Abstract
A central finding in experimental research identified with embodied cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e., executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment—the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances—makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction.
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Notes
I will address social cognition only in the basic sense of meaningfully interacting with others, ignoring issues that have to do with the so-called “theory of mind”.
I am thus following a program akin to that of Gallese and Lakoff (2005). However, Gallese and Lakoff focus on the semantics of concepts, while my focus here will be on the semantics and construction of utterances.
The term “simulation”, central to my argument, can be used in different ways. A specific usage has developed in the EC literature (and I shall adhere to it in this paper), which takes the word “simulation” to imply embodied simulation. Such simulation involves the (partial) imitation of the simulated action, rather than manipulation of abstract representations. At least in the case of simple bodily actions (on which current research focuses), simulation is performed in the motor system of the brain, rather than in a part of the brain dedicated to abstract reasoning or logical calculus (Gallese and Lakoff 2005). Since I understand embodiment to be related to action, rather than to the body per se, I take embodied simulation to involve some aspect of performing an action, even if it is not a bodily action.
All transcripts are taken from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois and Englebretson 2004; 2005). The transcription conventions are as used in the corpus (Du Bois et al. 1993), with slight simplification. Lines in the transcript correspond to intonation units (Chafe 1993). Other common symbols are: “@” (laughter), “=” (prolonged syllable), “(H)”, and “(Hx)” (audible inhaling and exhaling respectively). Several dots indicate a pause, proportional in length to the number of dots. The heading includes the filename and the location of the cited segment in the audio file.
While the words are attributed to Stephanie, it does not imply that she actually said, or will say, them. This is a typical case of what Pascual (2002) calls “fictive interaction”. By definition, all cases of fictive interaction are also cases of polyphonic reenactment: They involve characters presented as interacting with one another within an utterance. But polyphony is a broader category, not limited to the fictive. Thus, a faithful quotation would not count as fictive interaction, but would still exhibit polyphony.
It is common in the cognitive linguistics literature dealing with forms of polyphony (e.g. Brandt and Brandt 2005; Pascual 2002; Verhagen 2005) to describe these phenomena in terms of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier and Turner 2002): Each character occupies a mental space. Such usage offers a clear link between work on polyphony and intersubjectivity in language and mainstream cognitive linguistics, and is not alien to mental space theory itself (see, e.g., Coulson and Fauconnier 1999). However, on the philosophical level, the appeal to mental spaces is problematic, especially for an account committed to an EC perspective. After all, mental spaces are abstract entities and an account of language that reduces actual utterances to abstract entities is hardly in the spirit of EC. Rather, polyphony involves the actual or potential perspectives of agents, real or imagined (including personified inanimate objects and abstract ideas; cf. Cooren 2010). It may or may not be the case that our ability to entertain mental spaces in general somehow stems from our ability to consider how other people act and perceive the world, but I do not believe, and would not want to imply, that the converse is true.
There are many different strands within CxG, not all of which fit an EC-based account of language equally well. My focus here is on the more radical and usage-based approaches, such as that of Croft (2001), and to a lesser extent of Goldberg (2006). Also relevant is Gasparov’s (2010) theory of grammar, which is de facto a version of CxG even as he does not identify it as such. All these theories follow the more general principles laid out in Langacker (1987).
Constructions are established action routines, familiar to most speakers of a language. But reenactment can also be performed online, by appropriating a prior (usually immediately preceding) utterance from the ongoing conversation. Such on-the-spot reenactment has recently been studied by John W. Du Bois (2011) in his theory of dialogic syntax.
I would like to than an anonymous reviewer for several proposals for conceptualizing the issues discussed in this section.
Cf. Arie Verhagen’s (2005) work on sentential negation and argumentative conjunctions. Verhagen convincingly argues for considering such constructions as involving coordination between at least two personae. Thus, in the case of sentential negation, the audience not merely perceives the construction as expressing a proposition, but actually has to entertain the negated proposition as attributed to a character and then reject it.
People sometimes use prosodic markers to signal irony, but they are optional. Moreover, taken in themselves, prosodic markers are ambiguous. Thus, it is only in the context of an utterance interpreted as ironic, that a speaker’s tone of voice can appear ironic to her audience. No objective properties of the prosody used are in themselves sufficient to mark irony.
Cf. the results reported in Giora (2007), which indicate that irony is processed separately and more slowly than literal and metaphoric uses of language.
More context is needed to determine whether “why don’t they say” implies this is a position Republicans could have taken but did not, or whether the statements reflect an actual (insincere) Republican argument. My analysis assumes the latter.
More precisely, in a conversational setting, it appears between turn construction units, as defined in Sacks et al. (1974).
Also, as Du Bois (2009) shows, pauses between TCUs in a monolog may mark not a continuation, but a transition between parts of an utterance assigned to different characters.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Robert E. Sanders and Haim Marantz, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their highly useful and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Wendy Sandler for sharing some of her own and her colleagues’ work in progress with me. Some of the ideas contained here were first presented in April 2011 at the 13th conference of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis, “Dialogue and Representation”, Université de Montréal. While writing this paper I benefited from a postdoctoral fellowship from the Israeli Committee for Higher Education and the University of Haifa.
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Sandler, S. Reenactment: an embodied cognition approach to meaning and linguistic content. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 583–598 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9229-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9229-8