Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 14:29:29 -0800 (PST) From: Aaron Fox Subject: Re: Logic, experiential basis Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: linganthro list Reply-to: Aaron Fox MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk Gary Palmer wrote:

> what I have seen [on this list]
> regarding the search for some underlying common logic that
> enables interpretation between otherwise incommensurate
> languacultures suggests that the correspondents have not
> been reading cognitive linguists and philosophers.

I am *quite* familiar with Lakoff and Johnson, and much other work in cognitive/experiential phenomenology -- it is one literature from which I draw many of my arguments. (I esp. like Varela's *The Embodied Mind* which, vis a vis Hal's comments, compares Zen Buddhist and Western phenomenological methods of gaining insight into unconscious processes, and finds them commensurable). A similar perspective, but this time concerning the evolution of human language and its categorical properties, is Stokoe, Wilcox, and Armstrong's 1995 *Gesture and the Nature of Language* (Cambridge UP).

Ironically, it is in attending to the apparent "boundaries" of "Language" (gesture, metaphor, music, visual perception) as an abstract semiotic representational system that we find the strongest support for a universal (biological-social) basis for Language's distinctive properties. For example, see the citations to the tradition Gary cites in Feld & Fox "Music and Language" in the Annual Rev., 1994.

I think there is sometimes an ironic tendency (esp.of late among *male* academics, for reasons which may be obvious) to *overstate* the primordiality and non-discursivity of "the body" and "embodied schema" (and even "affect" and "emotion" as extensions thereof) over cognitive/referential schema and taxonomies and rules. Let me also emphasize that I do not mean to restrict this "Logic" to lexical and syntactic representations. I think there are *definitely* pragmatic representational universals (and parameters thereof), as theorized in Hanks, Duranti & Goodwin, Silverstein, Lucy, etc. etc. , and that these are clearly bound up with embodied orientations to reality such as our *feeling* of emplacement in space and time (I think esp. of Hanks's *Referential Practice* here). But these representations take on a life of their own when they become lexicalized/grammaticized and recombinable in Language and therefore constitutive of cultural transmission (giving some evolutionary support to Quinn and Holland, and the "cultural models" critique of Lakoff, Johnson, et al.)
Aaron
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