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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science

Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science* Chris Sinha Introduction Cognitive Linguistics (CL) is one of the principal branches of “second generation cognitive science”—the alliance of new approaches emerging from what has been called the “second cognitive revolution” of the last decade of the 20 th century (Harré and Gillett, 1994). It is also the rightful inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy in mid-20th century psychology from which classical (first generation) cognitive science liberated the sciences of the mind (Gardner, 1985). This older tradition, centered in psychology but drawing heavily on biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and sociology, was a kind of cognitive science avant la lettre. It is represented in the German Sprachpsychologie (psychology of language) tradition from Wundt, through Gestalt psychology, to Bühler; in Baldwin’s and Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology; in Bartlett’s socio-cognitive theory of memory; in Vygotsky’s and Mead’s socio-genetic theories of the development of language and cognition; and, of course, by social-psychologically oriented linguists in the United States (Boas, Sapir, Whorf) and Europe (Meillet, Bakhtin/Volosinov), as well as Prague School functionalism (Jakobson, Muka_ovsk_, Trubetzkoy) (see Ch. 41). The main focus of this chapter will be on cognitive psychology, which has been the source of many of the theoretical concepts employed by CL. The simultaneously embodied (biologically grounded) and contextual (socially situated) impetus of second generation cognitive science (G2CS) restores to psychology its original “bridge discipline” status, between the biological, social and formal sciences; bringing it once again to center stage in cognitive science. It is a measure of the poverty of behaviorism, that psychology was compelled to concede disciplinary leadership in

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The author is grateful to the following for their help with references: Dorthe Berntsen (autobiographic memory, e.g. Berntsen 1998); Ocke-Schwen Bohn (infant speech perception, e.g. ); Brigitte Nehrlich (history of psychology and linguistics, e.g. Nehrlich and Clark, 1998). This chapter is dedicated to the memories of George Butterworth and Steen Folke Larsen, with whom I still discourse, after closing time, about psychology.

Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science classical cognitive science (CCS) to formalist linguistics and computer science. The formalist-inspired CCS program viewed human (natural) cognitive processes as no more than an arbitrarily-limited subset of theoretically resource-unlimited, universal computational procedures. Despite the intense research effort generated by this program over a period of more than thirty years, and despite massive technical advances, the core CCS program has probably contributed little of lasting value to psychological science. This is in no way to deny the real advances registered by cognitive psychology and cognitive science during the period that formalism held sway. However, in just about every case, such advances involved an implicit or explicit break with the premises of the CCS program, and a reworking of key ideas in pre-behaviorist cognitive psychology. In the CCS scheme of things, the role of psychology (and psycholinguistics) was firstly to explore human “performance” limitations, and secondly to quarry data to be yielded up for formal modeling. In both roles, psychology was cast as an underlaborer to formal theory, with its research super-program of Artificial Intelligence. Cognitive psychologists were not in much of a position to protest at this treatment, since psychology was suffering at the time from a kind of self-inflicted amnesia. Behaviorism had purged the mind from theory, and scourged theory from the mind. Psychology, emerging from its mindless slumber, could only gratefully, but disastrously, borrow dualistic mentalism from generative linguistics. Behaviorism (for which the mind is supernumary), and formalism (for which the body is merely contingent), thus framed, in fearful symmetry, the disembodied, Cartesian mind of classical cognitivism. There were always, of course, psychological dissenters from CCS, but these tended to counterpose an ecological or social constructionist vision, leaving the heartland of cognition to the classical cognitivists. Not the least of the achievements of CL is that it offers psychologists a new map of this heartland, and new insights into what psychology has traditionally called the “higher mental processes”: memory, reasoning and, of course, language.


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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science The higher mental processes are considered, in the tradition to which CL reaches back, to be the locus of a specifically human psychology (not necessarily speciesunique in every respect, but uniquely developed, as an ensemble of capacities, in the human species); to constitute the domain proper to cognitive psychology (as opposed to, say, psychology of perception); and to occupy the problematic and indeterminate zone at which biologically-based psychological processes, shared by human organisms with other mammals, interface with, and are perhaps transformed by, the processes of social life, symbolization, and cultural tradition. The higher mental processes are thus both the focus of a cognitive sub-discipline of psychology, and an interdisciplinary meeting point between psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, semiotics and the social sciences. Because of the crucial role played by symbolization (sign-function) in mediating (a) all higher mental processes, and (b) individual and social aspects of psychological functioning, psychology of language can be considered to be paradigmatic of the psychology of higher mental processes. Both behaviorism, for which higher mental processes simply do not exist, and CCS, for which all mental processes are “symbolic”, in a restricted and non-semantic sense, are radically opposed to the tradition in cognitive psychology and psychology of language to which CL reaches back. This is not a question only of theoretical orientation, but also of the scope and methodology of psychology of language. In the psycholinguistics born of the first cognitive revolution, the principal questions concern the processing of formally-defined language structure, and the methodology is almost exclusively experimental. In the older tradition of psychology of language, research topics in linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition were closely connected, and language was viewed as a window to the general properties of higher cognition. Consider, for example, the range of linguistic work carried out by Wilhelm Wundt, founder, in Leipzig in 1879, of the first university laboratory of experimental psychology.1 Wundt contributed to the late 19th century debate in linguistic theory regarding the structural and semantic primacy of word vs. sentence; he was the inventor of the tree-diagram notation for analyzing syntactic structure; he was the Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science originator of the term “holophrase” to denote children’s early one-word utterances; and he discussed the complex relationship between grammatical subjecthood, agency and foregrounding, employing these terms in essentially the same sense as cognitivefunctional linguists (Bloomenthal, 1985; Seuren, 1998; see Verfaillie and Daems, 1997, and Ch. 9). Wundt also investigated what we would now term the cognitive basis of language change, and the role in this of metaphor (see Ch. 40). In short, Wundt saw linguistics not merely as an adjunct to, but as a complementary discipline to psychology. As well as interdisciplinarity, Wundt advocated a multimethodological approach to the science of the mind, upholding the complementary roles of experimental psychology and Völkerpsychologie (cultural, or anthropological, psychology), based upon field linguistic methodology. Wundt’s towering status in the language sciences, as much as in psychology, probably lies behind the assertion by Franz Boas that “the purely linguistic inquiry is part and parcel of a thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world”.2 Current research in CL is motivated by a similar research program, in which linguistic theory is unified and synthesized with findings regarding other aspects of higher mental processes. This chapter therefore emphasizes the historical connectedness of CL with non-behaviorist and pre-formalist cognitive psychology, as well as the affinities between CL and other currents in contemporary cognitive science. Where possible, the development of the application of key psychologically-derived notions in CL is traced from their historical roots up until the present day; however, their specific current applications in CL are not detailed, since this would duplicate material to be found elsewhere in this Handbook. Conceptual Foundations in Psychology “Rule” vs.“schema”. The single most important theoretical concept in traditional and formal linguistics is the rule, adopted by CCS in the specific form of the algorithm. CL is a usage-based, not a rule-based theory. The CL unit of analysis that most readily corresponds to “rule” is “schema”, which is employed in a variety of different Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science contexts (e.g. image schema, event schema, construction schema), and recurs throughout this Handbook. The functional equivalence between “rule” and “schema” was already pointed out by Immanuel Kant, who was the first to employ the term in the context of cognitive representation: “Indeed, it is schemata, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts … The concept “dog” signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents.” (Kant, 1929 [1781]: 182-183). Kant here presents us with two hypotheses that have been fruitfully explored in cognitive psychology and CL. The first is that some kind of regularity, or organizing principle, mediates between perception (what he called “intuitions”), on the one hand, and linguistic (or discursive) concepts, on the other. The second hypothesis is that this regularity is “rule-like” in guiding the application of linguistic concepts, and in “abstracting” from the particularity that attends any particular mental image. Kant himself was well aware that the “schema” notion raises as many questions as it purports to solve, but he also realised that these were essentially psychological questions which philosophy was unequipped to answer.3 Foremost amongst these are: (a) if schemata are stored representations (in memory), how do they get to “abstract” from specific objects or episodes, and yet be flexible enough to accommodate new instances of the category to which they apply? (b) What degree of internal structure and differentiation (or “partitioning”: Nelson, 1985) do schemata possess, and how do they fit into larger structures of knowledge and memory? Question (a) was reformulated as follows by Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research Group (1986, Vol. 2: 20): “On the one hand, schemata are the structure of the mind. On the other hand, schemata must be sufficiently malleable to fit around most anything.” A plausible computational and neuropsychological answer to question (a) only emerged in the PDP4 research of Rumelhart and his colleagues in the 1980’s. Question (b) re-emerged in cognitive science research as the issue of how Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science lower-level elements and sub-schemas could be slotted into structural positions in “frames” or “scripts” (Minsky, 1975; Schank and Abelson, 1977), work which in turn influenced both Fillmore’s (1985) “frame semantics” and Lakoff’s (1987) analysis of lexical meaning in relation to Idealised Cognitive Models. The concept of “schema” is therefore of extremely wide application. It has been applied both to perceptual categorisation and to higher cognition; and in relation to the latter, it has been used in theories of memory, language, action and motor planning, and reasoning. The “schema” notion has been criticised on exactly these grounds—that its breadth of application renders the concept vacuous. This criticism was in fact voiced by one of the pioneer cognitive psychologists most frequently cited as promoting the schema notion in the psychology of memory, Sir Frederic Bartlett, who wrote: “I strongly dislike the term ‘schema’ … to refer generally to any rather vaguely outlined theory … it does not indicate what is very essential to the whole notion, that the organised mass results of past changes of position and posture are actively doing something all the time; are, so to speak, carried along with us, complete, though developing, from moment to moment. Yet it is certainly very difficult to think of any better single descriptive word to cover all the facts involved.” (Bartlett, 1932: 201). Bartlett acknowledges that he is appropriating the term “schema” from the neurologist, Sir Henry Head, who proposed its usage in relation to movement, posture, and the body in space: “The sensory cortex is the storehouse of past impressions. They may rise into consciousness as images, but more often, as in the case of spacial [sic] impressions, remain outside central consciousness. Here they form organised models of ourselves which may be called schemata. Such schemata modify the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensations of position or of locality rise into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has gone before.” (Head, 1920: 607).5 Head’s formulation was important to Bartlett primarily because it offered an alternative account to the theory of the memory “trace”, which was essentially the Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science idea that each specific “sense impression” leaves an individual “copy” of itself in the brain. Bartlett, in fact, criticised Head’s formulation, cited above, for using the expression “storehouse of sensory impressions”, which “gives away far too much to earlier investigators … schemata, are, we are told, living, constantly developing, affected by every bit of incoming sensational experience of a given kind. The storehouse notion is as far removed from this as it well could be.” This counterposing of two deeply opposed views of memory anticipates the point made by Rumelhart et al. that (in contrast with locally-addressed memory), distributed memories are both content addressable and reconstructive: “There is no representational object which is a schema. Rather, schemata emerge at the moment that they are needed from the interaction of large numbers of much simpler elements working in concert with one another. Schemata are not explicit entities, but rather are implicit in our knowledge and are created by the very environment that they are trying to interpret—as it is interpreting them.” (Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research Group 1986, Vol. 2: 20). The best known evidence offered by Bartlett for the reconstructive nature of memory involved the repeated reproduction of an unfamiliar story, at various intervals after its reading. To heighten the unfamiliarity of the narrative material, and thus (Bartlett supposed) to increase the extent to which the schematic conventionalization of the remembered material would result in distortions, Bartlett used the now-famous “War of the Ghosts” story—“adapted from a translation by Dr. Franz Boas of a North American folk-tale.”6 Bartlett’s discussion of this and other experiments anticipated not only subsequent work on narrative schemas, but also a number of other themes in contemporary cognitive psychology and cognitive science, which are listed below. i. The role of imagery in language comprehension and in cognition. The role of imagery in thinking, reasoning and problem solving has always been an important (and disputed) topic in cognitive psychology (John-Steiner, 1987; Johnson-Laird, 1983), and one of obvious relevance to CL. Bartlett suggested that studying memory of narrations of dramatically vivid events would lead to a better understanding of the Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science “conditions and functions of imaging”. A similar line of reasoning was followed in a well-known experiment of Bransford and Johnson (1973) investigating the relationship between visual setting and text comprehension (see Fig. 1). Figure 1. Text and Pictorial Context Reprinted from Bransford and Johnson (1973: 392, 396). If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn't be able to carry far, since everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends upon a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to carry that far. An additional problem is that a string could break on the instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face-to-face contact, the least number of things could go wrong.

Subjects’ ratings of the comprehensibility of the text were higher when the picture was presented as prior context. Later, Shepherd and Metzler (1978) showed that the time taken to mentally rotate objects is proportional to the angle of rotation, a finding which suggests that visual reasoning makes direct use of imagery, rather than calling upon symbolic algorithms. Shepherd and Metzler’s work on imagery is widely regarded as having seriously undermined the theoretical presuppositions of CCS. More recently, research by David McNeill and his colleagues on the relationship


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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science between speech and gesture leads them to the unequivocal conclusion that “language is inseparable from imagery” (McNeill, 2000: 57). ii. Affect, consciousness and metacognition. Bartlett regarded the schema as constituting an “organized setting” whose constituents are mobilized for recall through what he called attitude: “a complex psychological state or process [which is] very largely a matter of feeling, or affect.” (p. 207). Attitude is a product of the capacity of the organism to treat schemata as objects of cognition: “To break away from [domination by immediate experience] the ‘schema’ must become, not merely something that works the organism, but something with which the organism can work … So the organism discovers how to turn around upon its own ‘schemata’, or, in other words, it becomes conscious” (p. 208). In modern terminology, Bartlett is drawing attention to the mutual relationships between consciousness, metacognition, and emotion. The cognitive process which is involved in “turning around upon” existing cognitive systems is designated by Karmiloff-Smith (1992) “Representational Redescription”, and is implicated across many domains of cognitive development, including language development. Representational redescription underlies the capacity to analyse, or partition, and to reconstruct or transform schemas. It makes sense, too, to relate it to the ability to construct inter-schematic mappings and blends, as proposed by conceptual integration theory (see Ch. 13). A hint of this may even be found in Bartlett’s discussion of constructive imagination: “Material from any one ‘scheme’ may be set next to material from any other ‘scheme’ … it is not in constructiveness that constructive imagination is peculiar, but in the range and play of its activity, and in the determination of its points of emphasis” (p. 313). iii. Schema, self and autobiographic memory. A closely related topic is that of the neuro-cognitive foundations of the self, self-consciousness and identity. Autobiographic memory has been a major topic of recent research, pioneered by the cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser (Neisser and Winograd, 1988; Rubin, 1996). Neisser’s career is of particular interest in that he was one of the original promoters of the “information processing” paradigm which was cognitive psychology’s Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science disciplinary signature in the heyday of CCS (Neisser, 1967). Later, he developed a critique of information processing cognitive psychology based upon insights from ecological psychology (Neisser, 1976), supplemented by a schema-based theory of memory and perception which attempts to remedy the main and glaring deficiency of ecological perceptual realism—namely, that it offers no theoretical purchase upon higher cognitive processes. Research by Neisser and others on autobiographic memory has confirmed Bartlett’s contention that memory is reconstructive, and such research has been decisive in recent years in undermining claims (themselves based upon Sigmund Freud’s adherence to a version of the “memory trace” theory) of the infallibility of “repressed” childhood memories. Even more radically, perhaps, current research in cognitive neuroscience points to a conclusion already drawn by Bartlett: that the apparently incontestable originary and unitary self of Cartesian theory of mind is itself a socio-cognitive construction. Bartlett wrote: “memory is personal, not because of some intangible and hypothetical persisting ‘self’ … but because the mechanism of adult human memory demands an organization of ‘schemata’ depending upon an interplay of appetites, instincts, interests and ideals peculiar to any given subject” (p. 218) and “we have so far no ground for denying the existence of a substantial, unitary Self, lurking behind all experience, and expressing itself in all reactions. We know only that the evidence … does not necessitate such a hypothesis.” (p. 309). Bartlett anticipates in his triad of hypotheses—the reconstructive nature of memory, the key role of consciousness in “turning around upon” schemas and treating them as cognitive objects, and the emergent, “attitudinal” nature of the self—the most recent findings of cognitive neuroscience. Antonio Damasio proposes that “we store records of our personal experiences in [a] distributed manner, in as varied higher-order cortices as needed to match the variety of our live interactions. Those records are closely co-ordinated by neural connections so that the contents of the records can be recalled and made explicit, as ensembles, rapidly and efficiently … The key elements of our autobiography that need to be reliably activated in a nearly permanent fashion Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science are those that correspond to our identity, to our recent experiences, and to the experiences that we anticipate, especially in the near future [my emphasis – CS] … The images which represent those memories explicitly are exhibited in multiple early cortices. Finally, they are held over time by working memory. They are treated as any other objects are and become known to the simple core self by generating their own pulses of consciousness … a key aspect of self evolution concerns the balance of two influences: the lived past and the anticipated future … The memories of the scenarios that we conceive as desires, wishes, goals, goals and obligations exert a pull on the self of each moment. No doubt they also play a part in the remodeling of the lived past, consciously and consciously, and in the creation of the person we conceive ourselves to be, moment by moment.” (Damasio, 1999: 221-225). Before leaving this topic, it is worth pointing out that even though the “originary Cartesian self” is a construction, even in some sense an illusion, the existence of a sense of persistent identity, a non-fractured autobiographical self, is a fundamental necessity for psychological well-being and even survival. As is dramatically demonstrated by research by Chandler and Lalonde (2000) on adolescent suicide in indigenous (First Nation) and European descent Canadian communities, the emergent autobiographical self is also deeply interwoven with, and in some sense dependent upon, the situatedness of self in collectively shared socio-cultural schemas, narratives, attitudes and ethical-political topoi. Self, like schema, both rests upon, and lends order to, meaning. iv. Meaning, embodiment and society. The psychology (and linguistics, at least in the United States) of the middle of the last century, from behaviorism through CCS, was predicated upon a flight from meaning. Behaviorism reduced meaning to stimulusresponse connections, and CCS marginalized and subordinated it to syntactic form. CL places meaning once again at center stage in language and cognition, and views meaning as being a broader category than linguistic semantics senso strictu. This is again consonant with Bartlett’s view that “we can take any constituent part of a setting and find that it ‘leads on to’ some other, related part. We can then say that its Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science significance goes beyond its own descriptive character … all the cognitive processes … from perceiving to thinking, are ways in which some fundamental ‘effort after meaning’ seeks expression.” (p. 227). A crucial part of Bartlett’s way of thinking was that schemata were conventionalized and shared by social and cultural groups. The concept of schema thus interfaces human neurobiology with the social context of cognitive process, a perspective shared by contemporary theorists in psychological anthropology (Shore, 1996). A topic which is currently emerging as central to much cognitive semantic research is the dynamic tension between sources of semantic motivation in the human body and nervous system, in the properties of the physical world, and in cultural schemas (see Palmer, 1996, and Chs. 2 & 45). Perhaps the major challenge facing G2CS is how to move, not just beyond Cartesian mind-body dualism, but also beyond the dualism of individual and society that has bedeviled cognitive psychology and cognitive science. In this, too, Bartlett was a visionary forerunner of modern cognitive science: he maintained both that psychology was an essentially biological science, and that understanding cognition demanded attention to its social situatedness. v. Dynamism and development. We have already noted that the dynamic character of Bartlett’s notion of schema lends it an affinity with PDP and with cognitive neuroscience. Bartlett’s schema is not a fixed entity but a developing, organized and organizing relational structure. The psychologist most associated with the development of schematization in ontogenesis, however, is Jean Piaget. 7 Piaget must be counted as a major, if somewhat ambiguous, forerunner of cognitive linguistics, and of current CL-inspired work in developmental psychology (Mandler, 1996). Piaget’s account of sensori-motor development in infancy is one in which successive re-organizations and co-ordinations of action schemata, arising from bodily movement and interactions with the physical world, lead to increasingly abstract cognitive representations (or internalized operational structures). The dynamic processes that underpin cognitive development are designated as assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. These biologically-inspired mechanisms were Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science criticized, until recently, as being vague and imprecise; however, PDP computational modeling has shown how they can be specified as emergent properties of learning in connectionist networks (McClelland, ; Plunkett and Sinha, 1992; Elman et al. 1996). Assimilation is the process by which the schema incorporates (and conventionalizes) new instances; accommodation the process by which the schema is modified by successive exposures to different instances; and equilibration is both the manner in which these two complementary processes achieve successive states of stable interaction, and the process by which schemata are assimilated and accommodated to each other. For Piaget, all schemata originate in basic bodily actions; for example, to grasp a cup (assimilate the cup to the grasping schema), the hand must shape itself to the cup in anticipation of the act of grasping (accommodation). Piaget believed that perception was subordinate to action, and he downplayed the role of imagery: an assumption which is, of course, not shared by CL, and which is contradicted by the work of, for example, Mandler (1996) and McNeill (2000). He regarded what he called “figurative thought” as non-progressive, and in some sense primitive. This was because he sought to formalize his stage theory of cognitive development in terms of the mathematical theory of groups, an aspect of his research program which most developmental psychologists now consider unsupported. Piaget´s neglect of the imagistic and iconic aspect of cognition was shared by other psychologists, such as Bühler and Vygotsky (discussed below); it can be counted as a major contribution of CL to cognitive science that it has directed attention to the centrality of visuo-spatial imagery and iconicity in language and cognition. A more productive feature of Piaget’s developmental theory is his employment of the developmental biological notion of epigenesis (Waddington, 1977). Piaget rejected both environmentalism and nativism in favor of a constructivist and organismic theory of development. Again, this notion has sometimes been criticized as a banal “interactionism”, but this criticism fails in the light of modern findings in developmental neurobiology (Changeux, 1985), and in the light of the recent revelation that the human genome contains only 1 or 2 per cent more genes than that Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science of the mouse. Furthermore, at a formal level, there are striking parallels between C.H. Waddington’s concept of an “epigenetic developmental landscape”, and the mechanism of gradient descent learning in an n-dimensional space that is the essence of PDP modeling. The era of formalism in linguistics was also the era of nativism in psychology; G2CS inaugurates an era of cognitive linguistics, and epigenetic and emergentist theories of development (MacWhinney, 1999; Sinha, 1988; Zlatev, 1997). vi. Linguistic schemas and metaphor. A crucial notion in cognitive linguistics is the linguistic schema (construction schema, utterance schema), with its semantic basis in event schematization (see Ch. 16). Although it has not been possible to determine with certainty the first usage of the term schema for linguistic construction, it can be traced at least as far back as Karl Bühler’s employment of the term “syntactic schemata” in a 1908 report of experiments on language comprehension, which he described as “something that … mediates between thoughts and words; a knowledge of the sentence’s form and the relations of the sentence’s parts to each other.” (Innis, 1982: 34). Bühler also employed the schema notion in his analysis of metaphor, which clearly anticipated some key results of cognitive linguistic research. First, he held that “every linguistic composite is metaphorical in some degree, and the metaphorical is no special linguistic manifestation”. Second, he viewed metaphor as a cognitive, not merely linguistic, phenomenon, with nonlinguistic parallels: “there exists outside of language in the most various representational techniques more remote and closer parallels to the linguistic procedure of fusion accomplished by metaphor.” Third, he proposed (in a way that anticipates conceptual blending) that every metaphorical utterance involves a “Sphärenmischung” or “mixing of spheres”, where “sphere” is a conceptual meaning (“Sphären-schema”): “a word’s range of meaning can be denoted as a sphere and the word itself as a schema opening onto it”, just as a syntactic schema “opens onto a particular sphere in the language, allowing only certain items to be included” (Innis, 1982: 49; see also Ch. 41).


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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science Bühler, who was one of the first proponents of Gestalt psychology, also used Gestaltist concepts in his theory of metaphor (to explain the combination of semantic surplus and semantic reduction that is involved in metaphor). This is then an appropriate point to conclude our discussion of the schema notion and move on to Gestalt psychology. Gestalt, Figure/Ground, Prototype. Bartlett employed the schema notion as an alternative to the associationist theory of memory advanced by Ebbinghaus (1897), who invented the experimental method of having subjects memorize lists of nonsense syllables, which was later widely used by behaviorist psychology of “verbal learning”. Gestalt psychology was based upon a similar rejection of associationism, in the field of psychology of perception. The term was employed first by Christian von Ehrenfels (1960 [1890]), who argued from the fact two melodies can be recognized as identical, even when no two notes in them are the same, that what is recognized as identical is the melody’s Gestalt quality. The problem of how to account for Gestalt properties in perception was extended by Max Wertheimer to include higher cognitive processes (such as number concepts from a cross-cultural perspective). In 1913, he proposed that “the contents of our consciousness are mostly not summative, but constitute a particular characteristic “togetherness” … Such structures are to be called Gestalten” (Ash, 1985: 308). Kurt Koffka took this argument a stage further in 1915, arguing for a revision of the concept of “stimulus”, which should no longer be seen as a pattern of excitation, but as referring to whole, real objects, in relation to an actively behaving organism. He concluded that “The unambiguous sensation exists only for the psychologist; it is a product of the laboratory.” (op. cit. 312). This is one of the earliest statements in psychology of the case for “ecological validity”; it should be noted that such considerations did not, in the view of Koffka and the other Gestaltists, invalidate laboratory experimentation, but rather called for both new data interpretations and more naturalistic approaches to experimentation. James J. Gibson advanced similar arguments half a century later, in his ecological theory of perception (Gibson, 1979). Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science Koffka argued that Gestalt qualities of “wholeness” characterize motor action, as well as perception. The next step, to apply Gestalt theory to learning and problem-solving, was taken by Wolfgang Köhler. He observed that chimpanzees appeared to exhibit a spontaneous grasp of means-ends relationships, and claimed this to be evidence of learning through “insight” (Köhler, 1973 [1917]). Köhler pioneered modern naturalistic studies of animal behavior, filming the chimps solving the experimental tasks he set them, and arguing that this ethological record was more valid and revealing than repeated trial laboratory experimentation. We have seen that Wundt had already employed the notion of foregrounding in his analysis of the psychology of the sentence. Foreground and background are the psychological basis, for Wundt, of the linguistic categories of subject and predicate. In fact, Wundt considered the operations of selective attention to be fundamental to higher mental processes, which are dynamically structured by a distinction between the foreground (focus of attention) and the background. The experimental demonstration of the existence of central attentional control in perceptual processing formed, indeed, a major part of his attempt to refute associationism. Edgar Rubin (1914) reported experiments on Figure-Ground perception and reversal, and Köhler attempted to construct a physically-based neurophysiological explanation for the segregation in perception of the Figure, and for the laws of “Good Gestalt” (e.g. Figural closure: the tendency to perceive, for example, an arc, beyond a certain circumference, as an incomplete circle). Köhler drew upon both electrical field theory and fluid dynamics to argue that physical systems tend towards “the simplest and most regular groupings”, calling this “tendency to simplest shape” the Prägnanz of the Gestalt. It has often been maintained that the attempt by Köhler to ground neuropsychology in physics was a theoretical dead end. This may be so for his detailed formulations, but Gestalt notions have proved more resilient, in the long term, than the behaviorism that won out in the late 1930’s. Recent years have witnessed a new interest in physical and mathematical models of self-organizing systems, including biological, cognitive Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science and linguistic forms (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Thom, 1976; Petitot-Concorda, 1985). In terms of specific psychological concepts, Gestalt psychology has probably contributed to CL, directly and indirectly, more than any other single cognitive psychological approach. Prototype theory, which treats categorization in terms of goodness of exemplification and organization around central tendencies, and which is based upon interactive stochastic processing of micro-features, rather than a “checklist” of atomic macro-features, has obvious affinities with the Gestalt notion. Figure/Ground is a fundamental concept in cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar (see Chs. 3, 9, 10), as well as in the recently developed vantage theory of categorization (MacLaury, 1997). 8 As the song says about Joe Hill, Gestalt psychology never died. It is alive, well, and living at a new address under the name of Cognitive Linguistics.9 This is ironic, for Karl Bühler came to criticize Gestalt psychology mainly because he considered that it paid insufficient attention to the psychology of language (Bühler, 1927), and to the specifically human dimension of symbolization. In proposing that the same mechanisms were operative in both perception and higher mental processes, argued Bühler, Gestalt psychology neglected to ask what might be specific to the higher mental processes.10 This is a live issue for CL, inasmuch we still have a great deal to learn about the relationship between the pre-conceptual and the conceptual basis of language (between perception, action and symbolization). Barsalou et al. (1999) and Mandler (1996) discuss how perceptual information may be transformed cognitively and developmentally into symbol-like internal representations; some such representational redescription of imagistic perceptual (and motor: Jeannerod, 1994) neuropsychological formats must play a crucial part in linguistic conceptualization. The recent turn to an embodied cognitive science (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) requires us, in the spirit of Köhler, to “abandon the idea of neat dividing lines between perception, cognition and action” (Clark, 1997: xiii). Bühler would still, however, have maintained that embodied action and perception is not the whole story of


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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science symbolization, and that in order to understand this, we need to move beyond the individual organism. Representation and Symbolization. Representation is perhaps the most important, and most contested, foundational concept in modern cognitive science. CL takes the view that linguistic structure is motivated by conceptual representation and communicative function, thereby placing the representational function of language at the center of its concerns. As a usage based theory of language, CL rejects the strict dichotomy in traditional, Saussurean linguistics between langue and parole, as well as the generative linguistic postulate of the autonomy of syntax. CL, though distinctive, new and unparalleled in earlier linguistic theories in terms of its detailed working-out of the cognitive-functional perspective, has many precursors in linguistic theory (Ch. 41), amongst which one in particular—the Sprachtheorie (language theory) of Karl Bühler (1990 [1934])—deserves especial attention as a fully fledged, linguistically sophisticated psychology of language. Bühler rejected langue as the basis for psychology of language, though not as a basis for linguistic description, which he considered to be a necessary precondition for a psychology of language. He viewed speaking as representational action, and language as the mediating vehicle of such action, elaborating this general perspective in the “Organon” (Tool/Vehicle) model of linguistic communication.11 His best known contribution to linguistic theory was the formulation of a theory of deixis of person and place, which remains to this day a standard model from which most current theories of deixis take off. We shall focus here, however, on the general features of Bühler’s language theory, beginning with the foundations in phonology of his attempt to integrate sign-theory into the psychology of language and speech. Bühler was an active participant in the discussions of the Prague Linguistic Circle, and, as Innis (1985) points out, he was probably the first psychologist to recognize the profound implications of Trubetzkoy’s and Jakobson’s analyses of the phoneme, and phonological representation, for a theory of perception. Bühler’s Gestalt psychological background undoubtedly played an important role in his realization that Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science in perceiving speech sounds, we perceive linguistic material, not untransformed “sensations”. In modern terminology, he understood that speech sound perception is categorical. Categorical perception has been extensively studied in visual as well as in auditory modalities (Harnad, 1987), and we now know it to be characteristic of human perception at all ages. Perceptual categories also have internal structure: they are organized around typicality (Rosch, 1977). Infants’ early speech sound perception is categorical in nature (Eimas et al., 1971); infants learn to apply words to typical category members before atypical ones (Meints, Plunkett and Harris, 1999); and they display preferences for typical over atypical members of lexical categories (Southgate and Meints, 2000). Bühler, however, was primarily interested in working out the consequences of the lesson that the “sign character” of language has a psychological reality which goes, as Bruner (1974) would later put it, “Beyond the information given”: what is “there to be perceived” are, at a physical level of description, just sounds, but what we actually perceive is meaningful speech. His question was then: how does language operate, as a symbol system? Bühler focused his answer on two properties which he considered to be unique to human natural languages, and which distinguished symbol systems from signals. Firstly, symbol systems have a “two class” character: every language has both a lexicon and morphosyntactic rules, and this two class character underlies the productivity of natural language.12 Bühler was aware that historical language change involved the recruitment of lexical items to grammatical constructions, but he insisted that these “two classes of posits” needed to be distinguished in linguistic theory. As we know, the distinction between lexicon and syntax is fundamental to generative grammar and CCS, in which the lexicon consists of a set of symbols, and the grammar of a set of non-meaningful rules for generating legal symbol strings. CL rejects the absolute distinction between lexicon and grammar, but it is arguable nevertheless that Bühler was closer to a CL position than a generative one, since he considered grammatical constructions, as well as lexical items, to be symbolically Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science meaningful (see the discussion above of “syntactic schemata”). Both the lexical and the combinatorial aspects of “two-class” symbol organization were thus, for Bühler, contributory to sentence or utterance meaning. Bühler argued, furthermore, that “one class” systems of signals can be considered as “codes”, but that language, as a symbolic system, is not a code. There is not the space here to explore this issue in depth, but it is arguable that this aspect of Bühler’s language theory points towards a deep theoretical inadequacy of generative linguistic theories: they are “code” theories, not theories of genuinely symbolic systems. Bühler was also aware of the role played by imagistic or iconic “relational faithfulness” (structural likeness) in motivating constructions. “[Language employs] not a materially faithful … but a relationally faithful rendering (through intermediate constructions) … what physicists nowadays naturally count as “mapping” … The set of case forms [function linguistically] only because [the represented states of affairs] are understood and perceived according to the schema of human or animal action … the schema is projected image-like … it is traced out by the [construction].” (Bühler, 1990: 213 & 219). 13 Secondly, Bühler argued that conventional symbol systems are grounded in an intersubjective meaning-field in which speakers represent, through symbolic action, some segment or aspect of reality for hearers. This representational function is unique to symbolization, and is precisely what distinguishes a symbol from a signal. A signal can be regarded as a (coded) instruction to behave in a certain way. A symbol, on the other hand (and using a deliberately updated terminology), directs and guides, not the behavior of the organism receiving the signal, but their intentional stance or (minimally) their attention. This, in a nutshell, is Bühler’s Organon theory of language, diagrammed in Figure 2.


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Referential Situation

Representation

Symbol Expression

Appeal

Speaker

Hearer

Figure 2. A modified variant of Bühler’s Organon Model. (Broken lines represent joint attention)

Fig. 2 modifies Bühler’s own diagram in two main ways. First, it makes explicit that the relationship of Representation is one obtaining between the symbol (or linguistic expression) and a referential situation (which is linguistically conceptualized by the linguistic expression).14 This representational relationship exists within a sign-field which is co-constituted with the other two sign functions: expression (obtaining between the Speaker and the symbolic sign) and appeal (obtaining between the symbolic sign and the Hearer). The symbol expresses the speaker’s communicative intention, and appeals to the hearer to direct their own intentional processes towards the referential situation represented by the symbolic sign.15 Functionally, these three meta-functions of the symbolic sign find structural realization in the person-deixis Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science system of natural languages: I (expression), You (appeal) and He/She/It (representation). The second modification introduced into Bühler’s original diagram is the depiction by means of dotted lines of the way in which the Symbol co-ordinates the “joint attention” of the speaker and hearer, directed towards the symbolically represented referential situation. In linguistic symbolization proper, this joint attention is expanded and developed into the symbolized communicative intention of the speaker, and the intentional reading of speaker’s meaning by hearer. However, in the prelinguistic co-ordination of joint attention by gesture or gaze, occurring productively from about 9/10 months of age, we can substitute for the symbolic sign an indexical communicative sign (e.g. pointing), while preserving the same general sign-field structure. This modification helps us to see how Bühler’s Organon model can illuminate the process of early language acquisition, as well as mature language use (see Ch. 40). To conclude this brief discussion of Bühler’s psychology of language, two significant advantages it possesses over other well-known sign theories can be highlighted. First, unlike other versions of the “semiotic triangle” (e.g. Ogden and Richards, 1923), Bühler’s model places symbolic representation in the context of communication: the Organon model is both cognitive and functional. Second, although Bühler’s binary distinction between “signal” and “symbol” does not invalidate C.S. Peirce’s betterknow triadic classification of index, icon and symbol, it is in many ways more psychologically and functionally illuminating. The essential difference between Bühler’s signal and symbol is that the symbol combines i. intentionality, ii. conventionalization and iii. structural elaboration, and these aspects of human symbolic communication emerge ontogenetically (and probably evolved phylogenetically) in just this order of development. By contrast, communication by signals involves none of these properties. Non-human communication systems have either only a signal character, or only intermittently, unreliably and unsystematically symbolic character (see Ch. 40). Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science Bühler was far from being the only psychologist of language to underline the significance of symbolization as fundamental to higher mental processes. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (e.g. Vygotsky, 1978 [1930]; 1986 [1934]), for example, developed an account of the developmental transformation of individual cognitive processes via the internalization of culturally established forms of “semiotically mediated” social interaction, a view with clear affinities to Bühler’s view of language as a mediating instrument of representation. 16 The sociogenetic theories of Vygotsky, and of his American pragmatist contemporary George Herbert Mead (Mead, 1934), lend a developmental counterpoint to Bühler’s functional-cognitive analysis of linguistic representation, and are key resources for researching and understanding the social interactional grounding of language and cognition. Bühler’s language theory, less well known than Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology, deserves the central place accorded to it in this brief historical survey because of the remarkably prescient manner in which he anticipated numerous themes in CL. In acquainting ourselves with this work, we are not engaging in a mere antiquarian exercise, but in a dialogic exploration of the intellectual foundations of what Tomasello (1998) justly calls The New Psychology of Language. This dialogue is productive, not merely reproductive, because Bühler’s writings invite us, across the gulf of a world war and more than a half a century of cognitive science, to rethink the concept of representation. Conclusion: representation and the situated, embodied mind. What is representation? The standard answer, in CCS, was that representations are internal states of a cognitive mechanism. Given the assumption that the cognitive mechanism is computational, it follows that representations are computational states (or, if we define computation in terms of procedures, then perhaps representations are the inputs and outputs of procedures). The totality of such internal representations at any time constitutes the current knowledge of the cognitive mechanism. Knowledge is therefore a kind of internal code, which stands in a “representational” relation to the Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science world outside the cognitive mechanism. Such internal representations can be communicated from one cognitive mechanism to another, by “recoding” them in natural language. On such an account, the semantic relationship between language and the world is derivative from the relationship between internal (mental) representations and the external world. The particular instantiation or implementation of the cognitive mechanism (in a biological organism, or in a computer, or in any other device capable of functionally realizing the computational states and transitions called for by the theory) is irrelevant to the goal of formalizing the theory. This classical, “representationalist” theory of mind has been challenged by a number of currents of thinking, most of which emerged in the mid-1980’s, and whose confluence makes up G2CS. Back to the Body and Brain. CCS was relatively unconcerned with the biological foundations of human cognition. Insofar as it did concern itself with the biological interface between the cognitive system and the real world, it conceived these in terms of the manipulation of symbolically-rendered “inputs”. The body was subordinated to the computational mind. The turn to an Embodied cognitive science has involved, firstly, a growing understanding of the constitutive role played in human cognition and language by the human body itself (Johnson, 1987); secondly, a (connectionist) computational research program which consciously seeks to constrain its hypotheses in ways which are compatible with what is known about the miocrostructure and functioning of the human brain; and, thirdly, the rise of cognitive neuroscience in the last decade of the 20th century, which promises to become as foundational for G2CS as AI was for CCS (see Ch. 45). Connectionist computational models do not directly “map” the structure of external reality. Rather, they map the input-output regularities that constitute the cognitive model’s adaptive (internal and/or external) environment. Representation ceases to be itself a model, it becomes a property of the functional coupling of the model (or system) with its environment. Furthermore, in “dynamic systems” approaches, this coupling itself becomes to a large extent non-representational. Apparently intelligent Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science behavioral strategies can emerge from morphology in dynamic functional interaction with environment (Clark, 1997). It is clear that the reformulation of the notion of representation is squarely on the cognitive science agenda (Gibbs and Matlock, 1999). Return to Reality. CCS was formalist in method, and mentalist in theory, having as its goal the formal description of internal cognitive states and processes. G2CS does not deny the existence of internal states, nor rule them (as behaviorism did) out of bounds for scientific inquiry. However, the boundary between “external” and “internal” is more permeable in G2CS than it was in CCS—the mind is now viewed as being no more separable from the world than it is from the body. The philosophical basis of CCS was Objectivist (Lakoff, 1987), based upon the idea of a correspondence mapping between external world and internal mental representation. CCS, even though it claimed to be realist, was in fact hopelessly enmeshed in the insoluble antinomies of Cartesian dualism. G2CS is realist, but not Objectivist. It seeks its grounding of the mind not in “mental representation”, but in the activity, movement and engagement of the organism with its environment: a point of view which clearly resonates with the pragmatist tradition (Rohrer, in press; Putnam, 1999). Dynamism and Development. CCS was not much concerned with development, some of its most famous proponents even arguing that it does not really exist (PiatelliPalmarini, 1980). Chomsky’s “argument from the poverty of the stimulus” was generalized from language to cover all aspects of cognition, resulting in the modular nativism which dominated theories of cognition in the recent past.17 In contrast, there is a natural affinity between CL and developmental, constructivist approaches to language acquisition (see Ch. 40). A main aim of future research will be to clarify the developmental relationship between conceptual and pre-conceptual aspects of cognition, by exploring the developmental relationship in human cognition between the emergence of intentional, representational communication, the capacity to employ schematic cognitive representations, and the development of fully fledged linguistic conceptualization. More generally, development and emergence are set to become central themes of G2CS, at all levels from neural plasticity to the socio-cultural Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science context of human cognition and communication. The new cognitive science is biologically based in the new epigeneticism. Socially Situating the Self. The formalism and mentalism of CCS were congenial to the epistemological individualism that it inherited from the Cartesian philosophical tradition. Questions of knowledge (and representation) are posed in this tradition exclusively in relation to the individual knower (or speaker/hearer). For most of its history, psychology too has had a predominant focus on the individual organism and the individual mind. We have also seen, however, that there have been repeated efforts, by psychologists such as Bartlett, Bühler, Mead and Vygotsky, to locate cognition and language in their social context of situation. In reaction against the individualism and mentalism of CCS, some contemporary Vygotskian and social constructionist psychologists have argued that the aim of explaining human action with reference to inner mental states is wholly misguided (frequently appealing in support of this stance to their reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language). Anti-cognitivism (in the sense of anti-CCS cognitivism) is also often anti-naturalist, implicitly or explicitly arguing that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable gulf between neuroscience and the explanation of sociallyintelligible action and interaction. Hutchins (1999: 1) argues that such anticognitivism merely mirrors the inadequacies of traditional cognitivism: “for much of cognitive science, cognition is exclusively something that happens inside people’s heads … The social and physical environments of thinking are what thought operates on, but have no part in thought itself. On the other hand, for some proponents of situated action and situated cognition … mental models are figments of analysts’ imagination. In a reaction against the excesses of early artificial intelligence, these authors deny the relevance of mental models to human action. Both of these views seem wrong to me.” Hutchins here articulates a conviction, shared by an increasing number of researchers in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, that human cognition is best viewed as dually grounded, in organismic properties adapted to the ecology of human life, and Draft Chapter for D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (Eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Draft 1. © Chris Sinha 2001

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science in the socio-communicative processes which construct that ecology. (See also Itkonen, 1997; Harder, 1999; Hutchins, 1995; Shore, 1996; Sinha, 1988, 1999a; Tomasello 1999). Such a cognitive science, grounded in “situated embodiment” (Zlatev, 1997), requires the methodological “recognition of the complementarity, not opposition, of the objectivizing stance of naturalism, and the reflexive stance of the sciences of meaning. This bi-perspectivism, or perspectival complementarity, [can be] called a ‘socio-naturalistic’ approach” (Sinha, 1999b: 34). Representation, because embodiment of culture extends beyond the individual human body (Sinha and Jensen de López, 2000), is not something existing in a different, “mental” sphere from the physical world. Rather, it is both consequence of, and part of, the shaping of the world by human agency, and the signifying of the world in acts of human, intersubjective communication.

1

A bust of Wundt, along, amongst others, with one of Karl Bühler, can be viewed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Wundt was sceptical about the application of experimental methods to language, because he considered naturalistic observation and linguistic analysis more appropriate methodologies. Bühler (who debated with Wundt over the appropriateness of experimental methods for studying higher mental processes in general) can be credited with founding modern experimental psycholinguistics: “he moved psycholinguistics into the laboratory, something George Miller had to accomplish again half a century later” (Levelt, 1981: 190). 2

Boas, (1966) [1911], cited in Palmer, (1996: 11).

3

Brigitte Nehrlich (p.c. 2001) points out that “Kant saw the schema as a procedure (Verfahren) of the productive imagination, see Kant (KdrV B179)” and that “Kant’s distinction between an image and a procedure of imagination, i.e. a schema, is similar to Wittgenstein’s conception of static and dynamic meaning, e.g. PI 251, PI 141”. 4

PDP: Parallel Distributed Processing; a strongly connectionist approach to cognition and learning.

5

Cited in Bartlett (1932: 200). Head was by no means the first to employ the term “schema” after Kant. Herbart employed it in his early 19th . associationistic psychology, and also coined the terms “assimilation” and “accommodation”, but this can safely be considered prehistory. 6

Op. cit. P. 65. Bartlett references the Boas source as Ann. Rep. Bur. of Amer. Ethnol. Bull. 26, pp. 184-5. 7

Piaget was a biologist by training and did not designate himself as a psychologist; for his interdisciplinary science of cognitive development used the term (coined by James Mark Baldwin) genetic epistemology. 8

We have already noted Bartlett’s use of the term “organized setting” as synonymous with “schema”, and it is interesting in this light that he clearly identifies, with reference to Rubin’s Figure-Ground experiments, Schema with Ground, entitling one of his subsections “The Scheme, or Setting, which makes Perceiving possible” (Bartlett, 1932: 32).


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9

Gestalt psychology was much weakened by the fact that many of its founders were victims of the Nazification of the German (and, later, Austrian) Universities, and compelled to emigrate to the United States. Wertheimer was a Jew, closely associated with Marxist and socialist philosophers, and a friend of Einstein. He was among the first professors dismissed by the Hitler regime. Köhler was one the few German professors to publicly protest at the Nazi purges of the universities and to try to defend his assistants accused of “communist activities”. Karl Bühler was associated with progressive educational circles and his wife, Charlotte, was Jewish. Charlotte Bühler was a developmental psychologist and psycholinguist who founded Gestalt therapy. Karl Bühler “spent the last 23 years of his life in total oblivion in America” (Levelt, 1981), his psychology of language neglected; the work of the other Gestalt psychologists mentioned here was received with interest and respect in the United States, but lacked the institutional strength of behaviorist psychology. 10

This criticism was also to be leveled, decades later, against Gibson’s ecological psychology.

11

The name of the model is taken from Plato’s Cratylus.

12

This discussion of productivity was not original to Bühler and can also be found in Wundt, but Bühler developed it particularly clearly. 13

The symbolic field of language, according to Bühler, is both an intermediary and an organizer (“an ordering and coordinating implement”, p. 217); in the quotation in the main text the term “construction”, employed by Bühler in designating one kind of such “implement” is accordingly substituted for the now unfamiliar expression “field implement”). 14

Bühler employed the designation “objects and states of affairs” ( ) for what I name referential situation, and “sender” ( ) and “receiver” ( ) for, respectively, Speaker and Hearer. 15

The symbolic sign-field thus also functionally incorporates the pre- or sub-symbolic aspects of meaning or signification: “[The complex linguistic sign] … is a symbol by virtue of its coordination to objects and states of affairs, a symptom (index) by virtue of its dependence on the sender, whose inner states it expresses, and a signal by virtue of its appeal to the hearer, whose inner or outer behavior it directs as do other communicative signs.” (Bühler, 1990: 35). Note that in Bühler’s theory representation is a relationship between symbol and world, not synonymous with or reducible to speakers’ “inner states”. 16

There is a tragic parallel between Bühler’s expulsion by the National Socialists, and the condemnation in the Soviet Union of Vygotsky’s psychology as a “bourgeois deviation” during the Stalin era. 17

The argument from the poverty of the stimulus, as developed by Chomsky with respect to language, whether its premises were really correct or not, at least had the virtues of originality, relevance and intellectual substance. The same cannot be said for arguments such as that, since witches and ghosts are never actually perceived, concepts of religion and magic are innate.

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Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science Barsalou, Lawrence, Karen Olseth Solomon and Ling-Ling Wu. 1999. Perceptual simulation in conceptual tasks. In Masako K. Hiraga, C. Sinha and S. Wilcox (eds.) Cultural, Psychological and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 209-228. Berntsen, Dorthe. 1998. Voluntary and involuntary access to autobiographical memory. Memory, 6, 113-141. Blumenthal, Arthur. 1985. Wilhelm Wundt: psychology as the propadeutic science. In Claude E. Buxton (ed.) Points of View in the Modern Hstory of Psychology. London: Academic Press. 19-50. Bransford, J.D. and Johnson, M.K. 1973. Consideration of some problems of comprehension. In W.G. Chase (ed.) Visual Information Processing. New York: Academic Press, 383-438. Bruner, Jerome. 1974. Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing. London: Allen & Unwin. Bühler, Karl. 1990 [1934]. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chandler, Michael and C. Lalonde. 2000. Cultural continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada’s First Nations. Transcultural Psychiatry 35: 191-219. Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford Books. Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London, Heinemann. Ebbinghaus, H. 1897. Grundzüge der Psychologie. Leipzig: Veit. Ehrenfels, Christian von. 1960 [1890]. Über Gestaltqualitäten. In F. Weinhandel (ed.) Gestalthaftes Sehen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlige Buchgesellschaft.


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