Semantic categories and conceptual categories: content The present study focuses on a specific construal operation: linguistic

categorization. It is assumed that the meaning contrasts between different causality markers coincide with different conceptual categories of causality. Thus, selecting a specific causality marker from the range of possibilities in a particular language is interpreted as assigning a given causal relation to a specific conceptual category of causality. The importance of categorization in human thought has been argued for by Lakoff 1987:

There is nothing more basic than categorization in our thought, perception, action, and speech. Every time we see a kind of thing, for example a tree, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason about kinds of things – chairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind of thing at all- we are employing categories. […] Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives. An understanding of how we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and how we function, and therefore central to an understanding of what makes us human. (Lakoff 1987: 5-6).

Within the field of cognitive semantics, the starting assumption is that “the structural categories of language itself will be analogous, in many ways, to the categories which human beings percieve in the non-linguistic world around them” (Taylor 1995: x). Findings from cognitive psychology and anthropology suggest that conceptual thought is organized in models (cf. discussion in Section 2.2.1) The idea that conceptual models play an important role in language too, is being proposed for decades. Examples are: schema theory (Rumelhart 1975), scripts (Schank &

Abelson 1977), frames with defaults (Minsky 1975). Fillmore’s (1977) ‘frame semantics’ is often taken to be the forerunner of ‘modern’ cognitive linguistic understanding of the way cognitive models may be manifest in language (Lakoff 1987: 68; Barlow & Kemmer 2000: xx). He maintains that words and constructions are interpreted against the background of conventional situations of use which include far more than linguistic information. Thus, Fillmore (1977) argues that there may exist interdependence between linguistic ‘frames’ and cognitive ‘scenes’.

Building on these findings, cognitive linguists assume that there is a direct relation between semantic knowledge and world knowledge (‘encyclopedic knowledge’) (cf. Langacker 2000: 3; cf. Haiman 1980; Lakoff 1987; Taylor 1995;

Geeraerts 1997; 1992). Lakoff (1987: 68), building on Fillmore’s propositional structure, elaborates this idea. He introduces the concept of ‘Idealized Cognitive Model’ (ICM); a “complex structured whole, a Gestalt.” Cognitive models are

‘idealized’ in that they often represent knowledge and phenomena that do not exist objectively in nature (Lakoff 1987: 69).

The assumption that linguistic meaning is to be equated with ‘speaker construal’ has important consequences for the definition of the content of semantic categories. The construal approach to meaning implies that semantic content is by definition ‘filtered’ by human perception and conceptualization (cf. Section 2.3.1).

This is why cognitive semantic analyses start from the phenomenological level of analysis (cf. discussion in Section 2.2) instead of attempting to relate semantic

content to some notion of ‘objective’ reality. This perspective has consequences for the form a semantic theory may take. This is indeed what has been proposed in numerous cognitive linguistic studies on the linguistic expression of causation. For example, Turner (1987) argues that many lexical expressions of causation witness to specific metaphorical understanding of causal processes (= phenomenological by definition). Some examples are cited in (5):

(5) Night produces fear.

Filth causes stench and disease.

Age causes sickness.

Solitude causes anxiety.

None of the causal relations in (5) can be properly analyzed making use of

‘scientific’models of causality. Rather, Turner claims, the examples cited are to be understood by way of the conceptual metaphor CAUSATION IS

PROGENERATION⁴ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). The specific metaphoric inference pattern invoked for interpreting the causal statements in (5) is the one of lineage,

“(expressing) paths by which things in the world, the mind, and behavior can spring from one another” (Turner 1987: 143). The metaphor is more explicitly visible in the original formulations of the statements in (5), cited in :

(6) Sable Night, mother of dread and fear Stench, diseases, and old filth, their mother Sicknesses, or their true mother, Age Solitude is the mother of anxieties

‘Causation as progeneration’ is the main conception of causation we use to understand mental creation. In the metaphorical mapping of CAUSATION IS PROGENERATION, ‘cause’ corresponds to the parent (mother, father) and ‘effect’

corresponds to child (6) (son, daughter). In the interpretation of the type of causal statements at hand, Turner identifies a number of elements that seems to occur in the linguistic expression of causation in general. Examples are: ‘cohesion and

individuation’, ‘quickness’ and ‘efficacy’ as aspects of a causal relation. Analysis of causal relations in these terms clearly deviates from the modern analytical, scientific understanding of the concept. As a matter of fact, it shows closer resemblance to pre- or early scientific understanding of the concept (cf. Talmy 1988; 2000)

Cognitive models play an important role in linguistic categorization, too. It is assumed that distinct descriptions of a single phenomenon differ in the frames of knowledge in relation to which the conceived situation is characterized. (Verhagen to appear: 2). A direct relation is assumed to exist between semantic categories and conceptual categories, as stated by Geeraerts (1997):

4 It is convention to refer to conceptual metaphors with capital letters (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980)

[T]he categorization function of language imposes a structure on the world […]. Specifically, language is a way of organizing knowledge that reflects the needs, interests, and experiences of individuals and cultures (Geeraerts 1997: 8).

Probably the most influential theory concerning the linguistic categorization of causal events is Talmy’s (1976, 1988, 2000) theory of ‘Force dynamics’, one of the basic imaging (or: construal) systems in language he identifies (cf. discussion above). Force dynamics characterizes “how entities interact with respect to force”

(2000: 409). Talmy positions his theory of causal constructions within the “broader approach of cognitive semantics”. In accordance with the approaches discussed above, Talmy claims that “the conceptual system for force interaction that appears to be built into language structure can be related to other cognitive domains. The linguistic system, in fact, shows close parallels with the conceptual systems for force interaction both in naïve physics and psychology, and in early science, as well as in casual treatments of modern science” (2000: 410). As for the general validity of Force dynamics explaining the linguistic expression of causality, Talmy claims:

Force dynamics (…) plays a structuring role across a range of language levels. (…) it has direct grammatical representation. In English, our main language of demonstration, such representation appears not only in subsets of conjunctions, prepositions and other closed-class elements but, most significantly, also as the semantic category that most uniquely characterizes the grammatical category of modals as a whole (…) (2000: 409).

According to Talmy, prototypically, causation is conceptualized as ‘two forces opposing each other’. The examples in (7) represent the basic pattern, “underlying all more complex force-dynamic patterns” involving ‘steady-state opposition (2000:

415).

(7) (a) The ball kept rolling because of the wind blowing on it.

(b) The shed kept standing despite the gale wind blowing against it.

(c) The ball kept rolling despite the stiff grass.

(d) The log kept lying on the incline because of the ridge there.

Language marks a role difference between the two entities exerting the forces. One of the entities is singled out for focal attention. According to Talmy, the salient issue in the interaction between the two forces is whether the entity ‘in focus’ is able to manifest its force tendency or, on the contrary, is overcome (2000: 413). The force tendencies at stake can be of any nature –rolling, standing or lying still in the examples in (7) but according to the conceptual model of Force dynamics they are relevant only in a highly abstract way; they are categorized dichotomously as having either a tendency towards ‘action’ (the focal participants in the a and c variants) or a tendency towards ‘rest’ (the focal participants in the b and d variants). The second

force entity is considered for the effect it has on the first entity, the focal participan, whether it will overcome its inherent force tendency or not.

The basic categories discussed here can be extended into more complex types, Talmy claims. Thus, Force dynamics is “a generalization over the traditional linguistic notion of “causative”: it analyzes ‘causing’ into finer primitives and sets it naturally within a framework that also includes ‘letting’, ‘hindering’, ‘helping’, and still further notions not normally considered in the same context” (2000: 409). The Force dynamics theory not only comprises the prototypical type of causing ‘onset causing of action’, which all accounts treat – an unanalyzed notion of primitive causation - but defines causation as “a complex built up of novel primitive concepts”

that reassess the idea of causation “as just one notion within a related set”; “a systematic matrix of concepts” (2000: 428).

Talmy, too, notes that the force dynamic understanding of causal expressions differs substantially from the type of models characterizing ‘rigorous (modern) scientific thought’. The theory of Force dynamics builds on the strong cultural tradition in physical (and psychological) science of analyzing phenomena as force interactions (that is, the idea that causality may be analyzed as concerning force interactions is not at all new, to say the least; cf. discussion in Section 2.2 above), but finds that the concept of force interactions is coded in language in a simplified, pre-scientific or naïve, manner. He finds that it is not the ‘conceptual models used inmodern science’ that are coded in the grammar of language, but the naïve models that guide our everyday reasoning (2000: 410; 1988).

The concepts of ‘privilege’ (of one participant over another in terms of focus, 2000: 456), tendency (intrinsic force tendency of one of the participants),

‘stationariness’ (as a distinct state set apart from motion) and relative strength (cf.

the discussion of the examples in (7)) don’t have equivalents in modern science and must be understood as typical examples of ‘speaker construal’ (as discussed above) that defines linguistic construal of events rather than objective reality.

Talmy’s theory of Force dynamics is elaborated for Dutch causal verbs by Verhagen & Kemmer (1997; Kemmer & Verhagen 1994). In Chapter 3, Talmy’s theory as well as Verhagen & Kemmer’s analysis of doen and laten within this framework are discussed in more detail. In Chapter 1 it was suggested that the meaning of Dutch causal connectives, too, can be adequately characterized in a categorization framework. This proposal will be elaborated in Chapter 4.

2.3.3 Semantic categories and conceptual categories: internal organization