual nature of norms can be detected in metaphorical roots of the Hebrew adverbs kashura and beseder—referring to order and the straight line, but also kara’uy and kaya’ut, implying a point of view and aesthetic standards.

112  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction 7.5.1.5  Ethics, Law, and Gender Regulatory norms play a crucial role in ethics, law, and social institutions. Note, for example, the following OED quoting from the internet. The title of the blog is Overpunished? “Criminal Justice blogger Matt Kelley, who asks about the balance law enforcement and victims’ rights groups, must strike between seeking individual punishment and building a more lasting, holistic reform”.18 Other OED quotations are also related to this domain: “Is drunk driving overpunished, or is distracted driving underpunished? and “Family outraged about overlenient sentencing”.19 The schema or model that emerges from all these frames and contexts is that of a boundary between a desired state of affairs, product, or performance. The ‘over-x’ construction, together with negative or prescriptive and warning expressions, implies that a norm has been breached or is about to be violated by excessive, flighty, unethical, or unprofessional acts that lead to unsatisfactory results. Norms are thus related to a positive attitude toward a desired, or at least accepted, state of affairs in many areas of life from cooking and gardening to government activities, finance, economics, ethics, and morals, as well as aesthetic judgments. An ideal picture of how things should be or how they should be done functions as a ‘yardstick’ against which these acts are judged and measured. The Hebrew x-yeter construction described below provides further illustrations of ways in which the abstract concept ‘norm’ is constructed in the mental lexicon.

7.5.2  The Hebrew x-yeter Construction—Four Types of Thresholds Positive and negative adjectives, nouns, and verbs, such as overactive, overcook, and overdose, have a negative sense. This negative sense remains present even when the kernel of the construction is positive, as in overprotective, overeffective, or overindependent. Overeat, overactive, overcautious, overemotional, overeager, overprotective, overexposure, and overcharge refer to a state or an act that is, as OED puts it, ‘above or beyond in degree, quality, or action; in preference to, more than compared with’ and hence implies a threshold. The Hebrew yeter has sources in Biblical text. It denotes a residual: yeter ha’am (Samuel II 10: 10) means the rest of the people. The term yeter-hapleta (Exodus 10: 6) refers to what will be left after the locusts “shall eat the residue”. The root of yeter is y.t.r. from which the adverb yoter ‘more’ is derived. However, in its post-nomic occurrences, yeter has a negative sense of ‘too much’, ‘over’, as in the English instances above. Modern Hebrew, perhaps due to growing exposure to English, is replete with x-yeter expressions where x is a verb or a noun (mostly abstract nouns such as ‘independence’, ‘diligence’, ‘activity’, etc.). These strange semantic bedfellows suggested by the Hebrew root y.t.r. linking ‘the rest of’ (yeter), ‘more’ (yoter), and ‘too much’ (meyutar) call for further explanation. They all concern the notion of quantity in the sense that adding more and more of something may become too much. This presupposes the question of when

Norm  113 this is ‘too much’, or what threshold is crossed when ‘too much’ is evoked. Specifications of the thresholds that are implied in Hebrew x-yeter constructions are discussed next. The most obvious example is that of the body’s threshold when using drugs: menat yeter—an overdose is harmful and fatal. Xasifat-yeter means overexposure. Overexposure to the sun is harmful for the skin, and overexposure to light damages camera film. The body organs, the senses, the skin, human anatomy, physiology, and human emotions all set thresholds that may vary slightly from one person to another, but a line can still be drawn between the bearable and the unbearable, that which is harmful to the body and the soul’s normal functioning. Efficiency—ye’ilut—is usually desirable. The Hebrew prefix yeter intensifies it: 30. hu nidrash la’avod be- yeter ye’ilut Lit: He v. was required inf. To work in more—efficiency Trans: He was required to work more efficiently. However, as a suffix, its appearance in sentences renders them negative: 31. hu ‘oved bi-y’ilut yeter Lit: He works (ms. sin) in efficiency—over He works too efficiently. It is the post-nomic Hebrew yeter that is translated as ‘too much’, indicating an excessive amount of anything, even good things. This negative sense is seen in this quotation from Proverbs (25: 27): “It is not good to eat much honey; so to seek one’s own glory is not glory”. Honey, which is sweet, cannot be consumed in large quantities; it is used as a metaphor for glory and honor, which should be pursued wisely without exaggeration. The threshold that is crossed here lies in the domain of social relations. City-wide power outages can at times be due to overloading, omes-yeter, in which case the ‘body’ in question is the electricity grid. The common denominator between the body, social, and technological systems is the fact that they function in ideal conditions. They need equilibrium, which can be disrupted by excesses. Hence, adding or augmenting one sector or segment to the detriment of others upsets the delicate balance or norm that is crucial for operation. An interesting fact about the Hebrew x-yeter construction is that although neutral and positive nouns yield negative expressions when suffixed with yeter, negative lexemes such as ‘despair’—ye’ush, ‘killing’— hereg, or ‘hate’—sin’a do not become positive when joined with yeter. Here, yeter as a prefix and a suffix functions in both cases as an intensifier. This implies that no thresholds are crossed, and no norms exist in the realm of ‘negativity’. It makes sense to thinks about the fragile equilibrium of organisms and social and technological systems, all of which demand continuous careful monitoring. By contrast, chaotic negative states of affairs

114  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction can only become increasingly more chaotic and negative by adding more of the same. These points to the important relations between the concepts of norms, thresholds, and equilibrium. 7.6  FURTHER LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE

7.6.1  The Riddle of the Hebrew Root h..n.n The concept of ‘norm’ emerges unexpectedly from surprising root associations in Hebrew. The semantic role of the triconsonant Hebrew root system and its role in conjoining lexemes was illustrated in Chapter 3 when dealing with the Hebrew root d.m. y and its derivations related to ‘similarity’ and ‘image’; in Chapter 5, when examining derivations of the negating sh.l.l, and in Chapter 6, when the roots ‘a.m.n and ‘a.m.t were discussed in the context of the concept of ‘truth’. Sometimes, the semantic relations between lexemes of one root are extremely transparent, but at other times, a historical search is needed to find subtle hidden relations. Hebrew’s morphological structure has been a powerful tool for inventing new terms and words to fill in the centuries-wide gap when Hebrew was almost entirely a written but not a spoken language. The combination of root and pattern (mishķal, binyan) has helped coin new words that have a logical and fairly transparent structure and meaning (Ephrat 1997, 2000; Schwarzwald 2002). The next section examines several distant lexemes, old and new, that nevertheless have the root ḥ.n.n as their basis.20 The semantic distance between them sheds light on aspects of the concept of ‘norm’. In Modern Hebrew, in a legal context, when convicted offenders appeal for pardon, they plead for h.anina. Yeled meh.onan is a gifted child—an adjective derived from a participle form. The meaning of ‘blessing and giving’ prevails in the old context: God is described as h.anun ṿerakhum ‘gracious and merciful’. He confers shalom—peace; tova—benevolence; brakha—blessing; h.en—grace, favor; ḥesed—kindness, and raḥamim— mercy. A righteous person is expected to follow the example set by the Lord in Psalm (37: 21): “The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy and giveth”. The association with giving and granting is also clear from the next quotation: “The children whom God has graciously given (h.anan) thy servant” (Genesis 33: 5). The noun ḥen (n) was already polysemous in the Old Testament. Its basic meaning component concerns positive qualities of beauty and adornment and also precious gems. It occurs about forty times in the semi-idiomatic biblical syntagma: moze-h.en, find favor’, which is still commonly used in everyday Modern Hebrew for ‘like’, and parallels the English idiom ‘find favor’ (like, prefer). The positive meaning component of grace, favor, liking, blessing, charity, and benevolence prevails in old as well as Modern Hebrew. Yet the same root h..n.n is the base of the adverb ḥinam ‘in vain’. The etymology of the English and French parallels of ḥinam ‘in vain’, en vain, stem from

Norm  115 the Latin vanum and vanus ‘emptiness’ and ‘empty’, which have a quite obvious negative connotation as in the lexemes ‘vanity’ and ‘vanish’. Why does Hebrew, by its old and new morphology and etymologies, associate the positive aesthetic and moral notions of favor, beauty, bliss, grace, pardon, and benevolence with the adverb ḥinam ‘in vain’ whose Hebrew synonyms are la-riḳ and la-shav, which refer to emptiness, vanity, vain and vanishing, fruitlessness, futility, and falsity? The adverb ḥinam preserves the first two consonants of the root. The deletion of the final third consonant of the root has left a faint morphological trace in the dagesh mark—a dot on the n marking the missing double consonant. This common phenomenon in the termination of consonants is accompanied by a typical change in pronunciation from ḥen—grace, to ḥinam.21 The lexeme ḥinam appears in the Old Testament in three distinct yet related semantic frames: the commercial transaction frame, the metaphorical moral requital frame, and the wider frames of actions, results, and reasons. 7.6.1.1 The Commercial Transaction Frame The adverb ḥinam is associated with payments and reward. Laban asks his nephew Jacob—perhaps hypocritically—“Because thou art my brother, shouldest thou therefore serve me for nought (ḥinam) (Genesis 29: 15)? Tell me what shall thy wages be?” The compound matnot ḥinam refers to gifts, something one gets for free, for which one does not have to pay or make any effort to obtain. 7.6.1.2 The Metaphorical Moral Requital Frame In moral contexts, ḥinam is associated with the realm of affections and emotions. The Biblical prince Jonathan demands justice for David from his hostile father, King Saul. Saul, envious and afraid of his popular young rival, wishes for no less than his rival’s death. Jonathan said: “Wherefore then wilt thou sin against innocent blood, to slay David without a cause (ḥinam)?” (Samuel I 19: 5). Other quotations relate ḥinam to bloodshed, hate, persecution etc.: “Thou hast shed blood causelessly” (ḥinam) (Samuel I 25: 31). John (15: 25) refers to the hatred toward Jesus: “But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: They hated me without reason”, evoking Psalms 35: 19 and 69: 4. The innocent person feels that he is exposed to unjust hate, evil thoughts, and harassment. The English translation of ḥinam here is ‘causeless’. The notion of requital demands good for good and punishment for evil, as well as justifications or reasons for attitudes and acts. Proverbs (3: 30) recommends “Strive not with a man without cause, if he has done thee no harm”. The Hebrew parallels for ‘without cause’ (ḥinam) and ‘done’ (gmalkha) evoke the requital frame. The metaphorical network of justice as payment is well entrenched in many cultures and languages (Johnson 1993). In a decent society, fair payment for work is analogous to just behavior; compensation for moral behavior and punishment for crimes

116  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction are similarly expected. These two contexts are part of the larger frame of harmony.22 Thus, unmotivated and unjustified, even malicious hate is seen as sin’at ḥinam (literally: hatred for nothing). 7.6.1.3 The Wider Frames of Actions, Results, and Reasons In the Book of Job, Satan challenges God to test Job’s firmness of belief (Job 1: 8–10): “And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land”. Satan expresses the common belief that faith is conditioned on an expected reward. In another context (Ezekiel 6: 4), the prophet describes how God will orchestrate the future destruction: “And your altars shall become desolate, and your sun-images shall be broken; and I will cast down your slain men before your idols”. He expresses the significance of God’s words of warning and determination to carry them out. The adverb le-ḥinam is negated. The double negation emphasizes the severity of the threat (ibid, 6: 10): “And they shall know that I am the Lord; I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them”. In Modern Hebrew, everyday sentences such as the following can be heard frequently: “I went to the post office in vain (le-ḥinam) it was closed”. In other words, the act failed to yield the expected result.23 The Hebrew le-ḥinam, as well as the English ‘in vain’, refers to reasons and justifications. A famous Hebrew saying (from the Talmud, around 500 CE) explains why evil or ill-mannered people are often found together: “Not for nothing (le-ḥinam) did the starling follow the crow, but it is of his kind”. As actions have expected results, this causal, normal chain of provides an ex post facto explanation for certain events. This Talmudic saying, which is similar in intention to the English idiom “birds of a feather flock together,” suggests that we should look for more instances of ḥinam in these two related contexts; namely, the actual domain of causality and purpose, and the parallel epistemic content domain of reasons and interpretations. The parallelism between causes and reasons and causes and effects when the perspective of time is reversed is well known (cf. Wierzbicka 1996; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In Western thought, this parallelism may stem from Aristotle’s telic concept of aims and goals as one of the four basic causes: the material, the efficient cause (the source of change), the formal cause, and the final cause, the end for the sake of which a thing is created (Aristotle, Physics, 11, 3). Midrash Tanh. uma (Pkudey 3) is a commentary on the Biblical text dating back to the fourth century CE. It tells a moral tale about an attempt to talk God out of creating man because of future man’s inherently sinful nature, which will demand too much from God’s forgiveness. God’s answer is as follows: “For no reason (al-ḥinam) have I been called gracious?” (referring to Exodus 22: 27). “I am called ‘gracious’

Norm  117 for a reason; I will therefore have to practice this property by creating man and by being gracious and merciful even when he sins”. Here again this suggests ties between reasons, expected results, justifications in the use of ḥinam, but also the logical reasonably expected relation between an epithet, as in being called ‘gracious’, and its counterpart in reality—being actually gracious, forgiving, and merciful.

7.6.2  Metaphors and Image Schemas The adverb la-riḳ and la-shav are almost completely interchangeable with le-ḥinam (in vain) in old as well as in Modern Hebrew. Unearthing the frozen metaphors upon which they are built is illuminating: riḳ means emptiness, vacuum, void, and vanity. Shav means nothingness, vanity, worthlessness, but also lies and falsehood. The shift from ḥinam to leḥinam and the parallelism between ḥinam and la-riḳ and la-shav illustrate a shift observed by Traugott (1986) and Sweetser (1987b) from the objective world to metalinguistic, sometimes grammatical discourse-sensitive meanings including oaths and promises, which, as performatives, commit the speaker. As a normative expected consequence, names and words are expected to relate properly to the objects they denote. All of them are explained by the imaginary normative line of harmony and balance24 according to which various human actions and expectations are measured. When an expected social harmony is disrupted, it elicits a sense of disavowal and disappointment, either in commercial or work relations or as a moral reaction where good sentiments meet hatred and bad blood; hence, the sense of complaint. Nevertheless, there are instances that reflect the supererogatory realm: what lies above the norm. Analysis of these cases will help resolve the tension between the positive and the negative derivations of the root ḥ.n.n.

7.6.3  Below and Above the Line–the Unifying Image Schema As shown earlier, the Hebrew legal term for pardon is ḥanina. It is derived from the root ḥ.n.n. Although its positive meaning seems quite remote from negative metaphors associated with ḥinam, it is derived from the very same root. All the contexts of ḥinam, le-ḥinam, and their synonymous expressions can be said to depict the image schema of the equilibrium or harmony line. The distance between them and the positive ḥanina and meḥonan (gifted) can be explained by the orientation or point of view. The area below the line, that of ḥinam, presents the perspective of a norm waiting to be fulfilled, a desired equilibrium in commercial, moral, linguistic, logical, and cause-and-effect relations. The part above this imaginative line of norm is that of the supererogatory, that which is above the norm that can be termed ‘saturated’. There, we find mercy, charity, benevolence, and grace, both human and divine. The positive state of a fulfilled norm, for example in moral behavior, is not altered by the added dimension of the goodness of

118  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction a supererogatory act. The positive becomes more positive, but the presupposed demand to do something is not enforced, which accounts for its purely benevolent nature. Below the normative line, the ‘positive’ has the function of fulfilling a moral, commercial, logical, or linguistic demand, without which the harmony is imperfect. This is why there is a touch of complaint in the moral usage of ḥinam expressing the idea that ‘I, being a moral agent, do not deserve this persecution, assuming morality is the norm’. This norm, metaphorical equilibrium, or straight line also exists in the social realm of fairness: payment due has abstract parallels in the realms of logic, reason, and language. Goal-directed acts such as ‘travelling’, ‘searching’, ‘asking’, ‘praying’ are thought to be fruitful and to lead to consequences; otherwise, they are said to be carried out in vain (le-ḥinam, la-riḳ, for nought, for nothing, literally ‘for emptiness’). Events and actions are supposed to have reasons, otherwise, the question arises as to why something is done with no explanation, reason, cause, or goal (le-ḥinam). Analogously, it might be unreasonable and futile to tag something with an improper name or title; adjectives are expected to reflect properties. Actions and events are supposed to have explanations; otherwise, they are considered unreasonable and lacking any rational justification.25 The logical-linguistic context of le-ḥinam is the most recent of all. This is a common process in meaning change from the more concrete (money) to abstract realms of emotions, ethics language, grammar, and metalanguage (Sweetser 1978a, 1986, 1990; Traugott 1989; Traugott and Dasher 2002). The riddle of the root ḥ.n.n and its derivations can be resolved by drawing an imaginative line at the highest stage of morality—the realm of grace and mercy. The commercial transactions frame, the frame of justice and moral behavior, and the frame of causality and reason, desired result, and rational tagging lie below this line and are governed by the expectations of achieving harmony and a ‘normative exchange’; in other words, services should be paid for, and decent behavior should receive reciprocal treatment. These are well-known analogies between the commercial frame and the frame of morality.26 The infra-frame is that of fulfilling and giving— as much as expected in ḥinam, and giving above expectation in ḥen and ḥonnen. The concepts of missing or lacking versus overflowing mirror each other from both sides of the normative harmonious line, which can be seen as a container that is empty, full, or overflowing. It is not surprising that most of the ḥ.n.n contexts above the norm are mainly acts of divine benevolence as in ḥen ṿaḥesed—grace and meḥonan—gifted, or human authoritative good will as in ḥanina—pardon, amnesty; see Figure 7.4. The imaginary line of norm and harmony separates the two realms, yet at the same time, it preserves the original conceptual tie between supererogatory actions beyond the call of duty—grace and normative behavior, as suggested by the meaning relation of the same Hebrew root. The image schema of the container is derived from bodily experience, as suggested by

Norm

119

hen - (divine) grace, mercy hanina - pardon, amnesty

mehonan - gifted

hinam }

hinam j Distric

(le) hinam3 Distric

commercial

Distric moral requital

causality Distric

transaction

Figure 7.4

Above and below the line of ‘norm’

the double meaning of ‘full’ in English and male ‘full’ in Hebrew, and the polysemy of ‘want’ between ‘will’ and ‘absence’.27 The basic trio of ‘full’, ‘empty’, and ‘overflowing’ can be extended to a wide range of frames. In all of them, there is an expectation of containment and completion in the social and moral arenas, as well as in understanding the world through explanation. The semantic frames where hen and hinam appear anchor them in a more basic unified conceptual infra-frame rooted in the human body and human perceptual experience. This hypothetical infra-frame eases the apparent polarity in the meanings of distant lexemes stemming from the same root and shows how complex concepts evolve from simple notions based on body perceptions and experience. 7 .6 .4 Norm s, Lines, and Containers The image schema of a leaking container also sheds light on the abstract concept of norm. The English literal as well as metaphorical meaning of the verb ‘leak’ has a negative connotation. Note the negative words ‘loss’ and ‘injury’ in its OED definition: “A hole or fissure in a vessel containing or immersed in a fluid, by which the latter enters or escapes from the vessel, so as to cause loss or injury”. The dictionary uses negative words such as ‘improper’ and the negative prefix ‘dis-’ when describing the metaphorical sense of leak: “An improper or deliberate disclosure of information”. The compounds ‘leak-detector’ and ‘leak-proof’ imply that a leak is undesirable and should be avoided. Hebrew has the same literal and metaphorical mean­ ings for words derived from the root d.l.f. Many word meanings in revived Modern Hebrew owe their meanings to their occurrence in liturgical Biblical contexts. The root d.l.f. appears in negative contexts and thus has acquired its negative meaning in Modern Hebrew. In the following examples 32-34,

120  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction the dripping of rain, tears, and the weary soul create this emotional negative sense. They all translate, and sometimes (as in 34), interpret the Hebrew verb dalaf that is usually translated in English as ‘leak’: 32. A continual dripping (delef)28 on a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike. (Proverbs 27: 15) 33. My intercessor is my friend as my eyes pour out (dalfa) tears to God. (Job 16: 20) 34. My soul is weary (dalfa) with29 sorrow; strengthen me according to your word. (Psalm 119: 28) Leaking refers literally to a liquid—rain or tears—or to a metaphorical and analogous one—sorrow and the behavior of a bad wife. What accounts for this negative component in d.l.f. (leak) is a comparison with other verbs associated with liquids such as ‘stream’, ‘pour’, and, more so, ‘flow’. ‘Stream’ is defined as ‘a course of water flowing continuously along a bed on the earth, forming a river, rivulet, or brook’. ‘To pour’ means ‘to cause or allow (a substance, esp. a liquid) to flow out of a vessel or receptacle; to emit in a stream; to discharge or shed copiously’. The definition of ‘flow’ is ‘to move on a gently inclined surface with a continual change of place among the particles or parts; to move along in a current; to stream, run; to spread over (a surface). Also with along, down, on, out’. None of the three verbs ‘stream’, ‘pour’, and ‘flow’ evoke negative associations such as ‘escape from a vessel’ and ‘to cause loss or injury’ that is part of the definition of ‘leak’. The difference concerns the image schema of containers that arises when the verb ‘leak’ is used and its absence in relation to streams, brooks, fountains, and rivers. The latter are expected to stream and flow. There, the movement of liquids is either neutral or positive. However, buckets as well as confidential government meetings are ‘containers’ whose contents should be ‘contained’; hence, leaking is considered a malfunction. ‘Norm’ here is implied by the image schema with the inferred expectation that containers should not fail to preserve whatever they are supposed to contain. The structure of actual containers is mapped (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) to the more abstract realms of human experience such as emotions, secret documents, and so forth. Overflowing, like crossing imaginative thresholds, is negative because it violates the prescriptive norm of containers that are expected to contain rather than leak. 7.7  WHAT IS A NORM? Let us revisit the subdomains in the lexical entry of ‘norm’ in the thesaurus along with the linguistic evidence from the English construction ‘over-x’ and the verb ‘leak’, the Hebrew x-yeter constructions, the adverbs ka-shura, beseder, ka-ra’uy, ka-ya’ut, ki-dva’ei, and ḥinam. Together, they paint a picture

Norm  121 of the ways in which the abstract concept of ‘norm’ is constructed. The human bodily experience with functions, limits, and thresholds and the encounter with instruments are extended to cover areas of social structures, law, morality, politics, art, and others. A second look at the main features of the frame ‘norm’ highlights these features. The dominant concepts in the semantic frame of norm are order and function. Regularity, rules, acceptance, and legitimacy are derived from the social arena. The semantic subdomains of nature, health and sanity, tools and social systems emerge from an analysis of the meaning relations between words related to ‘norm’. The notion of function governs many aspects of human life and in particular the human body and mind in health and wellbeing. The notion of normal functioning is descriptive in that it depicts the way things are when everything is normal and regular. However, the normal functioning of the human body and mind is a desired state of affairs. This is not only how things are, but also how things should be, which emphasizes the link between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The notion of threshold, the optimal conditions for proper functioning, stems from the descriptive-prescriptive pair. Crossing this optimal threshold is expressed in the ‘over-x’ construction. The body can contain only a certain amount of dangerous drugs. An overdose is fatal. But, even light and pressure, pain and sound have limits beyond which the body cannot face without being harmed. Thus, the body shapes one of the main concepts of threshold, and hence, the norm for normal functioning. Recall that the same idea emerged in the analysis of ‘negativity’ (Chapter 5): the first and immediate sources of negativity were the body and soul. Delicate thresholds guarantee their proper—normal, healthy, sane—functioning. However, thresholds are found also in a wider range of phenomena— wherever equilibrium is needed for proper functioning, whether it is the electricity grid or simple tools and containers that are expected to be made of the right material and shape to fulfill their functions. A leaky bucket is of no use; leaking secrets from a confidential meeting is harmful. A norm is violated in both. The concrete sources: the experience of the human body, tools, and machinery provide the structure that is mapped and projected to the abstract area of social institutions. This enables inferences in abstract areas such as mental health, decent society, politeness, law, government, finance, and aesthetics. In some areas, the norms are clear and stable, but in others such as aesthetics or in culturally dependent norms, they are more relative and can be challenged. Norms can be different, but they all share this dual nature of showing regularity and being regulative. It is not surprising that the Latin source of the English lexeme ‘norm’ and some Hebrew adverbs as well have to do with aligning walls and buildings and with lines and order. The straight line with its strict mathematical, geometric, as well as visual properties is a perfect model for regulations and norms. It is steady and predictable and hence positive and desired. Regardless of the length of a straight line, every point on it has a fixed value.

122  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction This is associated with regularity that enables prediction and control, and is therefore positive, desired, and recommended. It is probably also the reason why in many languages, there are expressions that describe a moral person’s attitude and conduct in terms of a straight line. The English ‘over-x’ and the parallel Hebrew construction x-yeter helped detect several areas where the prescriptive normative aspect is dominant as in the areas of cooking, winery, gardening, and meteorology. The idea of crossing a threshold and hence generating undesired negative results is also found in family life, in the field of emotions, education, and in social behavior and social institutions. Rules, regularities, thresholds, and limitations are needed in all of them, as well as in economics, finance, politics, government, ethics, and law. The Hebrew adverbs kasura and beseder are based on the concept of a line. Norms present a firm, strict, and enforcing prescriptive aspect. But ka-ra’uy (lit. ‘seen’ or ‘as chosen’) and more so ki-d-va’i (lit. ‘as one likes it’) refer to the other aspect of norms, the fact that different groups may enforce different norms and etiquettes. Norms are strict and rule-governed, but they can vary in their content and scope. All of this suggests that the prescriptive aspect of norms stems from the fact that there are limitations and thresholds in various facets of human experience. It also derives from the expectation that the human body, as well as tools, machines, and social institutions, will function properly and in an orderly fashion, with no exaggeration or breakdowns. The visual rigidity and the mathematical simplicity of the straight line is a perfect model of predictability and control, and hence, can be a model for norms, both in the descriptive sense of regularity, as well as in the prescriptive sense of the desired, the ideal, and the obligatory. It bridges between the normal and the normative. The abstract concept of ‘norm’ with its complexity emerges from the simple notions of ‘too much’, ‘beyond the limitations’, ‘overflowing’, from the container model and from the expectation that things will go on functioning with no surprises and crises. The body and the senses, containers, machinery and tools, as well as social, economic, and political systems are expected to preserve a certain equilibrium and to function regularly according to either natural or man-made rules. The abstract concept of ‘norm’ can be traced back to these simple everyday experiences with one’s body and environment, tools and other functioning systems. They contribute both to its sense of strictness and rigidity, as well to the fact that the contents of norms are culture-sensitive and can vary.

8

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor

Discourse metaphors have been in the focus of intensive cognitive linguistic research in the last decades. This chapter deals with the cognitive status of both discourse and poetic innovative metaphors. It assumes that there is common ground for creating and decoding both types of metaphors. Innovative metaphors are extreme instances of semantic relations that need to be analyzed. The role of abstraction in decoding metaphors, especially poetic metaphors, and general issues of meaning relations and the structure of the lexicon are discussed. Specifically, it is argued that: (1) There is a semantics of metaphor; (2) Metaphors, including innovative poetic metaphors, are governed by rules that affect the process of accepting and interpreting metaphorical utterances; (3) One theory alone should deal with the two kinds of metaphors- poetic metaphors as well as discourse or conceptual (sometimes known as ‘dead’ or ‘frozen’) metaphors; (4) Metaphors have a logical-semantic basis; (5) A theory of decoding and interpreting innovative metaphors should also incorporate criteria for evaluating their beauty and value. The chapter highlights the procedure of ascending the scale of abstraction.

8.1  DECODING AND INTERPRETING The tenor and the vehicle1 which mainly comprise innovative poetic metaphors are taken from different usually distant semantic fields. In the metaphor ‘the rosy fingers of dawn’, elements from nature and parts of the human body are juxtaposed and, on the surface, engender a feeling of incompatibility. Nevertheless, metaphors do make sense. To resolve this apparent incompatibility, another level of meaning relations should be referenced, a higher instance of abstraction where apparently alien meaning elements find ways to match and coincide. But rather than finding these elements fortuitously through a process of trial and error, as is suggested by some theories of interpreting metaphors, a fairly systematic method of ascending the scale of abstraction, implied in the meaning elements of the tenor as well as the vehicle, is suggested here based on a procedure of a horizontal alteration of paradigmatically cognate words. This is the way to

124  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction discover the higher level of abstraction that unites them. The mass terms vs. count terms dichotomy, or the individuated vs. the nonindividuated, will be shown to play a crucial role in this process of rendering metaphorical utterances meaningful. Components of innovative metaphors, which on an initial level of understanding seem alien or detached, can be matched and related when a higher level of abstraction is referenced. Previous metaphor theories, as will be shown below, hint at some notions of interaction between the elements that comprise metaphors. An answer is given here to two questions raised by such theories of decoding metaphors: (1) How is the process of interaction brought to fruition? and (2) Why are some meaning components of the tenor and the vehicle crucial to the interaction, whereas others play no part in it? ‘Similarity’, the traditional answer to the second question, is neither complete nor convincing. The mass-count dichotomy, unlike lowerlevel oppositions (human-inhuman, for example), appears on the highest levels of abstraction. It will be shown how a set of reconciling functions are applied to resolve the tension created by such metaphors, a process that is sometimes complex. This chapter outlines the theory behind the application of such functions and hints at its further implications for a more general theory of structure in the lexicon. The chapter reviews the useful insights, as well as the shortcomings of several theories of metaphor. The problem of predictability and various degrees of cohesion in poetic and discourse metaphors is discussed, paving the way for the main claims of the chapter where two metaphors are analyzed to demonstrate how the theory of ascending the scale of abstraction works. Finally, further ways of elaborating the theory of reconciling functions are discussed, as well as the demarcation between metaphor and nonsense in light of the proposed theory. 8.2 COGNITION AND ABSTRACTION—THE ROLE OF ABSTRACTION IN COGNITIVE THOUGHT Cognitive linguistics has bloomed in the last few decades. As in other growing disciplines, the process involves disagreements, debates, variations in emphasis and terminology, as well as different angles through which the same phenomena are studied and understood. However, most cognitive linguists concur regarding one main idea; namely, the recognition of the central role of human cognition in constructing concepts, as well as interpreting metaphors. As mentioned in the previous chapters, cognitive linguists who adhere to quite different semantic theories share the idea that the ‘world’ is not an objective fact that in some mysterious way penetrates our senses, minds, and language; rather, it is ‘conceptualized’ and made intelligible through the senses and the tools of mental cognition with which the human race is equipped. Concepts are not represented in the mind, but are constructed there. Conceptualization and words arise from reasons that are inherent to experience and human intuition, and therefore, a description of

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  125 the meaning of lexical values must refer to the world and to cultural knowledge. Recently, both in psycholinguistics and in Relevance Theory, much thought has been dedicated to the role of context, memory, and cognitive procedures that take part in the actual process of interpreting metaphors (Giora 1997, 2003, 2008; Faust and Mashal 2007; Wilson 2011). Here is a brief review of several theories. One of Jackendoff’s (1983, 1997a, 2002) goals in his search for ‘the architecture of the language faculty’ (1997) is to find the limited set of building blocks that comprise verbs and nouns. This set, he claims, includes thing, place, route, and several others that are quite concrete. His theory also refers to abstract elements, such as event and property. Jackendoff’s Thematic Relations Hypothesis (1983, 2002) describes the regularities of moving from locative utterances to more abstract temporal and possession and ownership utterances sharing the same basic structure, which thus form patterns of metaphorical shifts: “I moved the chair from your room to mine” echoes the structure of the more abstract sentence “The meeting was moved from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.”, or “He left his home to his older son”. Although they share the same syntax, the same argument structure, and thematic roles system, these sentences exhibit a rising degree of abstraction. The regularities of such affinities point to a certain structure in the mental and actual lexicon. This is only one facet of Jackendoff’s elaborate system, which aspires to explain the triple relations between the phonetic, syntactic, and conceptual aspects of language. Fillmore’s Frame Semantics (1982, 2006) evokes the abstract notion of ‘a semantic frame’, which is a representation of an event, object, situation, or state of affairs whose parts are identified as frame elements and whose underlying conceptual structure are accessed by speakers for both encoding and decoding purposes. A semantic frame is an organizing conceptual structure, rooted in human experience, that explains the semantic as well as syntactic relations between its elements that regular alphabetical dictionaries fail to account for. The abstract frame ‘commercial transaction’, for instance, accounts for the syntactic as well semantic relations between ‘buy’, ‘sell’, ‘money’, and ‘goods’. A frame is a schematic presentation of types of beliefs, practices, institutions, images, etc., that provide a foundation for meaningful interaction in a given speech community. Frame-to-frame relation, as in the relations between the general frame of ‘giving’ and the more specific and complex frame of ‘commercial transaction’ exhibit a higher degree of abstraction in the structure of the lexicon. Langacker’s (1999a, 1999b , 2008, and 2010) theory of cognitive semantics is part of his cognitive-grammar theory. He too focuses on conceptualization processes and products, while looking for the general and rather abstract elements and functions that provide a unified and complete explanation for various linguistic phenomena. In his view, a primal very limited framework of cognitive tools may explain the way in which we express ourselves linguistically at all levels. This framework makes a key distinction

126  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction between ‘ground’ and ‘figure’, the latter being the part of the expression receiving emphasis and focus against its linguistic background. The main mechanism of conceptualization includes a further cognitive abstract operation, that of ‘profiling’ and the distinction between the ‘trajectory’ of an expression and its ‘landmark’. Very few cognitive abstract elements and operations account for the wide range of linguistic phenomena, including the relations between word meanings such as between ‘entered’, ‘stayed’, and ‘left’, and the phenomenon of polysemous and metaphorical words such as the polysemous noun ‘ring’ or the metaphorical verb ‘grasp’ ( in “I could not grasp what she was saying”). Both Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its further elaboration as the Embodiment Theory of Metaphor (1980, 1999), as well as Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) mental and metaphorical Blending Theory refer to abstract levels of linguistic structure. Lakoff and Johnson’s Embodiment Theory of Metaphor explains the way the actual sensory structure of human physical experience is mapped into higher levels of human interest, such as philosophy, emotions, economics, logic, etc. Mapping and blending are key terms in Fauconnier and Turner’s theory. The notion of ‘generic space’ and ‘blend’ involves abstractions, such as the relations between spaces of analogy or identity and the cognitive process of compression, which is involved in creating mental blends, metaphorical blends, and other sorts of blends. A metaphorical blend, as well as other blends, is a result of the encounter of two somewhat alien spaces. To get at the blend, a generic space is evoked that ‘sifts’ the input and output spaces and ‘blends’ together, applying several cognitive procedures of mapping, projecting, condensing, and the like. Blending, mapping, and projecting are abstract entities and procedures (Fauconnier and Turner 1999, 2002). Recent neurological studies have confirmed the relations assumed in these theories between abstract thoughts and actual activity of mirror neurons activated both in real actions and imagined ones (Rohrer 2001; Feldman and Naraynan 2003; Wallentin et al. 2005; Faust and Mashal 2007). The ‘reconciliation’ and the ‘ascending the scale of abstraction’ model suggested in this chapter shares many of these cognitive caveats, but provides a different perspective on the issue of decoding metaphors. Before describing the model in detail, let us examine several more traditional approaches to metaphors that, to some extent, have been forgotten, but are relevant to the present argument about metaphor and abstraction.

8.3  THEORIES OF METAPHOR

8.3.1 Similarity The traditional idea of similarity as a basic relation in metaphor is quite old, but it seems to have lost much of its appeal in the last few decades. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle associates similes with metaphors, stating the small dif-

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  127 ference between them: “The simile  . . .  is a metaphor differing from it only in the way it is put; and just because it is longer it is less attractive. Besides, it does not say outright that ‘this’ is ‘that’, and therefore the hearer is less interested in the idea” (De Oratore 3: 38.156–38.157 [Barnes 1984]). Metaphors, says Aristotle, are elliptical similes, and similes, as suggested by their name, are based on explicit similarities. This idea, titled ‘the comparitivist view of metaphor’ or ‘comparativism’, was endorsed by Robert J. Fogelin, a modern critic who stated, “Aristotle’s position comes to this: metaphors are figurative comparisons, so are similes. The difference between them is that the comparison is made explicit in the simile, but not in the metaphor. I think that this is the most natural way of reading the passage from Aristotle, but, in any case, this is a position I will attempt to elaborate, clarify, and defend in detail. It is the position that I have in mind when I speak of the elliptical-simile or the comparativist view of metaphors”. (Fogelin 1988, 24) The basic intuition of comparativism is not easily dismissed; many metaphors do show some salient similarities, as in ‘Sally is a block of ice’, where Sally’s ‘cold’ indifference bears some resemblance to the frozen immobility of a block of ice. Are these similarities natural or conventional? 2 More should be said about why we do not think of the smoothness or the rectangularity of a block of ice as characteristics relevant to the comparison. Moreover, any two things may resemble each other in some way or another, but we still need to recognize the hidden criterion on which the comparison is based. It is easy for an English-speaking reader of poetry to see the beloved as a red rose, because the comparison has long been established, but what are the similarities between grapes and laughter, the body and lizards, as paired by the modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai? 3 You had a laugh of grapes: many laughs, green and round. Your body is full of lizards; they all love sun.(Amichai 1983, 2) Two other aspects complicate the issue even further: first, there is Amos Tversky’s empirical proof that, in many cases, metaphors create new similarities rather than depending on old ones (Tversky 1977, 332). Secondly, metaphors, especially innovative ones have another characteristic, no less important than similarity and quite opposed to it: a certain tension, deviation, incongruity is noticeable. This is more salient in poetic metaphors, but is also felt in conventional vivid discourse metaphors. How do these aspects fit into a comparativist theory of metaphor based on similarity? In fact, many writers have referred to this deviance as the basis for the unique nature of metaphor. This view can be traced back to Carnap, and as well as to Chomsky’s early work but it is often reiterated. The following quotation from Goodman is a good example: “What occurs is a transfer of a schema, a migration of concept, an alienation of categories. Indeed, a metaphor might be regarded as a calculated category mistake—or rather as a happy and revitalized, even if bigamous, second marriage” (Goodman 1968, 73). Although

128  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Goodman emphasizes shift and alienation in the concepts that a metaphor creates, he hints at another factor that I call ‘reconciliation’.4 Although some ‘deviations’ or gaps are seen in metaphors, eventually, these gaps are filled. When a solution is found, the metaphorical utterance starts to make sense. Such a view tends toward a theory of interaction, which will be discussed below. But, let us first examine some difficulties presented by the theory of deviance.

8.3.2 Deviance Something irregular and even ‘deviant’ does occur in the sequence of words that form a poetic metaphor, such as the above quoted beloved’s ‘laugh of grapes’ or her body, which is ‘full of lizards’ that ‘all love sun’. Even in less poetic metaphors such as ‘a head exploding with new ideas’ the irregularity is detected through some semantic incompatibility of ‘grapes’, ‘lizards’ and ‘explosion’ with the rest of the phrase or with the wider context. In innovative metaphors, the effect is almost that of a shock. Searle suggested a doublephase model where the sense of surprise appears in the first phase, yet to be followed by a second phase, an interpretive stage where an effort is made to overcome the ‘gap’ and make sense of the utterance (Searle 1981, 283–284). However, a simple but rather troublesome question still remains: how is this process carried out? Is any shift permitted? Why do we have the feeling that some shifts of meaning or deviations are beautiful, while others seem nonsensical, and a third kind might be considered just dull or lacking in beauty? As to Searle’s double-phase model, again, the main part is missing: how do we move from the stage where we recognize the shift or deviance in meaning, and the incongruity, to the stage of making sense or adjusting the deviant utterance to the rest of the text and our normal understanding of the world? Some of these questions were answered by Paul Ricoeur (1981). He dwelt on the complexity of metaphorical utterances, especially poetic metaphors, and suggested they are based on three components: metaphor is an act of predication rather than of denomination, a theory of deviance is not rich enough to give an account of the emergence of a new congruence at the predicative level, and a notion of metaphorical sense is not complete without a description of the split reference, which is specific in poetic discourse (246). He goes on to say: The burden of [this] argument is that the notion of poetic image and of poetic feeling has to be construed in accordance with the cognitive component, understood itself as a tension between congruence and incongruence at the level of sense, between epochs and commitment in the level of reference . . . . There is a structural analogy between the cognitive, the imaginative and the emotional components of the complete metaphorical act, and the metaphorical process draws its concreteness and its completeness from this structural and this complementary functioning. (ibid)

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  129 The deviations occur at the level of reference. ‘Sally’ is by no means a real ‘block of ice’; the two expressions refer to two nonidentical things just as ‘dawn’ never had real ‘rosy fingers’. Deviation, or incongruence, is a crucial characteristic of metaphors, especially poetic metaphors but also vivid discourse ones. However, Ricoeur claimed that the new meaning, based on a resolution of the uneasiness that innovative metaphors create on the surfacereferential level, takes place on another level that involves imagination and feeling. The assumed analogy between imagination, emotions, and cognition is thought to lessen the tension or eliminate the immediate sense of ‘improper’ usage of language that metaphors create. Wilson (2011) added to Searle’s earlier pragmatic treatment in her view of Relevance Theory by suggesting that the metaphor ‘Robert is a computer’ creates a new ‘ad hoc’ concept in the hearer’s mind. It is broader than the encoded meaning of each of its components, and thus, it tells the hearer to make an effort to identify the ‘utterer’s meaning’ through the ‘implicature’ that this new concept creates. As in every act of communication, according to this theory, the hearer is engaged in an inferential process of searching for the fastest and least costly interpretation that will make sense to him—the relevant interpretation. In this case, two alternatives may come to mind: Robert’s ability to calculate, or perhaps, his lack of emotions. Context plays a crucial role in the process of choosing among the possible alternatives. Giora (1997) termed this effect of context the Graded Salience Hypothesis. Its effect is confirmed by a set of empirical tests (Giora 2003, 2007a, 2008). The salient features in context help the hearer identify the utterer’s intention and discard the irrelevant options. Overcoming the initial ‘deviation’ created by innovative metaphors is suggested here by two complementary scientific lines of research: pragmatic Relevance Theory and psycholinguistics. More will be said later about the differences and affinities between these views and the analytical and cognitive view of the present chapter.

8.3.3  Interaction and Mapping The philosopher Max Black (1962) was one of the first thinkers to deal with the question of metaphor as a philosophical matter, and thus rescued it from its relatively isolated status in literary theory and literary criticism as one of the means of embellishing poetic texts. He is also responsible for introducing the idea of ‘interaction’ (25): a metaphor “selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the principal subject by implying statements about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject”. When Romeo compares Juliet to the sun, he assigns her the power of transforming the darkness into daylight; the distance and burning features of the sun are rejected from the interaction process as the metaphor is meant to praise the beloved. Thus, some properties, however typical of the sun, are irrelevant to this task of praising. Black’s ideas about the interaction between the features of the tenor and vehicle paved the way to further elaboration on other aspects of such interactions.

130  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction Kittay (1987, 258–300) introduced the idea of interactions not only between words, but also between semantic fields. When Plato compares Socrates’ way of teaching to the way a midwife helps a mother deliver her baby, the whole structure of the field of ‘labor’ is evoked and some of its relevant structural features are transferred to the semantic field of teaching and tutoring. The main idea is that the mother gives birth and the midwife assists her in delivering her newborn. Thus, a good instructor does not instill new ideas in a pupil’s mind but rather ‘helps’ him or her to ‘deliver’ it. The semantic domain reshapes or is mapped onto the other according to its own structure. For instance, in the metaphor ‘the old rock is dead’ (referring to an elderly person), the structure of the domain of stones and rocks is transferred to the human realm: firmness, cracks, rupture, and finally, shattering are borrowed to better express the sudden death of a splendidly strong person. At the same time that philosophers introduced their version of interaction between words, concepts, or semantic domains in metaphors, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson (1980) started to develop their Cognitive Theory of Metaphor with the idea of ‘mapping structures’. They recognized the crucial role metaphors play in human cognition, as in such basic metaphors as ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘more is up’.5 They pointed to the crucial role metaphorical mapping plays in human cognition in understanding and talking about the less accessible areas of human experience such as emotions, thoughts, logic, science, morals, economics, and the like. Since the early 1980s, metaphor has been studied extensively in various disciplines. Metaphors are seen as conceptual constructions that are central to the development of human thought. These ideas have received empirical confirmation from studies in experimental psychology (Gibbs 1994) and are incorporated in neurological and computational theories (Feldman and Narayanan 2003; Feldman 2006; Faust and Mashal 2007). Lakoff and Johnson’s Theory of Embodiment points at the basic human sensory-motor experience in the environment as a source for mapping these structures to abstract areas of human thought, as well as social, economic, and cultural interactions that create new networks of concepts. 8.4  DEGREES OF PREDICTABILITY AND CONTEXT DEPENDENCE One important property of metaphors that poses an obstacle to a generalized semantic theory of metaphor is that they are, to some degree at least, content dependent, time dependent, and culture dependent (Kövecses 2005). Despite these dependencies, generalizations emerge, even when the metaphor’s degree of predictability is very low. All sequences of words, including sentences, display various degrees of cohesion between the words comprising them. This affects the listener’s ability to predict the next item, anticipate

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  131 its occurrence, and be surprised when such predictions are not fulfilled. Predictability is related to a sense of automatic, conventionalized, expected relations between words, a sense of necessary concurrence, and various degrees of necessity. This arises partly from syntagmatic habitual relations, as in compounds, collocations, idioms, and so on. It is partly dependent on logical, grammatical, and semantic relations. Some signs and features in a sentence make the ensuing words more or less predictable. One of the important characteristics of (poetic) metaphor is its novelty, and hence, its generally low degree of predictability. Empirical studies have shown that the predictability rate is never zero, which means that even the wildest, most unexpected metaphor somehow has to fit into its context. The philosopher of language M. Dascal (2003, 194–195) has described humans as ‘meaning hunters’ who spare no effort in making sense out of even the weirdest and wildest sequence of words. Informants of varying ages, all of whom were native speakers were shown the following literary sentence taken from a short story. The blank space implies a missing (metaphorical) verb. People quite easily, though not unanimously, suggested verbs to fill the blank: 1. Dark, sinuous, and wiry the tribesmen ______ along the dirt paths.6 Although no informant filled in the blank with a metaphor, all the answers were verbs of motion or location. This was inevitable, since the possible relations between ‘tribesmen’ and ‘dirt paths’ are restricted. The modifier ‘along’ limits the choice even further. The aim of this mini-experiment was to show that the range of variations among such answers was quite limited. Hence, the procedure of eliminating irrelevant interpretations mentioned above in Relevance Theory is restricted from the first stage by syntactic and semantic features of the utterance, even in innovative poetic metaphors as the ones discussed here.7 This supports the claim that semantic and logical constraints preclude a great variety in the responses and that some latent rules, although not fully and consciously realized, are never broken. Identifying these rules is the main purpose of the present chapter. One metaphor that observes these restrictions is innovative and adds to the meaning—especially the emotive meaning—of the sentence. It also enhances the meaning of the paragraph, and even that of the story. The full original sentence was: “Dark, sinuous, and wiry the tribesmen trickled along the dirt paths”. Although somewhat ‘deviant’ in the context of people’s movements, the verb ‘trickle’ has a meaning component that accords with other meaning components of the sentence, and this agreement is the basis for the overall sense of the sentence. Instead of looking for ad hoc similarities between words or things, people look for a general formal framework that will explain such agreement on a larger scale. This is the first step in showing that although metaphors, especially poetic metaphors, may be beautiful, innovative, or surprising, they still obey some yet

132  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction unknown grammatical-semantic roles in the sentence or the wider context in which they occur. These rules limit the possibility of juxtaposition, they are somehow shared by the utterer and the hearer, and they shape the latter’s expectations in the process of interpreting the utterance. In the example above, the author was bound to use a verb of motion—human motion, and probably horizontal—as implied by the adverbial modifier ‘along’. By using ḥilḥalu—trickled, which is close to ‘dripped’—he kept the sense of motion, but the analogy to water added a vertical dimension and a slowness fitting the atmosphere of suspicion and apprehension felt by the villagers facing this slow, steady conquering movement of the tribesmen. Appearing in the opening paragraph of Amos Oz’s story “Nomads and Vipers”, the metaphor is a clue to the atmosphere and plot of the story. This is achieved by the successful use of the double aspect of any metaphor, which, on one hand, fits into the larger context and obeys its rules, but on the other hand, adds novel meanings and nuances to it. The metaphor here was restricted by and grounded in the semantic and grammatical relations of ‘tribesmen’ and ‘paths’ with the modifier ‘along’. The choice of verb was thus fairly restricted, yet it exhibits a degree of freedom of imagination that renders it quite poetic and surprising. The following two other examples exhibit varying degrees of restriction and hence varying degrees of predictability. 2. My last days there [before leaving the beloved and reluctant girl] were ____________with shaky hands. (Yehoshua 1975: 45) In this case, it was hard to get any reaction from Hebrew speakers. The English translator of this story preferred to ignore the verb niḳtefu ‘were plucked’, and thus eliminated the metaphor and lost some of its emotional and visual force. He paraphrased the sentence as follows. (2’) My last days there passed by despairingly. (Yehoshua 1988: 167) After having been told the missing verb, one of the Hebrew-speaking informants recalled the Latin saying carpe diem, which means ‘seize the day; do not let it escape’. English speakers offered ‘plucked’ with no hesitation, since the metaphor of ‘plucking days’ and ‘gathering days’, as if they were flowers, occurs in English poems and evokes a ready response in some literate English speakers. It is worth noting that relating ‘plucking’ to ‘days’ implies a very abstract and remote meaning component, which is responsible for making their matching possible. This is the component [+ discrete], [+ non-consecutive]. Again, what is found is agreement rather than similarity. Sometimes, when predictability is very low, a wider context needs to be evoked. This might be the immediate one, which helps create clearer conditions for interpretation, but sometimes, it is the context of the whole poem.

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  133 In the Amichai poem cited earlier, the relations between ‘grapes’ and ‘laughs’ are hard to detect: You had a laugh of grapes: many laughs green and round. Your body is full of lizards; they all love sun. Flowers grow in the field, grass on my cheek. Anything is possible. (Amichai 1983: 2) Clues are found throughout the poem: ‘lizards’, ‘body’ , ‘sun’, and ‘fields’ extract from the various possible meaning components of ‘grapes’ those of [+ summer], [+ laziness], even [+ lust]; these function as a bridge, eventually relating ‘grapes’ to ‘laughs’. These relations are not automatically created; they are generated by the poet’s creative imagination. A better acquaintance with a larger body of work by a poet is often needed before these hidden clues can be identified. Context can also be understood more broadly, such as the common beliefs of a community of speakers or allusions to earlier known texts, myths, and sayings. In this wider meaning, age and register play important roles. These modularities pose a serious difficulty for a generalized semantic theory of metaphor. However, when given a sentence in which the metaphorical part, in other words, the vehicle is missing, informants usually have no problem filling in the blank. The uniformity of answers is striking, and this uniformity leads to the assumption that metaphorical expressions are governed by rules. Each part of the sentence needs to meet all of the other grammatical and semantic demands that make it well formed and meaningful. A well-known kind of metaphor is produced by synesthesia. The principle of alternation and innovation emerges in this case from mixing one kind of sensory data with that of another sense, as in Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting entitled Music Pink and Blue, or in poetic examples: “Do you smell the sound of new green shoots?” (H. N. Bialik, 2000, 40) or “The bird’s voice is sweeter than the smell of roses”8 (L. Goldberg 1970, 196). Although the switch from sound to sight is unexpected and unjustified, we seem to have a certain amount of tolerance for such utterances, and we can understand or perceive them in some way. The last example in this section is chosen to show that even synesthesia—which means, etymologically, ‘mixture of the senses’—is bound by certain semantic (formal? logical?) rules. In his long novel Yemei Tsiḳlag, the modern Israeli author Smilanski Yizhar (1958, 11) depicts the atmosphere of Israel’s war of independence under combat conditions and in daily activities. The Days of Tsiḳlag is a two-volume war novel full of descriptions and meditations, along with detailed reports of episodes of combat. Its highly poetic style is sometimes extreme, but for our purposes, it provides a good illustration of how even totally unpredictable innovative synesthetic metaphors still obey some formal constraints. 3. Shmulik, the cook, was running and screaming _________ and ______.

134  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction As it stands, the sentence evokes no automatic reaction about what might complete it literally, let alone metaphorically. The original words are matsṿiaḥ rosh ṿela’ana meaning ‘screaming gall and wormwood’. The grammatical and semantic constraints demand something describing either the manner of screaming, the scream’s verbal content, or both. Why do the biblical rosh and la’ana (i.e., ‘gall and wormwood’) fit, while ‘milk and honey’ don’t, and ‘jam and butter’ even less so, although all three convey an impression from the realm of sound to the realm of taste? The answer lies in the formal constraints that play a role even in synesthesia: on the scale of human vocal expressions, ‘screaming’ lies near the negative end, as do ‘gall and ‘wormwood’ on the scale of taste. Replacing sound with taste is consistent with the affinity demanded by the sentence. The taste should predicate or specify the screaming. ‘Jam and butter’ fail to do so; they lack a formal negative (or any other) marker to make them suitable for the synesthetic exchange. The phrase ‘milk and honey’ would fit, with some difficulty, through an ironic, completely reversed understanding which would depend on the formal structure of [+] versus [-].9 But, the phrase ‘gall and wormwood’ fits with no need for further adjustment. In short, even synesthesias that employ only one simple rule of sensory alternation still obey some yet-to-be-specified rule of semantic compliance, which guarantees their decoding and acceptance by listeners and readers. 8.5  TOWARD INTERPRETATION The full interpretation of a poetic or even a nonpoetic but fresh discourse metaphor is a complex enterprise. First, one has to make sure that one is actually confronted with a metaphor. In several cases, this is not a problem, as in the above examples of ‘trickling tribesmen’, ‘plucking days with shaky hands’, ‘screaming gall and wormwood,’ ‘laugh of grapes,’ and even the common phrase ‘broken heart’. These are all immediately recognized as metaphors. But this is not the case with ‘John is a baby’. One needs to know John’s age. If he is forty years old, the utterance is a metaphor. No such additional information is needed for ‘John is such a baby’. It is clear that ‘being a baby’ is used here in a qualitative, predicative manner, which blocks interpreting it in its literal sense. The metaphorical use is implied by the modifier ‘such’ suggesting that John is a grown-up person who behaves like a baby. Thus, several contextual and conventional steps are taken before the actual semantic process of interpretation occurs. The utterance has to be recognized as a metaphor, and only then do further steps of pure semantic interpretation follow. The first step is a semisyntactical one in which the kind of relation that holds between the tenor and the vehicle is sorted out. Consider the following examples: 4. iron will 5. Golden days (touch, voice, hands  . . .)

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  135

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

a smack (taste, spark  . . .) of divinity (of old age, of flattery) only a few islands of hope (of sanity, of despair  . . .) the field of education a thin crust of virtue a bitter (sharp) cry warm (cold, soft, loud) colors

Hardly any effort or any external or contextual knowledge is needed for a full understanding of utterances (4) to (11). There are two reasons for this. First, most of these utterances are commonplace and widely used, not only in poetic contexts. But this is only part of the matter. Secondly, they all have a transparent structure, and the relations between their tenors and vehicles are clearly established. They may have close conventionalized cognates, such as ‘golden days’, ‘golden age’, ‘golden hands’, ‘golden touch’, and so on. The lexeme ‘gold’ is widely recognized as carrying a positive evaluative sense, and this helps in the immediate understanding and interpreting of these metaphors. We understand immediately that ‘gold’, because of its conventional salience, is the vehicle and that it evaluates the tenor, while ‘a smack’ and ‘islands’ are quantifying vehicles. This level of analysis, where the peripheral structural relations of the metaphor appear, is semiformal and semisyntactical yet does not throw one into the stormy waters of full semantic interpretation. This level of interpretation precedes a deeper semantic level where the real work of bridging must be done, especially in innovative and poetic metaphors. According to this immediate reading, in (4) and (5) the vehicle evaluates the tenor. I term these ‘EVAL-metaphors’. Examples (6) and (7) are ‘QUAN-metaphors’, in that ‘smack’, ‘island’, ‘taste’, ‘spark’, and many others say something about the amount or quantity of whatever the tenor designates. In (8) and (9) the vehicle defines and limits the tenor; these are ‘LIM-metaphors’. Examples (10) and (11) are cases of synesthesia. Here, the borderline between the surface structural level and the deeper semantic level is vague. At this deeper level, the actual meanings of the words, not just some of their formal traits, are expressed, and the above semantic functions have an effect. 10 Analyzing allegedly simple discourse or literary metaphors demands almost no effort in the process of understanding. In such examples, both levels, the syntactic as well as the semantic level, are quite transparent. Simple cases help show how the same mechanism of interpretation can be applied to innovative poetic metaphors only with greater effort, through more stages, and with a higher level of complexity. One reading of the nominal phrase ‘islands of hope’ involves understanding it as a metaphorical expression. One has to decide which element is the tenor and which element is the borrowed, usually visual, vehicle. Consider the possible reading of ‘islands’ as the vehicle. A wider context can confirm or refute this reading. The context: 12. After losing all his fortune, only a few islands of hope were left for him.

136  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction The human subject of the sentence implied by the pronouns ‘his’ and ‘him’ and the semantic fields of money and loss point to the lexeme ‘islands’ as responsible for the metaphorical reading, since it is foreign in the semantic context of the whole sentence, and comes from the semantic content domain of geographical entities. This shows the extent to which the first recognition level is context dependent.11 Here, an apparent grammatical incompatibility appears. It will be resolved when the metaphor is recognized as a ‘QUANmetaphor’. Such an interpretation is automatic, yet it is worth probing into the nature of the relations between the tenor and the vehicle in this phrase to show the tension and the apparent deviance, as well as the rules that resolve them. The following steps may be taken: a. Analyzing the semantic domains of ‘islands’ and ‘hope’ b. Looking for affinities (him, hope, fortune) and deviance (islands) in the sentence to identify the tenor (which agrees with most of the sentence’s components) and the vehicle (which is recognized as alien) c. Identifying their nature and aptness (or lack of it) for juxtaposition d. Applying the function QUAN to note the quantifying function of ‘islands’ (and only) and FRAC in an effort to reconcile the mass term ‘hope’ with the plural count item ‘islands’ by breaking down the mass term (hope) into scattered units (islands) e. Applying the function REL- relatively small units f. The result: Little hope, few matters about which one can be hopeful In the first step, the apparent incompatibility between the distant semantic fields of the lexeme ‘hope’ as a state of mind and that of ‘islands’ as a field of geographical entities comes to the fore. At the same time, an apparent grammatical disagreement is noticed: a quantifiable (plural) term versus a mass term.12 ‘Him’ and ‘hope’ and the rest of the sentence help identify the element of alienation or distance of islands in this context, hence its status as the vehicle in step b. The recognition of ‘islands’ as the vehicle leads to its rereading, as is usually the case with vehicles, in an effort to reconcile them with the rest of the sentence and the wider context. The solution will depend on finding some meaning components of ‘islands’ that can be matched with ‘hope’. Here lies the core of the analysis. The act of choosing is not random; it is a systematic, ‘logical’, computational process that depends on two features. Step (c) points to the fact that ‘islands,’ besides their source in a distant semantic field, are the plural form of a count noun, whereas ‘hope’ is a mass term. This may pose an additional obstacle for their juxtaposition. However, it is resolved by a cognitive (somehow mathematical, yet based on experience) function, a quantificational device that is general and valid beyond the metaphorical realm; namely, the fact that uncountable masses can be ‘broken down’ and measured, as with ‘bags of flour’, ‘hundredweights of cotton’, ‘gallons of oil’, and so on. I call this device the FRAC function: the function of fractionating. It is applied automatically everywhere, and

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  137 is basic in thinking and in perceiving the world. Note that the semantic distance occurs on the low, specific level of meaning, where words differ from each other and different semantic fields are individuated. The bridging of these distances occurs on a level of abstraction where logical meaning components common to the phrase’s lexeme, earlier understood as distant or deviant, can be found. It is here, in step (d), on this level of abstraction, that ‘hope’ “borrows” from ‘islands’ their plurality, their isolation, and their separation, while omitting their more specific characteristics, such as ‘land’ and ‘water’. When a FRAC function operates on a mass term that denotes a nonquantifiable entity, the result is a relative quantification (i.e., more, less). Hence, the amount of hope is marked as low by the modifiers ‘only’ and ‘few’ and their parallel meaning components in ‘islands’. This is the somewhat artificial step (e), since the whole device is so natural and common that the analysis looks almost artificial and redundant. The operation of the QUAN function on the mass term ‘hope’ was triggered by the plurality of ‘islands’. The fact that they are scattered, isolated, and surrounded by water, together with the modifier ‘only’ and part of the meaning of the verb ‘left’ call for the function REL in step (f) and to the decision that the amount of hopes is small and hope itself is very fragile. The somewhat artificial breaking down of the process into small steps, which normally is simultaneous, automatic, and therefore goes unnoticed, helps highlight the application of these general abstract functions which are not specific to this relatively simple example. The decoding process involves general cognitive functions that are not unique to metaphors yet can be applied to them as a means of interpretation. The functions revealed here involve fractionating and quantification—FRAC and QUAN—and the function of comparing and assessing quantities REL to decide whether a specific quantity is large or small. This quite simple metaphor paves the way to more complex literary innovative metaphorical expressions. This will reveal more functions, as well as further steps of abstraction only hinted at here in the simple case. 8.6 ABSTRACTION AND FUNCTIONS As seen in the earlier example, the present model shows that interpreting even a simple metaphor involves several stages that might be ignored because of their automaticity. The first needed strategy is the recognition of a phrase as a metaphor. Here, context plays a crucial role, as well as the process of lexicalization that renders some expressions, although idiomatic, familiar and hence easy to interpret and understand (Gibbs et al. 1977; 1994; Giora 1997, 2003, 2008). The interpretation, according to the present Semantic Relation Model, depends on at least two factors: a. Detecting abstract meaning components, those that naturally range over a wider spectrum of instances and thus overcome the surface

138  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction semantic distance between words that come from distant, or at least not very close, semantic domains; b. Detecting operations of abstract ‘logical’ function, such as the FRAC, QUAN, EVAL, LIM, and REL discussed above, and perhaps others yet to be discovered. This section will outline a much more complex description of these two principles in a more difficult poetic metaphor: it comes as no surprise to find a metaphor such as ‘ivory depths’ in Virginia Woolf’s highly poetic prose. It appears in a short story full of other surprises entitled “Monday or Tuesday”: 13. From ivory depths, words rising shed their blackness blossom and penetrate (Woolf 1982 [1944], 12). It would seem that the innovative ‘ivory depths’ can be immediately understood as a metaphor, especially after reading the rest of the sentence where ‘words’ are recognized as the items that are rising from these ‘ivory depths’. We are faced with a riddle, where three fairly remote semantic elements are organized into well-formed transparent syntax: words—the subject, ‘are rising’—the verb, ‘from’—a locative preposition that matches the locative element in the verb ‘rising’. The locative noun constructs ‘ivory depths’ as the head of this locative prepositional phrase. However, a less-transparent syntactical relation comprises the construct ‘ivory depths’. The wider context provides no help, as this phenomenon of rising words is only one of many other scattered details that a heron notices while flying over London. The sentence is thus isolated and needs to be interpreted from within. All the stages presented earlier in the case of simple metaphors are much more complex here, including the decision about which word of the pair ‘ivory depths’ is the tenor and which is the vehicle. The answer to this is provided by the semantically established ties between ‘rising’ and ‘depths’: a spatial relation and well-known metaphorical pattern of producing words as though they came from the ‘depths’. This leaves ‘ivory’ as the only nonconnected, quite alien, hence predicative and metaphorical element in a predicative PRED metaphor: ‘depths’ (in the plural) are described by, or somehow related to, ‘ivory’. So far, we have dealt with the difficulty on the syntactic level. In the next level are the semantic relations. After noticing the PRED nature of the metaphor, an abstraction process is called for, on the assumption that ascending the scale of abstraction should help bridge the semantically alien words ‘ivory’ and ‘depths’. When this effort fails, more abstract bridging elements in both sides of the pair are needed. This element can be detected by a horizontal paradigmatic search for cognate words. The fact that these lexemes belong to a class suggests the more abstract class name—the hypernym, which unites them and is more abstract. ‘Ivory’ denotes a material, and so does ‘gold’ or ‘silver’; this is the axis of class members for which we are looking. The category to which they belong is more abstract than either of them is individually.

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  139 However, materials, including ‘ivory’, block further abstraction. They have properties that are sensed by the human eye, tongue, and hands, and they can be individuated by their specific physical and chemical characteristics. The cognates of ‘depth’ are other already abstract words. ‘Depth’ is a dimension, as is ‘width’, ‘height’, ‘length’, and ‘volume’—this is the relational axis that points to their hypernym—dimensions. Their plural form poses another obstacle, which will be dealt with later. The abstract components common to dimensions are [+ add] and [+ plus]; namely, to measure the depths of a hole, we add measuring units. The same is true when ‘heights’ are compared and measured, but in another direction. Hence, dimensions can be further abstracted to the element of a ‘unit’, together with the process of ‘adding’ and ‘counting’. ‘Ivory’ here is not a piece of ivory; it is simply the general name of the material and hence does not match either ‘units’ or adding and counting. What function can ease the tension between a nonmeasurable material term and the idea of units and adding? We need here bridging concepts that are close, if not parallel, to ‘adding’. The function INTENS suggests itself, but this calls for an explanation. In the search for an abstract element in ‘ivory’ and ‘depths’, only the latter yields any result, but unfortunately, unlike the case of ‘islands of hope’, the abstract elements of ‘unit’, ‘direction’, and ‘addition’ are not applicable to ‘ivory’. However, a feature hidden in the abstract notion of ‘adding’ may be the clue for matching with ‘ivory’. The function of the nature of FRAC, which turns masses into quantifiable elements, seems helpful. Something such as a mass term that will bridge between the concept of ‘additivity’ of dimensions and a boundless concept of matter is needed here. The natural candidate is the function of intensity—INTENS, which refers to the relations between quantity and quality. The function INTENS looks for something that will be parallel to ‘many’ (or here to ‘depth’) in the realm of masses. This function is hinted at in the polysemous nature of the word ‘most’: ‘most of the students’ can be counted, ‘most of the apple’ can be measured, ‘I took the most out of it’—means ‘the best’. By applying the additive nature of depth, with its established connotation of ‘much’ to ‘ivory’ at a higher level of abstraction, an interesting semantic characteristic of the innovative poetic metaphorinterpretation process emerges—namely, the phenomenon of open texture. The INTENS function takes the notion of ‘additivity’ and the function REL (as the entrenched notion of a large or important amount) from ‘depths’ and applies it to ‘ivory’. This leaves open the choice of what should be intensified in ‘ivory’: ivory at its best, purest, or unique form. The result is an open class of ivory characteristics that may vary according to the age, rank, nationality, experience, cultural exposure, tastes, preferences, and many other features relevant to the interpreter. Whatever one chooses as the means of intensification of ivory, such as its rarity, exoticism, smoothness, noble, or artistic nature (piano keyboards and sculptures), or the fact that it is obtained by inflicting suffering on elephants, each can work as a predicate to the process of writing or talking as producing (‘rising’) words. The almost unintelligible

140  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction metaphor now has acquired a very rich and interesting meaning. Writing can now be understood as a process associated with rarity, suffering, nobility, beauty, and the hard work of carving and shaping raw material; it may be exotic and beautiful, as well as deep. This is the reward for the long process of bridging over and reconciling distant elements in this unique metaphor. The distinguishing features of ‘ivory’ and ‘depths’ at first prevented them from predicating each other in a meaningful way. Only at a later stage of abstraction, where ‘dimension’ and ‘additivity’ were depicted as meaning components of ‘depths’ and evoked the function of INTENS (intensification), does the metaphor gain meaning. The abstraction of meaning components bridges the alien elements of meaning in metaphors. It is made possible by the fact that more abstract components, such as [+ plural], [+ quantity], or [+ add], have a wider range of application than such sensed components as [+ liquid], [+ sea], [+ white], [+ land], or [+ exotic]. Certain operating functions ease the tension between elements that cannot otherwise be connected. The following sections outline more functions and their mutual relations in the conceptual system. This provides aesthetic clues to the value and beauty of metaphors through the delicate equilibrium between investing effort and gaining new meanings. Very little, sometimes nothing, is invested in common, collocated frozen metaphors to make sense of them. The feeling of automatic reading and the lack of innovation reduce their aesthetic value. On the other hand, an innovative metaphor calls for an effort that is provoked by the difficulties involved in understanding it, so that meeting the challenge reinforces the beauty of the novel metaphor while enriching its meaning. Talented writers seem to leap over semantic gaps, propelled by genuine intuition and linguistic sensitivity. They should not leap too far (i.e., to the point where they may not make any sense), but just far enough to arouse the reader’s imagination, thus providing pleasure through novelty and surprise. 8.7  CONTEXT AND CONVENTIONS Let us look at another phrase: ‘eternal serenity flame’. It appears in the eleventh poem of Le’a Goldberg’s “The Love of Therese de Moun”, where the female speaker complains that her beloved one will not listen to her secrets, which are concealed in her heart as in a hidden shell. She will only entrust her love secrets to death in the form of poems, compared in the twelfth final sonnet to pearls: 15. And when death will come, and with an eternal serenity flame will light my sea of night, careful and gentle he will close my eyes, will lend me his listening ear – and he will listen to the secrets and the song Then I will entrust in him my treasures (My translation T.S.)

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  141 The pair ‘eternal serenity’ is familiar to English speakers. Hebrew speakers understand them with no difficulty as well. Perhaps the pair ‘eternal flame’ has some familiar connotations, but the pair ‘serenity flame’—­shlahevet shalva—whose strong Hebrew alliteration of whispering—shal- va, shalhe- vet—exhibits a semantic gap that is difficult to bridge. Their immediate semantic frames or fields are quite alien: ‘serenity’ is an abstract noun related to peace and tranquility and ‘flame’ a visual and sensed phenomenon, although one that has acquired abstract symbolic meanings related to the soul or to life. What can bridge the gap between flame and ‘serenity’? Here, syntax and the wider context of the stanza and the sonnet as a whole play a reconciling role. The main clues for deciding which element is the tenor are the words ‘my night,’ something real and meaningful, the time when love secrets can come out. However, the listener is a personified figure of death, which is portrayed as a gentle even expected attentive visitor, very different from the beloved addressee of the poem who is not listening. This gentle attentive Death will eventually receive the gift of the secret of the hidden unanswered love. But, Death is also the one who is supposed to light ‘my sea of night’. Again ‘a sea of something’ is not hard to interpret as a vast mass—here, perhaps an eternal night that is death in one reading, and a real, profound engulfing night in another. Syntactically the ‘eternal serenity flame’ is an instrument by which this ‘sea’ or night will be lit. Although ‘serenity flame’ is an innovative poetic metaphor, the syntax of the whole sentence, the context of the poem, and some conventionalized cultural symbols help make sense of this metaphor—despite its novelty and highly poetic nature. Death is associated here with a vast ‘sea’ of tranquility ‘lit’ by an eternal flame. Contrary to expectation, Death will light the night, although death is usually associated with darkness. Here, Death promises light and perhaps comfort. When a lover is deaf—as the poem firmly suggests—it is Death who will listen and comfort. Despite the highly innovative sense of the sentence, it is interpreted without the help of the functions described above. The abstraction processes that are needed for reconciling ‘flame’ and ‘serenity’ or ‘sea’ and ‘night’ are already conventionalized, and hence, can be applied automatically.13 This was not the case with ‘ivory depths’, which is a stubborn innovative phrase, with no context to ease the tension between its elements, and hence, called for the more complicate logical device of abstraction and reconciling functions to make them conceivable. 8.8  FURTHER ELABORATIONS ON MASS VS. COUNT The model of interpreting metaphor outlined here is extended in this section to a perspective involving the latent logical-semantic structure of language in general that reflects some patterns of the conceptual structure. Other aspects of this structure were discussed in the previous chapters. One is the affinity between the logical dimension, the sensory-motor dimensions, and

142  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction the deep pragmatic dimension of human preferences and needs revealed in the analysis of difference (Chapter 4) or the role of a healthy, functioning organism and tools in constructing the social notion of norm (Chapter 7). Since metaphor does something irregular with meanings, one is obliged to find how this meaningfulness is achieved. Ascending the scale of abstraction reveals the structure of gaps and affinities, and points to functions that allow the passage from one group of meanings to another. Some semantic differences pose no obstacle to metaphorical understanding and need none of these functions for their interpretation. A metaphor can overlook the differences between living things and inanimate objects with no real difficulty. The human and the inhuman, the natural and the artificial, are very often juxtaposed in ordinary metaphors and in conventionalized symbols. Synesthesia—a mixture of senses—poses no real problem either. Lexicalization and conventionalization processes render originally innovative metaphors into frozen collocated phrases with immediate ‘ready-made’ meanings. But, Woolf’s metaphor revealed a tension, or rather an opposition, that does not lend itself easily to matching; namely, that between two logical realms lies the quantifiable versus the nonquantifiable. Linguists and philosophers have long been aware of these differences, which sometimes, rather imprecisely, have been labeled ‘mass terms’ and ‘count terms’. An empirical survey of a large number of metaphors yields the same picture. At higher levels of abstraction, where a reconciling function is needed, the alien components are words that designate either the countable, individuated, or nonconsecutive elements or the uncountable, incommensurable, nonindividuated consecutive elements in the world. Here, the analysis can proceed in two directions: either by examining many new metaphors and sorting out the conflicting meaning elements, as well as the reconciling functions, or, as I suggest, trying to penetrate the logical nature of the opposition between the quantifiable and the nonquantifiable to ascertain which meaning elements constitute each realm and which bridging (logical-semantic) functions can pave the bidirectional way between them.14 We have examined two such functions, but we should look for more: FRAC is the function that breaks down uncountable items, such as milk, salt, and swimming into ‘drops of milk’, ‘grains of salt’, and ‘moments of swimming’; INTENS renders quantity, number, nonquantifiable things such as material into extracts of this material, indicating their unique and special characteristics instead of measuring their quantity. The most likely way of discovering such functions is to probe the nature of both these realms and look for their constituent elements. Then, the elements of the two realms can be matched through these purported functions. The whole enterprise leaves the solid ground of expressions and words in an attempt to make direct contact with the realm of logical-semantic abstractions. The schema in Figure 8.1 depicts some guidelines for such an investigation, displaying elements of the realm of COUNT.

Abstraction and Poetic M etaphor

143

quantity

material+,-

number

COUNT

addition

time iteration

location, direction

order

limit, name Figure 8.1

Specifications of the realm of COUNT

Individuated items belong to the realm of COUNT. They can be ordered, counted, and numbered. They can be either material such as chairs or immaterial such as thoughts. As countable items, they can be iterated and added to each other to form their quantity. Material individual objects have limits in space; these limits define them, as implied in the etymology of ‘de-fin-ition\ Between each chair in a line of chairs, there is a space. Nonmaterial entities are limited in time. Thoughts can come and go, appear in our minds and disappear and be forgotten (Strawson 1959). Noncounts are characterized not as masses having no individuation or specified limits, but rather, as having a property (material or immaterial) that assigns them their special essence. As nonindividuated entities, they cannot be numbered or ordered or counted. But, they can be measured. Water, and sand, oil or pleasure, sadness and fear can be measured, but to do this, the function FRAC has to be applied either to break material masses into separate measured quantities of kilos or liters, containers, trucks, or by instances, or episodes of pleasure, sadness, or fear. Masses can be measured only when FRAC is applied either in space for material masses or in time for nonmaterials; see Figure 8.2.

144

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction dimension [-limit]

relative quantity

material +, -

NON-COUNT

DistricDistric duration

name

Distric space Distric

evaluation fraction

Figure 8.2

The realm of NONCOUNTs

Compare the category ‘name’, which is applied equally to countables and noncountables since something has to individuate each entity from another. Naming is crucial for navigating in language and thought. The parallel of ‘number’ is the realm of counts is ‘relative quantity’ when noncounts are concerned, since masses can be measured but not counted. ‘Location’ and ‘limit’ in the count realm (Figure 8.1) can only be matched with ‘name’ in the noncount realm (Figure 8.2). Such moves have traces in language usage, as in the polysemy of ‘further’ referring to a time or place ahead, as well as to a subsequent premise in an argument and also in the root of ‘de-fin-ition’, as mentioned above, which etymologically relates the logical act of nam­ ing to drawing limits in time or space. This parallelism is seen in the frozen discourse metaphor ‘the field of education’. There are many areas of human interests and activities that have titles or names that identify them, including education, economics, accounting, etc. But, the metaphor ‘the field of educa­ tion’ reveals the cognitive root of this activity of naming in a simpler affinity between location and naming. Try also replacing ‘field’ with ‘domain’, ‘area’, or ‘sphere’. They all refer to locations and help define ‘education’ as one of the abstract human activities and interests; see Figure 8.3. ‘Education’ is a noncount term associated in the expression ‘the field of education’ with the count term ‘field’, whose most salient meaning component

Abstraction and Poetic M etaphor The field

145

of education

Vehicle

Tenor

count

non-count

limit

definition

Figure 8.3

Boundaries and categories

is [+ loc]; that is, ‘location’ with ‘limit’ implied. A field is a demarcated lim­ ited location with borders or even fences. However, it is impossible to match a noncount concept with [+ loc] since the former’s essential characteristic is ‘being spread and having no explicit boundaries’. A transition, that is, a rec­ onciliation function, is needed, and the most natural candidate is the function that matches ‘location’ and ‘limit’ to ‘definition’, which implies logical bound­ aries, a name or a tag, or a category. I call this natural function LOC>NOM, a basic transformation that has many expressions in meaning relations such as, for instance, ‘this is not my field of expertise’ or this is ‘beyond my under­ standing’. We assign imagined limits or boundaries to abstract mass concepts such as understanding to specify their unique individuation as masses. The boundaries applied to the abstract mass terms are factitious and dwell on the real boundaries of space and time of the vehicle ‘field’ as a dominant feature of count entities. A transition is made to a higher degree of abstraction from a specific location in space to distinctiveness in mean­ ing. This is in line with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1990) view of basic metaphorical mappings from spatial orientation related notions to abstract mental entities. Consider now the next simple example: ‘A thin crust of virtue’; see Figure 8.4. Note the variation that results from applying the same function to resolve the metaphor in Figure 8.3. The same incompatibility of the countable notion ‘crust’, which strongly implies boundaries, with the noncount term ‘virtue’ calls for the variation of the earlier function LOC>NOM: the reconciling

146

Relational Semantics and the Anatomy o f Abstraction A

thin crust of virtue

Tenor

Vehicle

count limit

non-count

definition, condition Figure 8.4

Modifying abstract entities

function LOC > LIM (NOM). The additional notion of LIM matches the locative notions with the limits of the application of accurate names and terms, their closest cognates in the parallel realm. But, note that here, we have a secondary meaning component of ‘crust’ namely: [+ external] appears, that yields the final reading: ‘hypocrisy’. ‘Virtue’ is an abstract human qual­ ity related to morals, politeness and civilized behavior. When the not very poetic metaphor ‘a thin crust’ modifies it, it borrows the material quality of a non-sufficient cover, something that can be peeled off easily, and reveals that the crust hides or disguises something altogether different and hence denotes hypocrisy. The function LOC > NOM can be understood in Lakoff and Johnson’s terms (1980, 1999) as a metaphorical pattern that implies mapping from the concrete experiential level of spatial orientation to the realm of words and thoughts. As Sweetser (1987a, 450) noted, such mappings leave traces in the course of the development of languages. Categorization, she argues, is

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  147 “mentally putting Concepts into sets (delimited areas of our mental space)” while “Con-fuse (Lat. Con +fundere “pour together, mix”) portrays ideas specifically as mixable liquids that must be kept separate if we are to make mental distinctions between them” (ibid). The Hebrew parallel of definition hagdara also reflects the Aristotelian ideal of a clear-cut, finite definition since it is derived directly from the word ‘fence’ (gader), as though whatever is inside the finite limits of the fence is defined, excluding everything that is outside it. The English word ‘term’ also has a spatial component of reaching an end. ‘Label’ and ‘tag’ stem from concrete materials or ribbons. The common expressions ‘the sphere of’, ‘the realm of’, and ‘the domain of’, which are used to refer to categories or a special part of discourse or abstract thought, all refer to locative spatial elements such as a ball or globe in ‘sphere’. Land ownership and the divisions of actual property in ‘domain’ refer to the dominus, the lord who owns the property, or to kings and kingdoms in ‘realm’, which stems from the Latin regalis. Further exploration of corpora of discourse and poetic metaphors may reveal more applications of such reconciling functions that draw on the tension as well as the parallelism between the realm of counts and masses. Our concern here is with the level of abstraction they suggest and the fact that words and concepts have some characteristic that reveals an algorithm that enables their juxtaposition. 8.9 METAPHORS VS. NONSENSE, JUXTAPOSITION, AND ABSTRACTION It would be nice to have a cognitive theory of metaphor creation and decoding that could give a definitive answer to the question of whether or not any two words can make a metaphor, or, from a more aesthetic literary point of view, whether there is an identifiable borderline between metaphor and nonsense. This enigma has not yet been solved by any theory of metaphor. However, something can be said about it in light of the above suggestions. ‘A fork of an idea’ is formally a metaphor. It juxtaposes two alien concepts from different, remote semantic frames. Why does it sound more like nonsense than like a poetic, challenging metaphor? In the same way, the nominal construct ‘depths of a table’ may be defined as a metaphor; however, it sounds dull, uninteresting, and perhaps silly, especially when compared to the rich and beautiful Woolf’s ‘ivory depths’. How does one differentiate a good metaphor, a bad metaphor, and a nonsensical utterance? My suggestion here follows principles of the Theory of Relevance, which explores the way meanings are inferred in context (Sperber and Wilson 1998; Wilson 2011). The difference between metaphor and nonsense can be formulated as a scale rather than as a strict dichotomy. There may be a ratio between

148  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction the interpretive effort invested and the richness and depth of interpretation gained. Given a certain context, ‘a fork of an idea’ could become a meaningful (nonpoetic) metaphor. The context would need to include remote, abstract meaning components of ‘fork’, such as ‘sharp’, ‘able to pick up food’, and ‘able to connect to food’. The component ‘connectable’ seems to be abstract enough to match the abstract level of the meaning components of ‘idea’. ‘Fork’ has to be released from its natural contextual ties to other kitchen utensils to eventually say something utterly trivial: a connection of two ideas. Therefore, this artificially formed novel ‘metaphor’ has a meaning but is rather dull and unattractive. The effort to make it meaningful is wasted. This suggests that the appropriate context can extract a meaning component from any word that functions as a vehicle that is abstract enough to be connected to any tenor. This leads to the conclusion that there is no real borderline between metaphor and nonsense, but only between good and bad metaphors. What about the metaphor ‘depths of a table’? It is clear at first glance that this is not a nonsensical utterance. ‘Table’ and ‘ivory’ are both concrete; hence, the function INTENS can be applied here, as in ‘ivory depths’. But, the intensification of ‘a table’ is rather dull and almost meaningless when compared to the rich connotations that arise from the intensification of ‘ivory.’ This may have to do with the fact that ‘table’ is a count noun denoting an everyday artifact, whereas ‘ivory’ is an unbounded mass and quite rare, and sought after. Thus, ‘depth of a table’ is a farfetched unimaginative metaphor, and the effort of applying the INTENS function in its decoding yields a poor result. One should therefore be aware of the potential richness of concepts as suitable candidates for the successful operation of a logical-semantic function. Sensitive, innovative writers of poetry and prose are equipped with the ability to make such distinctions. They avoid routes in metaphorical usage, which although logically possible, lack aesthetic and literary value. Words differ in their meanings. They belong to different semantic fields and designate various aspects of reality. But, as we have seen, words also have some kind of logical ‘wrapping’ that bundles them up in an abstract package. A metaphor creates a tension on the lower semantic level. This tension is relieved by appeal to a higher level of abstraction where, through logical affinities, reconciling functions resolve what at first sight seems contradictory or at least incompatible. In the examples discussed above, such functions take the meaning component of being countable from the word ‘islands’ (‘separation’ and ‘isolation’ follow later). The metaphor ‘islands of hope’ is understood as a QUAN-metaphor, and the move from ‘number’ to ‘small quantity’ is easily made by moving from the realm of quantification in the realm of count nouns to the realm of noncountables and nonindividuated masses by means of the function FRAC. The function EVAL connects two allegedly incompatible nouns, such as ‘gold’ and ‘hand’, by relations of positive evaluation components, as in ‘golden hands’. Other functions help switch from actual limits and

Abstraction and Poetic Metaphor  149 locations to abstract conditions and definitions, as in the metaphors ‘the field of education’ and ‘a thin crust of virtue’. It is clear, I hope, that these functions are not an artificial apparatus for interpreting metaphors, but rather, cognitive devices that operate in language and thought. They reveal the way interpretations can be achieved in the anomalous cases of innovative creative metaphors but also more immediately in discourse metaphors. The appeal to a higher level of abstraction of meaning components, to a mechanism that lies between semantics and logic, adds a systematic dimension to the interaction theory of metaphor. The surface contradictions can be sorted out quite easily and the appropriate reconciling function immediately sought to yield the correct reading of the metaphor. Earlier versions of ‘interaction of the meaning components’ as tools for interpreting metaphors failed to resolve two crucial questions: (1) What ends the trial-and-error matching of meaning components in the process of understanding a metaphor? (2) Why are some meaning components (and which ones?) excluded from the interaction process? The answers to these two questions rely on this operation of abstract function through the process of ascending the scale of abstraction. The fact that words are different in meaning does not guarantee either their contradiction or their matching in a metaphor. When juxtaposed in a metaphor, words interact where they can on an abstract level of logical semantic relations. The initial incompatibility is easily detected on the surface semantic level as mere misplacement; this is why metaphors were considered ‘deviant expressions’ (Margalit 1970). It is on a higher level of abstraction, where the above logical and semantic functions operate, that reconciliation is achieved and the innovative metaphor becomes meaningful and appreciated. Any meaning component that is not part of this abstract matching process will be irrelevant. That is why the components ‘water’ and ‘land’ are less relevant to understanding the metaphor ‘islands of hope’, whereas ‘number’, ‘discreteness’, and ‘seclusion’ play an important part in the interaction of meanings. Finding interactions according to the present model is shown to be not a matter of lucky guesswork, but rather a systematic, rule-guided, cognitive process. One can tell which metaphor depends on a commonly used function, and hence is easily understood in a semiautomatic manner, and which metaphor is innovative and involves more than one stage of abstraction, as in the case of ‘ivory depths’. Since the function INTENS is not widely used, the metaphor it yields is unique and intriguing as well as rich and beautiful. Although what is suggested here is in the nature of an outline for a wider survey that might reveal more functions, perhaps enough has been said to support the main claims: a metaphor is an encounter between meanings. These meanings do not match on the simple semantic level. This was the motivation for theories of incongruity and deviance. The purported incongruity is resolved on a higher level of abstraction, where functions help to change the meaning

150  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction of the vehicle in a systematic way. This is perhaps what some theorists of metaphor took to be ‘similarity’, but which is seen here to be compatibility, or matching on an abstract level, rather than mere similarity. I believe that the challenge of innovative poetic metaphor had yielded here a twofold result: a theory of interpreting poetic metaphors, together with a glimpse of some aspects of the structure and operation of the conceptual system when it is forced to become more active and more laborious in its constant search for meaningfulness.

9

Conclusion

Abstract concepts have long been a topic of philosophical thinking, and conceptual analyses date back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato devoted long dialogues to his quest for the meanings of ‘friendship’, ‘justice’, and ‘virtue’ as part of his theory of ideas. Aristotle’s Metaphysics Delta is dedicated to clarifying fundamental concepts that constitute his philosophical and scientific thought, concepts such as ‘beginning’, ‘cause’, ‘nature’, ‘one’, and ‘necessity’. Twentieth-century philosophers concentrated on both language and analytic methods of clarifying ideas through language. Recent developments in conceptual semantics and cognitive semantics have revealed regularities in the use of language, including those associated with abstract concepts, and have contributed to a better understanding of what makes language an effective tool for thinking, expressing and conveying thoughts, and communicating with others. Researchers, including the author of the present volume, have developed new approaches to meaning and meaning relations. As shown throughout this book, lexical semantic, cognitive semantics, and conceptual semantics provide a unique perspective on concepts and conceptual structure. Various cognitive semantic theories share the idea that concepts are constructed and can be deconstructed, and that they cannot be understood independently of the domain in which they are embedded. One of the key assumptions guiding this research is that both the concrete and the abstract parts of the lexicon are structured. Relational semantics starts from the premise that because the lexicon is comprised of semantic frames, relations among cognate words within a frame and relations between frames are informative and illuminating. Metaphors, idioms, models, and polysemous words are basic to human thought and human language and help uncover the perceptual models and processes governing the ways the world is conceived and constructed. The topics covered in this book illustrate the fruitfulness of this approach. The delicate map of relations between cognate words in a frame reveals traits of the infrastructure of the actual and the mental lexicon. New light is shed on an age-old philosophical puzzle concerning truth or similarity by analyzing inter-semantic relations. The long history of the Hebrew concept of truth—‘emet—provides a mirror through which shifts

152  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction in the cultural focus, habits, and stages of use of this concept are reflected from its early Canaanite source relating to buildings and their firmness and stability, through the Hebrew monotheistic phase that considered God to be the source of stability, and finally, to the cognitive scientific era that associates truth with proof and hence with doubt and verification. The lesson to be learned from this journey through time is that the conceptual system undergoes changes that are necessary for meeting changing human needs and changes in culture and thoughts. The comparative semantic analysis of English and Hebrew abstract concepts also provides a window on shared features and structures in the abstract lexicon, as, for example, in the case of ‘negativity’. Its analysis revealed a stratification of the lexicon moving from bodily sensations, emotions, and mental states, through the social arena where the ambivalent and dual nature of ‘negativity’ expresses itself, to a higher and even less-stable notion of ‘negativity’ associated with mythologies, beliefs, and elaborate cultural constructions, such as ‘doomsday’ or ‘atoning scapegoat’. The fourth layer, exemplified by the ‘natural algebra’ of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and ‘the friend of my enemy is my enemy’, points to a basic bias in human thought toward stability and persistence, but at the same time, emphasizes the interplay between the positive and the negative as a limit and as a means of individuation and identification. Two important discoveries emerged from the study of lexemes that express various shades of difference. The first is the relationship between the spatio-temporal and the logical. The second is the discovery of a third axis of human needs and preferences, and the pairing of these dimensions, such as consequence-identity or containment-class membership. Similarity was long considered a problematic concept that resisted serious logical and philosophical description. However, the very nature of similarity is shown here to act as a bridge between identification, individuation, categorization, and the need for knowledge and science to expand and absorb new experiences and knowledge before being able to commit to an exact identification. Similarity words like ‘as’, ‘like’, and others provide the much-needed bridge between these two stages of knowledge. The chapter on ‘norms’ explores the social realm. The analysis of the English construct ‘over-x’ and its Hebrew parallel yeter, as in ‘overdose’, ‘overbaked’, and ‘overdue’, led to the discovery of the origins and models for constructing norms. It showed the relations between norms and thresholds, and the key roles of models, metaphors, and actual experience in the physical world in constructing the abstract concept of ‘norm’. Health, sanity, and functional instruments lend their structure to abstract concepts of ‘norm’ in such areas as politeness, ethics, law, work relations, and political and social behavior, as well as art and aesthetics. The last chapter dealt with the role of abstraction in decoding poetic metaphors. Their innovative nature seemed at first to defy regular rules of semantic association. The process of reconciling initially distant elements

Conclusion  153 calls for a process of ascending the scale of abstraction to reach meaningfulness. The interesting gap and parallelism between ‘count’ and ‘mass’ lead to the discovery of several reconciling abstract functions. Let us return to Neurath’s parable about sailors who must reconstruct their ship on the open sea but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. It echoes the possible critique of the circularity of studying language by and through language. Have we avoided this critique? We started each chapter by examining actual instances of language use. In the search for conceptual building blocks, we looked for synchronic and diachronic meaning relations in actual sentences of two quite distant languages: English and Hebrew. We found metaphors and models of the experiential basis that underlies the abstract lexicon and came up with a set of insights about the building blocks of several abstract concepts; we discovered affinities and stratification at the base of these concepts. We now have a better understanding of the flexibility of concept formation aided by similarity words. We dealt with the twists and turns in the process of constructing abstract ideas through time. Two important constraints that confirm the avoidance of circularity were met: the effort not to contradict known linguistic, developmental, neurological, literary, and other data, and a better understanding of several characteristics of the anatomy of abstraction. Abstraction is shown here to be built on basic human perceptions and needs, on the notions of continuity, stability, gap, and containment, as well as on a few basic logical preconcepts, such as individuation, identity, otherness, class membership, and value. Together, they show the wonderful interplay between the sensed and the mind and the need to survive. These three dictate much of the way abstract concepts are constructed. Relational semantics suggests itself as a tool for disclosing the automaticity of language use. The traditional Saussurian paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic and synchronic vs. diachronic pairs provide powerful tools for understanding the structure of language through the analysis of meaning relations. Relational semantics is based on a few simple assumptions. It starts from the overt layer of relations between close words in a semantic frame. The procedure of sorting cognate lexemes into groups and subgroups in frames such as ‘truth’ or ‘norm’ reveal relations that constitute the unconscious mechanisms that guide speakers to choose the right word in the proper context. The linguist is thus offered a window through which to observe two elements: what might guide the speaker’s choice, and how the language is structured. Abstract concepts exhibit abstraction, but they are shown to be comprised of conceptual building blocks of an even higher level of abstraction and generalization. One example is the element of ‘consequence’, exemplified in the model of the straight line that emerged from the analysis of the concept of difference, and the concepts of threshold and limit. Thresholds and limits mark the breaking of the straight continuous line into segments and highlight the individuation of each segment. The continuous straight line becomes several

154  Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction different segments, each possessing a unique identity. Hence, continuity and limit are both crucial components of identification and individuation, and the straight line and its segments are their perceived counterparts. These insights are acquired by probing into the relations between lexemes in the frame of ‘difference’. The same parallelism is revealed there between the experience of containment and the logical concept of class membership. Another finding concerning the anatomy of abstraction is the analogy between perceptual human thresholds and the functioning of tools and social institutions. A triple analogy emerges here in the frame of ‘norm’ between the human body, tools, and machines as well as social institutions. Norm is shown to be based on the models of health, sanity, working machines, and functioning tools. Relational semantics describes the way the conceptual system that includes abstract concepts is based on human perception, experience, abilities, and needs. Abstraction enables the conceptual system to encompass new areas of experience. Science and thought are always tied to their basic somatic and psychological origins. Additional analyses of abstract concepts like ‘order’, ‘value’, and ‘change’ await further studies and may expand and enrich our knowledge of the structure and function of the conceptual system.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1 S. Carey’s (2009) book entitled The Origin of Concepts provides further empirical evidence for the existence of processes of categorization and conceptualization in infants. Researchers have developed various theories and methodologies to study this subject, and they do not always agree on the methodologies or the interpretation of the empirical data. Yet there seems to be no debate about the existence of a preverbal ability that enables infants to form some initial ‘concepts’ or ‘preconcepts’. For a review of more than three decades of research and debates, see Dromi (2009). 2 See Rosen’s philosophical treatment in the entry ‘Abstract Objects’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/abstract-objects/. (Accessed May 19, 2013.) 3 Acquisition researchers do not agree on the extent or the nature of these innate preconcepts, nor about the methods of studying their nature and role in language acquisition. 4 Their theoretical hypotheses and methodological tools will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. 5 See Horn’s 40+ page bibliography on the subject (Horn 2011, 287–329).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1 See Yariv La’or and Sovran (1998) for several analogies between Hebrew and Chinese. 2 This line of thought evolved in modern philosophy from Descartes through the proponents of rationalism. Its most full-fledged version is found in Kant, who developed a theory that accounts for the ways reason shapes raw sensory experience through categories such as unity, plurality, part-whole relations, causality, etc. 3 Note that the present semantic, metaphorical, and cultural analysis of color terms is quite different from the lengthy treatment of color terms in the watershed work by Berlin and Key (1969). Cf. also Kay and Muffi 1999; Pitchford and Biggam 2006; Deutscher 2011. 4 In the Israeli army, the milk dishes are marked in blue and the meat dishes are marked in red. According to Jewish kosher dietary laws, these dishes must be kept separate. It is quite clear why red is chosen to mark meat dishes by visual association. It is less obvious why blue marks milk dishes. Perhaps

156 Notes







more remote associations to liquid and coldness helped shape this choice. The important thing here is that, as in ‘pink and blue’, the axe of opposition is cultural and conventional. 5 Fillmore’s FrameNet project is based on this assumption (Fillmore, Petruck, Ruppenhofer, and Wright 2003). The work on a new frame begins with the native speaker analyst’s intuitive judgment that some particular conceptual pattern underlies one or more lexical units in the language in a systematic way. This judgment is confirmed by analyzing sentences containing the words assigned to the frame. These sentences are annotated to indicate the frame elements that characterize the frame. In so doing, further distinctions emerge, sometimes leading to the creation of a new frame. FrameNet scholars describe the process to be, to a certain extent, a matter of trial and error. 6 There is no consensus about the nature, the number, or the function of ‘features’ in linguistic theory. See Lyons on semes* (1977, 326–328, 332–333). 7 Sign-oriented theoreticians demarcate the meaning and use of even closer pairs (perceived by others as synonyms) such as ‘only’ vs. ‘just’ (Tobin 1990), ‘shut’ and ‘close’ (Tobin 1993), ‘talk’ vs. ‘speak’ (Tobin 1995a), ‘have (got) to’ vs. ‘must’ (Tobin 1996b, and see also Palmer 1986, 103). They assume that each element that has survived in a language makes a unique semantic contribution. Here, I look at lexemes that belong to the same semantic domain and subdomain, which seem to be related yet have different meanings, but are not considered synonymous although they are close in meaning. I consider the dual aspect of relatedness and difference to be insightful and a guide to the structure of the lexicon. 8 Chapter 4 will show that the spatio-temporal and the logical dimensions are not the only ones, and their relations to a third, the evaluative dimension, are even more illuminating.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1 As mentioned above in 2.3, the general term ‘semantic domains’ and the older term ‘semantic fields’ (Trier 1973, Lehrer 1974, Kittay 1992) refer to groups of words that are semantically related. The more recent Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, Petruck 2011, and FrameNet project) are based on a similar idea of words related semantically to each other. This theoretical framework and lexicographical endeavor emphasizes the reliance of frames on human experience. For a more elaborate and historical description of similarities and differences between the terms semantic fields and semantic frames, see Nerlich and Clarke (2000). Here and in the following chapters, I use the terms semantic domain and semantic frame instead of the older term semantic field. See further discussion in 3.3, below. 2 This has prompted certain evolutionary cognitive scientists to posit that similarity may be involved in learning from threatening past experiences to avoid repeating similar hazardous results and could have an evolutionary value (Cosmides and Tooby 2013). 3 https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/about. (Accessed March 11, 2013.) 4 https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/index.php?q=frameIndex. (Accessed March 11, 2013.) Note the emphasis on syntactic relations as part of meaning relations, which reflect Fillmore’s earlier interest in Case Grammar and current interest in Construction Grammar (Fillmore1968, Petruck 2011). 5 https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/index.php?q=frameIndex. (Accessed March 11, 2013.)

Notes  157 6 For a summary of efforts to deal with similarity measurements formally in the discipline of computer science, cf. Boriah, Chandola, and Kumar. https://www.siam.org/proceedings/datamining/2008/dm08_22_Boriah.pdf. (Accessed March 11, 2013.) 7 The following words were selected from the 1977 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. 8 Such products of similarity are not part of the FrameNet list of general similarity words, but they appear to convey glimmers of their specific similarity relations, and as such, are vital to the present analysis. Note that one noun can appear in more than one subgroup, as predicted and explained by Barsalou. 9 http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WY1NDFkM/Tenses.and.Pronouns .pdf. (Accessed March 11, 2013.) 10 http://www.labnol.org/home/obama-multipen-signature/13281. (Accessed March 11, 2013.) 11 Lyons, in his 1975 paper Deixis as the Source of Anaphora, and even more so in his 1979 paper Deixis and Anaphora, argues for the priority of deixis over anaphora, in that the former introduces an item to the general universe of discourse, whereas the latter refers to its preceding occurrence in the actual text. The anaphoric usage of ‘as’ hints once again at its deictic origin, as shown above by its etymology.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1 h t t p s : / / f r a m e n e t 2 . i c s i . b e r k e l e y. e d u / f n R e p o r t s / d a t a / f r a m e I n d e x .xml?frame=Similarity. (Accessed March 12, 2013.) 2 The use of the expression ‘difference between words’ refers here to the naive speaker’s ability. It is used here as a tool to discriminate and detect nuances of meaning to get a better understanding of the theoretical notion of ‘difference’, which is the subject of this chapter. The litmus test of the power of this approach is whether it leads not only to a better understanding of ‘difference’ itself, but also to a richer understanding of the way the lexicon is structured. 3 This is a selection from the 1977 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, from its electronic version: http://education.yahoo.com/reference/thesaurus/. (Accessed March 12, 2013.) Some websites provide a schema of relations in the form of a map or a network with varying degrees of richness and complexity. Lexipedia for example has an entry for ‘difference’. http://www.lexipedia.com/ english/difference+. (Accessed March 12, 2013.) 4 Unlike the role of synonyms in traditional lexical semantics, cognitive trends in semantics hesitate to assign synonymy even to close words. Sign-Oriented Theory is even more consistent in rejecting the idea of synonymy, and it claims that each sign has its own unique meaning that differentiates even very close cognates such as ‘shut’ and ‘close’, which are elsewhere considered stylistic variants (cf. Tobin 1994; Edmonds and Hirst 2002; Apresjan 2000; Murphy 2003). 5 This so-called ‘intuition’ is actually part of mastering the language and exemplifies the knowledge of how to use words in the proper context. 6 Lyons (1977) is aware of the theoretical problems involved in using this notion, thus he puts an asterisk next to it and its close terms: meaning components*, distinctive features*, semes* (Lyons 1977, 245, 317, 324– 328, 332–333). These are sometimes defined as “important features by which speakers of the language distinguish different words in the domain” (Ottenheimer 2006, 20). Several such ‘components’ emerge as basic building

158 Notes blocks of the concept of ‘difference’ and hence play a crucial role in understanding the world. 7 FrameNet treats difference in a very limited way as the opposite of similar. I argue that there is much more in the concept of ‘difference’, which justifies further inquiries. 8 All quotes are from the OED. 9 I avoid the ongoing debate between Piagetians, Neo-Piagetians, and their opponents about the exact stages and processes of cognitive-conceptual development and the idea of ‘object permanence’ (cf. Lourenço and Machado 1996). However, a recent finding by Mandler (2004, 2008) suggests that very young babies have the ability to discern MOVEMENT, PATH, and CONTACT, and the BLOCKED PATH of hands, a person or a dog, and CONTAINMENT. This may imply that ‘differences’ connected to ‘blocked path’ are perceptual (probably innate) preconcepts. I extend this argument to posit an implied parallel between continuity (of a BLOCKED PATH, for example) and the individuated identity (of a THING), as well as the parallel between the perception of CONTAINMENT and the logical concepts of group and membership that emerge later on in development. 10 This issue is the core topic of the next chapter, which probes the nature of ‘negativity’. 11 Note that although these polar pairs appear to be equivalent in value, there is an established bias toward one pole. The metaphor ‘more is up’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) captures the bias toward terming the axis between two poles according to the positive pole. This can be seen in the use of ‘length’ and ‘width’ rather than ‘shortness’ or ‘narrowness’ as descriptive terms. There are many morphological, idiomatic, and semantic manifestations of this bias toward the positive in English, Hebrew, and Chinese; see Yariv-La’or and Sovran (1998). Although this bias is attested, positive and negative signs of the poles remain relative rather than absolute. More will be said about this issue in the next chapter on negativity. 12 This point is further confirmed in Chapter 5 on negativity, which includes a discussion of the empirical psychological support for these claims. 13 The consonant b in the root b.d.l. is sometimes pronounced v for phonetic reasons. 14 Further metaphorical patterns that relate thoughts, cognition, and categorization to spatial notions will be discussed in Chapter 8 (8.8), where the etymologies and metaphorical extensions of notions such as ‘term’, ‘realm’, ‘field’, ‘branch’, ‘domain’, ‘crusts’, etc., are discussed in the analysis of the function LOC-NOM, the function that relates spatial locations to naming. 15 Cf. Sovran 2006 for discussion and further references. Note the parallel criticism in the argument against Chomskyan “autonomy syntax” or his “syntactocentrism” (Jackendoff 2002; Langacker 1999, 2008, 2009).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1 The asterisk (*) in this chapter marks a nonexisting form. 2 Cf. Hoeksema (2011: 187–189) for a review of earlier works. 3 For Hebrew studies of negative polarity items, cf. Levi (2008), Sevi ( 2008), Bliboim (2010), and Ziv (2013). 4 Mental spaces are conceptual units that constitute the understanding of aspects of reality as expressed in language sentences. The blending of spaces plays an important role in Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of metaphor (2000) that will be referred to in Chapter 8.

Notes  159 5 But unlike her and several pragmatic studies of polarity and negation mentioned above, I confine myself to the analysis of lexemes, and especially nouns. I do not refer to discourse elements or constructions. 6 I use the modern term ‘semantic frame’ instead of the older ‘semantic field’. For the present purposes, the differences between the two as specified by Nerlich and Clarke (2000) are irrelevant. 7 Cf. the entry ‘pleasure’ in FrameNet https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/ fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Experiencer_focus. (Accessed March 13, 2013.) 8 The adjective ‘negativity’ is classified in FrameNet in the frame of attitude description. https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex .xml?frame=Attitude_description. (Accessed March 13, 2013.)This is the metaphorical and derived sense of the word. However, the index and the list of frames do not include any further reference to ‘negativity’. https://framenet2 .icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Attitude_description. (Accessed March 13, 2013.) 9 The original experiment was carried out in Hebrew, but it can be conducted in any language. Several culturally dependent lexemes may be classified differently, but the basic lexemes such as ‘not’, ‘absent’, ‘poison’, or ‘kill’, and their counterparts in any language, seem to pose no difficulty to participants who put them in the ‘minus’ column. 10 It is well known that people have the ability to abstract meanings from particular contexts and to treat them in a paradigmatic manner, to match them with synonyms and antonyms, and hence, be responsive to psychological and linguistic tests. 11 Note that for some value judgments, the context is not necessary, perhaps because the positive or negative values have been established by real-life experiences. In other cases, however, context does matter: Hebrew speakers are well acquainted with the once-popular tune composed to Biblical words describing the land of Israel as flowing milk and honey: “For when I shall have brought them into the land which I swore unto their fathers, flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 31: 20). This is definitely a positive context where the verb for flowing is zavat (adj. sing. f., from the root z.v.). However, two other derivations of the same root are quite negative and concern, both in Biblical Hebrew and in Modern Hebrew, sexually transmitted diseases: “Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that hath an issue [suffering from venereal discharge], and whosoever is unclean by the dead” (Numbers 5: 1–4). In Modern Hebrew, the noun ziva means gonorrhea; hence, both contexts are concerned with fluids: milk and honey as a sign of affluence rooted in a pleasant taste vs. bodily secretions as a symptom of sickness with immoral associations. Thus, the meaning of the verb zav that could be neutral, as in pouring or flowing, is affected by the nature of the fluid associated with either good taste and blessing or bodily discomfort and sickness. 12 This ‘intuitive’ knowledge is part of the basic language mastery that guides the choice of proper words in speech and in writing; however, it is automatic, and speakers are not normally aware of it, as pointed out in de Saussure’s famous observation about the value of lexemes as reflecting their relations in the system. The idea of minimal pairs renders this tacit knowledge more explicit and can function as a tool on this sorting task that leads to forming subgroups of meaning in a semantic domain of cognate words. 13 The concept of ‘thresholds’ will be further examined in Chapter 7 with its relations to the concept of ‘norm’. 14 https://www.google.com/search?source = ig&rlz = 1G1ACAWCIWIL363&q =george+orwell+politics+and+the+english+language+1946&oq=george+ orwell+

160 Notes poli&gs_l = igoogle.3.3.0j0i30l9.1567.18582.0.22740.24.15.2.6.6.0.995.6 987.1j1j0j2j8j1j2.15.0 . . . 0.0 . . . 1ac.1.xDyIfg1_rDUI. The italics in the passage are mine (T.S.). (Accessed March 8, 2013.) I thank D. Gavrieli Nuri and A. Musolff for clarifications and examples. 15 The concepts of thresholds and norms are evoked in Chapter 7.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1 http://911scholars.org/. (Accessed March 14, 2013.) 2 For recent works, see Lappin (1996) Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. See also a historical survey of the development of this particular stream of thought in Partee (1996): “The development of formal semantics in linguistic theory”, in ibid. pp. 11–38. 3 For a detailed account, see Haack (1978) Philosophy of Logics and Cohen, Y. (1994) Semantic Truth Theories. 4 See Chapter 8 for a detailed account. 5 See, for example, Foucault (1984) Truth and Power; Derrida ([1972] 1988) Limited Inc. 6 https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/about. (Accessed March 14, 2013.) 7 The division into four periods is, of course, very general. There is ample work by Hebrew language scholars showing the variants, nuances, and subdivisions in all periods. 8 Referring to the six-volume codex of religious and social laws—the Mishnah. 9 The morphological patterns (binyanim) into which a root is inserted carry certain aspects of meaning, such as instrument, action, property, profession, and others. 10 Describing these interesting and complex frame relations is beyond the scope of this volume. 11 This can be read as a dual usage: without the ‘faith’ of Aaron and Hur, who held up Moses’ arms, his arms would not have been steadied. 12 Traditional commentators interpret ‘emunim here as ‘their faith (belief) in their God’. In Modern Hebrew, shomer ‘emunim is often used as a collocation in the context of marital fidelity, but also in relation to loyalty to one’s work or other habits, being conservative, avoiding radical changes. 13 This is a very common phenomenon in Hebrew morpho-phonetics. 14 This direction of meaning shift is as predicted in Traugott (1986) and Hopper and Traugott (1993). 15 Such nominal constructs are typical of the Semitic family of languages. However, in English syntax, they appear as a combination of a noun and a complementary adjective: true lips, true witnesses, or true law. The polysemous reading stems from the complex meaning relations between ‘emet and the nouns annexed to it (cf. Fillmore 1995 for more about semantic isolations and the polysemous status of nouns). 16 Note that the adjective nakhon (true) in Hebrew has undergone the same change from its concrete Biblical meaning: ‘being established and firm’ to ‘ready’ and then to ‘true’. One of the components in the Hebrew idiomatic phrase ‘emet veyatsiv (true and firm) and samukh uvatu’aḥ (assured and confident) still refers metaphorically to firmness and stability, as another synchronic reflection of the meaning shift. This is analogous to the assumed relations between English ‘truth’ and ‘trust’ and Indo-European *dru ‘tree’. It is also hinted at in the Lithuanian adjective drutas (firm) and Welsh drud (strong), and the notion of ‘steadfast as an oak’.

Notes  161 17 Note that the English noun ‘truth’ appears in the FrameNet project only in the frame of ‘candidness’ related to communication. The adjective ‘true’, however, is found in the frames of ‘artificiality’, ‘correctness’, ‘accuracy’, ‘candidness’, ‘exemplar’, and ‘direction’—evoked by the noun phrase ‘true north’. https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml? frame=Candidness. (Accessed March 15, 2013.)

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1 This preceded modern trends in cognitive semantics, including FrameNet and collaborative efforts of researchers in neuroscience, computational neural modeling, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive and developmental psychology who study the way the mental lexicon is structured (Feldman 2006). 2 Current editions of the Thesaurus draw on many literary and spoken sources that replace the tiring process of gathering cognate words through informants, teams of researchers, and texts. 3 1977, 4th edition. 4 Attested as far back as 1160, in le Noveau Petit Robert, 1994. 5 A controversial book entitled The Bell Curve discusses the implications of IQ tests. 6 https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame = Typicality. https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex .xml?frame = Frequency. (Accessed March 15, 2013.) I believe that this is a theoretical decision rather than a result of the unfinished state of the project. And, if so, it is another testimony to the polysemous nature of the concept of ‘norm’. 7 Relevance Theory emphasizes this point over the idea of fixed lexicalized meanings (Sperber and Wilson 1998; Carston 2002; Wilson and Sperber 2004; Wilson 2011; Wilson and Carston 2007). 8 This is based on de Saussure’s (1916[1966])) idea of paradigmatic relations between lexemes. Without this tacit knowledge, people would not be able to converse properly. Note that a possible circularity is avoided here, as mentioned in Chapter 1, by following the ‘hermeneutic circle’, a practice common to studies in the humanities in which one starts from a vague unspecified intuition and moves toward better understanding of the issue at hand. The test of its validity is whether each step is justified and whether the end point provides a deeper, richer, and more elaborate understanding. 9 Cf. also Jackendoff 2009. 10 Cf. Cienki (1998) for Slavic examples. The notion of a straight line lends itself as a model for morality and hence desired behavior. Something about the sense of ‘strictness’ and absoluteness suits the demands of the abstract realm of ethics and morals. The stability of the notion of a straight line exemplifies this same strictness and absoluteness in moral contexts. 11 The Kabbalah expert Ronit Meroz pointed out (personal communication) that in some Aramaic Kabbalistic texts, the lexeme kideva’i has a prescriptive meaning of ‘should be done’, whereas in other contexts, it is related to will, as hinted at in its etymology. This sheds additional light on the concept of ‘norm’ because it associates it to desire and will, perhaps not of an individual but rather of a group that demands obedience. Another Hebrew literary adverb kaya’ut, stemming from ya’e—beautiful, further emphasizes the relative aspect of several ‘norms’ by associating a Hebrew ‘norm-adverb’ with taste and aesthetic judgment.

162 Notes 12 The problematic issue of the social dependency of the definition of mental health and its social implications regarding individuals’ rights and freedom has been amply discussed (Cf. Foucault 1976; Rogers and Pilgrim 2010). 13 http://www.uni-leipzig.de/˜gcla08/upload/abstr66.pdf. (Accessed March 15, 2013.) 14 Other meanings of ‘over-x’, although metaphorical and abstract, are not associated with ‘norm’: j) superiority: ‘won a narrow victory over her rival’; k) preference: ‘selected him over all the others’, and l) rule or control: ‘the director presides over the meeting’ and hence will not concern us here. 15 Note that some of these OED instances are quite old. Some instances are hyphenated and some are not. 16 See below for a discussion of the Hebrew root ḥ.n.n’s derivations. 17 The bold letters are mine (T. S). 18 http://montanacorruption.org/2012/02/10/criminal-justice-chat-with-mattkelley-1121-by- prison-reform-movement-blog-talk-radio/. (Accessed March 15, 2013.) 19 http://dreamcatchersforabusedchildren.com/2011/04/family-outraged-overlenient-sentencing/. (Accessed March 15, 2013.) 20 Note that the doubled middle and final identical consonant of this root sometimes merge (a common tendency in such roots) as in the lexeme discussed below ḥen(n)—grace. 21 The adverbial suffix: am is a trace of a Semitic adverbial case that is preserved in Modern Hebrew in only a very few adverbs. 22 Note that the etymology of the English word ‘justice’ is close to ‘just’ (as in ‘just a moment’) via the French ‘juste’ and to ‘adjust’, and is associated with the image schema of a straight line. The Latin origin (ius) means ‘right’, ‘law’, ‘what is fitting’ (Traugott 1986). 23 I could find not any reference to ‘in vain’ or exemplary sentences in the FrameNet project. However, in one of the most romantic moments in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Chapter 31), Mr. Darcy confesses: “In vain have I struggled? It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” http://www .goodreads.com/quotes/4566-in-vain-have-i-struggled-it-will-not-do-my. (Accessed March 15, 2013.) 24 See also Cienki 1998 for more evidence in English and Russian for metaphorical extensions of the image schema of straightness to the contexts of time, events, discourse, thoughts, control, social norms, morality, truth, and law. See also Johnson, Moral Imagination (1993). 25 Note that the polysemous word ta’am in Hebrew means cause, reason, and justification and explanation, among others. 26 Note also the English word ‘gratitude’, the Spanish ‘gracias’, and the etymology of the French merci all stem from the Latin mercedem meaning reward, pay. 27 As an example of a polysemous English word, Wierzbicka (1996, 25) cites the lexeme ‘want’ in ‘I want you to do something’ and ‘this house wants painting’. She says there that “of these two meanings only the first is proposed as a semantic primitive”. We can look at the state of ‘wanting’ from the point of view of what is not there and is wanted or missing. The English adjective ‘wanted’ as in ‘wanted by the police’ is parallel to the Hebrew mevuḳash—an adjectival derivation of the present participle of the verb levaḳesh meaning ‘to ask’. These relations can be described by Wierzbicka’s natural semantic metalanguage theory, which holds that basic primitive concepts common to all languages are also valid for more ramified and culturally dependent lexical units. The missing, the absent, the NONEXISTENT and hence sought for, and the FULL or EXISTING are bridged by the primitive

Notes  163 notion of WANTING. One wants what one does not have, therefore, ‘The house wants painting’ can also be translated into the more basic sentence ‘it is not painted yet but it should be’. The etymology of ‘want’ in Germanic languages supports this description. Wane is related in Icelandic to ‘inferior’, ‘decreasing’, ‘falling’, ‘diminishing’, and deficiency’. Recall the famous Psalm (23: 1), “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”. The Hebrew parallel of ‘shall want’ is lo eḥesar, lit. I shall not miss anything. 28 The Hebrew parallel noun delef that denotes rain is accompanied here by a negative adjective tored—annoying, irritating. 29 The Hebrew metaphor portrays the suffering soul as a full container. Sorrow is compared to a liquid leaking slowly out of the overflowing soul.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8 1 The terms vehicle and tenor were introduced by the British rhetorician I. A. Richards (1936). 2 The relation between ‘warmth’ and ‘affection’ is not only well rooted in literary-cultural convention; it also has a physiological basis. The first sensations of security, care, and love are intimately connected in infancy with a physical sensa­tion of ‘warmth’. Interpreting the opposite sensation of ‘coldness’ or ‘iciness’ as a lack of emotion is therefore quite natural. The borderline between the natural and the conventional is quite vague here and is the basis for further elaboration on metaphorical patterns and ‘embodiment’, as will be shown below (Lakoff 1987, 380–415; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). 3 Here, as elsewhere in the chapter, examples are adduced from Modern Hebrew and English writers. This should present no difficulty since the argument is of a theoretical nature and should be understood as applying to metaphor in any language. 4 Note that part of this chapter appeared in my paper (Sovran 1993) “Metaphor as Reconciliation”. 5 Further elaboration of the theory is in the demarcation between basic and secondary metaphor (Grady 1997) and the Embodied Mind Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, Johnson and Lakoff 2002) and in many satellite studies that are still being written as the theory gains more and more popularity. 6 In the original Hebrew sentence, Oz used the verb ḳilḥalu ‘trickled” (Oz 1981, 21). 7 The nominal poetic metaphor ‘laugh of grapes’ will be discussed below. It poses a real interpretation problem because of the lack of syntactic clues in the juxtaposition of two nouns. Cf. Fillmore (1995) concerning the unique cognitive status of noun compared to verbs. However, the poet adds clues as the poem goes on. They help the interpreter to make sense of the metaphor and even enjoy its beauty. This is achieved, although not without effort, by connecting this metaphor to the rest of the poem. 8 My translation (T. S.). 9 Cf. Chapter 5 above on ‘negativity’. 10 Wilson (2011) makes an effort to reconcile her own pragmatic communicative approach based on contextual and inferential procedures, with the cognitive approach to metaphor as a cognitive process (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Fauconnier and Turner 2008). She claims that the differences between these two approaches are only a matter of degree of lexicalization, and since the cognitivists deal with lexicalized metaphorical patterns, they skip the inferential stage. The view presented in this volume is consistent with the cognitive approach. It presents a model based on lexical-semantic relations

164 Notes and is a theoretical model that is not communication or psychology oriented. As in the other chapters, the main focus is on semantic relations, with the assumption that although speakers and hearers are not fully aware of these relations, they ‘know’ them and are guided by them both in producing proper sentences and in interpreting discourse as well as poetic metaphor. The linguist’s task is to make these relations explicit. 11 There might be another reading of the phrase ‘islands of hope’ in which ‘island’ as a singular term is the tenor and ‘hope’ might be considered a metaphorical vehicle. It has been recently semilexicalized, as in the following web article title: “Islands of hope: building local capacity to manage an outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in the Pacific”. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih .gov/pubmed/21148710. (Accessed March 15, 2013.) The lexeme ‘Pacific’ anchors the lexeme ‘islands’ in the real world in the semantics of geography and hence renders the whole phrase nonmetaphorical. The same literal interpretation is found in the title of the book: Island of Hope, Island of Tears: The Story of Those Who Entered the New World Through Ellis Island- in Their Own Words by Brownstone, Franck and Brownstone. The actual mention of a real place, Ellis Island, the immigration portal to New York, blocks the metaphorical interpretation. A fifteen-page internet search for the phrase with ‘islands’ in the plural form yielded no findings. This statistical fact confirms the initial reading as a metaphor and a nonlexicalized one. 12 I stress the aspects of tension and deviance here somewhat artificially. Normally, people sense no deviance or tension here either because such phrases are lexicalized or are at least very common and hence automatically interpreted. 13 These simple cases exemplify Wilson’s (2011) view and Giora’s Graded Salience Hypothesis mentioned earlier (Cf. note 10, above). However, the more complicated cases discussed here demand the elaboration suggested by the present model of ascending the scale of abstraction and applying reconciling abstract functions. 14 The distinction can be defined as mass/count, quantifiable/nonquantifiable, individuated/nonindividuated; see Mufwene (1984) and Pelletier (1979). ­ Recent studies (Pelletier 2010) point to the fact that languages vary with respect to the syntax and semantics of the count/mass dichotomy. They also highlight the fact that there are differences between certain types of mass terms—homogenous vs. nonhomogenous masses (aggregates). Other researchers have studied the relation of the count/mass distinction to ‘generics’ and to the study of conceptualization, as well as questions concerning the ways the distinction is acquired. However, none of these studies have explored ‘reconciling’ functions of the types discussed here.



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Index

Abelson, R. P. 27 acquisition 3–4, 45, 60, 63, 66, 77, 155, 157 additivity 139–40 Adelson, B. 23, 45 aesthetics 9 AI 7 algorithm 86, 147 Alharizi, Y. 94 alliteration 141 ambiguity ix, 38–40 Amichai, Y. 127, 133 analogy 15, 31–5, 40, 45, 95, 118, 126, 128–9, 132, 154–5 anaphora 157 annotation see FrameNet anthropology 5, 25–6, 79–80 antonyms 67, 69–70, 73, 159 Apresjan, J. 157 Arabic 25, 52, 69, 88, 93–5 Aramaic 88–9, 106, 161 Aristotle 5, 66, 85, 93, 97–8, 116, 126–7, 147, 151 aspects 12–13, 22, 24, 26, 32, 45, 65, 67–9, 78, 81–2, 87, 107, 114, 121, 125, 127, 129, 141, 148, 150, 158, 160, 164 asterisk 3, 157–8 Atkins, B. T. 6, 13, 27, 87, 99 Austen, J. 162 Austin, J. 43 Barlow, M. 5, 14 Barsalou, L. W. 6, 11–12, 15, 19, 23–5, 31, 45, 157 Behaviorism 23, 25, 35 Benbaji, Y. 101 Bialik, H. N. 37, 133

Biblical Hebrew 26, 32, 36, 40, 61, 88–91, 93–4, 112, 114–16, 119, 134, 159–60 Bliboim, R. 158 Boguraev, B. 1 bootstrapping mechanisms 4 Boucher, J. 66 British National Corpus see FrameNet Brugman, C. 107 Canaanites 8, 89–91, 95–6, 152 Carey, S. 14, 155 Carnap, R. 127 Carston, R. 16, 67, 73, 161 categorization 23–5, 36, 44–6, 62, 82, 98, 147, 152, 155, 158 Chomsky, N. 2, 7, 22–3, 25, 35, 127, 158 Churchland, P. 3 Cienki, A. 5–6, 62, 161–2 circularity 5, 153, 161 Clark, E. 166 Clark, H. 57, 66, 71 Clarke, D. 26, 99, 156, 159 Clausner, T. C. 13–14, 18, 99 Cohen, M. 72 Cohen, Y. 160 coherence 64, 86 Coleman, L. 87 commercial transaction frame 15, 27, 70, 115, 118 comparativism 127 comparison i, 20, 23, 30, 34, 37, 40–2, 44, 49, 51, 62, 120, 127 compositionality 53, 171 concept formation 4, 16, 20, 22, 44, 46–7, 98, 153 conceptual analysis i, 5–6, 68 conceptualism 10

182 Index construal see Langacker, R. container 15, 52, 54, 57, 59, 62, 108, 118–19, 122, 143, 156, 163 containment i, 54–5, 58–60, 64, 119, 152–4, 158 context 47, 51, 53, 56–7, 67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 80, 88, 90–6, 98–102, 104, 106, 108–9, 112, 114–19, 125, 128–30, 133, 140–1, 147–8, 158–63 continuity 19–20, 49, 54–61, 69, 78, 81, 153–4, 158 corpora ii, 16–17, 28, 30, 48, 101–2, 147 Cosmides, L. 156 count terms see metaphor creativity 9, 26, 82 Croft, W. 13–14, 18, 99 Dascal, M. 131 Dasher, R. 118 Davidson, D. 63, 86 de Saussure, F. 48, 83, 153, 159, 161 Derrida, J. 160 Descartes, R. 95, 155 Deutscher, G. 12, 26, 80, 155 development 1–2, 4, 8, 41, 45, 62–3, 71, 153, 161 deviance see metaphor diachrony xii, 15–16, 20, 40, 62, 66, 83, 95, 153 Dimroth, C. 66, 71 discreteness 8, 49, 51, 54–7, 60–1, 69, 149 disquotation 86 domain 1, 6–9, 13–15, 17–20, 22, 25–6, 30–2, 46, 48–9, 51, 57, 62, 70, 75, 78, 81–4, 87, 90, 95, 97–9, 102, 105, 112–13, 116, 130, 136, 138, 144, 147, 151, 156–9 Dromi, E. 24, 35, 45, 75, 155 Easterlin, R. A. 79 Edmonds, P. 157 embodiment see Lakoff, G. Ephrat, M. 114 equilibrium 36, 80, 113–14, 117–18, 121–2, 140 etymology 8, 16, 41–2, 44, 46, 49, 55, 60–4, 97, 99, 102–3, 105–6, 111, 114–15, 143, 157–8, 161–3 EVAL see metaphor Evans, V. 107 evolution 8, 11, 40, 45, 57, 60, 63, 70, 80, 98, 156

Fauconnier, J. 6, 11, 16, 67, 126, 158, 163 Faust, M. 125–6, 130 features 11–12, 15, 19, 23–4, 31, 34–5, 38, 53–4, 57–60, 68, 72, 78, 102, 106–7, 111, 121, 129–31, 136, 139–40, 145, 152, 156–7 Feldman, J. 126, 130, 161 Fillmore, C. J. 6, 11–13, 26–8, 63, 87, 98–9, 101–2, 125, 156, 160, 163 Fisch, M. 101 Fodor, J. 3 Fogelin, R. 127 Foucault, M. 160, 162 FRAC see metaphor FrameNet ix, 27–30, 48, 50, 87, 101–2, 156–62 frames i, ix, xii, 6–8, 12–15, 17–20, 24–30, 48–53, 68, 70, 72–4, 82, 84, 87–8, 90–3, 96–102, 104–5, 112, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 125, 141, 147, 151, 153–4, 156–7, 159–61 Frege, G. i, 10, 53, 63, 84–6 Fridlund, A. J. 58 functions 2, 6–9, 11, 13–15, 17, 20, 21, 26, 36, 40–2, 44, 53, 58, 67–8, 81–2, 87, 101, 104, 109, 112–13, 118, 121–2, 124–5, 133, 135–43, 145–9, 153–4, 156, 158–9, 164 Gati, I. 23 Gavrieli Nuri, D. xi, 76, 160 Geeraerts, D. 87 Gestalt 14 gestures xi, 34, 60, 62–4 Gibbs, R. W. 11, 51, 130, 137 Ginzburg, A. (ah.ad ha'am) 37 Giora, R. 11, 66–7, 125, 129, 137, 164 Givon, T. 57, 66 Glinert, L. 40 Goddard, C. 85, 87 Goldberg, A. 5, 11 Goldberg, L. 133, 140 Goldin-Medow, S. 1 Goldstone, R. L. 12 Goodman, N. 21–2, 34, 44, 127 Gopnik, A. 14, 24, 45 grace xii, 114–15, 117–18, 162 graded salience hypothesis see Giora, R. Grady, J. 11, 163 Grandy, R. 31 Grice, P. 14, 85, 87

Index  183 Haack, S. 160 Halevy, Y. 69, 93 Hebrew i, ix, xi, 7–9, 13, 15–16, 18, 26, 30, 32, 36–41, 52, 61–2, 69–74, 79, 81, 83, 88–91, 93, 95–7, 101, 104–6, 111–22, 132, 141, 147, 151–3, 155, 158–63 hermeneutics see circularity Hirschfeld, L. A. 58 Hirst, G. 157 Hoeksema, J. 67, 158 homonymy 10, 71 Hopper, P. 160 Horn, L. 8, 65–7, 155 Hüllen, W. 48, 99 Ibn Ezra, A. 88, 93–5 Ibn Saruk, M. 93 Ibn Tibbons 88, 94–5 ICM see Lakoff, G. idioms 6, 10–11, 14, 16–20, 32, 42, 46, 61, 70, 107, 114, 131, 137, 151, 158, 160 Illouz, E. 100 imagination 36–8, 42, 44–5, 77, 117– 18, 120, 128–9, 132–3, 140, 162 Inbar, A. 62 individuation 34–5, 50–2, 54, 57, 59–62, 81, 139, 142–5, 152–4, 158, 164 innateness 3–4, 19, 22–3, 35–6, 45, 155, 158 INTENS see metaphor: functions interpretation 9, 67, 80, 87, 116, 129, 131–2, 134–7, 142, 148–9, 155, 163–4 intuition 3–4, 18–19, 25, 30–1, 34, 44, 48–9, 53, 57, 64, 71–2, 75, 81, 88, 124, 127, 140, 156–7, 159, 161 Israel, M. 67, 73 Jackendoff, R. xi, 2, 5–7, 11, 14–15, 104, 125, 158, 161 Janssen, T. M. V. 53 Jespersen, O. 79 Johnson, M. 6, 11, 14, 15 ,19, 20, 51, 54, 63, 86, 116, 120, 126, 130, 145, 146 Jung-Beeman, M. 7 Kabbalah 161 Kahneman, D. 100 Kant, I. 28, 155 Kasher, A. 7 Kay, P. 14, 87, 155

Kemmer, S. 5, 14 Kendon, A. 62 kinship terms 18, 25, 31 Kittay, E. F. 13, 15, 26, 31, 86, 99, 130, 156 Kövecses, Z. 11, 130 Kratzer, A. 33 Lakoff, G. 6, 11, 13–15, 19–20, 45, 51, 54, 63, 86, 98, 107–8, 116, 120, 126, 130, 145–6, 158, 163 landmark 14, 126 Langacker, R. 5–6, 11, 13–14, 63, 69, 125, 158 laws 25, 82, 92, 101, 104, 107, 155, 160 layers 2, 8–9, 18, 65, 77–8, 81–2, 88–9, 152–3 learnability 15 Lehrer, A. 13, 15, 25, 70, 156 Levinson, S. 12, 16 Levy, A. 158 Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. xi, 68–9, 71 lexicalization 137, 142, 161, 163–4 lexicography 4, 15, 26, 30, 156 lexicology 48, 51 lexicon, i, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 9, 12–13, 15–18, 20, 24, 26–7, 30–1, 46, 48, 50–1, 57–8, 63–5, 69–70, 73, 75, 79, 81, 102, 112, 123–5, 151–3, 156–7, 161 lexipedia 157 Librecht, M. 62 LIM see metaphor Lithuanian 160 Livnat, Z. 96 Locke, J. 28 logic ix, 2, 5, 7–8, 10, 19, 21, 26, 34, 36, 41, 44–5, 47, 53, 55–7, 63–5, 67–70, 82, 84–6, 88, 94, 96, 98, 111, 114, 117–18, 126, 130, 149 Logical Positivism 10 Lyons, J. 3, 25, 40, 156–7 Maimonides 69, 93–5 Mandler, J. 2, 14, 24, 45, 158 Margalit, A. 6, 149 markers 27, 66 Mashal, N. 125–6, 130 mass terms 28–9, 124, 136–7, 139, 141–5, 147–8, 153, 164 mathematics 8, 10–11, 16, 48, 59, 65, 70, 72, 81–2, 85–6, 101, 106, 121–2, 136

184 Index Medieval Hebrew 8, 69, 88–9, 93–5 Medin, D. L. 23–4 membership i, 4, 19–20, 24, 34, 53–5, 58–60, 63, 75, 97–8, 100, 138, 152–4, 158 memory v, 11, 15, 24–5, 27, 35, 45, 101, 125 mental space see Fauconnier, J. Mendelssohn, M., 89 mentalese 3 Meroz, R. 161 Mervis, C. B. 98 metalanguage 6, 66–7, 85–6, 117–18, 162 metaphor i-ii, vii, xii, 5–6, 9–11, 15–16, 18–20, 22, 25–6, 47–8, 51–2, 61–4, 66, 70, 80, 86, 95, 97–8, 101, 104–6, 108, 111, 113, 117, 123–53, 158, 163–4 metonymy 26, 102 Miller, D. T. 100 minus 8, 65, 81 Mishnah 40, 88, 93, 104, 160 Moabites 89 models i, 6, 9, 13–14, 18–20, 23, 27, 31–2, 47, 49, 58–60, 63–4, 85, 97, 101–2, 104–7, 112, 117, 121–2, 126, 128, 137, 141, 149, 151–4, 161, 163–4 Modern Hebrew 37, 40, 69, 89, 90, 91, 95, 104, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 159, 160, 162, 163 monotheism 8, 89–92, 94, 152 Montague, R. 63, 85 Morag, S. 89–90 moral imagination 162; see also Jonson, M. morality 16, 72, 77, 86, 92, 96, 106, 112, 118, 121, 130, 146, 161–2 moral requital frame 115 morphology 8, 16, 27, 36, 56, 65–6, 68–9, 71, 79, 89, 91–2, 95, 97–8, 101, 104, 114–15, 158, 160 MRI 12 Mufwene, S. 164 Müller, C. 62 Murphy, M. L. 157 Musolff, A. 160 Narayanan, S. 126 NEG element 8, 65, 68–72, 75–8, 81–2 Nerlich, B. 26, 99, 156, 159 networks 15, 48, 99, 115, 130, 157

Neurath, O. 5, 153 neurolinguistics 7, 15, 157 neurology 4–5, 7, 11–12, 108, 126, 130, 153 newborns 70, 130 Nietzsche, F. 42 NOM see metaphor nominalism 10 nonsense 124, 147–8 nuances 20, 47, 53, 107, 132, 157, 160 objectivity 63, 96 OED 47, 83, 108–9, 111–12, 119, 158, 162 Old Testament 77, 89–92, 114–15 ontogenesis 63 oppositions 17, 49–50, 54–5, 58, 67, 69, 92, 124, 142, 156 order 9–10, 17–18, 20, 22, 27, 32, 36, 48, 53, 56, 60, 64, 79, 85, 97, 99, 101–2, 104–7, 111, 121–2, 143, 154 Orwell, G. 76, 159 Osgood, C. 66 Oster, H. 70 otherness 47–8, 50–1, 54–5, 57–8, 63, 81, 153 Ottenheimer, H. J. 157 Oz, A. 62, 132, 163 Palmer, F. R. 156 paradigmatic relations 83, 123, 138, 153, 159, 161 parallelism 7, 26, 54, 58, 60–3, 114–18, 144, 147, 153–4 Partee, B. 63, 85–6, 160 particles 68, 71, 105, 120 parts xii–1, 13, 17–18, 26–7, 51, 68, 71, 105, 120, 123, 125, 151 Pelletier, F. J. 164 perception 2, 12, 14, 24–5, 60–1, 63, 79, 85, 108, 119, 153–4, 158 Petruck, M. 26–7, 98, 156 phenomenology 25 philosophy xi, 8, 16, 20, 84–5, 88, 94, 95, 101, 126, 155, 160; philosophy of language 4–5, 10, 85, 160 phonetics 27, 89, 92, 125, 158, 160 phraseology 76 phylogenesis 63 physics 17, 25, 116 physiology 58, 109, 113, 163 Piagetians concepts 158

Index  185 Pierce, C. S. 84 Pilgrim, D. 162 Pinker, S. 15, 45 Pitchford, N. J. 155 Plato 4–5, 85, 130, 151, 155 Platonism 10 plurality 35, 51–2, 54, 59–60, 137, 155 plus 8, 65, 81 poetry xii, 27, 37, 88, 93–4, 111, 127, 132–3, 140–1, 148, 163 polarity 19, 49, 52, 54, 58, 60, 67, 119, 158–9 polysemy ix, xii–1, 6, 8, 10–11, 16, 18, 20, 26, 36–7, 79, 83–4, 87–8, 90, 94, 96, 98, 101–2, 114, 119, 126, 139, 144, 151, 160–2 polyvalence 36, 96 Portuguese 66 post-Biblical era 88 postmodernism 84, 87, 96 pragmatics ii, xi, 16, 67 pre-Biblical era 88, 95 preconcepts i, 4, 11, 24, 153, 155, 158 PRED see metaphor predication 128, 134, 138–40 predictability 106, 122, 124, 130–2 prelinguistic notions 22–3 prescriptive 8, 97, 99, 102–4, 106–7, 110–12, 120–2, 161 presentation 7, 25, 45, 63, 125 presuppositions 56–7, 66 primates 2 Prince, A. 45 probability 75 processing 12, 25, 28 proprioception 24 prose 138, 148 prosody 68 prototype 13–14, 23, 27, 45, 47, 67, 87, 98 psycholinguistics 2, 15, 65–6, 68, 125, 129, 157 psychology 1, 4–5, 7–8, 11–12, 22, 45, 65–6, 98, 109, 130, 161, 164 Pustejovsky, J. 1 QUAN see metaphor quantification 21, 34, 36, 48, 66, 71, 104, 110, 135–7, 139, 142, 148, 164 Queen, N. 93 questionnaire 30, 72–3, 75 Quine, W. V. O. 5, 21–3, 34

Rabbinical Hebrew 93 Ramsey, P. 86 Rashi 93–4 rationalism 86, 155 rationality 96 reason 2, 6, 35, 73, 84, 95–6, 101, 115–18, 122, 155, 162 reconciliation ii, xii, 126, 128, 145, 149, 163 reconciling functions see metaphor reconstruction 5, 31–5, 44 redundancy 78, 82, 86 reference vii, 1–2, 13, 41, 48, 56, 68, 72, 85, 87, 89, 94, 99, 123–4, 128–9, 157–9, 162 regularity 7, 13–14, 16, 20, 102, 104, 107, 121–2, 125, 151 REL see metaphor relevance 2, 22, 67, 125, 129, 131, 147, 161 religion 75, 96 Renaissance 95 repetition 25, 30, 38, 41–2, 102, 107 representation 1–4, 7, 12, 23–4, 27, 33–4, 36, 45, 59, 99–100, 125 Rescher, N. 86 resemblance 22, 25–31, 34–5, 98, 127 respects 19, 50, 58 retrieval iv, 71, 101 rhetoric 126 rhymes 111 Richards, I. A. 163 Ricoeur, P. 128–9 righteousness 83, 92 Rogers, A. 162 Roget’s Thesaurus 30, 48, 50, 61, 99, 104–5, 108, 157 Rohrer, T. 126 Rosch, E. 23, 45, 51, 98 Rosen, G. 3, 155 Rosenstein, D. 70 ruler 9, 106 rules 27, 31, 80–2, 99, 101–2, 104, 107, 121–23, 131–33,134, 136, 149, 152, 162 Ruppenhofer, J. 156 Russell, B. i, 10, 86 Russian 162 Sapir, E. 26 scale i, 9, 36, 52, 54, 66, 68, 82, 123–4, 126, 131, 134, 138, 142, 147, 149, 153, 164 Schank, R. 13, 27

186 Index schema 6, 14, 23–4, 47, 52, 59, 108, 112, 117–20, 125, 127, 142, 157, 162 Schwanenflugel, P. J. 11 Schwarzwald, O. 114 scripts 13, 27 Searle, J. 86, 128–9 segments 59, 153–4 sememes/semes see features semiotic 4 Semitic languages 88–9, 92, 160, 162 sensorimotor 20 sentiments 28, 83, 117 separateness 42, 47–54, 61, 81, 118 Sevi, A. 158 Shakespeare, W. 51, 111 Shoben, E. J. 11 Shyldkrot, H. xii sign 10, 17, 55–7, 60, 71–3, 75, 78–81, 84, 107, 131, 156–9 signals 8, 65 simile 126–7 similitude 30 simulation 24–5, 31 simulators 24–5 sin 61, 77, 113, 115–17 situated concepts 6, 12, 17, 24–5 situations 11–12, 17, 20, 25, 27, 36, 40, 62, 76, 80, 108, 125 Skinner, B. F. 22, 25, 35 Slavic languages 40, 161 Smilanski, Y. 40, 133 sociology 7, 100–1 Socrates 130 sorting ix, 8, 18, 22–3, 31, 45, 57, 65, 72–3, 82, 142, 153, 159 Sovran, T. i–iv, xi, 5, 7, 15, 36, 74–5, 79, 86–7, 108, 155, 158, 163 spatial cognition 9, 12, 15, 26, 51–2, 54, 61–2, 74, 107, 138, 145–7, 158 spatio-temporal i, 8, 10, 15, 19, 47, 54–7, 60–3, 107, 152, 156 Spelke, E. 60–2 Sperber, D. 2–3, 16, 58, 147, 161 stem 34, 60, 114, 116, 147, 162 stems 52, 57, 61, 121–2, 147, 160 stimuli 22–3, 101 Stowe, R. W. 11 stratification 13, 15, 81–2, 89, 152–3 Strawson, P. 143 Stringaris, A. K. 7, 11 Structuralism 25, 51, 84

subcategories 30, 32 subclasses 19 subconsciousness 16 subdivisions 160 subdomains ix, 7, 18–20, 31–2, 34, 75–6, 78, 82, 86, 97, 101, 105, 120–1, 156 subgroups ix, 7, 16–18, 30–2, 48–50, 51,53–4, 57, 71, 75, 78, 102, 104, 153, 157, 159 subjectivity 96 subtype 14, 21, 35–6 supererogation 6, 117–18 superordinate 18–19 Sweetser, E. 5–6, 11, 14, 62, 67, 87, 117–18, 146 symbols 17, 24, 59, 77, 141–2 synchrony 20, 62, 83, 153, 160 synesthesia 133–5, 142 synonymy 26, 49, 102, 115, 156–7, 159 syntagmatic 114,131, 153 syntax 2, 46, 68, 88, 125, 138, 141, 158, 160, 164 Talmud 88, 93, 116 Talmy, L. 11, 20 Tarski, A. 86 taxonomy 13 tenor and vehicle see metaphor thesaurus 25, 29–30, 48–9, 97, 99, 109, 120, 157, 161 thresholds 8–9, 22, 65, 76, 97, 101, 107–9, 112–14, 120–2, 152–4, 159–60 Tobin, Y. 156–7 toddler 4, 54 trajectory 14, 126; see also Langacker, R. transaction 115, 125 transactions 15, 27, 70, 118 transferred 130 Traugott, E. G. 117–18, 160, 162 tri-consonant root system 114 Trier, J. 25, 70, 156 Turner, M. 6, 11, 16, 126, 158, 163 Tversky, A. xi, 23, 127 Tyler E. 107 type 2, 4, 15, 23–4, 28, 30, 32–6, 38, 40–1, 44–5, 47, 50, 53–4, 66, 70–1, 85, 105, 112, 123, 164 typicality 45, 101–2, 161 typology 66

Index  187 Ulmann-Margalit, E. 6 uniformity 69, 99, 102, 104, 133 universals 10 vagueness 30, 76 Vakulenko, S. 19 valence 8, 28 value, i, xi, 19–20, 23, 47–8, 54–8, 60, 63–4, 67, 73–5, 78, 84–6, 94, 99, 106, 121, 123, 125, 140, 148, 153–4, 156, 158–9 vectors i, 54 verification 93 Wallentin, M. 126 Wattenmaker, W. D. 11, 24 Weimer-Hastings, K. 11–12 Weizman, E. xi Whorf, B. L. 26

Wierzbicka, A. 11, 36, 116, 162 Wilson, D. 2–3, 11, 16, 125, 129, 147, 161, 163–4 Winkielman, P. 19 Wittgenstein, L. i, 10, 30, 34, 51, 84, 86, 98 WND see Gavrieli Nuri, D. Woolf, V. 142 Wright, A. 156 Wu, L. L. 11 Yariv-Laor, L. 79 Yeh, W. 11 Yehoshua, A. B. 40, 132 Yiddish 40 Zalta, E. N. 155 Zimmer, K. 66 Ziv, Y. 158