Peer F. Bundgaard

Making sense together: A dynamical account of linguistic meaning-making*

Abstract How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental “platonic” ideality independent of individual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent linguistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four sources of structural stability: 1) the physical constraints and affordances of our surrounding material environment, 2) biological constraints of our human bodies, 3) social normative constraints of culture and society, and 4) the local history of social interactions. These structures and constraints interact in dynamical ways in actual language usage situations: local dialogical and social dynamics motivate and stabilize the profiling of a conceptual space already highly structured by our shared biology, culture, and environment. We will substantiate this perspective with reference to recent studies in experimental pragmatics and semiotics in which participants interact linguistically to solve cooperative tasks. Three main cases will be considered: The dynamic grounding of linguistic categories, the construction of conceptual models to relate entities in a scene, and the construction of shared conceptual scales for assessing and appraising subjective experiences.

The grammar of aesthetic intuition: on Ernst Cassirer’s concept of symbolic form in the visual arts

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic form” is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form (Cassirer called these structures “modes of objectivation”); thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition.

Waterproof fire stations? Conceptual schemata and cognitive operations involved in compound constructions

Abstract The paper develops a characterization of nominal compounds. The analysis is carried out on frame-schematic and construction-grammatical grounds. It rests on assumptions about cognitive processing long since known within cognitive linguistics, but it criticizes certain linguistic applications of Fauconnier and Turners theory of conceptual integration, which historically is a reelaboration of Lakoff and Johnsons theory of metaphor. The first section sums up two classical approaches in the analysis of nominal compounds; it comments on their inadequacies, and how these have been assessed by Fauconnier and Turner; next, it sketches out the way these two authors and other scholars in blending theory have traditionally analyzed nominal compounds in terms of conceptual integration, and finally one of the major drawbacks of this approach is identified: namely, its limited descriptive import. In the following section, the authors unfold their own semantic analysis. A non-trivial and non-standard compositional theory is proposed, likely to capture the general way in which semantic parts of a compound configure into a semantic whole. Hereafter the authors proceed to a summary survey of how this scaffolding is actually instantiated or processed cognitively. A crucial difference between processing of literal and metaphorical compounds is established. Thus, the approach has a double scope: it aims at characterizing both the semantics of compounds and the way the semantics is cognitively accessed.

The ideal scaffolding of language: Husser's fourth Logical Investigation in the light of cognitive linguistics

One of the central issues in linguistics is whether or not language should be considered a self-contained, autonomous formal system, essentially reducible to the syntactic algorithms of meaning construction (as Chomskyan grammar would have it), or a holistic-functional system serving the means of expressing pre-organized intentional contents and thus accessible with respect to features and structures pertaining to other cognitive subsystems or to human experience as such (as Cognitive Linguistics would have it). The latter claim depends critically on the existence of principles governing the composition of semantic contents. Husserls fourth Logical Investigation is well known as a genuine precursor for Chomskyan grammar. However, I will establish the heterogeneous character of the Investigation and show that the whole first part of it is devoted to the exposition of a semantic combinatorial system cognate to the one elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. I will thus show how theoretical results in linguistics may serve to corroborate and shed light on those parts of Husserls Fourth Investigation that have traditionally been dismissed as vague or simply ignored.

The cognitive import of the narrative schema

Abstract This paper aims to establish the origin of the narrative schema in the perception of intentional movements. The distinction between mechanical and intentional movements is vital for human beings, and the narrative schema, which is underpinned by this distinction, is therefore a basic cognitive principle of intelligibility. This is the reason why the narrative schema is by no means confined to the domain of the literary work of art. It is rather a major principle for the combination of partial significations in many other domains. The paper explores the role traditionally assigned to the narrative schema within continental semiotics and, through an interpretation of Heider and Simmels study on apparent behavior, it establishes the cognitive import of the narrative schema and its origin in visual perception; finally, it gives examples of the meaning organizing import of the narrative schema.

The emergence and nature of genres – a social-dynamic account

Abstract This article has a double scope. First, we consider the dynamics inherent in the emergence of genres. Our view is that genres emerge relative to two sets of constraints, which we aim to capture in our double feedback loop model for the dynamics of genres. On the one hand, (text) genres, or text types, as we will interchangeably call them, emerge as a variation of already existing text types. On the other hand, genres develop as a response to the negative constraints or positive affordances of given situations: that is, either the “exigencies” of the situation or the new resources available in a situation. Accordingly, Section 1 is mainly devoted to a characterization of situations and of the dynamic relation between situational constraints/affordances and genres. Our main claim is that situations and genres stand in a relation of mutual scaffolding to each other so that the existence of a text type is not simply caused by the exigencies present in a given situation, but, once emerged, also feeds back into the situation, further stabilizing or consolidating it: hence, the use of the term “feedback loop.” Section 2 is a more detailed discussion of the dynamics of genres with a particular focus on the first feedback loop: the way genres develop as deviations from existing text types and then stabilize as text types proper with a normative import. The second scope of this article consists in developing a typological apparatus consistent with the dynamic approach to the emergence of genres. This is our parameter theory of genres presented in Section 3. Here we consider genres as governed by parameters external to them and intrinsic to the situations they are dynamically related to. Genres should thus be understood not simply in terms of inherent textual or formal traits, but also relative to a certain set of situational parameters and relative to the degree to which they are governed by them.

Toward a Cognitive Semiotics of the Visual Artwork — Elements of a grammar of intuition

In this paper I introduce some of the principles which rule meaning making in visual artworks — both in regard to construction and interpretation of meaning. The approach is naturalistic in that aesthetic meaning construction is claimed to rest on features and structures which are intrinsically significant for the visuo-cognitive system in plain, everyday perception: the artist exploits such features, and so doing he transforms the automatisms of perception into a rhetoric of aesthetic intuition. Section 1 of the paper consists of a phenomenological characterization of the aesthetic object as such (in its difference from everyday objects). In the core of the present work, section 2, I give concrete examples (with a general import) of the meaning making tools used in visual art and their roots in everyday perception. The central concern here is to show how purely spatial relations can become significant, or, in other words, how conceptual meaning can be anchored in perception, or, finally, how artists can encode meaning in shape. The final section discusses the general principles ruling the semiotics of the visual artwork and addresses a couple of methodological issues.

The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure

Abstract This text has two parts. In the first section, we intend to define the narrative schema — the canonical plot structure — as a symbolic form in Ernst Cassirers sense of the term. This basically implies that the narrative schema is not an invariant higher order combinatorial form, but may itself be subject to variations in view of yielding specific meaning effects. This is because the production and reception of a narrative is a dynamic process where physical forces, modal forces and intentions set up a space of possibilities for the narrative trajectory. We therefore propose a determination of the narrative schema in terms of ‘force dynamics.’ In the next section we proceed to an analysis of Ernst Hemingways ‘A Very Short Story’ in order to illustrate this point. We lay down the main elements of its remarkable, if not simply outstanding both narrative and semantic-configurational structure: its plot structure is indeed driven by an inverted narrative schema and each significant event in the story but one (as well as each physical paragraph but one) has its rigorously symmetrical counterpart. Moreover, this inverted schema can be explained in terms of the modal forces at stake in the narrative.

Husserl and Language

From a purely quantitative point of view, Edmund Husserl has devoted a rather small amount of time and space to the study of language proper. Essentially, his contributions within this domain amount to the description of language use in the First Logical Investigation (Husserl 1901), and the determination of the essential properties of language as such (independent of any specific use) in the Fourth Logical Investigation. Otherwise, language is only sparsely dealt with in Husserl’s writings: the unpublished note “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotics)” (Husserl 1890) anticipates the distinction between “expression” and “index” which constitutes the starting point of the First Logical Investigation; i.e. the difference between a linguistic or any other sign bestowed with intentional meaning and any type of sign which is immediately or physically linked to its meaning: smoke → fire; scar → wound; weathercock → wind, etc.); Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1929) contains an appendix related to the theory of syntax outlined in the Fourth Logical Investigation; and, finally, a number of passages from Experience and Judgment (Husserl 1939) reexamine the relation between perceptually formed or antepredicatively structured meaning and its linguistic, predicative articulation (as we shall see this issue is also in the heart of the discussions unfolded in the Fourth Logical Investigation).

Aesthetic perception, attention, and non-genericity: How artists exploit the automatisms of perception to construct meaning in vision

Abstract The present work is an attempt to bring meaning to the fore of not only empirical aesthetics but also experimental aesthetics. We have addressed meaning in terms of attention-grabbing perceptual structure, doing so in the strong sense of structure; i.e., structure understood as a pure spatial relation between shapes, independently of what objects these shapes represent. The structures we investigate are the so-called non-generic configurations that obtain between objects seen from a unique vantage point. In the paper, we first introduce the notion of non-genericity, in general, and its use in visual art in particular, where it is claimed to affect the visual brain as an attention grabber. We then present an experiment we have designed to test the effect of such a relation on the visual brain, and we give evidence to the effect that non-generic configurations in pictures do attract attention significantly more than their generic counterparts. Non-genericity can therefore be considered as one among other pictorial techniques artists dispose of to construct perceptual meaning in vision.