Alan Cienki

Sensegiving in entrepreneurial contexts: The use of metaphors in speech and gesture to gain and sustain support for novel ventures

Gaining and sustaining support for novel ventures is a vital yet difficult entrepreneurial process. Previous research on this topic has generally focused on the social competence and social capital of those creating new ventures, and their ability to align their ventures, with collective norms of novel ventures as sensible, acceptable and legitimate. We suggest that sensegiving – the ability to communicate a meaningful course for a venture – to investors and employees may also play a direct role in achieving support for a venture. Based upon a micro-ethnographic study of two individuals who were in the process of creating new ventures, we demonstrate how they give sense, to others in real time that involve not just their speech but also their gestures. Overall, we find evidence that in the early stages of the commercialization of a venture, metaphors in both speech and gesture are consistently used to emphasize agency and control and the predictability and taken-for-grantedness of a novel venture.

Metaphor in the “Strict Father” and “Nurturant Parent” cognitive models: Theoretical issues raised in an empirical study

Abstract The metaphorical components of two cognitive models of moral/political systems, presented in Lakoff (1996 [2002]), were tested empirically, using a set of televised debates between two candidates for US president as data. Few verbal metaphoric expressions were found in the data which directly reflected the conceptual metaphors proposed in the models. However, a large number of mostly non-metaphoric expressions were found which constitute entailments of the models. This suggests a form of reasoning according to the logic of the proposed metaphors. The speakers’ metaphoric gestures in one of the debates were then coded and analyzed. Quantitative analysis produced results similar to the linguistic analysis, but qualitative analysis highlighted significant differences between the models, both in terms of their composition and how they can be expressed. The study raises methodological issues for metaphor research, and theoretical questions about the ways of identifying and labeling conceptual metaphors and about the status of cognitive and cultural models.

STRAIGHT: An image schema and its metaphorical extensions

In this article, Ipropose STRAIGHT äs an image Schema, discuss t he evidence for this claim, and examine the relationship between some of the specific properties of this image Schema in our experience and how they are extended into abstract domains. Relying on Johnson s (1987) criteria for an image Schema, I review research on the special role of straight lines in visual perception, and consider the relations between spatial and forcedynamic properties of straight bodily forms and movements, and of straight objects which we commonly encounter in our experience, particularly in industrialized societies. An examination of metaphorical expressions in English and Russian shows t hat domains in these languages commonly characterized by STRAIGHTNESS— or its opposites—include timef events, discourse, thought, control, social norms, moralityt truth, and law. The examples support findings from previous research that a duality commonly exists in Systems of metaphors between OBJECT and LOCATION versions. Cultural models of the target domains are also discussed äs a factor which motivates the metaphorical charactenzation of a domain äs STRAIGHT or not, and whether that STRAIGHTNESS is evaluated äs positive or negative. Keyword s: image Schema; metaphor; morality; perception; straight. 1. Evidence for STRAIGHT äs an image Schema Since Johnson (1987) presented bis arguments for recognizing a number of image Schemas äs recurrent patterns, shapes, and/or regularities of our actions, perceptions, and conceptions, the bulk of the research ensuing from this study has focussed on the metaphorical extension of image Schemas to abstract domains. Though Johnson (1987: 106) notes that the list of image Schemas he discusses is merely a selection of those he believes Cognitive Linguistics 9-2 (1998), 107-149 0936-5907/98/0009-0107

Multimodal alignment during collaborative remembering

This article investigates the roles that interactive alignment of manual gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze play in small groups engaged in collaborative remembering. Qualitative analyses of a video corpus demonstrate that the coordination of these behaviors may contribute to joint remembering in various ways, depending upon the cognitive and communicative affordances of these behaviors. The observation that these behaviors are different in their nature and their contributory potential to shared remembering is corroborated by the results of a quantitative analysis, which suggests that co-speech gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze have different interactional dynamics. This supports the conclusion that in order to understand the role of multimodal alignment in the discourse of shared remembering, co-verbal behavior should not be treated as a homogeneous category. Finally, we discuss the potential of combined qualitative–quantitative approaches to inform the interplay of verbal and bodily coordination during interactive memory construction.

Cognitive Grammar and gesture: Points of convergence, advances and challenges

Abstract Given its usage-oriented character, Cognitive Grammar (CG) can be expected to be consonant with a multimodal, rather than text-only, perspective on language. Whereas several scholars have acknowledged this potential, the question as to how speakers’ gestures can be incorporated in CG-based grammatical analysis has not been conclusively addressed. In this paper, we aim to advance the CG-gesture relationship. We first elaborate on three important points of convergence between CG and gesture research: (1) CG’s conception of grammar as a prototype category, with central and more peripheral structures, aligns with the variable degrees to which speakers’ gestures are conventionalized in human communication. (2) Conceptualization, which lies at the basis of grammatical organization according to CG, is known to be of central importance for gestural expression. In fact, all of the main dimensions of construal postulated in CG (specificity, perspective, profile-base relationship, conceptual archetypes) receive potential gestural expression. (3) CG’s intensive use of diagrammatic notation allows for the incorporation of spatial features of gestures. Subsequently, we demonstrate how CG can be applied to analyze the structure of multimodal, spoken-gestured utterances. These analyses suggest that the constructs and tools developed by CG can be employed to analyze the compositionality that exists within a single gesture (between conventional and more idiosyncratic components) as well as in the grammatical relations that may exist between gesture and speech. Finally, we raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges.

Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

The Ten Lectures by Alan Cienki consider what it means to apply theoretical approaches from cognitive linguistics to the dynamic phenomena of speech and gesture. Taking the usage-based commitment seriously with audio-visual data raises new theoretical questions for cognitive linguistics.

Utterance Construction Grammar (UCxG) and the variable multimodality of constructions

Abstract Some proponents of the theory of Construction Grammar have been investigating how it might address the nature of spoken language usage as multimodal. Problems confronted in this endeavour include the variability with which gesture is used with speech in terms of its (in)frequency and its (non) obligatoriness: for some expressions a certain kind of gesture is basically obligatory, but for most others it is a variably optional component depending on contextual factors. This article proposes “utterance” as a level of description above that of speech and gesture for characterizing audio-visual communicative constructions. It picks up on earlier proposals to consider constructions as prototype categories with more central and more peripheral features. The language community’s knowledge of a given utterance construction and that of any language user are discussed as “deep structures” (in a non-Chomskian sense) that provide a set of options (some more central and others more peripheral) for expression, whereby any “surface structure” is a metonymic precipitation in context of the construction’s features. An important attentional mechanism proposed that guides production and comprehension (“uptake”) of utterance constructions is the dynamic scope of relevant behaviors. Taken together, this approach may help bring Construction Grammar closer to being a truly usage-based theory.

Cognitive Space and Linguistic Case

As Schlesinger explains in the preface, this book summarizes and develops the linguistic and psycholinguistic studies on the relationship between cognitive and linguistic categories which the author carried out over a period of about twelve years. The positive side of this is that the book is an ambitious, detailed study with many examples. The negative side is that so much relevant work was published in the field of cognitive linguistics in the twelve years prior to this book, yet virtually none of it is cited. The result is that the author essentially reinvents the wheel, but comes up with something that rolls in quite an unusual manner. The reinvention begins straightaway. The analysis of example sentences starts after two and a half pages of introduction, with scant critique of the volumes of existing research on case. The hypothesis which Schlesinger is testing throughout the book is that syntactic categories, like subject and object, are semantically homogeneous. His study is based primarily on English (although the reason for this is not given), and the assumption is that the use of noun phrases in subject or object position, as well as the use of prepositions, are the consequences of semantic cases. The book deals most extensively with the agent or A-case, the comitative or C-case, and the attributee. Cases are proposed as consisting of cognitively primitive “features.” Thus the A-case is defined by the features of cause, control, and change, “the presence of any one of which in a noun phrase may suffice for assigning it to the A-case” (211). A feature, in turn, may have certain “dimensions”; cause, for example, has the dimensions “activity” and “affecting.” The presence of both features and di mensions in a noun phrase is a matter of degree. The assignment of features to a noun phrase is determined by the lexical entry of the verb in the sentence. Cases and the number of features and dimensions, as well as their relative strengths, play a role in the “linking” of noun phrases to syntactic categories. Syntactic subjects, for ex ample, are largely, but not always, in the A-case. The author concludes that in his framework the subject can be shown to be relatively semantically homogeneous, whereas the direct object cannot be said to typically express any given case. Indi vidual chapters are devoted to the following topics: agent and subject, the comita -