Bob,

I just wrote a reply to your response to Craig and to me, which, by the way, i loved.  But, before I get to that, I would like to cut-and-paste Dr. Seth Katz into this discussion, because he has supported you and Lakoff better than I could.  In fact, he fairly well does a dance on the words I laid out identifying language with thought.  I hope my reply, which follows that of Dr. Katz,below, might add something worth while to this present conversation.

Dr. Seth Katz writes:

Bob Yates writes: 
 
(snip) 
 
(Actually, this is not a very bizarre idea.  Imagine that you lost your 
ability to say anything.  Would you say you are incapable of thought?  I 
have several cats.  They are unable to use language but it is clear they 
"think."  They know that certain sounds mean they will be fed and they 
are learning a quick "no" means to stop what they are doing.) 
 
(snip) 
 
My comments: 
 
The bell rings; the dog salivates.  Has the dog then had a thought? Is response 
without reflection 'thinking'? Or are you proposing that the cats are engaging 
in some kind of interior reflection? Hard to tell with cats, I know. 
 
I don't think Lakoff and Johnson, or any of the cognitive linguists, would argue 
that 'language structures thought.' Rather, as I understand the argument, it is 
that metaphoric relations--where we understand one thing in terms of its being 
another--structure thought, language, and many other human activities. Metaphor 
is, for the cognitive linguists, not just a linguistic device, but a cognitive 
structure that manifests in language. 
 
Seth 
 
Dr. Seth Katz 
Assistant Professor 
Department of English 
Bradley University 


Bob,

This is a magnificent post.  Thank you for elaborating.  I do not feel that we are at odds.  Lakoff and Johnson are using metaphors as invoking a frame.  This frame seems to be a deep understanding of a particular exchange or action and its consequences.  This is based on physical experience and emotional narrative.  Eighty percent of what goes on in our minds as we are creating language is unconscious.  This, Bob, seems consistent with your experience with cats and my experience with dogs.  Bringing a reader down into that pool of ambiguity is what language is all about.  It is a baptism in a stream of ideas, understood in a physical narrative, such as “we are at a turning point in our relationship,” or “the road has been rocky,” or “this journey is at an end.”  By invoking one element of the frame, the entire frame comes to mind without it ever being mentioned explicitly.  Our understanding is implicit.  In writing, we must decide how explicit to make it so that it might be understood by others.  In this day when language comes to us through television to be encoded in the visual are of the brain, children refer to events with pronouns, assuming through habit that others can watch the same screen and understand the reference.

Lakoff and Johnson would also agree with you about not being able to hold onto mutually exclusive frames.  As with optical illusions, we can envision only one frame at a time.  Bellow, in Herzog, refers to intensity of experience to be a self-evident truth, indivisible.  Jefferson believes the same of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Words are unnecessary.  Experience is a priori.  You are actually onto something.

Also, a priori are our needs as outlined by Maslow.  If we take the negative and positive aspects of pride, we might the negative as based on fear and a need for safety:  all-rejecting anger. The positive sense of pride addresses our need for love and a sense of belonging:  all-embracing love.  Both have physical experience at their base, either as hands held in front to repel others and protect oneself and one’s tribe or the reaching out of arms to offer oneself and hold onto others.

As well, I understand that Gregory Bateson, once the husband of Margaret Mead, claims evidence shows that facial expressions create a frame within which we interpret the meaning of a person’s words.  Tests show that 99% of adults, when viewing pictures of people experiencing emotions are right 100% of the time.  Younger folks are right about 50% of the time, teens often confusing adult concern and sadness with anger.  In either case, understood or misunderstood, frames rule.

It might be said that syntax also creates a frame.   But I would think that only a beginning learner of English as a second language would suffer a moment of ambiguity when distinguishing the different syntactical use of “up” in “Terry looked up Toni’s address,” and “Terry looked up Toni’s dress.”  Semantics trumps syntax when it comes to framing.

The importance of ambiguity in language is the same as ambiguity in experience, it forces us to negotiate with each other on somewhat equal footing.  Concept words are like playground language, we use the words as though they were real, but they are more like glasses in our hands, collecting meaning through an accretion of experience that eventually transubstantiates into a concept.  In this case, words are not only a place-marker for meaning, as they were in the poem “Upon a Child,” but they are containers of meaning, vessels through which we share our life’s blood with each other.

That’s about all I have to say for now, but I am glad to find us together in thought.  You may find that you have been a cognitive linguist all along.

I wonder what Craig might say about what you and I have written.

All my best,

Gregg


---- Robert Yates <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> Colleagues,
> 
> I started my first reply on the metaphor string to suggest that there is
> an alternative view from the one that language “structures our thinking.”
>  I believe that language and thought are completely separate.  
> 
> (Actually, this is not a very bizarre idea.  Imagine that you lost your
> ability to say anything.  Would you say you are incapable of thought?  I
> have several cats.  They are unable to use language but it is clear they
> “think.”  They know that certain sounds mean they will be fed and they
> are learning a quick “no” means to stop what they are doing.)
> 
> I used the example of syntactic ambiguity to question the claim that
> language structures are thinking.  If that is the case, then it would
> seem whenever we utter an ambiguous sentence, we are having both
> thoughts at the same time.  I don’t think that is the case.  I cited the
> example of a real headline:
> 
> Puberty in girls begins earlier than thought
> 
> I just don’t think the writer of that headline had both meanings in mind
> when that headline was composed.  As best as I can tell from the
> following by Gregg Heacock, that is the implication of the following:
> 
> "But, in my relating having, doing, and being to the past, present, and
> future and to reality, imagination, and conceptualization is that
> grammar encodes deep thought patterns.  Teachers who belittle grammar
> instruction have little idea of how important this discipline is to
> shaping the mind.  For language not only translates our thinking, it
> structures our thinking."
> 
> ******
> 
> Craig Hancock is right about how, in normal conversations, we resolve
> utterance that are ambiguous by reliance on context.  He writes:
> 
> “I don't see any reason to infer . . .  that language and thought are
> "separate systems." "She was a lightweight" can mean so many things in
> so many contexts. It can be a literal observation about weight or a
> metaphoric observation about power or ability. Any sensible theory of
> language needs to deal with this.”
> 
> Descriptions of language deal with how particular utterances can be 
> ambiguous, but NO theory about the grammar of language can figure out
> all of the possible contexts for determining the meaning of a particular
> utterance.  I think the passage above  acknowledges that language must
> necessarily be different from thought if context is crucial for 
> determining what a speaker means.
> 
> Consider the following two exchanges and the “meaning” of the string “Is
> the Pope Catholic?”
> 
> Exchange I
> A visiting Indian student to her American friend: Is the Pope Catholic?
> 
> Exchange II
> Wife to husband returning home late from work: Would you like a drink?
> Husband: Is the Pope Catholic?
> 
> In exchange I, the string “Is the Pope Catholic” is a real question; in
> exchange II, the string means “yes.”  Craig is right that context
> determines these two meanings.  That the exact same string of words can
> have two separate meanings seems to me that “language” and “thought” are
> very separate systems.  Perhaps, he can provide an example that they
> must be intimately connected.
> 
> (For the best explanation I know to understand why those meanings are
> different, see the work of Sperber and Wilson, Relevance Theory, which
> is an elaboration of Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle.)
> 
> This discussion has implications for how we view our students’ writing. 
> If we find an ambiguous sentence in a student text or a sentence that
> makes no sense, do we think the student’s thought is confused or do we
> think the student has not recognized in another context the utterance
> has a different meaning? 
> 
> This post is long.  In a paper by Jim Kenkel and me that will be
> appearing in Written Communication in October, we discuss such sentence
> in a student text.  If someone wants, I will discuss it in a further
> post.
> 
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
> 
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