The Geometry of Conceptual Spaces: Cognitive Iconicity and Signed Languages
Sherman Wilcox, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Abstract
The relation between meaning and grammar is surely one of the most crucial and contentious issues in modern linguistic theory. Within the formalist or generative tradition, the claim has been that there is no relation, the classic demonstration being Chomsky's putatively grammatical but meaningless sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
The cognitive grammar framework claims precisely the opposite, that grammar and meaning are indissociable (Langacker 2000). Cognitive grammar claims that language consists solely of semantic structures, phonological structures, and symbolic links between the two. Meaning, the domain of semantic structures, is identified with conceptualization and cognitive processes. Phonological structures constitute our capacity to deal with the physical manifestation of language: sounds, speech sounds in particular for spoken languages, or optical arrays of the hands and face for signed languages.
Another way to describe semantic and phonological structures is in terms of conceptual spaces. Conceptual space constitutes the "multifaceted field of conceptual potential within which thought and conceptualization unfold" (Langacker 1987: 76). There are two subregions of conceptual space specific to language - phonological space and semantic space.
The cognitive grammar model of language suggests a new way to describe iconicity that I have dubbed cognitive iconicity. In the classic view, iconicity is seen as a relation in which the physical form of the lexical unit corresponds to characteristics of the real-world entities to which they refer, the classic example being onomatopoeia. Cognitive iconicity redefines the relation to that between two locations in conceptual space: a location in the semantic region of conceptual space and one in the phonological region of conceptual space. Cognitive iconicity thus may be regarded as a geometric relation within conceptual space. The degree to which a linguistic form, whether lexical or grammatical, is regarded as iconic is a matter of conceptual distance.
In my paper, I will explore the notion of cognitive iconicity in the grammar of American Sign Language. I will also describe metaphor in cognitive grammar terms and demonstrate how metaphor realigns distance relations by moving semantic structures within conceptual space, thus creating cognitive iconicity.