Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Assignment 1

Distributed: September 4, 2008

Due: September 16, 2008

Instructions: Feel free to discuss this assignment with your classmates. But write up your discussion notes and answers independently (you only have to turn in the latter). Double-space all work and use a font size no smaller than 12. Your entire homework should not be longer than five pages.

We've looked at several different aspects of meaning. All of these have been argued to support the idea that meaning isn't out there in world, but instead that we construct meaning on the basis of our interactions – in our bodies – with the world. This is the idea of embodied meaning.

In this assignment, you will write very brief, critical descriptions of three of the phenomena we've discussed so far in class. You can select from basic-level categories, prototype effects, metaphor, and metonymy.

For each phenomenon, provide answers to three questions.

(1) What is the most compelling evidence that this phenomenon is an active part of how people access the meaning of language? (The evidence can be a well reasoned argument, or empirical evidence. Make sure to describe this is enough detail to support your point.)

(2) In what way does this evidence argue that meaning is embodied?

(3) What is the most devastating criticism of this argument that you can think of? That is, what makes other explanations could we find for the evidence in (1), or in what ways does this evidence fail to demonstrate that meaning is embodied?

Here is a sample response, for the phenomenon of polysemy:

(1) Polysemy is when a single word has multiple meanings represented in a language-user's cognitive system. Compelling evidence for polysemy comes from a priming study (Klepousniotou, 2002), in which participants heard a sentence that primed one meaning of an ambiguous word, and then performed a lexical decision task on that word. That study found that purportedly polysemous words showed stronger priming than purportedly homonymous words. This is evidence that the different senses of a polysemous word are stored in a more tightly related fashion than are homonymous words.

(2) The phenomenon of polysemy shows that meaning is embodied because it usually isn't objective similarity or shared objective features that define the different senses of a polysemous word. Instead, a word can have multiple meanings based on our own perceived similarity (like a stuffed lion versus a real lion), or based on our experience with a frame (e.g. a newspaper and the editor of the newspaper and the corporation that runs the newspaper). The multiple meanings of polysemous words are defined by our experiences, rather than features that are out there in the world, which argues that word meaning is dependent upon our own embodied experiences.

(3) Polysemy is very difficult to define. Without clear definitions and discovery procedures for these two categories, it's impossible to know when we're looking at polysemy, and when homonymy. As a result, even if there is some evidence of different priming in different words, we don't know whether this extends to all cases of polysemy.