Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality

Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and prototypicality. The unidirectional nature of metaphors is a product of various asymmetries characteristic of grammatical structure, in particular, those related to thematic role assignment. This paper argues that contemporary metaphor unidirectionality is the outcome of an evolutionary journey whose origin lies in an earlier bidirectionality. Invoking the Complexity Covariance Hypothesis governing the correlation of linguistic and socio-political complexity, the Evolutionary Inference Principle suggests that simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to more complex ones, and accordingly that bidirectional metaphors evolved at an earlier stage than unidirectional ones. This paper presents the results of an experiment comparing the degree of metaphor unidirectionality in two languages: Hebrew and Abui (spoken by some 16 000 people on the island of Alor in Indonesia). The results of the experiment show that metaphor unidirectionality is significantly higher in Hebrew than in Abui. Whereas Hebrew is a national language, Abui is a regional language of relatively low socio-political complexity. In accordance with the Evolutionary Inference Principle, the lower degree of metaphor unidirectionality of Abui may accordingly be reconstructed to an earlier stage in the evolution of language. The evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality in metaphors argued for here may be viewed as part of a larger package, whereby the development of grammatical complexity in various domains is driven by the incremental increases in socio-political complexity that characterize the course of human prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

Metaphors They Lived By: The Language of Early Modern Intersubjectivity

This chapter contends that conceptual metaphors constitute a form of distributed cognition. But while Lakoff and Johnson (1999) propose a transhistorical theory of conceptual metaphor, the present essay, following Trim (2007, 2011), presents a diachronic account of conceptual metaphor that allows for cultural evolution and historical change. Originally presented as a companion piece to Lochman, this chapter offers a case study of metaphors of emotional and cognitive enaction that were prominent during the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, and that throw into relief certain premodern perceptions of intersubjectivity and synchrony. Conceptual metaphors frequently entail notions of gender, in addition to those of embodiment, extension, and enaction. Drawing attention to the gendered aspect of the history of distributed cognition helps us to understand our own embodiment better, while also enabling us to perceive and to critique in new ways the long history of real and imagined gender differences, as well as the political, social, and conceptual hierarchies that have been naturalized in and by our metaphors.

Concept Finding Proofs

We propose a proof-theoretical way of obtaining detailed and precise information on conceptual hierarchies. The notion of concept finding proof, which represents a hierarchy of concepts, is introduced based on a substructural logic with mingle and strong negation. Mingle, which is a structural inference rule, is used to represent a process for finding a more general (or specific) concept than some given concepts. Strong negation, which is a negation connective, is used to represent a concept inverse operator. The problem for constructing a concept finding proof is shown to be decidable in PTIME.1 1. This paper is an extended version of [1].

altri canoni / canoni altri

The concept of the literary canon is one of the most debated and controversial in the western intellectual tradition. This book offers ten contributions by Italian scholars of Anglo-American culture addressing the way in which the concept of the literary canon holds out against areas traditionally considered as external or extraneous to it. The essays range over different topics: the etymological analysis of the term "canon"; the relations between canon and performativity; paraliterature – a universe populated by non-hierarchic genres; the relations between post-colonial literature and the canon; postmodern biofiction; studies on translation and finally gay and lesbian literature. The book ends with a meditation on the innovations wrought on the Anglo-American canon by the virtual world of Internet and with a reading proposal originating from a different area of literary studies. Taken as a whole, the intention of the book is to pave the way to democratisation and pluralism in literary studies, going beyond the limitations set by the traditional scale of values of the "western canon". It proposes a frequentation of the geographical and cultural borderlines and hence of the areas of resistance that such borderlines pose to the dominant conceptual hierarchies within and around us, enabling us to glimpse an original future for literature and for western culture in a broader sense.