The Communicative Mind

The Communicative Mind

Introduction

Line Brandt, The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction (NewCastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

---

Summary

’Implementing an interdisciplinary theoretical integration of ideas and methods in linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, literary studies and cognitive science, the research presented aims to uncover the intricacies of “the presence of man in language” (Benveniste) as a phenomenon both formally and rhetorically manifest in natural language structure and use, and to relate wide-ranging examples of meaning construction, defined by their occurrence in instances of communicative interaction, to the development in cognitive science of the semantic theory called Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT), so as to examine in detail its advantages and limitations in relation to the study of meaning‘ (595).

Outline

Part I

Chapter One. Enunciation: Aspects of Subjectivity in Meaning Construction.

Part II

Chapter Two. The Subjective Conceptualizer: Non-actuality in Construal.

Fictive Interaction

Subjective Motion

Chapter Three. Conceptual Integration in Semiotic Meaning Construction

Mental Spaces and Meaning

Conceptual Integration Typologies

Part III

Chapter Four. Meaning Construction in Literary Text

Chapter Five. Effects of Poetic Enunciation: Seven Types of Iconicity

Key Concepts

Enunciation

This is probably the most important concept of the book. Brandt defines enunciation as “the individual act of language production, in a given situational context, structurally and pragmatically manifested as intention-laden and interaction-dependent meaning. The utterance is the product; the uttering itself is the enunciation” (p. 47). Her stated goal is to trace this ‘ontological domain which is deeply influential in molding semantic cognition’ (p. 595) through many areas of language.

This unit of analysis is important because it brings together under one theoretical construct disparate facets of analysis sometime referred to as 'cognitive' and other times as 'pragmatic', e.g., context, schemas, scripts, categories, ICMs (Idealised Cognitive Models), etc. All of these resources for meaning assume a speaker intending to communicate meaning to a hearer through shared representations. Thus, the ’The study of enunciation entails systematic accounts of those conceptual categories shaping language, that are derived from representational acts of interpersonal communication, and awareness in a speaker of other subjectivities.’ (49)

This analytical category is stated in helpful didactic terms by one reviewer. ‘The key proposition here points to the dialogism of language: even talking to yourself involves a division of mental labour. Even utterances and exclamations that are apparently vented solipsistically into the air have been designed and uttered within the inescapably dialogic texture of language.’

The overall goal of the book, as stated by the author, isto 'examine how enunciation influences linguistic meaning' (38).

‘Fictivity' in Language

This is a very pervasive feature in language whose pervasiveness renders it somewhat hard to pin down. On an experiential level, it amounts to the intuition that we often present things not as they really are. The notion is so pervasive that Langacker[reference] admits that ‘I have no idea of how far it is useful to push the notion of fictivity...Should we go all the way and say that everything is fictive? Since our entire conceptual world is in some sense a mental construction, should we not just admit that the only kind of reality we have access to is virtual reality? I will leave that to the philosophers'.

Brandt shows that the domain of enunciation pervades fictive features of language.

One kind of structure where this is manifest is utilising utterances as sentence constituents: ‘Think for instance of the 2005 Microsoft Office “New Era” advertising campaign. This campaign features advertisements which all include a punchline utterance proclaiming the beginning of a new era in software. These sentences all have the same structure: “The [utterance] era is over.” One advertisement reads: “The OOPS I HIT REPLY ALL era is over”’ (121). A similar type of utterance is the ‘metonymic fictive interaction’. This refers to the tendency to represent attitudes and beliefs with utterances. For example, observe the quote from a financial economist: ‘When Congress passes a minimum wage law, they are essentially giving up on the poor. They are saying, “We don’t believe you are capable of making your efforts to be paid a decent wage”’. According to Brandt ‘Congress is not literally “saying” anything; it is a fictive quote. This fictive enunciation stands metonymically for an attitude, namely the attitude that according to Skousen led Congress to pass a particular law’ (124). These examples simply show that we tend to recruit the situation of speech (enunciation) as a semantic domain expressing ourselves.

Another area where enunciation corrects the lack of clarity to previous suggestions are examples of ‘fictive’ (or, more accurately ‘subjective’) verbal motion. Brandt problematises and subsequently reframes what we typically mean by 'fictive'. Consider the following sentence:

The fence goes from the plateau to the valley.

The typical explanation in Cognitive linguistics of a sentence such as this one is that the verb 'goes' is used 'fictively' or 'metaphorically' to represent a static state of affairs. For example, CMT would analyse this as an instantiation of a conceptual metaphor FORM IS MOTION. However, this analysis completely excludes the conceptualization process of the enunciators (viz., the speaker and addressee in a situation of enunciation). For Brandt, ‘the motion predicates apply, not to the referents in the expressions, but to the subjective act of representing’ (170).

The question Brandt seeks to answer here is ‘How do we make sense of representations that are not vested with belief and that are not presented as fictive referents?’ (156). The reason we can do this is because communication is such a fundamental cognitive resource that we quickly associate it with thought itself. The reason we know that 'They are effectively saying “X”’ really means ‘They think that X’ is that communication and thought are experientially linked and presenting thought content as utterances makes the thought content not only clear, but more immediate/dramatised.

Mental Spaces

Brandt discusses mental spaces at length throughout the book. In some ways, the entire work may be seen as an extended critique and refinement of Faucconier's (and Turner's) idea meaning emerging out of the integration of mental spaces. Much of the Brandt's criticism may be boiled down to a single question, one which any (frustrated) reader of Faucconier's and Turner's works will be all to familiar with, What is a mental space? How do we know when and how many spaces to construct? These questions must be inferred from Fauconnier and Turner's analyses, but the various 'space builders' (cues to construct a mental space') have some deep philosophical problems. For example, time is said to be a space builder, viz., when ever we use temporal words like 'then' and 'now' we construct a mental space. However, where is the cut-off point? How do we distinguish when one moment begins and another one ends? This is not a pedantic question if, as Fauconnier and Turner claim, building up the same number and kind of spaces is required for communication. ‘It seems to me it would be an impossible task for us to ever conceive of the same number of spaces, since there is no objective criteria for deciding when a new moment has arrived’ (137).

For Brandt, one solution to this conundrum is to be found in enunciation. ‘The pragmatic feat of enunciation itself can be said to function as a space builder; by the act of speaking, mental content is evoked for consideration, and, at the fundamental level of discourse grounding, the enunciator and addressee share the mental space of being engaged in communication, before further spaces are set up’ (206).

What she means by this is the situation of enunciation assumes intentionality, that is, the intention to communicate a specific meaning. Meaning is communicated semiotically, which is to say that the intended meaning (the signified) is always referred to by something (the signifier). This reduces the amount of mental spaces used in an actual blend to a manageable and predictable amount. The contents of the mental spaces are structured by different kinds of relevance, of which Brandt delineates five types.

Enunciation in Literary Studies

In the previous section, it was seen that an enunciator can embed another enunciation in the former's own, for various purposes. This shows that the first enunciator is responsible for organising some discourse.

This idea has some interesting consequences when applied to literature. Stated simply, ‘some subject is taken to be responsible for what is “put on stage”’ (91). On the other hand, we all know that ‘not all authors are expert readers of their own work’ (465). When one considers (1) the evident necessity of enunciation presupposed by the very act of producing a literary work and (2) meaning is only seen as such if it is itentional (‘A computer-generated text would not solicit the same interpretive attention—unless fictively imagined as originating in some sort of intentionality' (462)), every pattern in the text that coheres with the semantics becomes meaningful and justifiable. Thus, the primacy of enunciation provides grounds for literary readings.

Key Arguments

===
model:
    removeTagsFromText: true
    shortcodes:
      ":C:": {unicode: "🄲"}
      ":G:": {unicode: "🄶"}
      ":A:": {unicode: "🄰"}
      ":I:": {unicode: "🄸"}    
      ":L:": {unicode: "🄻"}
      ":D:": {unicode: "🄳"} 
      ":M:": {unicode: "🄼"}   
selection:
    excludeDisconnected: false
===
[Enunciation]: The concept of enunciation should feature as a unit of analysis within all areas of Cognitive linguistics and Cognitive poetics
 + <Neurobiology>: Humans are 'fundamentally attuned to interpersonal interaction' (46).
  + <Mirror Neurons>: The study of 'mirror neurons' in the brain has shown that certain parts of the brain that normally activate when performing a task also activate when we sense (literally, with our senses) someone else doing that task.
  + <Child Development>: The work of Colwyn Trevarthen has demonstrated that children learn ‘turn-taking’ for the sake of communicative contact with another human long before they ever learn to speak or interact with the physical environment.
 + <Disciplinary Challenges>: Consideration of enunciation sheds light on a number of vexing questions in the analysis of natural and literary language.
  + <Metonymic Interactions>: The phenomenon whereby utterances are used as sentence constituents shows our propensity to utilise enunciation as a semantic domain.

---

Impact

Praise

• Innovation. Many commend Brandt for seeking to close the semantic/pragmatic divide suggested in her endeavour to combine enunciation (a pragmatic theory of meaning) with various topics in cognitive linguistics (a semantic theory of meaning). 'At first glance, these are distinct approaches to language, which seem to roughly move along separate sides of the semantic-pragmatic divide. In Brandt’s hands, however, they are seamlessly brought together in a blended space far from exhausted by the individual parts which, indeed, can be called a cognitive semiotic endeavor.‘
• Correction.
  • Physicalism.As Brandt points out early on in the book (cf. pp. 6, 29–32), cognitive theories of meaning have become too 'physicalist', claiming that certain concepts are built and operate unconsciously and that we have no access to these concepts. ‘Brandt...[points]to the inconsistency of lines of reasoning such as Lakoff & Johnson’s, which rely on conscious judgments and evaluations for denying the role and function of the same.’
  • Lack of Contextualisation. 'at times cognitively oriented analyses of literary discourse fail to account for the textual and discursive contexts in which discourseparticipants’ cognitive processes are embedded (Gavins and Stockwell 2012: 34).'
• Interdisciplinary. All reviewers point out to some extent the fact that Brandt draws on Cognitive linguistics, Cognitive poetics, semantics, philosophy, neurobiology, child development research and literary theory in her approach.

Critique

• Overemphasis on Contextualisation. ‘there is a risk in strongly insisting on the primacy of contextualization of meaning. It may result in an account where the conventionality of linguistic meaning becomes methodologically and theoretically ignored. Methodologically, the interpretation of an expression as “fictive” or “metaphorical” requires recourse to something like conventional or prototypical meaning. Though Brandt’s analyses indeed steer clear of falling into problematic dichotomies as fictive vs. factive, they arguably rely, as do all semantic analyses, on conventional meaning. Without it, the demarcation between expressions as fictive or blended becomes analytically impossible.’
• Too Scattered. The range of literature covered in the book is also impressive. However, at times, this range can be disorienting and the book would benefit from more considered editing and organisation. Clearer signposting of the relevance of the material covered to the overall argument of the book would also be useful.
• Editing. Cf. The above quote. The book reads more like a 600-page notebook than a piece of writing. Between the personal anecdotes, random references to unpublished manuscripts, inconsistent formatting, missing figures and theoretical rabbit trails, the reader struggles to trace the main argument through the book.
  • Highly Specialised. This book is not for the uninitiated. This research is the product of the author's doctoral thesis and no effort was made to make it more accessible to other readers outside the author's own Cognitive Semiotics community. Understanding the book therefore requires an unwieldy investment of time learning all the jargon and theories referred to.