Todd Oakley

Conceptual Blending, Narrative Discourse, and Rhetoric

This study addresses t he concerns oft he linguist interested in understanding complex referential relationships that develop over extended Stretches of discourse, the concerns of the rhetorician interested in understanding how human beings use language for purposes of establishing and maintaining individual and group identity, and the concerns of the literary critic interested in understanding the r öle narrative structure plays in guiding readers through complex textual artifacts. I address these concerns by conducting a three-part analysis of a passage from Art Spiegelmaris Maus II: Survivors Tale using Fauconnier and Turners Conceptual Blending model. As an extension of Fauconniers (1994) mental space grammar, conceptual blending is a general cognitive Instrument capable of performing a variety of discourse functions—from event Integration, conceptual change, and metaphor projection to humor, literary invention, and the transfer of emotions and attitudes. Discourse participants construct mental spaces for the purpose of local understanding and action. One kind of mental space is a blended space, which develops rieh conceptual structure of its own from two or more input spaces and a generic space. My aim is to show that conceptual blending provides a plausible account of how readers construct meaning in narrative discourse.

The Human Rhetorical Potential

This article explores the possible grounds for a research program in cognitive rhetoric that aims to forge a tight link between the structures of meaning and structures of brain, body, and world. In section one, I outline a theory of human meaning-making in terms of pragmatic, epistemic, and symbolic actions as they relate to the principles of intentionality, projection, publicity, and materiality. In section two, I consider recent global theories of mind and brain to assess the theorys neurological plausibility. The common link between these two sections is the phrase, “tombstone technology,” taken from the voice-over narration from a television show about plane crashes. I first analyze this construction in terms of its effects on attention, value, categorization, and memory; I then use it to speculate on the neurophysiological processes subtending our ability to use symbolic resources to make inferences and decisions. I conclude with some suggestions for future research in discourse production and comprehension.

Honeymoons and Pilgrimages: Conceptual Integration and Allegory in Old and New Media

The cultural-historical manifestations of allegory are extensive and varied. We present detailed analyses of two allegorical texts from disparate historical formations: a Prudentian allegory from 17th century England and a short, 21st century viral video uploaded to YouTube. Despite vertiginous differences, a common conceptual core is identifiable and, we argue, best modeled by Conceptual Integration Networks. These networks, however, vary in systematic ways. While in the viral video attention is focused primarily upon its blended space, in the Prudentian allegory attention is distributed more uniformly over the entire Integration Network.

Still more on money: A response to Brandt

I thank Per Aage Brandt (2017) for his commentary, which elaborates on the gift origins of money that was only elliptically alluded to in my own piece. I agree with Brandt’s genealogical argument that giving underlies the social categories of debtor and creditor. This indeed was the point of Graeber’s analysis of credit money, from which my own analysis draws heavily. Brandt’s discussion of the role of priests and the priestly class in the establishment of wealth and credit is well established. In fact, my own claims of the money-as-credit origins of what becomes sovereign (state) money systems is fairly well attested among historians of money, whether conscious of Mauss’s important discussion of gifts or not. Brandt is also correct in emphasizing the role of metallic adornments in the history of money. I caution, however, that it is easy to slip seamlessly from acknowledging the material necessity of monetary “inscriptions” to mistaking the expressive sign of money for its content — a mistake made repeatedly throughout history, with disastrous consequences (such as John Locke’s arguments in the late seventeenth century that send England into a financial tailspin) that persist to this day. This is in part due to the fact that money as a store-of-value has to have some form of materialization, but it is and has always been the case, even as far back as Mesopotamia, that the store-of-value resides in whatever records of debts and credits are being maintained and, importantly, WHO has the authority to create and edit the record. As Brandt points out, the priestly classes historically have been “chartered” with the rights to create and edit the ledger, using precious metals as the preferred medium (for physical and religious reasons). It is not a coincidence, then, that precious metals are a perduring material of the pecuniary interest, but it is also important to emphasize that the evidence for “banking” in the form of cuneiform ledgers appears long before evidence of its metallic avatars (see Werner 2005). I mention this in part to emphasize that a fiat-basis for money is not a consequence of metallic adornments, but rather metallic adornments as coined money are consequences of the fiat-based “banking” operations. Brandt’s account and his response, however, focuses on banking as a “mediational” activity, which dilutes his initial point of priest being the first bankers — banks, both historically and especially now, are institutions that either arrogate or are granted the power to create credit-money — their roles as “mediators” are socially salient constructions, which do not, in fact, capture their real operations. Banking as a function of goldsmithery in medieval England and the high prevalence of bankers from European Jewry (a profession for which they were legally consigned to in some instances) adds to the legend of the mediators as outsiders. But goldsmiths did not lend from their deposits in gold, rather they created “fictional deposits” in the form of promissory notes, a practice that became fully sanctioned in England by the Remedies Act of 1704, at least 400 years after the practices of bank-credit creation appeared on the Thames. The above throat clearing is simply to emphasize that Brandt and I largely agree on the general origins of money. Brandt emphasizes the store-of-value dimension over the unit-of-account dimension; I emphasize the unit-of-account dimension as equally elemental and antecedent to coined money. There are a few points that I wish to register substantive disagreement. I do not doubt that commercial acts and acts of giving can be easily represented by distinct networks, but the commercial network sketched by Brandt does not speak to the issue of money-as-store-of-value (aka, credit) and remains irrelevant to the problem of sovereign money. It merely deepens Fauconnier & Turner’s own account. I, therefore, demur to the claim that “Oakley mistakenly explains how to make more money instead of discussing what money is in the first place” (Brandt 2017: 207). If I wasn’t clear in the article, let me reiterate: money is a storeof-valueand a unit-of-account. My explication of the store-of-value dimension has obvious and general overlaps with Brandt’s view of money as “protection.” Bearers of money have credit and hold a desire to “hoard” that credit (i.e. save). It is the unit-of-account dimension that I seek to focus on with respect to sovereign or state money and the institutional properties that develop therefrom, some of which go back to the beginnings of money-systems in Mesopotamia, others of which developed over the last 500 years with the formalized institution of double-entry bookkeeping, and still some others that have just arrived on the scene. Brandt’s account offers nothing by way of this critical dimension, but it seems that the unit-of-account dimension is precisely what Brandt regards as the basis for “the madness of money” for which he seeks deliverance. If something is inherently “mad,” then

Debtors, creditors, and sovereign money: A case for institutional blending and the amalgamated mind

Abstract Much social cognition and action is dialogical in nature and profitably understood from a second-person perspective. The elemental social roles of “debtor” and “creditor” are of great importance in explaining the structure and history of a wide range of social facts and institutions. Yet these person-level experiences of indebtedness and the mental spaces they engender are not sufficient to account for complex social facts. Sovereign money systems are a leading example where our person-level experiences of exchange lead us astray by actively hindering our ability to grasp money’s macroeconomic functions. This article provides a comprehensive account of money as a distributed cognitive phenomenon. It summarizes and critiques a prior analysis of money as a conceptual blend enabling exchange and subsequently advances an alternative “institutional” blending analysis of money as primarily a store-of-value and unit-of-account. This alternative analysis tracks findings of anthropologists and legal historians of money and banking as well as heterodox economists who make money the centerpiece of their macroeconomic models. The account of money also emphasizes that the underlying logic of sovereign money systems is stubbornly difficult for users of the currency to grasp or accept, as evidenced in a brief televised debate. If money is an instance of institutional blending wherein social structures and their material manifestations have cognitive status, then it recommends a broader argument that human minds themselves are an amalgam of neural assemblies, bodily structures and functions, and environmental structures and arrangements.

Invocation or apostrophe?: Prayer and the conversation frame in public discourse

We investigate how idioms of prayer operate along a complex set of rhetorical dimensions, all of which take the conversation frame as a starting point. We present results of a search of idioms from the UCLA NewsScape archive. After distinguishing invocationary acts of the divine from the more “fossilized” apostrophic (i.e. fictive) reference to the divine, we propose a four-dimensional model of prayer. Each dimension is an axis bounded by two poles: factive/fictive, pathos, ethos, and attitude. Instances of prayer often manifest alignments and misalignments along one or more of these axes.

Metaphor and Writing: Figurative Thought in the Discourse of Written Communication. Philip Eubanks. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 214 pages,

How do writers think and talk about writing and written communication? Philip Eubanks provides an answer to this question in his latest book. The question itself is neither trivial nor obvious, as ...

99.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780521191029.

Abstract We present the broad outlines of theory of intersubjectivity as it pertains to the production and understanding of deixis in discourse produced by two verbal autistic subjects. After a brief philosophical and linguistic overview of deixis, we provide an outline of the intersubjectivity matrix as it normally develops. We then use this framework as a heuristic for assessing the performance of our participants as they conversed with typically developed counterparts about specific video clips. Verbal autists possess many of the intersubjectivity skills required for normal conversation but lack the ability to deploy stable reference points when using the deictic scheme to communicate about situations in which either the topic or the audience are displaced in time and space. We present the Fluidity to Inelasticity Hypothesis (FIH) in which an initially fluid and chaotic use of deictic forms settles into a stable but inflexible deictic scheme.