Book Review_creativity and Convention, The Pragmatics of Everyday Figurative Speech

8/2/2019 Book Review_creativity and Convention, The Pragmatics of Everyday Figurative Speech

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Book review

Creativity and Convention: The Pragmatics of Everyday Figurative Speech

Rosa E. Vega Moreno, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2007, 249 pp

Creativity and Convention (CC) is presented as a unified account of figurative speech based on the theoretical

tools provided by the latest developments in Relevance Theory (RT). The book, which makes lavish use of the relevant

literature in psychological experimentation on language processing and figurative language in order to back up its

proposals, is divided into eight chapters. In the following, I will present a brief summary of the most central theses of

the book and then an assessment of its main strengths and weaknesses.

The first chapter discusses state-of-the-art work in psychology dealing with the way the human mind works in

processing new information. The evidence points in the direction of selective processing which in turn often leads toshallow processing. The author argues that it is necessary to incorporate these findings into work on ostensive

communication, which is possible to do in relevance-theoretic terms through the notions of ad hoc concept

construction and ad hoc categorization.

The second chapter is an outline of RT, an approach to human communication according to which the human mind

tends to cognitive efficiency. Our minds have developed mechanisms for the recognition of ostensive stimuli and the

interpretation of the intentions underlying them. Any such stimulus raises expectations of relevance, which triggers a

comprehension procedure based on the balance between effort and effects.

Chapter 3 discusses three approaches to metaphor: (i) the Comparison View, rooted in Aristotles Poetics, which

identifies features common to topic and vehicle; (ii) Glucksbergs Class-Inclusion theory, which proposes that a

metaphorical interpretation results when the vehicle is taken to stand not for its literal referent (e.g. rats in Tom is a

rat) but for a superordinate category that the vehicle exemplifies (e.g. entities which are specially disgusting) and thatcan be constructed ad hoc; (iii) Blacks Interaction Theory, which sees metaphor as a creative process that explores

similarities between entities thus giving rise to the reorganization of assumptions in the topic. These three approaches

share a dynamic view of metaphor that results in the creation of ad hoc or emergent conceptual structure. However,

the three views lack a clear specification of the principles and mechanisms that guide the creation of such structure.

Vega sees relevance conditions as underlying such mechanisms. In this connection, the author briefly examines

Fauconnier and Turners Blending Theory, according to which emergent structure arises from blending conceptual

structure from different mental spaces, i.e. conceptual constructs that are built during communication as needed for

the purpose of understanding. The blended space or blend is the result of combining elements from the different input

spaces with further information retrieved from long-term memory. For example, understanding the metaphor My

surgeon is a butcherinvolves deriving conceptual structure from the input mental space where a surgeon is operating

on a patient and combining this information with conceptual structure from the input space where a butcher is cutting

meat. In the blend we have a surgeon that acts like a butcher operating on a patient as if cutting meat. The blend thus

gives rise to the additional idea of incompetence, which does not belong to either of the input spaces. Vega criticizes

this analysis of emergent structure since it leaves out potential (but possibly crucial) implications (e.g. the surgeon, but

not the butcher, could be sued for medical malpractice). This problem, the author argues, can only be solved by a

theory, like RT, that takes into account the speakers intentions.

The fourth chapter discusses the RT view on metaphor interpretation, where metaphor is not a departure from

literalness or truth but a case of loose use of language. On many occasions speakers prefer to produce a literally false

utterance to convey the intended meaning if the utterance minimizes the amount of effort invested in doing so. A case

in point is when we round off figures as in I earn 1000 dollars [vs. 989.39] a month . The loose expression is easier to

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process and conveys the same meaning implications as its literal counterpart in terms of standards of living, personal

achievement, etc. In a similar way, a metaphor is a literally false utterance that can economically produce a large

number of meaning effects. For example, This room is a pigsty conveys the implications that the room is untidy and

dirty, that it smells bad and makes the speaker sick. The implications derive from broadening the denotation of pigsty

into PIGSTY*, and ad hoc concept that thus designates foul-smelling and untidy places that make people sick. In this

light, the problem of emerging structure can be easily dealt with by considering the assumptions made accessible by

the encoded concepts as mere inputs to a pragmatic inference process. A related issue that seems to be satisfactorilysolved in RT is the transformation problem. For example, My lawyer is a shark conveys the idea that the speakers

lawyer is aggressive and obstinate. This interpretation is taken by many to be a matter selecting the relevant properties

of the vehicle that apply to the topic. The problem is that, even though both lawyers and sharks are aggressive and

persistent they are so in different ways. The relevance-theoretic solution allows for a degree of fine-tuning of the notion

of aggressiveness as applied to sharks which makes the notion denote positive aggressiveness involving energy and

courage or negative aggressiveness involving intentional damage.

Chapter 5 contrasts the relevance-theoretic and other cognitive approaches to metaphor. The Class-Inclusion model

suggests that the content of a metaphorical word contributes to the explicit content of an utterance. This idea is explicit

in RT. Thus, in My lawyer is a sharkwhat is asserted is not that the speakers lawyer is a literal shark but a SHARK*, a

member of the ad hoc category of aggressive people and animals. In turn, Lakoff and Johnsons Conceptual

Metaphor Theory (CMT), which sees metaphor as a conceptual mapping of concrete knowledge onto abstractknowledge (e.g. LOVE IS A JOURNEY), is criticized by Vega on the basis of what she sees as a case of circularity in its

central argument: people talk of love in terms of journeys because people think of life in terms of journeys; we know

that people think of life in terms of journeys because they talk of life in terms of journeys. An additional problem is that

many conceptual metaphors are, according to Vega, mere cases of analogy or simile, but not real metaphors. Thus,

although life is like a journey in some respects, it is not a journey (it does not take place on a bus or a train, we do not

buy tickets to embark on, etc.).

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to idioms with particular emphasis on analyzability and transparency issues. Vega

argues for a model that captures the independence and interaction of both factors. The pragmatic perspective is useful

here too since it allows the analyst to consider idioms as partly motivated by the literal meanings of their parts, an

assumption that finds support in psycholinguistic experiments. Vega further claims that the stored meaning of an

idiom, which is generally the result of broadening its compositional meaning, may sometimes need to be pragmaticallyadjusted into a new ad hoc concept. For example, the expression at snails pace, which has been broadened to

designate slow events, will have to be adjusted differently in The train ran at snails pace and My grandma walks at

snails pace. This view of idiomatic meaning naturally goes beyond the capacity of the compositionality approach.

Finally, Chapter 8 discusses, on the basis of evidence from psychology and pragmatics, the complementariness of

creativity and convention in language use, where convention is related to automaticity in performing other tasks (e.g.

reading, writing, riding a bike, etc.) and can thus be explored in connection to the acquisition of cognitive and motor

skills. Vega sees the development of such routine skills, including those affecting language, as a consequence of the

tendency of human minds to minimize processing effort, a view that is consistent with the central claims of RT.

From this summary it will have become evident that CC provides readers with an updated and exhaustive account of

a number of potentially complementary perspectives on metaphor. The author discusses possible inconsistencies in

each approach and consistently offers the most recent developments in RT as a solution. The result of this effort is a

comprehensive account of metaphor as an everyday language use phenomenon that makes explicit the cognitive andpragmatic connections between figurative and non-figurative speech. Particularly impressive is the discussion of the

various forms of pragmatic adjustment that take place in metaphor comprehension, all of them guided by the search for

relevance. Pragmatic adjustment results in the construction of ad hoc concepts, very similar to the notion of emergent

structure studied in Blending Theory. But in Blending Theory there is no motivation for emergent structure. It happens

because it is retrieved from long-term memory. The advantage of the RT account, in this respect, lies in its ability to

motivate the existence of such structure in terms of the notion of relevance.

However, the appeal to relevance does not endow linguistic theory with much predictive power. For example, in the

surgeon as a butcher metaphor, the surgeons incompetence is a crucial emerging feature. But in other cases, as in

Milosevic was called the butcher of the Balkans, there is no such a feature. Butcher, in this context, is used to

highlight the horrors of Milosevics ethnic cleansing campaigns. RT can account for the two different uses on the

grounds of pragmatic adjustment by postulating the construction through broadening of two different ad hoc

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concepts, BUTCHER* and BUTCHER**. While it is true that this kind of pragmatic adjustment is a requirement of relevance

conditions, what RT cannot explain is (i) how the adjustment takes place in terms of the way our minds handle

concepts, and (ii) why some adjustments are not possible.

The answer to both problems lies in some of the explanatory tools developed by Cognitive Linguistics that the

author has not explored. One such tool is the classical Langackerian distinction between base and profile (Langacker,

1987). Every semantic structure designates an entity, the profile, which is a cognitively more prominent substructure of

a more complex semantic structure or base. We generally profile butcher in the base domain of cutting and sellingmeat, but in the case of a war context the metaphoric topic (Milosevic and his role in the war) calls for a special focus

on butchers in their role as slaughterers who have no feelings of mercy for the animals that they kill. As noted by

Lakoff (1993), the metaphoric topic (called the target in CMT) constrains the way we look at the vehicle (or source).

The topic also allows us to disregard potential vehicles that share the encoded concept but not some crucial conceptual

elements. Thus, we would not refer to Milosevic as the meat cutter of the Balkans. Of course, underlying cognitive

constraints like these is the search for cognitive efficiency, but this does not mean that such constraining factors are

superseded by relevance criteria.

Vega points out that CMT was initially proposed as a theory about why people use the metaphors they way they do.

In contrast, RT intends to account for how people understand utterances, including metaphorical utterances, on the

basis of the same cognitive machinery. RT thus rejects the existence of special processing strategies for metaphor such

as conceptual mappings. There are two problems here. One is the fact that RT accounts for metaphorical uses ofconcepts as cases of broadening concepts (versus narrowing which applies to some metonymies). Ironically enough,

broadening a concept can also be taken as a special comprehension task. So, why substitute one for the other? The

second problem ties in with the lack of constraining power of the relevance-theoretic machinery. If we do not have an

adequate account of the mechanisms used to construct plausible metaphorical expressions, how can we expect

speakers to be capable of shaping their utterances in a way that will maximize relevance? The potential of a

metaphorical utterance to convey the intended meaning implications is based on the hearer knowing what

communicative resources are available to the speaker.

There are two other problems with Vegas treatment of CMT. One relates to the supposed circularity that was

mentioned above.The original argumentin favor of conceptual metaphor is that we canfind evidencein language that, for

example, people think of some aspects of a love relationship in terms of journeys. This allows linguists to postulate a

metaphorical system that underlies a wide array of linguistic expressions (e.g. We are going nowhere, Our love is on therocks,Its been a long, bumpyroad). Since thesystem is conceptuallyavailable it guideslanguage users in their inferential

processes(in We are going nowhere, thehearer may reason that it is possible for both lovers to retrace their steps and find

the right way to achieve their common goals). So cognitive linguists do not claim that people think of love in terms of

journeys because people talk of this concept in terms of journeys; all to the contrary, the claim is that analysts know that

people think of love, and other concepts, in terms of journeys because they find linguistic evidence that that is the case.

The second major problem is the misled assumption that what cognitive linguists regard as metaphors are cases of

analogy or simile. Vega (p. 139) argues that conceptualizing life as a journey would imply we cannot think of life

without thinking of journeys. This is simply a straw man argument. The actual position defended by cognitive

linguists is not that people conceptualize life as a journey, but that some aspects of life those that have to do with

achieving goals can be understood in terms of some aspects of journeys. We can, and we often do, think of life

without thinking of it as if it were a journey. As to the analogy issue, if we are to understand analogy in a narrow

manner as a simile, one may wonder where the analogy is between such concepts as life, love, or careers and journeys.There is no resemblance. Of course, it is possible to broaden the notion of analogy, as is modernly done by some

cognitive scientists (cf. Gentner et al., 2001), to make it cover any form of alignment between structures, an idea that is

very close to the notion of conceptual mapping. But in fact it is possible to see analogical reasoning in a narrow sense

in some cases of metaphor. For example, a pump is to a hydraulic system as the heart is to the blood circulation system.

This analogy licenses the metaphor where we think of the heart as if it were a mechanical pump. Or think of the

lawyers as sharks example. There is analogy in the sense that in their professional context lawyers behave to people

like sharks to their prey. But, as Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have discussed, there are many metaphors that are not

based on resemblance relations between source and target, but rather on experiential correlations. Ironically, LIFE IS A

JOURNEY, which Vega claims is based on simile, is in fact grounded in the more basic correlational metaphor GOALS ARE

DESTINATIONS, which conflates the events of reaching a destination and achieving ones purpose. So the metaphor cannot

be based on analogy except in a very broad sense, which is not the one taken by Vega.

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Despite these obvious misunderstandings, Vega is right in joining some cognitive linguists in their claim that both

CL and RT can benefit from each other. Of course, some adaptation of the most radical claims from both sides may be

required. CL may have to take online processing and pragmatic adjustment more seriously while RT may have to

revise some basic misunderstandings of the CL position, especially in the light of the most recent literature in this

approach.

References1

Gentner, Dedre, Holyoak, Keith J., Kokinov, Boicho K. (Eds.), 2001. The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. MIT Press,

Cambridge, MA.

Lakoff, George, 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In: Ortony, A. (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought. 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, pp. 20022251.

Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books, New York.

Langacker, Ronald, 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez has published research on cognitive models, pragmatics, and functional grammar in the Journal of

Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Folia Linguistica, and in different book series in Mouton de Gruyter and John Benjamins. He has been

an invited speaker in many international conferences, themost recentbeing the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Krakow, 2007),

and the Seventh International Conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor (Caceres, 2008). He serves on the scientific boards of journals

such asJezikoslovlje,Revue Romane, and Cognitive Linguistics. Heis the editorof theAnnual Review of Cognitive Linguistics (John Benjamins) and

co-editor of Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter).

Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez

Department of Modern Languages, University of La Rioja,

Logrono, La Rioja, Spain

E-mail address: [email protected]

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1 Note: Support for this review has been provided by Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant number HUM2007-65755/FILO, which is

associated with the Lexicom research group (www.lexicom.es).
http://www.lexicom.es/http://www.lexicom.es/

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Book Review_creativity and Convention, The Pragmatics of Everyday Figurative Speech