Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Editors
Dirk Geeraerts
John R. Taylor
Honorary editors
Rene Dirven
Ronald W. Langacker
De Gruyter Mouton
Meaning in Mind
and Society
A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn
in Cognitive Linguistics
by
Peter Harder
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-020510-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-021605-9
ISSN 1861-4132
Harder, Peter.
Meaning in mind and society : a functional contribution to the
social turn in cognitive linguistics / by Peter Harder.
p. cm. (Cognitive linguistics research ; 41)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-020510-7 (alk. paper)
1. Cognitive grammar. 2. Sociolinguistics. I. Title.
P165.H37 2010
306.44dc22
2010020071
I have been trying to write this book for about seven years. As usual, it
would never have happened without the encouragement and help of a
number of people. I am grateful to Anke Beck from Mouton de Gruyter
for starting the discussion that led to the book, and to her and Birgit Siev-
ers for remaining patient with me. Dirk Geeraerts on various occasions
discussed key ideas and offered a penetrating critique of a previous ver-
sion of chapter 6. I am grateful to Eve Sweetser for making it possible to
be a visitor at Berkeley at a formative phase of the project.
Without the pragmatics circle, an informal reading group that has
existed since 1977, I would never have discovered many of the perspec-
tives that made it possible to think of the possibility of writing a book of
this kind.
It has been extremely rewarding, as well as a great personal pleasure,
to be able to draw on the expertise of my sons Christoffer (in biology) and
Jonathan (in political science) in addressing the interdisciplinary issues
raised in the book.
Chris Butler, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Hans Fink, Lars Heltoft, Lis-
beth Falster Jakobsen, Ronald Langacker, Chris Sinha, Ole Togeby, Ib
Ulbk, Peter Widell, Niels Erik Wille and Jordan Zlatev read various
parts of the book and gave helpful suggestions. Niels Davidsen-Nielsen
generously offered to proofread the book in the final phase. I am grateful
to my wife, Birthe Louise Bugge, both for remaining patient and for the
passages she read and discussed with me.
For all I owe to these and unnamed others, the faults remain my own.
Contents
Introduction
1. What this book tries to do 1
2. A summary of the argument 5
2.1. There is no such thing as conceptual frames
(But theres a whole social-cognitive world) 5
2.2. On-line vs. off-line features 8
2.3. Social cognitive linguistics vs. analysis in terms
of discourses 9
2.4. Functional relations and adaptation 9
3. The progression of the book 10
References 463
Index 505
Meaning in Mind and Society.
A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn
in Cognitive Linguistics
Introduction
This book was undertaken with two purposes in mind, one academic and
one civic.
The academic purpose is to describe and contribute to the process
whereby cognitive linguistics is expanding to include the social side of
language and meaning. This development is one aspect of an even broader
intellectual challenge for the 21st century: cognitive science successfully
integrated a number of disciplines, including linguistics, in an umbrella
discipline to study the human mind but the very success of that endeav-
our has now carried it from a beginning where cognition was viewed as an
autonomous domain (the brain in the vat) into the study of cognitive
processes in society. Since there is no umbrella social science no soc-
sci that expanding cog-sci can team up with there is no easy blueprint
for how to take this step. No matter what ones preferred approach may
be, however, it will have to take the role of language into consideration
which makes it an exciting challenge for a language person.
Even more important than the academic motivation, however, is the
civic purpose. Recently, a prominent spokesperson for critical Muslims in
Denmark opened a debate on immigration by saying everything begins
with language and went on to argue that divisive ways of speaking were
at the root of the problems. Cognitive linguists would tend to disagree
with this statement, pointing instead to cognitive models in the mind.
Most ordinary people (and politicians) would ignore both and point to
social realities as they see them. The academic community can offer no
obvious way of making these different perspectives cohere. The book tries
to achieve its academic purpose in such a way that it can address this gap.
The specific focus of this book is expressed in the word functional. As
I use the term, cf. also Harder (1996), it refers to relations between a
dynamic object of description and the context more specifically the type
2 Meaning in Mind and Society
ing, other social processes of the same kind. Since the distinguishing fea-
ture of this heterogeneous collection of approaches is that it operates with
the plural form discourses, I use the plural attributively to avoid confusion
with the uncontroversial non-count singular: a discourses approach is
something much more specific and problematic than a discourse approach.
From an individual perspective, the discourses perspective has the
attraction that it allows you to be the founder and sole proprietor of your
own local processes of meaning creation. Significantly, however, it is also
attractive to power holders who want to make sure that such processes
work so as to promote their interests. The claim that meaning is detached
from all foundations beyond the immediate process was originally put for-
ward by critical intellectuals, who wanted to tear the mask from estab-
lished interests parading as ultimate reality. Now it has become common
property, which means that those who have more power use it more effec-
tively. The civic position does not stand much of a chance if the winner
takes it all, also when it comes to meaning in society. That makes it worth
while looking for a different approach.
The book tries to show that a social cognitive linguistics can serve the
civic purposes I have described, and make the academic and the civic
agenda go hand in hand. Two basic features of the CL approach are essen-
tial arguments for thinking so.
First of all, as pointed out by Geeraerts (2003b; 2007), CL is inherently
oriented towards recontextualization. What created and continues to
unite the whole CL enterprise is the movement of going behind language
to set it in a wider cognitive context. What I call the social turn can be
understood as a new operation of the same kind: language-and-conceptu-
alization needs to be set in the wider context of meaning-in-society1.
Secondly, in the context of CL, the issue of foundations has been recast
in terms of grounding, which is an attractive way of thinking about the
relation between a focal object of description and the context in which it
belongs. In classic CL, the central form of grounding is bodily grounding
(cf. Johnson 1992). This dimension retains its crucial role, but in a social
cognitive linguistics, grounding also includes the anchoring of meaning in
feedback from the environment, outside the individuals body. This is in
keeping with the broader agenda in CL of experiential grounding.
Grounding contrasts on the one hand with dogmatic foundationalism,
where everything is rigidly determined at some basic level, and on the
other with the deconstructionist detachment of meaning from all founda-
The overall question is: how should Cognitive Linguistics (= CL) expand
in order to be an adequate framework for describing meaning as part of
social reality?
Some of the central parts of the answer are introduced in list form
below:
A very brief summary of this book is to say that what a cognitivist sees as
conceptual frames is the tip of an iceberg that constitutes the whole social
universe, and a frame-based theory of meaning needs to broaden out to
encompass this perspective. In order to understand cognition-in-action, a
social cognitive linguistics needs an account of the social grounding of
meaning including relations between cognitive and non-cognitive
dimensions. This in turn involves the following issues:
6 Meaning in Mind and Society
(a) First of all, it requires a format for describing social facts as distinct
from cognitive facts: the book therefore presents and argues for such a
format.
(b) A central claim about that format is that it involves various forms of
interaction between meaning in the individual mind and meaning in the
environment.
This is less trivial than it might appear at first glance. To say that there
is meaning in the environment, just as there is meaning inside the mind, is
one of those ideas that are sort of obvious but have not been given a clear
and consensual descriptive format. Cognitive Linguistics is basically pred-
icated on putting meaning inside the head (cf. Grdenfors 1998: 21), and
two of the authors I build on in moving into social territory also locate the
essential mental elements inside the mind of the individual. Searles (1995:
26) definition of social facts is based on a we-intention inside an indi-
vidual mind; and Croft (2000: 111) defines meaning as something that
occurs in the interlocutors heads.
In contrast, I place the individual agent in an interface position between
meaning emerging from within the body and meaning impinging from
outside. The approach that enables me to do so is entirely unmysterious
and implies no assumptions about a collective mind existing independ-
ently of individuals. Basically, it is a matter of levels-of-analysis. I do not
dispute what Searle and Croft are claiming the individual level just does
not capture all there is to say (as they are the first to point out in other
respects).
The rationale has two steps. The first can be illustrated with the proper-
ties of a traffic jam as opposed the properties of a car. Even if a traffic jam
consists entirely of cars, it has not just additional but apparently contradic-
tory properties; thus the location of a traffic jam that starts if two lanes out
of three are suddenly closed will quickly get extended backwards on a
congested freeway, although all the cars in it separately move forward.
And if we identify a traffic jam with the individual cars it consists of, how
can it be that the traffic jam persists while individual cars escape?
This issue reflects a basic ontological point that is related to Russells
theory of types (the implications of which were central to Bateson 1980).
At the basic level where the issue is the existence of assemblies with prop-
erties that differ from those of the individual instances, meaning-in-soci-
ety as understood in this book includes the traffic jams of meaning in the
human environment, an example being a rumour that arises and prolifer-
ates accidentally: it may have to be taken seriously while it lasts, but may
also disappear without a trace. But although I will occasionally refer to
A summary of the argument 7
this level of collective meaning, the focus is on more specific and struc-
tured forms of collective, meaning-imbued phenomena. These depend on
the uniquely human ability to engage in joint attention (cf. Tomasello
2008).
Joint attention (as part of joint activity) means that mental as opposed
to merely behavioural properties of others acquire the status as parts of
the world I live in. The most fundamental meaningful collective entity in
the human world is we understood as a group of which human indi-
viduals are members, and which is not reducible to the sum of its parts. In
other words, it is not the case that the we inherits all its mental properties
from properties of the individuals there are also mental, cognitive prop-
erties that the individuals have because they are members of a we. Evo-
lutionarily speaking, human beings are adapted to a world where it is
meaningful to be members of such collective wes and all other forms of
collective meaning are differentiated and specialized forms of the basic
we-type of experience. At this more advanced level, meaning enters into
structured and constitutive relations with the social world (cf. especially
ch. 7).
A special methodological difficulty is that when individuals relate to
meaning in the social and cultural environment, they do so by means of
representations in their individual minds there is no other form of access.
This means that much of the time it is difficult to know when you are deal-
ing with the content of your own mind and when you are talking about
meaning in society. But this problem has to be addressed rather than
denied. Cognitive linguistics can only successfully expand from the mind
into society, if it can tell the difference between what is going on in an
individual mind and what is going on in the social world.
(a) The process or flow dimension is the basic and fundamental aspect
of social reality (as widely recognized after Wittgenstein, e. g. Toma-
sello (2008: 34243), citing Searle (1995: 36).
(b) There is more to social reality than facts about online processes
most obviously because there are constraints on the flow which are
due to factors outside it.
(b) A social cognitive linguistics (that integrates the process and the
product dimension) provides a framework that includes the founda-
tional role of agency and cooperation as part of the necessary context
for understanding impersonal and conflictive processes
The book argues that functional relations are an essential part of the off-
line causality that structures meaning-in-society (including its linguistic
encoding). This claim builds on an extension of evolutionary dynamics
from the biological to the sociocultural time scale, whose basic features
are taken over from Crofts version (2000; 2006). In comparison to Croft,
there are two main differences: first, this book places greater emphasis on
the (off-line) concept of function, while Croft focuses more on the online
flow of usage; and secondly, it follows Andersen (2006: 59) in arguing that
there are significant differences between the transmission of genotypes
and of cultural traditions (the main difference is captured under the slo-
gan the visible hand). On both points, this book therefore assigns a
greater role to the functional dimension.
Functionality operates on both the individual and the collective level:
10 Meaning in Mind and Society
Part One (chapters 14) lays the foundations, while Part Two (chapters
58) presents the main argument and the conclusions:
Part One:
Chapter 1 describes what I call classic CL: language as conceptualization.
Chapter 2 describes aspects of the ongoing social turn to which this
book aims to contribute. The main ongoing developments can be summed
up in the words variation and intersubjectivity. Among the elements I
build on are Sinhas theory of epigenesis, Tomasellos account of joint
attention and the evolution of communication, Verhagens inclusion of
the addressee in the grounding scene, Clarks account of joint action,
Geeraerts approach to language variation, Zlatevs exploration of evolu-
The progression of the book 11
Part Two:
Chapter 5 begins with the nature of meaning in the new perspective,
stressing its dynamic nature as a contribution to interaction (rather than
something residing in an underlying, Platonic landscape). It argues, how-
ever, that it is necessary to take account of both offline and online dimen-
sions of linguistic meaning, also in the new perspective. The offline dimen-
sion (viewed as an aspect of language ability or competency) is
functionally shaped so as to constitute potential-for-action, while the
online dimension takes the form of meaning construction in context.
Chapter 6 is about language structure, and argues for an integrated
account of (a) functional and cognitive dimensions, and (b) variation and
structure:
(a) Structure has two interdependent aspects: the bottom-up unit-ori-
ented conceptual dimension (reflecting a competency to fit an inventory
of units into whole utterances), and the top-down, recipe-for-action func-
tional dimension (reflecting a competency to handle formats for whole
utterances, saliently including clausally structured utterances).
(b) From the langue perspective, linguistic affordances in society reflect
a number of variational dimensions to which individual competencies are
differently adapted but all variants constitute potential sources of selec-
tion pressure for individuals who are exposed to them, and all are there-
fore equally part of a post-Saussurean, social cognitive langue. In contrast
to more radically variationist approaches, the main point is that varia-
tional linguistics presupposes structural identification of units. Variational
description is stage two in terms of descriptive adequacy, one level higher
than structural description, and not to be confused with a level zero
account simply in differences: saying that [t] and [tT] are variants in a
speech community is much more interesting than merely saying that they
are different.
Chapter 7 is about meaning-in-society. A major point is that while
meaning feeds into the construction of social reality, the results of the
12 Meaning in Mind and Society
1. Introduction
This first chapter is an overview of classic key positions and results in Cog-
nitive Linguistics (= CL). I hope to give a sense of both the unity and the
richness of the CL achievement: CL has been able at the same time to pro-
vide something new and distinctive and to introduce a broad and varied
range of phenomena into linguistics.
To understand the broad impact of CL, it is important to keep in mind
its rise as an alternative to formal generative grammar. Where generative
grammar is based on a rigid distinction between core linguistic properties
and everything else, CL is in its basic orientation a recontextualizing move-
ment, cf. Geeraerts (2003b, 2007). The central purpose that unites cognitive
linguists of different persuasions is to describe language as reflecting
human experience. Although this would not have surprised traditional
grammarians, it was a new start for linguistics as a science: according to
well-entrenched dogma, human understanding was too vague and uncon-
trollable to be admitted into scientific description hence the need for at
rigorously formal descriptive procedure, and for an anchoring in objective,
mind-independent facts.
The most prestigious manifestation in science of this approach was the
role of the formal structures of mathematics as the language of physics.
Formal linguistics hoped to achieve a similar success by distilling the basic
formal core out of the human language ability. Once the basic formal struc-
ture was found, so the reasoning went, actual language events would be
just as trivial from a linguistic point of view as the actual event of an apple
falling downwards would be for physics after Newton had distilled the
basic law out of it.
A centrepiece of the hard-nosed scientific position is that when lan-
guage is used in a controlled manner to talk about the real world, the concep-
tual level can be eliminated as epiphenomenal, i. e. as the unnecessary mid-
dle man. Formal grammar adopted a similar attitude to human understanding:
linguistic structure naturally had to map on to objective content in some
way, otherwise language would be irrelevant but worrying about how
actual speakers made the connection would only be a source of confusion.
The idea of allowing the full richness of human conceptualization in at
the front door is therefore truly a new step. It puts into well-deserved focus
Introduction 15
the domain in which language most immediately belongs, and also intro-
duces a way of thinking about language according to which it is neither
distinct from mental content nor forced to be in lockstep with it. Instead,
language is seen as a way of accessing mental, cognitive processes and
representations a window on the mind. In order to describe language in
that light, it was necessary for the new cognitive paradigm to put on the
map the whole range of cognitive resources that language could draw on.
Finding out about what the mind could do, as a prerequisite to finding
out how language used what the mind could do, was an exciting opening,
but at the same time a suitably constrained task. It also constituted a new
stage in the larger enterprise of cognitive science. Instead of moving in a
cautious and hamstrung manner, controlled more by ideas of what was
scientifically kosher than by insights into the object of description, cogni-
tive linguistics for the first time threw the door really wide open: let us
look at everything the mind can do, and stop looking over our shoulders
worrying about the science police.
When the tables were turned by CL, the whole idea of disembodied
objective understanding was rejected and the conceptual dimension was
reoriented away from reflecting objective reality towards the roots of con-
cepts in human life. Instead of being a weakness, the experiential and bod-
ily basis of understanding became a new foundation. Whatever human
understanding might turn out to be, it had to be based on the stuff that
goes on in a human body. Therefore embodiment or bodily grounding
arose as a key dimension in the landscape of conceptualization as under-
stood in CL.
This constituted an even more radical new departure. If the human
mind used to be a potential source of error, so much the greater was the
fallibility factor associated with the weaknesses of the flesh. This difficulty
illustrates a faultline in the role of the human mind in hard-nosed posi-
tivist thinking. On the one hand, the mind is the home of reason and
knowledge; on the other hand the mind is an object of empirical investiga-
tion. Behaviourists had declared the mind out of bounds to scientific
investigation because they believed nothing scientific could be said about
it. In order for that to make sense, however, they had to presuppose that
one could cordon off a mental sanctum of unpolluted truly scientific
knowledge. Yet if you do not recognize the existence of reliable properties
of the mind, it is hard to understand how the mind can host the inner sanc-
tum of knowledge.
First-generation cognitive science, including formal linguistics, revolted
against behaviourism by showing that strict formal simulation allowed for
investigation of the mind without polluting scientific knowledge with the
16 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
kind of mush that behaviourists were afraid of. When Searle (1980) showed
that the strictly formal-computational approach to meaning was untena-
ble, his outraged opponents in the discussion talked about the threat to
the cathedral of science: if the human mind is cut loose of its science-
imposed shackles, who knows where that will lead to? The historical mis-
sion of CL was to look for the language-related answers to that question.
3 The point was made by Nagel (1974) in an article entitled What does it feel
like to be a bat?. If we take bats to have a mind, the most fundamental
assumption we make is to assume that a bat has a subjective point of view, i. e.
that there is a felt quality of being a bat.
4 The reason for this is that non-representational mental states such as pain
have no direct relation to linguistically articulated expressions: the word pain
does not evoke actual pain. Conceptual representations of food or water, in
contrast, have a privileged relationship with linguistic expressions such as food
and water because the ability to evoke representational mental content is what
makes these expressions meaningful.
5 But the direction can also go the other way: once we have stored such a per-
ceptual representation, we can turn it around and use it as a basis for evaluat-
ing actual events: the remembered forest may trigger a reaction against envi-
ronmental destruction. The essential property is the element of duplication,
combined with the intentional relation between the representation and what
Conceptualization and concepts 17
As we have seen, in the logical tradition there was no room either for
subjective experience or for conceptualization understood as a mental
process only for concepts understood as a way for the mind to map pre-
cisely onto categories of the objective world. Classical, Aristotelian con-
cepts were therefore understood in terms of checklists of features (cf.
Fillmore 1975) that translated directly into truth conditions. For instance
the concept of bachelor is defined as an (1) unmarried, (2) male, (3) adult
(4) human, and conceptual classification of external objects (such as
potentially eligible males) can proceed by ticking off these four criteria. If
they are fulfilled, we have a bachelor, otherwise we do not: tertium non
datur there is no third option.
An important step towards the human perspective was the discovery
of differences between good and less good instances of categories, as cap-
tured by the term prototype, cf. a series of seminal papers by Rosch (1973,
1975), Rosch and Mervis (1975), Rosch et al. (1976), etc. Among the cases
investigated are colour categories. Rosch asked people to place a range of
colour chips in familiar categories such as (for English) red, yellow and
blue. It turned out that there was greater agreement on how good exam-
ples they were, i. e. whether they were more or less close to focal red
(roughly = the colour of blood), than there was about whether they were
inside or outside the category red.
Two consequences follow from this: first, there is a gradual transition
between red and non-red. Thus the Aristotelian point-blank division into
plus and minus is simplistic human categorization is subtler than that.
But secondly, because judgements of gradience agree better than judg-
ments about the cutoff point, prototypicality does not necessarily mean
lower levels of precision. Unclear boundaries and grey zones may appear
messy, compared with the tradition but the point-blank alternative
actually gives a less precise picture.
The difference is linked up with the true/false bias in the tradition: it
was implicitly taken for granted that the right categories would not only
serve the purposes of the ordinary conceptualizer, but also and more
importantly the purposes of the philosopher or scientist, whose goal was
to strive for the whole truth (and nothing but). For ordinary people, the
priorities are different: the question is mostly how to deal with the con-
crete matter at hand. For that purpose, focal points are more handy than
precise checklists. This element of focality-cum-gradualness was therefore
a central point in struggling free of the rigidity of the logical view of mean-
ing that had occupied the scene for almost 2500 years.
Roschs findings also undermined the structuralist claim that it is only
the language that defines the content of a concept, while pre-linguistic
meaning is totally vague (cp. Hjelmslev 1943: 69, Lakoff 1987: 267): it
turned out that (after some initial training) the New Guinea Dani, who had
only two basic colour terms, one for dark and one for light, gave responses
to colour tasks that agreed to a surprising extent with Anglophone
informants e. g., about degrees of similarity with focal red. The conclusion
was that the level of human experience in this case colour experience
was more fundamental than the level of linguistic distinctions.
CL generalized this finding into a theory that the central concrete
foundation of experience-based categorization is sensory experience, i. e.
perception (cf. Evans and Green 2006: 7). One of the pioneers of CL,
Leonard Talmy (2000: 139), coined the term ception in order to stress the
continuity between perception and conceptualization. On a philosophical
level, this reflects an empiricist orientation in CL, in opposition to Chom-
skys rationalist orientation; there is a faint echo of John Locke saying
that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.
Colour concepts are also good examples of the bodily basis of concep-
tualization: we see blood as red and grass as green because this is the
experience of blood and grass that our kind of nervous system generates.
How it works is also scientifically well understood, and common knowl-
edge, because some people are genetically wired to see the world differ-
ently; they are, as we say, colour-blind. By the same token, it shows that
conceptualization is not a direct reflection of the objective properties of
the world out there. We only see colours the way we do because we have
a human body with certain properties, not because the world is inherently
red or blue. Moreover, we see things differently depending on the context:
the colour orange is midway between yellow and red, and so an orange is
more red than a lemon, while being more yellow than a (ripe) tomato. The
fact that it can be (truly) described by both linguistic predicates simulta-
neously, while it would still be true to say that it is neither red nor yellow,
shows that application of concepts to referents is not rigidly controlled by
the inherent nature of the object. Nor is this a rhetorical trick: the inde-
pendent existence of concepts as part of the way the world works implies
exactly this, that objects can be grouped in different ways, depending on
which concepts humans find most adequate for grasping the situation at
hand.
One way of capturing this perspectival element in conceptualization is
to say that human categorization reflects what is salient to people, cf.
Conceptualization and concepts 19
6 As pointed out by Geeraerts (1992; 1997), some of the features of the proto-
type-based approach reflect familiar and traditional assumptions of pre-struc-
tural lexical semantics. Dictionary makers have always known that words have
more central and more marginal senses, and that no single set of criteria would
suffice for each word. As he also stresses, however, the tradition had not pro-
vided a concept that would do the work of the concept of prototype, with its
new conception of conceptual grouping as based on a focal area of meaning
rather than on a bounded category.
20 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
ally found together with feathers, for instance (cf. Rosch et al. 1976 on
cue validity).
In general a concept, as a countable, individuated construct, represents
the outcome of segmenting the uncountable process of conceptualization
in a particular way. This general feature of dividing up the basically con-
tinuous world of conceptualization applies whether a concept is basic,
subordinate or superordinate, and whether it is understood in the classic
checklist fashion or as involving various forms of gradience. Boundaries
between conceptual categories may take different forms, but their exist-
ence is not in question; Croft and Cruse (2004: 89) rightly suggest that a
boundary is arguably the most basic of all properties of a category. If
concepts are containers, as suggested by Lakoff (1987: 283), we need to be
able to tell the inside from the outside.
The revolution in understanding concepts was also important in rela-
tion to historical change. As pointed out by Sweetser (1990), it had been
traditionally assumed that one could find ancestor concepts by abstracting
over extant present-day concepts. This assumption led linguists to postu-
late very general proto-concepts, like sharp object, as a source for
present-day diverse meanings. However, if the most solidly entrenched
concepts are those that reflect concrete everyday routines, this theory
loses its rationale.
Although concepts thus reflect recurrent features of experience, there
is no determinism involved: grounding involves motivation, not dogmatic
foundationalism. The element of choice is encoded in the term construal,
which is associated with the notion of alternative construals (cf. Lan-
gacker 1987:13841): the mental construct changes while the object of
conceptualization remains the same (as when the human subject shifts her
focus of attention). The relation between a conceptualizing mind and the
object of conceptualization is therefore called the construal relationship
(Langacker 1987: 128).
All linguistic distinctions can be understood as reflecting such alterna-
tive construals. Croft and Cruse (2004, ch. 3) discuss a range of grammati-
cal distinctions as reflecting pervasive differences of construal: leaves vs.
foliage (plural vs. non-count); something moved in the grass vs. there was
movement in the grass (agency vs occurrence); Joe killed Bill vs. Bill was
killed by Joe (from what perspective is the event conceived), etc. The same
applies to distinctions between lexical concepts. The classic examples of
lexical construal include the distinction between coast and shore: both
designate the border between land and sea, but coast views it from the
inland perspective, while shore views it from the sea. From coast to coast
is therefore a trajectory on dry land, while from shore to shore moves from
22 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
one side of the sea to the other (cf. Fillmore 1985). In all cases, alternative
construals are simultaneously available as options and can be encoded in
two different lexical choices, allowing the speaker to impose his own per-
spective on a scene.7
Construal, in short, subsumes all modifications, online or convention-
ally encoded, that are superimposed upon a given input to conceptualiza-
tion, and pinpoints the ability of human minds to tinker in myriad ways
with the stuff they mentally represent to themselves. Construal therefore
reflects the seminal change described in the introduction: the realization
that the human mind has a role of its own, instead of being a source of
error.
term reflects the same property that enters into the basic framing prob-
lem in artificial intelligence, i. e. the problem that because computers can-
not by themselves link up with the problems they are used to solve, the
user always has to provide the connection. If you analyse computer opera-
tions without taking into consideration what human beings use them for,
you end up with a string of zeros and ones.8 Two examples will illustrate
how the frame type of context-dependence works in understanding lin-
guistic meaning, cp. Fillmore (1985).
The word Sunday denotes a non-mysterious everyday entity that would
appear to offer no inordinate challenge to semantic description. However,
attempts to specify a list of features that would allow you to recognize a
given day as an instance of the category Sunday fairly obviously miss the
point. In order to explain what Sunday means, you have to take your point
of departure in a wider cultural and conceptual frame within which the
word belongs: the traditional Christian calendar, including the seven-day
week. Without that frame, the word itself could not have the meaning it
has.
A slightly more complex example is the interpretation of what it means
to be a first-class hotel. You might try to understand it by seeing it in the
context of a whole set of other linguistic labels including second, third, and
possibly economy class, but that would not solve the problem. In order to
really understand what first-class means, you have to find out how the
categorization system works in relation to the available range of hotel
experiences, including everything from noise levels to language compe-
tencies of the staff. Once that background is in place, the linguistic context
would also be significant, including the question of how many classes are
higher on the list (luxury class, world class .). Here, too, there is no way
of understanding what first class means without understanding the frame
first.9
8 Framing can of course be helped along by specifying links and adding them to
the program. For each step of such a framing operation, you can add an extra
computational operation. But the ultimate framing operation will always
evade the program, receding one step each time: no matter how many specifi-
cations and framing instructions are included, the human operator has to pro-
vide the actual link with the world on her own.
9 The same problem would recur regardless of terminology and definitions.
Teachers will be familiar with marking systems and their descriptions of what
is required for students to obtain each mark and they (we!) know that how-
ever carefully you work out these descriptions, knowing the institutional con-
24 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
Framing is not primarily concerned with the nature of the universe and
other related matters, but with how to fit a given, to-be-interpreted, unit of
meaning into the context. This can be illustrated with reference to a lin-
guistic application that depends on structural slots. Fillmore has used the
concept specifically in relation to one grammatically central form of con-
text-dependence: the ongoing FrameNet project (cp. Ruppenhofer et al.
2006) explores the whole inventory of contextual and grammatical slots
that are relevant to English verbs. In Fillmores theoretical development
this was a crucial step beyond the purely linguistic case frames for which
he became famous, cf. Fillmore (1968): the difficulty in constructing a
coherent and exhaustive theory based purely on syntactic case roles led
Fillmore to expand the foundation to the larger experiential and concep-
tual frames that were evoked by the relevant verbs.10
In Ruppenhofer et al. (2006: 6) the term frame is understood in a wide
sense according to which core nouns also evoke frames. However, it is also
clear that these are less central and can be ignored for the purposes of
annotation; hat or tower does not impose frames on surrounding elements
in the same way as verb meanings do (cf. chapter 6, p. 257). That is because
verbs (unlike nouns) have a core function in defining argument slots. A
verb like sentence, as in they could have been sentenced to five years in
prison, puts the patient in a criminal_process frame (cf. Ruppenhofer et
al. 2006: 126): because it designates a process that takes place as part of the
activities of a criminal court, the argument slot frames the filler as taking
part in a criminal process. The noun prison belongs in the same domain,
but does not in itself trigger a framing operation in the way that verbs such
as accuse, charge, convict and sentence do for the arguments they apply to.
In contrast, when it comes to the more general processes of contextualiza-
tion, there is no difference between nouns and verbs.
Although more specific than contextual understanding, the term
frame can nevertheless be individuated in different ways, depending on
what you are interested in. In the FrameNet project, the purpose is defined
in terms of the characterization of lexical entries: the frames they establish
are chosen so as to allow generalizations about the properties of the verbs.
text (frame) in which they are actually used will still be crucial for evaluating
what a given mark really means.
10 The key problem with case grammar was that the problem of identifying a
language-internal watertight system of deep cases was intractable and this
turned out to be connected with the more general insight on which CL is
based: all structural categories have to be understood in a larger context,
which needs to be included as the foundation of the analysis.
Frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models 25
11 Part of the same idea is the pair profile and base as understood by Lang-
acker (1987:183f). The notion of arc can only be understood against the back-
ground constituted by the concept circle, and you can describe what an arc is
by drawing first a full circle, and the draw a subpart of it in bold. The circle is
therefore, cf. the definition above, part of the domain within which it belongs,
but because it is the necessary immediate surroundings of the particular con-
cept arc, it is also the base. Other geometrical figures are part of the same
domain, but they do not constitute the base for the concept arc.
26 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
14 One can understand the change without having to take sides: to some extent it
is a question of getting hold of the other end of the stick. From the point of
view of secure knowledge the foundation of mental content is what is objec-
tively (out) there regardless of the human observer. From the point of view of
human understanding, the foundation must be mental processes in human
beings.
Embodiment and image schemas.From conceptual to neural patterns. 31
content, she must be able to handle physical space and get her basic bear-
ings there.
Image schemas were launched in parallel by Johnson (1987) and Lakoff
(1987). Although (cf. Hampe 2005) no consensus has been reached on the
precise status of image schemas in CL, the concept is predicated on link-
ing up the two dimensions specified above: the structuring of (primarily)
space, and the privileged relation with felt experience. The example that
has perhaps received the greatest interest is the container schema (cf.
e. g., Lakoff 1987: 267). This schema illustrates both the structural simplic-
ity and the plausible relation with basic experience. It involves the con-
tainer itself, which has an inside and an outside, an element (which is
either contained or not), and two potential directions, in and out and
that is about it. But the abstract structure is of a kind that can be related
directly to perceptual systems.
As shown by Mandler (1992, 2005), empirical evidence suggests that
this kind of knowledge is indeed part of the very early cognitive develop-
ment. However, Jean Mandler points out that the plausible source of
image schemas in basic perceptual experience should not be confused
with the status of fully acquired image schemas in child cognition. These
are different levels, and may diverge (cf. the general discussion p. 383 f.):
image schemas as cognitive constructs are independent of sensory modal-
ity and can be used for inferencing already at the pre-linguistic stage, and
they are thus instances of abstract conceptualization rather than raw per-
ception. The word schema, in other words, captures an essential part of
their mode of being. The two sides of the idea, structural abstraction and
direct experiential basis, thus do not automatically cohere, as also pointed
out (with some regret) by Johnson (2005). Mandler also provides argu-
ments to show that the experience of spatial impact in the form of force
dynamics appears not to be crucial to image-schematic understanding:
spatial relations are sufficient in themselves. Thus the understanding of
containment is not necessarily bound up with the experience of being con-
tained (in the crib or pram, for instance). We will come back to this issue
below p. 79 f.
Schemas are one bid for integrating experience and conceptual struc-
ture. Another is the emphasis on emotional experience as a foundation for
thinking. This idea received scientific underpinning with the discovery by
Damasio (1994) of the dependence of rational thought on emotional
grounding. In the book (entitled Descartes error) he showed, based on
detailed clinical evidence, that rationality, rather than having to keep clear
of the mush of human emotions, actually became inoperative when the
link with emotions was severed because of brain damage. Without know-
32 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
ing what feels right, the human subject can no longer take rational deci-
sions. Relating to the conceived world therefore depends on linking up
the conceptual and the emotional dimension.
The theory of embodiment thus involves very concrete relations in the
brain between concepts, schemas and emotional qualities, down to con-
crete neural implementation. The most radical manifestation of the project
of integrating concrete bodily phenomena with the description of mental
processes is the neural theory of language, which aims to provide a con-
crete specification of how to get from molecule to metaphor, with the
title of the recent book (Feldman 2006). With the experiential grounding
of someone who has made the whole journey from one pattern of thinking
to the other Feldman started out as a computer scientist and only later
began to take an interest in neural processes he explains in biographical
as well as theoretical detail why a purely computational approach based
on information processing is misguided. Using the word epiphany (Feld-
man 2006: 63) about his sudden realization that there was no distinct level
of physical symbols in the mind or brain (which in the formal paradigm
was necessary to provide formal symbols with causal relevance, cf. Newell
and Simon 1976: 116), he describes how the actual neurobiological feat of
deriving information from the environment must be carried out directly
by the neural wiring otherwise it would simply not be possible.
The core ability in Feldmans perspective is to respond appropriately
to information from the environment. Survival depends on being able to
come up with the best match between input from the environment and
the response from the organism. Beginning with the amoeba and its abil-
ity to follow a gradient of increasing concentrations of nutrition and away
from irritants, Feldman goes on to illustrate how the more complex neural
systems of frogs (citing Lettvin et al. 1959) are similar in allowing the
organism to respond to relevant features such as moving bugs and
approaching shadows. On the way to full human complexity we encounter
mirror neurons (more on this below p. 82 f.) which trigger relevant pat-
terns of action when animals perceive conspecifics coping with the envi-
ronment in particular ways (cf. Rizzolatti et al. 1996).
This is particularly interesting in relation to the process of linking up
embodied experience with relations between individuals: if the individual
is capable, by neural wiring, to share the experiences of others, a neural
theory does not entail a purely inward-looking approach to meaning, but
has a plausible link with social experience. By virtue of that, it also links
up with the basis of normativity and morality: human beings can act as
moral agents because they have access to experience about what pro-
motes or hinders the well-being of others.
Embodiment and image schemas.From conceptual to neural patterns. 33
In using this theory about human minds, a key element is the causal
link between mental connections and active neural connections (Feldman
2006: 91). This brings us to the level of priming effects, as driven by the
mechanism of spreading activation in a network. However, in order to get
to the level where mental connections are linkable with language, it is not
feasible to go all the way with the neurons alone (Feldman 2006: 151). Not
enough is known about the complex patterns of neuron circuitry to be
specific about how we actually understand the cat is on the mat in neural
terms. Feldman, in other words, cannot close the gap that everybody else
has also failed to eliminate, between the physical and the mental level of
description of the mind/brain: the slash remains.
To his credit, Feldman is quite explicit about this. He sees this as an
instance of the fact that sciences often need bridging theories: astrono-
mers need them in order to make facts about stars cohere with basic phys-
ics, and biologists need them to make facts about protein structure cohere
with theories of how sequences of amino acids fold into three-dimensional
shapes as specified by DNA. Rather than giving up the attempt to build a
neurally based theory of conceptualization, Feldman uses the level of
computational modelling to mediate between neuron circuitry and actual
linguistic performance.
This puts him in the company of classical computational modelling,
with the same basic framing problem: only the human operator can pro-
vide the essential link between simulation and simulated reality. The dis-
tinctive feature of the neural theory is the explicit commitment to an
adequacy criterion based on converging evidence, including especially a
criterion of neural plausibility and learnability. Based on these premises,
Regier (1996) constructed a computational model that was able to learn
spatial relation terms. One of the ways to achieve this feat was to provide
the system with a simple model of the visual system. In contrast with com-
putational models built on the blank slate (Feldman 2006: 154), which
could not learn these terms, a model based on what is neurally plausible
could do the trick.15
15 The same strategy was pursued by Bailey (1997) for action words, where the
crucial addition to the system was motor programs. The model was extended
from physical events to metaphorical interpretations by Narayanan (1997). He
showed how news stories about economics including statements such as
Japan continues its long, painful slide into recession could be understood as
transferring event structure (including aspectual phases from ingressive to
perfective) from the basic motor domain to the abstract target domain. This
34 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
5. Figurative meaning16
Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Metaphors we live by, was the first powerful
illustration of how figurative meaning could enhance understanding of
language as part of a general project of understanding the human mind.
Putting figurative meaning at the centre of attention also effectively high-
lighted the narrowness of the science-imbued conception of meaning in
language. From the objectivist perspective, figurative meaning was mar-
ginal in two interconnected ways: ornamental rather than essential to the
message, and basically involving a misrepresentation: the statement you
are the cream in my coffee is not literally addressed to the cream in the
speakers coffee. There is an effect, rhetorical as well as humorous, of
putting it like that, but underneath is a real literal meaning which has to
be figured out. In terms of the standard position usually attributed to
Aristotle, metaphor was a figure of speech, rather than a feature of real
conveyed meaning.
The cognitive linguistic position on metaphor as stated by Lakoff and
Johnson is a continuation of the dimensions discussed above: meaning is
based on experience, on presupposed cognitive domains, and on pre-con-
ceptual embodied schemata. Figurative meaning adds an extra step to the
process of conceptualization, in the form of a mapping from one location
(the source) in the conceptual territory to another location (the target). In
the case of metaphor, the mapping goes from one domain to another, a
salient case being space as a source domain and time as a target domain,
as in you have your whole future in front of you. In the case of metonymy,
the mapping works by direct association, sometimes staying within the
same domain; in reading something with fresh eyes, the eyes are a part of
the whole that also includes other parts of the neurocognitive system;
sometimes it includes cross-domain connections, as in having ones eyes on
someone, with metonymic mappings that go from eye to vision to atten-
tion to desire (cp. Hilpert 2007: 87).
This makes figurative meaning an integrated part of the object of
description: taking an extra step inside a cognitive landscape is radically
16 For a long time, figurative meaning was the only area of CL that many people
had heard about, and it remains the best-known area of the approach. It has
also given rise to a plethora of different developments each of which would
require book-length accounts. For that reason, the various manifestations of
figurative meaning will not be in focus in this book. Only some of the most
pervasive features will be taken up as necessary dimensions of the social
extension of the framework.
36 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
and to the nonce and ephemeral end. In present-day Denmark we can still
use horse terms for processes associated with setting things in motion: in
addition to putting the cart before the horse we may also belong to the
kind of people who do not ride on the day they saddle their horse (i. e.
slow starters). The primary scene of horse-powered locomotion, however,
is not around any more, and we may expect an ongoing process of gradual
de-entrenchment of the mapping as a result.
An essential feature of metaphor theory is the basic asymmetry
between source and target. It reflects the same basic bottom-up direction-
ality that is associated with embodiment: we use what is basic and already
available to get at what is more sophisticated and intangible. Events in
time are less graspable than physical objects in space and therefore we
recruit spatial concepts in getting a grip on time. Physical processes are
more familiar and manageable than emotional processes, and therefore
we resort to physical source domains in trying to grasp what happens in
love relationships, including the physical journey as an experience of mov-
ing into a new location via various intermediate places and events. The
process could be seen as reflecting a strategy of metaphorical bootstrap-
ping, whereby we seize upon a familiar domain and use it to take a leap
into the unknown, retaining the familiar structure as a handle on the world
while we move on.
When we impose source structure on a target domain, however, we
cannot know in advance what conceptualization is most appropriate in
actually grasping the new domain. Lakoff (1993: 216) therefore intro-
duced a target domain override principle, explaining why not all infer-
ences from the source domain were valid. She gave him a kiss imposes a
transfer-of-goods structure on the act of kissing, but the inference that
when Joe gives me a book, I have the book afterwards does not extend
to the kiss, because the nature of the act does not leave a retainable prod-
uct (unlike he gave me a black eye). As has been pointed out, if the target
domain can selectively resist imposition of source structure, the formula X
IS Y is clearly simplistic it only holds for the current purposes of the
metaphor, if we express it with a Gricean twist (cf. below, p. 191 f.).
For the purposes of classical conceptual metaphor theory, metonymy
was something of a poor country cousin. It shares some of the essential
features, especially the asymmetry that in the case of metonymy is usually
expressed as going between vehicle and target, and the experiential basis,
including recurrent scenes cf. all hands on deck, for instance. In the per-
spective of permanent mappings there would have to be a stable link in
order to enable metonymy, while there would be nothing obviously cor-
responding to the bootstrapping process involved in going into a differ-
Linguistic meaning: Polysemy, ambiguity, and abstraction 39
tion?, Langacker asks, and indeed the path of extension would not be
easy to trace if there was never any resort to schematic abstraction. The
general sense of schema subsumes the more specific use in image schema,
cf. above, which is an abstraction from concrete sensory images. As usual,
it is not clear exactly where the distinction should be drawn; Langackers
schemas for capturing grammatical meaning often recur also in lists of
image schemas, including e. g. the distinctions between mass and count.
The existence of schemas does not license a general return to classical
semantics, however. Similarly, the notion of radial models does not justify
a strategy whereby you limit the meaning of an expression to only a pro-
totypical core and leave the fuzziness to vagaries of usage. The extent to
which there is a clear prototype or a clear schematic formula is variable
from one expression to the next.
For the notion of a meaning associated with a linguistic expression, I
suggest it might be practical to think of it terms of the territory, the area of
potential application within which the expression is sanctioned, to use
Langackers term. Territory differs from profile in being more general,
and naturally can be thought of as including a variational dimension, so
that a new usage extends the territory. (Thus when the practice whereby
internet con artists try to get people to mail their passwords is dubbed
phishing, it extends the territory of the spoken word fishing). The term
territory covers the full range of variant meanings for over, in other words
the range of potential use that may occur without infringing linguistic con-
ventions in the community. It is usefully primitive in that it abstracts from
category-internal semantic structure including ambiguity, prototypes, par-
tial family resemblances, metaphoric extensions and schematic charac-
terizations.
The term thus ignores the details but the job it does is central to the
idea of a specifically linguistic as opposed to a general conceptual descrip-
tion. If you ask what a given expression means, the full answer requires a
specification of the whole territory whatever else it might be useful to
say about it.
7. Mental spaces
cation and may be closed down as soon as they are no longer needed. They
are not defined by explicit referential specifications: they are underdeter-
mined (Fauconnier 1985: 2), allowing complex configurations of mental
spaces based on relatively simple grammatical input. They are triggered
by expressions serving as space builders, including conditionals (If she
accepts ), modals (They may refuse) and prepositional phrases (In your
situation, ).
The ultimate source of all such space-building is the ability of the
human mind to form representations, cf. the discussion in relation to con-
ceptualization above p. 16. In relation to opacity of reference, the prop-
erty of intentionality cf. Searle (1983) is central. Intentional mental struc-
tures are understood as representing the world, or more generally a
world. When we go to pick up a familiar person at the airport, we check
the remembered, mind-internal features against the faces in the crowd.
And while we are waiting, we operate with a mental space with specifica-
tions that we want to materialize in the base space of physical experience.
When the person actually turns up, we can close down the want space
again.
All mental spaces owe their properties to the primordial mental space,
i. e. the human mind: because the mind can represent things to itself, it can
also create a split between a referent and its mental representation. It is
especially striking, however, in cases when the relation between the world
and our representation of the world is explicitly put on the agenda: condi-
tionals, modals, and thought experiments in general are manifestations of
this ability to imagine worlds, modulated by the relations of desire, belief
and imaginative projections of various kinds.
For reasons that will be discussed below, I suggest the term alternativ-
ity borrowed from modal logic (cf McCawley 1981: 276) for relations
between such spaces. Mental spaces, I suggest, arise when we imagine an
alternative scenario, and that means there is always an implicit compari-
son involved. The space that constitutes the basis of comparison is defined
by the current discourse but the mother of all these is the so-called
base space: the actual situation in which the conversation occurs. There
can be several such alternative spaces in play at the same time; thus in
Joe told me that Jill expected Jack to think of something, the something
is in Jacks mental space, which is situated inside Jills mental space, which
again is inside Joes mental space, which is part of the mental space
evoked by the speakers utterance but it all ends up in the actual dis-
course world.
The status of a mental space as an alternative licenses a very basic rela-
tionship in Fauconniers account, which is also associated with referential
Mental spaces 45
17 The counterpart relation was also part of the discussion in possible worlds
theory; at one time the preferred example was what Socrates could or could
not have for a counterpart (an alligator was one of the examples!). For obvious
reasons, the discussion becomes less tortuous if you do not have an objectivist
semantics, but instead view it as a matter of alternative construals of the same
situation in actual communication.
46 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
(2008a). The first thing to point out about the framework, also in the con-
text of this book, is its commitment to the foundational relationship
between grammar and meaning.
That linguistic structure is symbolic is one of the points on which there
is a direct confrontation with the understanding of structure in generative
grammar. Generative grammar is predicated on the existence of a purely
syntactic structure, such that meaning is outside of that structure but may
correspond more or less to elements in it. Cognitive grammar takes its
point of departure in the symbolic relation between grammar and under-
standing-in-use; and symbolic structures have two poles, a phonological
and a semantic pole. Thus there are only three kinds of linguistic elements:
phonological, semantic or symbolic. Since sounds only count as linguistic
elements when they are used as part of symbolizing structures, all linguis-
tic elements are part of symbolic structures (the content requirement,
Langacker 1987: 53), and structure as such does not occur on its own.
As Langacker frequently emphasizes, this is by no means a free ride, or
a mere declaration of faith. While the distinction between competence and
performance initially set Chomsky free to postulate meaning-independent
structures in a way that was not easily controllable, Langackers commit-
ment to assigning all structure a role in a symbolic relationship means that
he has to provide an explanation for cases that are often assumed to be
obvious examples of non-correspondence. As a case in point, Langacker
(1999) offers an account of so-called formal subjects (like the pronoun it
in it is raining) in terms of the overall generalization that also applies to
contentful subjects. The schematic generalization he suggests is the role
of the subject as initial focus for the understanding of clause meaning. In
the case of prototypical subjects, the initial focus is assigned to an agentive
nominal, but the presentational frame that is associated with so-called
formal subjects can plausibly be regarded as a type of expression where
the initial focus is assigned not to an entity but to an abstract setting
(which may subsequently have an entity or a process assigned to it).
Whether or not one agrees with the description, clearly this symbolic com-
mitment has implications that the analysis must make good.
The symbolic view of grammar naturally leads to a bottom-up approach
to syntactic structure. The generative approach to structure starts out with
a question that is bound up with the innateness agenda: what abstract
relationships are characteristic of sentences in human languages? 18A sym-
bolically based theory of linguistic structure, however, has to take its point
of departure in meaningful linguistic items in use. The existence of com-
plex utterances can be understood (Langacker 1987: 279) to arise from the
fact that if you want to encode a complex conceptualization, there will not
always be a single word that captures what you want to express which
means you have to combine your way to an expressive option that will do
the job. The point of departure for that process, therefore, is the list of
available items in the language.
At this point we need to distinguish between two separate applications
of the distinction between top-down and bottom-up descriptive strate-
gies.19 The application introduced above reflects the choice between start-
ing with general rules (top-down) and starting with actual instantiations
(bottom-up). It is on this point that there is a clearcut distinction between
generative grammar and CL but you can also apply the distinction to the
direction in which you approach a structure. Either you can begin with the
whole configuration (top-down) or you can begin with the single elements
(bottom-up). On this point neither generative grammar nor CL can be
placed unambiguously on one side of the divide.
Early generative grammar was clearly top-down (beginning with the
symbol S and moving downwards), but the minimalist framework has a
strong bottom-up element based on the operation merge. Cognitive
Grammar in its classic version is predominantly oriented bottom-up, being
understood as a Structured Inventory of Conventional Linguistic Units
(Langacker 1987: 73), which could be combined according to a composi-
tional path that moves from elements towards complex combinations. At
the same time, it is stressed that each conventional combination has prop-
erties of its own; this holistic aspect is one of the points on which Cogni-
tive Grammar differs from the strictly compositional approach of genera-
tive grammar. Hierarchy is always partial and only one possible dimension
of organization. An assemblys coherence has to be assessed holistically,
i. e. it is not inherently or exclusively bottom-up, top-down, or left-to-right.
In accordance with this, it is an open issue how structures constituting the
assembly are accessed in actual processing.
This has implications for the understanding of complex syntactic rela-
tions. To the extent they are compositional, i. e. if they are formed in
accordance with general principles (as assumed by generative syntacti-
20 The same core contrast surfaces in relation to language acquisition: the bot-
tom-up approach entails that children learn units first, and then later get the
hang of how to build combinations, thus gradually mastering more complex
structures the structure-first approach entails an acquisitional path where
the underlying structural mechanisms gradually surface in the childs emerg-
ing language. And most general of all, the contrast is associated with a basic
understanding of the role of theory in relation to actual findings: Chomsky
sees the role of linguistic theory as analogous to the role of very general prin-
ciples of physical theory in relation to actual physical events stressing local
and bottom-up regularities is simply equivalent to focusing on the periphery
instead of the centre. Cognitive linguists, in contrast, reject the analogy with
physics and assume only the existence of those abstract categorizations that
actual human speakers and conceptualizers establish, which means that the
local perspective is basic.
52 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
9. Final remarks
In this chapter, I have tried to give a condensed survey of the key ele-
ments in the rejuvenation of linguistics that CL brought about. I have
deliberately tried to create an idealized cognitive model of what may be
termed classic cognitive linguistics, and therefore backgrounded prob-
lems as well as issues which are central to the development that this book
focuses on; both kinds of issues will be taken up later on. While I recognize
the lacunae left by omissions due to condensation and idealization, of
course I hope to have given an impression of a view of language and cog-
nition that is both valid and innovative in a way that is not diminished by
subsequent qualifications.
All available truths are partial, and classic cognitive linguistics is no
exception. However, the tearing down of the wall between the general
56 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
which the money can be transferred so as to get out of the reach of the
oppressive powers-that-be: this is often a subframe of the commercial
transaction frame, but in these letters it tends to occur on its own (with
only three central frame elements, i. e. the money and its source and target
locations).
At the level of the whole utterance, there are two frame analyses pos-
sible: there is an explicitly invoked frame of political abuse of power,
which defines a slot for the message as a request for help (such that com-
pliance would coincidentally put some money in the recipients posses-
sion). The real frame is that of a scam to drain the accounts into which the
Nigerian money was supposed to flow, and in that frame the letter consti-
tutes the bait. Since there is an alternativity relation between the two
frames, we need to distinguish between two mental spaces, one for each of
the two frames which are linked by counterpart relations such that the
sender is a victim of persecution in one space and a crook in the other, and
the recipient is a potential millionaire in one and a sucker in the other.
Although this construal of the basic concepts in CL on some points
contrasts with proposals from other authors (some of which are cited
above), the point is not to criticize these alternatives, which are well-moti-
vated in terms of the purposes they serve in their respective contexts.
These narrowing-down construals are suggested in the hope that they may
serve to bring out the full and differentiated potential of these concepts,
reflecting an overall strategy of differentiation-within-continuity, where
CL in my view has tended towards emphasizing continuity at the risk of
making precise differentiation difficult. I think the need for continuity has
now been emphasized strongly enough to make it safe to move in the
other direction and stress differentiation: if all the theory offered were the
millionaire frame/space/domain/model with no clear differentiation, the
analysis would be somewhat less precise.
In the next chapter, the subject is the ongoing developments in CL that
constitute the social turn, the expansion from the individual mind to soci-
ety; this will affect especially the understanding of grounding, prototypes
and image schemas. I return to some core concepts of classic CL in chap-
ter 5, with a view to suggesting a reprofiling of their role in view of the
extended framework proposed in chapters 14.
Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to
social processes: aspects of the ongoing social turn
1. Introduction
social aspects of our conceptual systems (p. 37). When Pires de Oliveira,
pressing her point, suggests that socially based assumptions might to some
extent shape Lakoffs views on language and ideology, she gets rebuffed in
no uncertain terms2.
This position did not remain unchallenged. The sense of stepping over
a new threshold can be exemplified with reference to two programmatic
articles: Taking Metaphor out of our Heads and Putting it into the Cultural
World (Gibbs 1999) and The Social Dimension of a Cognitive Grammar
(Hawkins 1997).
As a psychologist engaged in CL, Ray Gibbs has devoted much of his
attention to research into the mental reality of the phenomena that are
central to CL, especially metaphor (cf. Gibbs 1994, Gibbs & Colston 1995).
One strand of this research had taken the form of experiments showing
empirically that activating conceptual metaphors has effects for cognitive
processing that cannot be accounted for by purely linguistic similarity or
generalizations based upon them.3 But looking back on the evidence,
Gibbs points out that there is another step that needs to be taken (the
continuing path of recontextualization, cf. p. 3). The classical CL assump-
tion is the following (cf. Gibbs 1999: 146):
Most cognitive scientists supportive of the conceptual view of metaphor tacitly,
and sometimes explicitly, assume that conventional metaphorical mappings
must be internally represented in the individual minds of language users.
2 Lakoff summed up the discussion as follows (Pires de Oliveira 2000: 34): You
asked, Isnt it based upon our own biases (that of a white, male, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant)? Putting aside the racism and sexism of the question, the answer
is no. It is an empirical issue.
3 Thus the conceptual mapping underlying the metaphor ANGER IS HEATED
FLUID IN A CONTAINER, once activated, will connect up with expressions
such as make ones blood boil, blow ones stack and hit the ceiling, although
there is no literal similarity (or literally based abstractions) linking these
expressions. This work was crucial to the empirical underpinning of the basic
assumption of CL, namely that linguistic meanings are not specific to language
as a self-contained domain but draw on general conceptual mechanisms and
models.
62 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
Taking himself to task (1999: 155) for not explicitly acknowledging this
dimension in previous work, Gibbs points out the essential link between
the social evaluation of an (annoying) event such as being kicked in the
leg and the question of whether it gives rise to the embodied experience
of anger as a fluid with yourself as the container. Depending on whether
the kick is perceived (socioculturally) as a deliberate unmotivated attack,
an accident, or a well-deserved revenge, the embodied response may dif-
fer considerably.
As an extra dimension, he points out the role of external symbols for
internal experience (including pictorial representations of people with
steam blowing out of their ears, p. 158), as a significant locus for meta-
phorical mappings. With the therapeutic practice of Erickson as an exam-
ple, Gibbs goes on to show how overt social practices such as sharing a
meal can serve as scaffolding for approaching emotional relations.4 For
the purposes of this book, however, it is significant that there is still a
sense that the object of description remains basically the same: in his con-
clusion, Gibbs suggests that there is much less of a difference between
what is cognitive and what is cultural than perhaps many of us have been
traditionally led to believe (1999: 162).
From a different perspective, Hawkins (1997, 2000) expresses similar
views, pointing out both that there is a field outside the individual mind
that needs to be explored, and that cognitive grammar is well equipped to
handle meaning in the social sphere (1997: 22). Hawkins announces his
agenda in the first lines of his article: The purpose of this paper is to dem-
onstrate that a cognitive grammar can and should attend to the socio-polit-
ical aspects of language use. Hawkins takes up the direction from social to
individual meaning, focusing on the role of ideology (with reference to
Althusser (1971) and Hodge & Kress (1993). In his approach he defines a
field of interest constituted by strongly emotional (positive or negative)
ways of referring to socially salient entities5. Presenting two obituaries of
Richard Nixon, he demonstrates how one tends towards the extreme pos-
itive pole (one of the great statesmen of this century) while the other is
located at the extreme negative pole (the only president forced to resign
the nations highest trust).
With respect to the usage based commitment, Dirk Geeraerts has occu-
pied a unique position in the development of cognitive linguistics, both
because of his background in historical lexical semantics and his dual
commitment to theory and to practical lexicography. Across his multifari-
ous research topics, the social life of words and meanings, as opposed to
the purely mind-internal dimension, stands out as the focus of interest.
Especially from the lexical point of view, his approach has provided a
broad sociocultural enrichment of cognitive semantics.
The concept of prototype is one example where Geeraerts (e. g. 1989)
reorients the significance of the concept from conceptual structure per se
to what prototypicality reveals about the relation between incoming expe-
rience and the mental organization of information.7 The key feature is
that prototypicality is essentially a result of the cognitive effort of manag-
ing experience in a flexible way.
This reflects the onomasiological perspective on meaning, i. e. the
approach that begins not with a word or concept but with the designated
phenomenon. Starting with the communicative task, onomasiology asks:
how can we name this object by linguistic means? This contrasts with the
traditional semasiological perspective that starts with the word and asks
what kinds of phenomenon it can denote. To illustrate the significance of
this perspective: Dutch offers two alternatives for destroy, cf. Geeraerts
(1988), vernielen and vernietigen, which can be used about virtually the
same range of conceivable cases. Working from the words themselves, it is
hard to establish a clear difference. However, starting out with a usage
survey, looking at the kinds of things the words are used about, Geeraerts
can establish a pattern: vernielen (whose root is to do with tearing down)
is mainly used about concrete physical objects, and the result can typically
be viewed as constituting damage. In contrast, vernietigen (whose root is
to do with negation) is typically used about abstract objects, and results in
absence of the object. This also enables a greater degree of precision in
the area of conceptualization: atypical uses do not eliminate the core
senses, but impose atypical conceptualizations, like demolishing ideas or
negating physical objects.
The historical trajectory of meaning and naming is the subject of a
large-scale empirical investigation reported in Diachronic prototype
semantics (Geeraerts 1997). The introduction of legging as a new type of
clothing is studied in minute empirical detail, with mail order catalogues
and womens magazines as the corpus material. Only sources with picto-
rial representations are used, enabling researchers (1) to provide a feature
representation of instantiations named by the terms (including length,
width, material, etc.), (2) to cover also potential referents that are actually
named by a different term (including superordinate terms like trousers).
The development is followed in the years from 1988 to 1992, during which
the category undergoes a rapid development (cf. Geeraerts 1997: 3640).
In all years there was a core instantiation type (below calf length, maxi-
mally tight-fitting, without crease, smooth and finely woven/knitted,
upper rather than underwear, for female use) but the clothing article
became a success and the linguistic labels associated with it were carried
along by this success. One of the results that illustrate the process of social
expansion is that the increased incidence of core instantiations went hand
in hand with a gradual expansion in the range of variation: from the pro-
totypical centre, the successful new concept spread out into the surround-
ing terrain, establishing a rich new radial model in this lexical area.8
In the legging case, the social process involved a new physical object.
This makes it easy to see the existence of both directions: from the social
phenomenon to the word, and from the word to the social phenomenon.
Social processes, however, also have their own role to play when the phys-
ical world remains the same, but the sociocultural processes cause them to
be understood differently. This creates a situation where it is more diffi-
cult to tease the cognitive and the social dimensions apart. This can be
exemplified with the case of the humours (etymologically = liquid)
model of emotions (cf. Geeraerts and Grondelaers 1995), which looks at
social processes that involve the history of high culture, including the his-
tory of ideas.
This case presents a direct contrast between a usage based and social
approach and a traditional cognitivist approach. Arguing against Kvec-
ses as a representative of the classical CL position of analysis in terms of
bodily based cognitive mappings (cf. Kvecses 1986), Grondelaers and
Geeraerts argue that the physiological basis (whose existence they do not
deny) is overlaid by a tradition from antiquity of analysing emotions in
terms of the four humours: black bile for melancholy, yellow bile for
anger, phlegm for sluggishness, and blood for light-heartedness The analy-
sis of the anger metaphor, understood in purely physiological terms, does
not explain the salience of the fluid element (as in ANGER IS THE HEAT OF A
FLUID IN THE CONTAINER) over the heat and fire elements. Also, the wealth
of expressions of other terms of fluids and temperatures show that there
is a historical pattern that cannot be predicted from universals of physiol-
ogy (cf. also Gevaert 2005). Among other things, this raises the question,
underplayed by Lakoff, of the significance of the distinction between liv-
ing and dead metaphors: if a way of thinking slowly becomes obsolete,
retrieving it as a source becomes gradually less natural. The understand-
ing of choleric and phlegmatic emotional responses in the 21st century is
likely to evoke bodily humours in a diminishing segment of language
users.
A major priority for Geeraerts is to expand the methodological base of
cognitive linguistics. One of the really hard core consequences of taking
the sociocultural dimension seriously is the need to go beyond introspec-
tion: since usage is not accessible by introspection, a usage-based model
cannot be based solely on it; empirical, quantitative data are needed. This
calls for a number of different enrichments of traditional descriptive prac-
tices. A central factor is the rapidly growing availability of electronic cor-
pora and associated statistical descriptive tools, which make possible a far
greater breadth and depth of empirical coverage than previously availa-
ble. A descriptive aim facilitated by this tool is the possibility of account-
Variation, lexical semantics and corpus linguistics 67
ing for variational patterns, i. e. the type of fact that used to be the prov-
ince of sociolinguistics (including dialect geography), cf. Geeraerts (2005).
Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003) demonstrate that lexicology is incom-
plete without an integration of the sociolinguistic dimension: the key
object of description, lexical choice, simply cannot be described without
an integrated sociolinguistic dimension. Just as the choice of phonetic
variants is determined by the social pressures (including the Labovian
parameters of style and social class), so is lexical choice.
One of the factors in prototypicality that become highlighted in the
usage-oriented perspective is the role of salience itself: what factors are
most important depends on speakers and the situation. This expands a
classic point made by CL against objectivist semantics: rather than being
an unfortunate misrepresentation of the real world, this is a reflection of
the fact that words inherently serve purposes for language users; thus con-
cepts need to be understood in relation to both naming and linguistic con-
ceptualization practices, including pragmatic variability (cf. Geeraerts
1989).
As an example of the interfacing between meaning relations tradition-
ally viewed as intra-linguistic and social factors that are traditionally
viewed as external, Grondelaers and Geeraerts investigate lexical choice
in names of cancerous diseases. The internal dimension they focus on is
lexical specificity, i. e. the choice between superordinate terms like illness
or disease, and more precise diagnoses such as cancer, or breast cancer.
Based on a corpus divided into medical and non-medical texts and
between personalized and generic contexts it is found (as predicted) that
there is a significantly higher frequency of the less threatening and more
general terms illness and disease in personal contexts (as compared with
generic and professional contexts), reflecting an avoidance strategy when
speaking of people close to you. Clearly, it would be arbitrary and unre-
vealing to separate this description into two sub-descriptions, one of which
dealt with level of semantic specificity and the other dealt with the impact
of social contexts.
The kind of issues that are thus brought into CL can be illustrated with
a long-standing research process involving the use or non-use of er, the
Dutch equivalent to existential there, in construction types with initial
locative (cf Grondelaers et al. 2002, Grondelaers, Speelman and Geer-
aerts 2008, 2008b). The illustration case is In the ashtray (there) was a
hailstone. Introspection about conceptual content does not provide
immediately striking ideas about how to account for the choice, if you fol-
low the standard structuralist commutation procedure of looking at the
same example with or without er. It is hard to verify any ideas that may
68 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
come into your head, first of all because the difference is not very great
(and does to pertain to truth conditions or other more tangible criteria).
As always in such cases, looking for too long at the examples may con-
found any intuitions you might spontaneously have had.
Corpus investigations therefore have a distinctive explanatory poten-
tial, and they have made it possible to show that er serves as an inacces-
sibility marker, i. e. its occurrence correlates with the extent to which the
object that comes after er is unpredictable. Thus after the concert came a
reception would be without er, while after the concert there was an
earthquake would tend to have er. In addition, there is regional variation.
Belgian speakers are more prone to use er than speakers of Netherlandic
Dutch. By logistical regression, it can be shown that you can account for a
very large part of the variation (85 %) that way.
In one investigation, Grondelaers and Speelman (2008) pursued the
methodological agenda one step further, in an attempt to get at the
remaining 15 % of the variation that eluded logistical regression based on
the features that had previously been found to make difference. Although
questionnaire investigations have obvious limitations as guides to actual
usage, since they tap error-prone introspective judgments, they might be
one way of going beyond what corpus data could yield. The study did
reveal some regularities but on closer examination confirmed the reserva-
tions. Among other things, a retest revealed that there was an instability
factor in the judgements. Then again, it was interesting in that the instabil-
ity primarily affected cases without er, rather than the er examples: intro-
spection-based judgments changed significantly for the er-less examples.
While this does not settle the issue with respect to remaining factors, it
illustrates the difficulty of getting reliable data by asking people to intro-
spect. The research group at the University of Leuven to which Geeraerts
belongs (Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, QLVL) has
since 2000 produced a steady stream of work that combines the social and
conceptual dimensions, thus providing an institutional focus for this kind
of work within cognitive linguistics.
The variationist and the history of ideas perspective are combined in
the analysis of culturally salient alternative approaches to linguistic varia-
tion in different national traditions (Geeraerts 2003c). There are two
influential models: the rationalist and the romantic model. The rationalist
or enlightenment model focuses on the virtues of a standard language as
a crucial means to enable all people to take up the ideal role of citizen
(citoyen, in the terminology of the French Revolution). This role (as
opposed to the stereotype bourgeois) involves emancipation from out-
moded constraints, and shared and equal participation in the political
Variation, lexical semantics and corpus linguistics 69
9 In Denmark, for instance, the influence of the religious, educational and cul-
tural reformer Grundtvig gave rise to dialectology as the study of the authen-
tic voice of the people.
10 Geeraerts follows the two models through two series of transformations. In
the age of nationalism in the 19th century, the enlightenment model becomes
associated with the nation state as the basis of a liberal democracy, while the
Romantic model assumes the guise of the medium of national identity; in the
present postmodern age, rationalism underpins the movement towards global
English as a medium of international opportunity and co-operation, while the
Romantic model becomes recruited to defend multilingualism, whether of
ethnic minorities or of nation states under the pressures of increasingly anglo-
phone international collaboration. Quantitative measures of uniformity in
different strata in different time periods of Flemish and Netherlandic Dutch
are subsequently used to discuss the development in the light of the twin pres-
sures of ethnic identity (romantic) and standardization (rationalist). Three
possibilities are raised, with no attempt at prediction but the dual contextu-
alization of lexical choice in the context of regional and diachronic variation
as well as in the cultural pressures of standardization and ethnic factionaliza-
tion means that the question of whether a speaker of Dutch decides to use
(over)hemd vs. shirt (for a shirt) or caleon vs. legging(s) becomes fraught with
somewhat greater significance than a pre-variationist glance in a dictionary
would lead one to believe.
70 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
possible only via events occurring at those times (beyond simple deictic
temporal reference based on time of utterance). There is an extended
grammatical system of nominal aspect, so the language is by no means
generally impoverished, but it has no cultural or linguistic evidence of
either segmentation of time, metaphorical division of time via spatial con-
cepts, or any other obvious way of documenting an awareness of time as
an independent and separable dimension of the human world. (The argu-
ment is rather more powerful than Whorfs famous one for Hopi, cf.
Whorf 1956).
Among their provisional conclusions is that Time as Such is not a
Cognitive Universal, but a historical construction based in social practice,
semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts and
entrenched in lexico-grammar. The classical CL trajectory whereby
human beings gradually develop concepts based on universals of primary
bodily experience, mapping previous and more concrete domains such as
space onto later and more intangible domains such as time, thus needs to
be supplemented with a trajectory that starts from the sociocultural
dimension. We return to this discussion in chapter 7 (cf. niche concepts,
p. 318).
Michael Tomasellos research interests cover several issues central to
the social agenda in CL: language acquisition, the pragmatic dimension of
cognitive development, and the evolutionary path of language and cogni-
tion. In relation to language acquisition, he took up a unique position in
addressing the central interest of generative linguistics, the acquisition of
syntax, from a CL-oriented perspective. Because of the polarization in
relation to Chomsky, syntax has to some extent been a contaminated area
within CL, and as a result there was little attempt to offer alternative solu-
tions for the kind of problems that occupied the attention in Chomsky-
inspired psycholinguistics. For a long time, psychologists and psycholin-
guists interested in language acquisition, cf. Tomasello (1998), therefore
tended to take the generative theory of language to be the only bid for a
linguistic starting point for their research.11
intention. As Tomasello points out (2003: 23; 2008: 91), this is what is
required for Gricean non-natural meaning the kind that goes beyond
depending on information available in the environment. While smoke
means fire by a mechanism that does not depend on human intentions, hi
is a greeting only because I attribute to the sender the intention of greet-
ing me and this requires fellow subjects who attribute intentions to each
other as part of their form of life.
In addition to communication, this ability also has implication for
learning and for the kind of social environment that human beings inhabit.
What Tomasello calls cultural learning is special and different from basic
trial-and-error learning, because the target goes beyond an individual
goal. The aim is to do what the other person is doing, and because of the
role of intentions this also depends on what the other person has in mind.
In adopting cultural patterns you cannot expect an immediately tangible
reward for successful acquisition to be part of what the others are doing
must be felt as a reward in itself, otherwise the process will not work. Play-
ing football may be fun, but it is not really fun until you know how what
makes the initial humiliations worth while is that there is a point in being
part of the action. Therefore the only game in town is always worth play-
ing, whatever it is. This enables human children to learn things of no osten-
sible value, simply because it makes them part of the community. Lan-
guage change over time thus trades on what Tomasello calls the the
ratchet effect of cultural learning: speakers do not have to start from
scratch, but can stand on the shoulders of previous generations, starting at
the point to which the community around them has arrived (because they
enjoy standing on peoples shoulders).14
the inherent motivation that is associated with being on the same page as
others.16
As a last dimension, this process also opens a pathway into a normative
universe thus establishing an foothold within empirical psychology for
an aspect of the human world that is more familiar from philosophy and
sociology (cf p. 277 on Itkonen, p. 141 on Durkheim; p. 364 on Habermas).
Joint attention and joint activity have causal underpinnings just like eve-
rything else in the universe, but the fact that it can only come off if speak-
ers are actually on the same page means that one can be looking at the
wrong object. The attentional stance of the other person is the criterion
for whether I am getting it right. In this primal scene, there is no norm
beyond the here-and-now but once cultural learning gets under way,
learning the norms inherent in cultural practices is part of it. You cannot
learn to play soccer without learning that scoring a goal is good and that it
is bad if the other team scores a goal, cf. Rakoczy, Warneken and Toma-
sello (2008) on the acquisition of norms in relation to games. Language
works the same way: water is called water, and if you ask for it by using the
word zunk, you are doing it wrong simply because you are not hitting
the target in joint social space.
Once this mechanism is there, acquisition does not have to depend on
an innate crib. You can take the steps one at a time, as part of figuring out
what the other speakers are on about. The joint attention hypothesis thus
feeds into Tomasellos long-standing research into language acquisition,
including the precise path into complex syntax. The first major step was
the discovery of the asymmetry between nouns and verbs in early acquisi-
tion, known as the verb island hypothesis (Tomasello 1992). While chil-
dren learned to insert nouns in slots in a productive manner fairly early,
generalizing overall noun properties across instances, they tended to use
verbs only in ways that they had heard, i. e. with complementation pat-
terns that were actually attested in usage. Thus the idea that there was a
general category verb at the outset of the acquisitional path a core
16 The absorbing interest which children invest in those acts of pointing, gaze-
following, mutually co-ordinated movement etc, where shared attention and
understanding are at stake, can be understood as an instinctual basis for lan-
guage learning but obviously this is a different kind of instinct from Pinkers
Language Instinct (1994). In relation to language learning, a key difference
between humans and animals is therefore that human children can learn the
language without being rewarded with nuts at intervals. Being able to do what
others can do and being with the others and knowing what they know are
experienced as inherently valuable.
Extended grounding 79
The previous section brought out one central social factor, which is equally
essential to the development of language, culture and personality: human
subjects are inherently disposed towards establishing a community of
understanding with other human subjects. This has profound conse-
quences for some of the basic assumptions in CL.
These consequences affect the understanding of grounding. Ground-
ing is the key foundational difference between first-generation cognitive
science and CL (cf. the discussion p. 3 above). CLs platform was and is
that language and meaning are not autonomous and self-contained enti-
ties but grounded in human cognition as a whole, which in turn is grounded
in the human body as a whole. The title From molecule to metaphor sums
up this path of understanding.
In order to accommodate the social dimension in the picture, this
notion of grounding is no longer sufficient. Rohrer (2005) has pointed out
80 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
for cognition: before anything else, there must be a criterion for what is
good or bad.
On that basis Zlatev suggests four types of meaning systems: cue-
based, associational, mimetic and symbolic creatures. Cue-based beings,
the simplest type, work solely through responses to a fixed and innate set
of environmental cues, i. e. event types. The standard minimal example is
the coli bacillus which propels itself towards food and away from toxic
substances. Habituation is the only form of learning, entailing adaptations
of the response system to ignore stimuli below a certain intensity. Above
these, we find associational creatures (comprising most higher animals),
which are capable of modifying their response system by (re)forming
associations between environmental input and actions. Evaluation in
terms of intrinsic desirability remains basic: responses are modified based
on whether they give good or bad results. For higher animals, the limbic
system, as described by Damasio 1994, has a crucial role in generating
primary, hard-wired emotions which constitute the criterion for evaluat-
ing success or failure.
Since the third stage is in important respects transitional, it is easier to
take the fourth stage, symbolic creatures, first. The crucial properties
include abstraction and conventionalization, i. e. symbolic meanings that
are detached from direct relations with the stream of experience, and soci-
oculturally shared. This also means that they are intentionally controlled,
i. e. they constitute non-natural meaning: you understand an expression by
making assumptions about what is meant by it, rather than by simply asso-
ciating it with other features of the environment. This stage is strongly
associated with a radically increased role for the cortex in the brain.
The third stage is transitional in that its key feature, taken over from
Merlin Donald, is that it is mimetic, i. e. capable of understanding and
using bodily responses for the ulterior purposes of representation, includ-
ing gestural communication. This entails a form of detachment from the
strictly associational link with the environment that is characteristic of
stage two, but falls short of the achievement of shared and abstract sys-
tems of meaning at stage four. Only the apes are candidates for belonging
at this stage. This placement is motivated by their ability to form culturally
distinct groups, which may plausibly arise by mimetic transmission of
behaviours, and by their ability to take over and iconically represent
human forms of communication. At the same time, they fail to make the
transition into the symbolic stage, and therefore they cannot undergo cul-
tural development because their cultural differences are still concretely
anchored in the shared context, rather than based on shared representa-
tions alone.
82 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
society to go about its collective business. In both cases, the larger group
constantly faces tasks that are beyond the capabilities of any individual
member (ibid.).
One of the things that make this possible is another type of extension
beyond the body of cognition-imbued activity: the use of material
anchors. The case he discusses in detail is that of the astrolabe (Hutchins
1995: 9699); a simpler example is the compass. If we look at the collective
task of navigating on the one hand and the individual cognitive systems on
the other, it is obvious that the success of the enterprise depends on a reli-
able way of mediating between on the one hand the demands of the task
and the cognitive systems, and on the other hand between the different
cognitive systems between which there is a division of labour. The role of
material anchors in that context can be illustrated with the apparent plau-
sibility of behaviourist reasoning: there is something mysterious about the
idea that invisible processes in the mind can control the material world,
and it feels more scientific to attribute effects to overt material causes. The
type of operations that are necessary to keep a ship on its course may well
appear mysterious to rookie navigators for the same reason and if the
necessary cognitive operations are mediated by an object where its ele-
ments are represented in material form, it will literally make the task
more tangible. Learning to handle the compass and the astrolabe is an
intermediary step to learning how to handle the whole navigation of the
ship. Similarly, the abacus makes calculation visible, and thus more man-
ageable in the initial stages.
In order to understand the significance of this operation, however, it is
necessary to understand it as involving a kind of back-formation, a top-
down modification of a relationship whose basic mode is bottom-up. As
pointed out by Sinha & Rodriguez (2008), the primal scene of intersubjec-
tivity is not going from individual knowledge to common knowledge as a
special and refined form of knowledge. Instead, intersubjectivity is based
in the experience of participation in shared material practices. Physical
objects such as chairs enter into this process: they acquire shared signifi-
cance by entering into shared practices. An object, socially speaking,
counts as a chair if it enters into those practices by serving the function
of chair. As an example, bean bags at one point in the sixties began to
count as chairs, without acquiring new physical properties simply
because they entered into shared practices as things you would sit on.
Material anchors are therefore a special case of the relation between
material practices and cognitive representation. The basic way in which
objects acquire significance is that their symbolic significance emerges
from their place in (non-representational) shared practices material
86 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
with properties that do not only impinge upon cognition but constitute
the presupposed context for it and therefore have to be included in a full
account of grounding. From Bhler via Sinha and Tomasello to Verhagen,
the triadic relationship between the first, second and third person roles
recurs in different variants as the basic scene for understanding language,
replacing individual cognitive representations as the object of description.
18 At that point the analogy was centred on the general attitude to the subject
and the priority of diachronic patterns and pathways over synchronic rules.
The focus was on showing that the source of understanding why languages
look the way they do was in the types of development that could be found,
rather than in the relations between different parts of languages with other
parts of languages which is analogous to the contrast between morphological
theories of organisms as opposed to theories based on trajectories of evolu-
tionary development.
Language as a population of utterances: an evolutionary synthesis 89
isms from one end of a lineage to another, and (3) what happens to the
whole population. The changes are linked, but not identical.
When all these elements are present, they allow the mechanisms
whereby evolution becomes possible. The essential two-step nature of the
process of change is ensured because of the distinction between replica-
tors (genes) and interactors (organisms): the small thing that may change
in a way that is passed on to the next generation (by replication) depends
for its success on how it contributes to the success of a bigger thing, namely
the interactor. Although the standard way of thinking is anchored in the
gene as the replicator and the organism as the interactor, the point of
Hulls application of this idea to scientific development is that it is the
causal structure that is important, not its particular application in par-
ticular the co-existence and mutual dependence between reproduction (at
the individual level) and selection/proliferation (at the population level).
Science may evolve in an evolutionary manner because the same causal
structure is involved, regardless of how (dis)similar the history of science
is in other respects from biological evolution: ideas are produced and
reproduced through the work of individuals but they are selected and
proliferated as a result of selection mechanisms that work over the indi-
viduals head (through the reception history in periodicals, at conferences,
etc). This applies to language change, too (more on this p. 157 below). Evo-
lutionary theory is therefore something totally distinct from embodiment.
What matters there is the causal structure of evolutionary dynamics.19
There is a direct link in Crofts theory with the doctrine of usage based
linguistics. Evolutionary dynamics involves causal processes that affect
the relevant entities through actual usage events such as matings, births
and deaths. A necessary property of all elements belonging in such a sys-
tem is therefore that they constitute spatiotemporal particulars, i. e. physi-
cal entities bounded in space and time. This is a condition on having the
relevant causal properties. Thus species of animals, in order to enter into
evolutionary processes, must be understood as populations rather than
essences (cf. Croft 2000: 13, 2006: 95). Even if we assume for the sake of
the argument that the definition homo sapiens encapsulates the essential
property of the human species, thinking animals might in principle exist
20 This does not, of course, mean that it is forbidden to investigate and enumer-
ate the properties that characterize members of a population that constitutes
a species. What is forbidden is if these properties are taken out of their his-
torical context and reified as constituting the general object of description.
Even a perfectly adequate descriptive generalization (e. g. that human beings
have a language ability) is only a partial truth about the species because it
belongs in a wider context of causal pressures and changes.
92 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
22 The evolutionary analogy is also found in other versions, cf. Frank (2008), who
focuses on the way metaphors arise, spread and disappear as part of the socio-
cultural process. In her approach, the memetic dimension plays a more sig-
nificant role. A meme, following Dawkins (1989:192), is a unit of cultural
information, such as a tunes, catchphrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, which
are like linguistic expressions in that they may proliferate across populations.
Frank points out the problems with this notion, recognizing the need to flesh
it out in order to set up a fully fledged theory. The point of the article, however,
is to trace a way of thinking about language, with the complex adaptive sys-
tem as the most fully developed version, as the wider frame in which the life
history of discourse metaphors must be understood. The idea of extending
the evolutionary analogy to sociocultural formations will be pursued in chap-
ter 7 below.
94 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
23 Croft uses the term subject in its grammatical and psychological senses as an
example: part of knowing the language is to shift your understanding depend-
ing on the actual discourse situation so that you avoid linking grammatical
agreement with psychological subjects (and vice versa).
Meaning construction 95
7. Meaning construction
24 Kant the philosopher is still with us in his works as a result of cultural learning
(in one of its more demanding forms!), and in terms of the restrictive defini-
tion of mental spaces adopted on p. 46 above, philosophical discussion can
therefore be carried on by people inhabiting one undivided mental space that
96 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
includes the results of the process of cultural tradition. But online debate
requires the integration of distinct mental spaces also in the restrictive sense,
because Kant the debater is no longer with us and cannot enter the space in
which the living philosopher puts forward his arguments.
25 A step towards more dynamic conceptualization of metaphor was taken by
Lakoff and Turner (1989), describing literary metaphors as extensions of exist-
ing conceptual mappings, with novel literary effects, which might equally
deserve the epithet of emergent effects. Conversely, blends may involve stable
mappings. In Turner (2001: 19f), cockfighting in Balinese culture as analyzed
by Geertz (1973) is described as involving a blend between man and cock that
endows the fighting with a significance which depends on the co-presence of
man elements and bird elements in the fight to the death. The blends status as
staple element is revealed in the fact that outsiders are likely to miss the point
if they drop accidentally past an actual cock fight.
Meaning construction 97
not have to involve two different domains like space and time or philo-
sophical tradition and campus debating arrangements any two concep-
tual spaces can be blended. Another standard example can be invoked
here: the riddle of the monk (adapted from Koestler, cf. Fauconnier and
Turner 2002: 39). Imagine a monk who walks from the foot of a mountain
to a sanctuary at the top, taking from eight in the morning to eight in the
evening to reach his goal. After staying the night at the shrine, he follows
the path in the opposite direction, again taking from eight in the morning
to eight in the evening to complete his journey. The riddle asks: is there
a place where the monk is at exactly the same time on the two consecu-
tive days? The answer can be arrived at by blending the two journeys,
imagining the monk setting out at eight oclock simultaneously from the
top and the foot of the mountain. The place that the riddle asks for is the
point where the monk meets himself. This blend is clearly distinct from a
metaphor, since there is no recruiting of structure from one domain to
another.
The second distinct property of blending in its most interesting form is
that it is double-scope, i. e. it does not have the clear directionality that
metaphors have. The whole point of a metaphor is to recruit structure that
you know in order to impose it upon something that you are trying to
understand. If theories are buildings, you know that they take an effort to
construct, for instance. If argument is war, you know you have to counter
your opponents moves. Blends lack this directionality because the rela-
tionship is not from source to target; it goes from two source spaces to one
output space that did not exist before, and where anything can there-
fore happen.
This is where the distinctive creative potential of the blending opera-
tion comes in. It is no accident that blending theory gave rise to a book
called The Literary Mind (Turner 1996). Blending offers the unique
opportunity of mixing conceptual elements in ways that transcend the
familiar cultural environment. The figure of Satan in Miltons Paradise
Lost achieves his literary effect because his status as personification of
Evil is blended with certain properties of heroic figures in narratives
(including being the arch-rebel).26 Successful writers at some point dis-
cover that their creations are no longer willing to do their creators bid-
ding but start to act in ways that need to be discovered rather than deter-
mined and this testifies to the strength of emergent effects. If a blend is
26 There are also a great deal of other blending activities going on in the Satan
figure, cf. Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 16062).
98 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
successful and has a life of its own, a new entity has arisen and the concep-
tual world is no longer the same.
This potential is obviously a source of meaning construction rather
than evocation or invocation of existing meanings. Deviant but fascinating
figures abound in great works. When many of us read a great many more
run-of-the mill crime novels than great works of contemporary fiction, it
is partly because blending may be a conceptual challenge, and sometimes
you may not feel comfortable with some of the newly emergent creatures
that start prowling around in your mind27.
One type of conceptual integration operation illustrates the reversal of
the perspective that is central to this chapter. The directionality that begins
with the human body has its counterpart in the goal that unites the princi-
ples of blending: achieve human scale! (Fauconnier and Turner 2002:
312). This principle is a constraint on the processes of meaning construc-
tion and thus affects the output end rather than the origins of the process.
The process of compression works so as to convert a multiplicity of inputs
in both spaces to a compact version in the blend, such as when the evolu-
tionary story of the population of pronghorns across millions of years
evolve to run away from predators is compressed into one pronghorn that
escapes which is open to human identification because it is a kind of
event that fits into ordinary experience. The human element is active at
both ends: in the body that provides the neural wetware and in the online
interactive process that shapes the outcome.
In Coulson (2006), the potential of blending for online construction of
meaning outside literary contexts is analysed in relation to thought, rheto-
ric and ideology. Stressing the temporary and online nature of the opera-
tion of blending, she traces the new interpretations imposed by blends
such as snowflake kid used by a Christian pro-life group about surplus
fertilized eggs resulting from in vitro fertilization. Speaking of these eggs
in their liquid nitrogen tanks as tiny humans located in frozen orphan-
ages triggers a process of meaning construction whereby it would be
unethical to use them for stem cell research (which is what the debate was
about). Note that the operation works by the active re-construction from
eggs to children, encoded with the endearing term kids, and by conferring
the affective value that is associated with baby humans on the eggs. If you
think of them in those terms, it would indeed be unethical to experiment
with them. (There is of course a step from running the blend in your
mind to adopting this as the way you think about them; more on that
below p. 307.)
When this powerful mechanism of generating new meanings has
become part of the landscape, it becomes logical to think also of less
pyrotechnic (the term is Turners) forms of conceptual processing in
terms of meaning construction rather than in terms of meaning evocation.
One unresolved issue is the division of labour between the creative build-
up of surprising new forms of meaning and the evocation of familiar types
of meaning in standard combinations. As pointed out in Bundgaard,
stergaard and Stjernfelt (2007), although blending analysis may be uni-
versally feasible, it will often be overkill because standard schemas are
more plausible and economical. Their illustration case is compounds (one
of the issues listed as examples of what blending analysis applies to in
Turner 2007). They are essentially asymmetrical because they are modifier
constructions with a head that defines the point of departure for under-
standing, and therefore you can understand modification in the simple
case as based on schemas associated with the head. Thus fingernail can
be understood without requiring blending, because nails have a schematic
relation with fingers. Similarly house rat can be understood without
blending while mall rat (a term for delinquent teenagers who hang out
in shopping malls) do indeed require blending: no schema associated with
rat will provide the right interpretive link with mall28.
One of the processes that have acquired new significance as a result of
the increased focus on meaning construction is metonymy (cf. Panther
and Thornburg 2007, Panther 2006, Radden et al. 2007). Basic so-called
metaphors like more is up, cf. Panther (2006), might with greater justifica-
tion be understood as metonymies because it is the experiential, indexi-
28 Embodied construction grammar (cf. Bergen and Chang 2005; Feldman 2006)
views the process of meaning construction in a way that is relevant to this dis-
cussion. In accordance with the central assumption in construction grammar,
it is assumed that constructions are entrenched as wholes rather than com-
posed online. The comprehension process therefore has a necessary first step
in the form of evoking the constructions which are involved in a given utter-
ance. For the classic example of she sneezed the napkin off the table you there-
fore need to evoke caused motion, sneezing, napkin, etc. However, once the
constructions are activated, down to sensorimotor level, the second phase con-
sists in running what is termed a simulation of the entirety of the construc-
tional subcomponents. The analogy is with the way a computer runs a pro-
gramme, and the way Fauconnier and Turner speak about running a blend.
100 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
8. Final Remarks
There is obviously more to say about the socially oriented work that is at
present developing within CL than described in this chapter. This chapter
has attempted only to single out the main directions of this work. Some
additional aspects, including the specifically political dimension, will be
taken up as part of the presentation of the overall social cognitive frame-
work in Part Two of the book, especially in chapter 7.
In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned variation and intersub-
jectivity as the two keywords. To sum up at sound bite level what the
essence of this chapter has been, the most striking manifestation of the
usage-based trend is variational description, while the most radical change
from the individual mind to minds in an interactive relationship is the shift
to intersubjectivity. One phenomenon is especially central to the whole
project of the book: joint attention and action. Because joint attention and
action create a third element in addition to what is in each individuals
mind, collective mental phenomena have more emergent properties than
traffic jams (cf. the introduction, p. 6). All the issues taken up in this chap-
ter must be understood in the light of the constructive powers of joint-
attention events: conceptualizations viewed as part of culture, the role of
the population level in variational and evolutionary patterns, the dynam-
ics of meaning construction in context.
In the next chapter, we are now going to have a look at the competi-
tion. The social arena is not virgin territory that advancing cognitive lin-
guists can claim as their own merely by planting the flag, and in order to
discuss the potential role of a social CL, it is necessary to assess the find-
ings of approaches who regard it as their home base.
Introduction 103
1. Introduction
The social sciences do not traditionally take a primary interest in mind and
language. However, there is one type of approach, associated with the two
keywords in the title of the chapter, which has gained ground in the past
generation, and which has assigned a significant role to language and mean-
ing. Social constructionism1 is the belief that social processes have the
power to create a range of entities that used to be understood as facts (dis-
eases, scientific theories, genders, etc). Discourses (in the plural) are key
agents in that process: what precise entities are generated depends on what
discourse is at work. The social semiosis is one name for the whole overall
process in which we find discourses and the entities they give rise to.
Although this approach is radically opposed to that of CL and cogni-
tive science generally, there is another sense in which they start from the
same point of departure: the demise of objectivism. In order to under-
stand what the two approaches share and where they differ, it is necessary
to understand this historical point of departure.
From antiquity onwards it had been assumed that words had meaning
because solid reality lurked right behind them. The precise nature of that
seemingly obvious link, however, stubbornly resisted all attempts to nail it
down; and in the 20th century it was abandoned.2 The transition is gener-
ally associated with the change from early to late Wittgenstein. In Philo-
sophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953), meaning is described as some-
thing that emerges from language games, rather than being based in
mind-internal structures or as labels of objects. Placing the naming game
as merely one type of activity that you can use language for, Wittgenstein
in one fell swoop gets rid of both objective and mental categories as priv-
ileged sources of meaning. An alternative example of a language game is
one enacted by two builders, one of whom has the task of passing on build-
ing materials to the other, who does the actual building. An utterance like
slab gets its meaning from being part of that language game, and the other
builder understands it because he is part of the game. Looking for the
source of meaning in the mind would thus be mistaken: if we abstract
away the building activity (and imagine the two people lying on the beach
instead), the utterance slab would no longer make sense.
This was a truly monumental change. Suddenly it became clear that the
entire 2400-year-old approach to meaning had got it backwards. When the
objective facts of unified science went away, both mental and social facts
came out to play but they played in separate ball parks. Cognitive science,
including CL, pursued the mental side of the issue. The social side did not
join forces in a parallel umbrella discipline of social science, but across
disciplinary boundaries social constructionism had equally spectacular
consequences. If social processes are the key causal agent behind every-
thing from the scientific world picture to Tolstoys War and Peace, it under-
mines the foundations of the whole tradition of knowledge not just the
tradition in the humanities (which had been slowly undermined by the
progress of science anyway), but also in the hard sciences. In various forms
it has continued to exert corrosive influence on the authority of apparently
solid knowledge. We are still in the process of digesting this change.
This chapter begins by outlining the rationale of social construction-
ism, with a view to identifying the main true insight and the main fallacy
in the development. The next section describes the most influential mani-
festation, the French poststructuralists or anti-humanists, and then goes
on to sketch out the type of discourse analysis that is associated with the
plural form discourses. I then describe first a form of psychology and then
a form of linguistics in which the social semiosis is the basic point of depar-
ture.
In order to understand what this approach implies for language and mind,
it is necessary to begin by considering what it means for knowledge in
general. In relation to language, the causal power of social forces is most
familiar from Austins and Searles theories of speech acts. Acts such as
marrying and promising bring about things that were not there before
(marriages and promises). Social constructionism views the creation of
scientific knowledge from the same point of view: what are the processes
whereby a piece of information is assigned the status of fact?
From that perspective, facts are constructed through social processes.
The same goes for another centrepiece of the tradition, the concept of
knowledge itself: only if we assign the status of fact to a given piece of
information can we say that we know it. In addition to the iconoclastic
thrill, it created a new exciting project: investigating the processes that
contribute to the construction of facts. The first major work that thema-
tizes the role of social factors in determining what counts as scientific fact
was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962), which put the
notion of a scientific paradigm on the map as a name for the collective
belief system of a school of scientists. This concept is set up expressly as
something distinct from scientific theories viewed as the best available
approximation to true knowledge. Paradigms are familiar facts of life for
linguists, since the field is a very obvious example of how scientific disci-
plines may contain competing sets of basic assumptions. When a linguist
has to present his investigation of a given linguistic body of observations,
the issue of how to adapt his conclusions to the paradigm is clearly a sepa-
rate and laborious issue that comes on top of the process of adapting his
conclusions to his object of description (previously understood as real-
ity). Scientific paradigms are cognitive constructs, and thus illustrate that
this development is part of the same historical process that gave rise to
cognitive linguistics. But like other authors discussed in this chapter, Kuhn
is less interested in cognition than in the workings of social power, in this
case the power of scientific communities.3
A second major work, which came to define the post-positivist take on
scientific knowledge also in a broader community perspective was The
social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966). They dis-
cussed science as a key example of how social processes determine what
4 The difficulty in pinning down exactly how much was determined by social
processes, combined with the common sense acceptance of the distinction
between solid fact and illusion has created considerable leeway for disagree-
ment and extreme positions. One of the most celebrated clashes was the so-
called Sokal Hoax, where a physicist wrote an article which was a travesty of a
social-constructionist critique of belief in hard physical facts. The article in fact
succeeded in getting published in Social Text, a leading social-constructionist
periodical (cf. Sokal 1996).
108 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
can we know whether they are trustworthy or not? The second is the ques-
tion of rationality: If the individual is causally bound to believe whatever
he downloads from the social group he hangs out with, what happens to
the process of sorting and evaluating incoming information? The latter is
associated with what Pinker (1994, 2002) calls the standard social science
model, in which human minds are blank slates, overwritten by whatever
social processes may inscribe on them. While the anything goes position
is not credible in science, we still need to know the precise nature of the
influence of social processes in determining what counts as good science.5
What such a precise account is going to look like is controversial. What
is uncontroversial is that the process by which we assign the status as sci-
ence to something is social, and reliable procedures for evaluating scien-
tific results thus depend on a good social framework for science. Ironically,
social constructionism about scientific knowledge therefore revolves
round one pivotal, objective, inescapable scientific fact: all the stuff that is
recognized as knowledge has undergone a process of social construction.
This means that whatever other factors enter into the picture, such as mol-
ecules, neurons and metaphors, an account of the role of social factors is
mandatory in order to understand the way we think.
The social constructivist revolution affected not only the theory of hard
science but had an even more pervasive impact on fields dealing with the
softer forms of knowledge in the areas of culture and society. In this
context, it allied itself with a broad agenda of anti-authoritarianism that
affected also the more general political and cultural agenda of the 1970s.
Revolts against established forms of knowledge went hand in hand with a
revolt against the set of assumptions that constituted the legitimization of
established political practices in the western world.
In the early phase of that development, Karl Marx was an important
influence, especially with respect to one key point: mental categories are
shaped by social processes ultimately driven by power relations. The state-
ment that the ruling thoughts are the thoughts of the rulers (Marx/Engels
1932: 35) can be regarded as the foundational statement in the left-wing
6 One way of summarizing the main thrust of his ideas is to say that what is real
is in fact not decided by social consensus. That was why all the socially
entrenched ideas that young and old Hegelians were haggling about were all
equally misguided. Instead, the bedrock reality of peoples lives is created by
their own interaction with the material world. This is where the term ideology
gets its sense of illusion from: there is an actual social reality which can be
factored out from all the talk. While the freshness of the indignation behind
Marxs attack on German idealist philosophy has survived, the project of fil-
tering out the realm of non-reality from material reality turned out to be dif-
ficult to bring to a successful conclusion without an element of reductionism
(vulgar Marxism). Reducing superstructure to being determined by the
base constituted by material production gradually lost ground; the remains
were swept away by social constructionism and with it the intellectual inter-
est in the strictly economic part of the agenda.
7 As emphasized by Wright (2004), this is a more specific situation than simply
one in which there is simply a superior position that dominates over less pow-
erful beliefs and practices.
110 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
itself directly into the bodily dispositions of the students (cf. Bourdieu &
Passeron 1990: 31), dispensing with the detour that goes via cognitive rep-
resentations8.
The key type of social practice, and the central explanatory factor in
critically oriented social constructionism, is what is called discourse in a
wide sense that includes all language-mediated social processes from edu-
cation, religion, and government to everyday communication. The con-
cept of discourse as understood by Foucault and especially his followers,
has gradually assumed centre-stage position as the term for what analysts
need to get their hands on in order to understand what shapes post-objec-
tivist forms of reality. The most striking renewal of the standard way of
talking about discourse is the introduction of a countable sense, a dis-
course, understood broadly speaking as a particular way of talking about
things (more on this in the following section).
Initially, Foucaults interest was in large-scale quasi-objective forms of
determination, with historical epochs in focus and shifts in discourse as
parts of a new form of history of ideas. Foucaults (1969) study of the
change in scientific discourses at various points in history points to a
mechanism related to the one made famous by Kuhn (1962) in the theory
of science9. At any given point in history there is a particular way of talk-
ing and also disagreeing about a field of study that is taken for granted.
When the participants in such historical circles of practice make their con-
tributions, they act according to unwritten rules to which there are no
alternatives available. By the same token, these practices also determine
what is beyond the pale, i. e. what cannot be articulated within a context
dominated by a given discourse. It is not that it is physically impossible it
is just that it does not arise, or if by a freak accident it does, it becomes
invisible because it does not qualify as a relevant way of talking about
things.
8 Cultural and material practices are interwoven in this view of human practice,
since symbolic and financial capital are interchangeable. An illustration is that
in certain societies it is rational to spend all your money on a wedding since
that wedding will give more status in the sociocultural order than hoarded sav-
ings. Although Bourdieu explicitly does not see either language or cognition
as the central factors, the processes that he as well as the other French anti-
humanists are interested in are those that are accompanied by language and
other forms of symbolic mediation; Bourdieu speaks of lconomie des
changes linguistiques in the original title of the book that in English became
Language and symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991).
9 As pointed out by Piaget 1972, p. 112 (in the Danish translation).
112 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
10 This contrast has been adopted and used in vast numbers of different guises,
including gender studies (where heterosexual patterns are mainstream), class
structure (where the ruling classes are mainstream) and post-colonialism
(where established western doctrines are mainstream).
Power, habitus, marginalization and discourse 113
reality, texts take their cues from each other and reproduce as well as
reorganize particular organizations of meanings. In the most radical ver-
sion of this position, there is nothing but interpretations as far as the eye
can reach: Every decoding is another encoding, as succinctly expressed
by David Lodges fictitious professor Zapp. A key point of reference is a
passage from Derrida which is often rendered as there is nothing outside
the text (but which in the French original is il ny a pas de hors-texte, Der-
rida (1967: 227), which is a pun on hors doeuvre and means something
like there is no privileged domain that is totally extra-textual).
In Derridas own context, this much-discussed quote is not part of a
discussion of what really exists Derrida is playing a different language
game and is not really into ontology talk. This becomes clear in the dis-
cussion with Searle in Glyph, Derrida (1977a&b), where rather than
entering into the discussion, Derrida is being naughty according to the
standard rules of the game.11 Although the plausible intended message is
not to express the thoroughgoing ontological scepticism which detractors
use it to illustrate, but rather the text-like interpretation-driven features
of human existence as such (cf. Derrida 1981: xiv), there is a certain irony
in having to resort to the authors intended message in trying to defend
Derridas general position. However, this should not obscure the rele-
vance of the theme that Derrida is pursuing: that readers are in the grip of
forces they cannot hope to get behind, and we should therefore be scepti-
cal of the claims of those who pretend to have found a secure foothold
beyond the semiosis itself. The risk is only that this particular agenda is
taken to be the whole truth, cf. pp. 336 and 450.
With the alliance between discourse and the exertion of social power
of marginalization and oppression, there is a critical edge shared with
Marxism, even if there is no material base for it. The factors that shape
discourse in ways that speakers cannot defend themselves against still cry
out for being pointed out and examined. This gives rise to a pattern of
interpretation which, following Ricoeur (1970), has been called the
hermeneutics of suspicion: the task of meaning construction in under-
standing discourse is associated with an orientation towards dismantling
illusions and unmasking hidden power play in the text.
11 As pointed out in Siegumfeldts 2005 (counter-)obituary, the fact that his posi-
tion emphasized the unfinished nature of all interpretations and openness
towards the future did not mean that questions of sources and origins were
foreign or irrelevant to him.
114 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
12 It follows from the heterogeneous nature of the enterprise that what I present
as core features will not fit all instances equally well, cf. also chapter 7, section
4. What I claim is merely that there is a position in the landscape that my
account fits well enough and that has enough impact to make it worth chal-
lenging.
The analytic practice: discourse(s) analysis 115
13 This is true in more than one way. First of all, it applies to the borderline
between the field that constitutes our world and the untrodden domains
beyond and secondly it applies to the distinction between the types of things
we say and the types of things we habitually do not say within the everyday
cosmos we live in. The latter we only meet in the shape of embarrassing fail-
ures and transgressions, without being aware that what is a failure by one
standard may be an achievement by another.
118 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
ous added attraction of the model, however, is that it situates the analyst
at a level of consciousness above the language user: the analyst is looking
for something the speaker herself cannot see. This privileged position for
the observer follows directly from the limitations of the position of the
subject: if the analyst was equally incapable of seeing what eludes the sub-
ject herself, there would be no analysis possible. There is no dialogic, col-
laborative relation between the sender and the analyst, who is not an
addressee but an observer.14
Foucault pioneered the approach of looking for the backgrounded,
hidden and invisible elements in the picture rather than the foregrounded
and explicitly highlighted. The distinction between the focal and the mar-
ginalized is related to the distinction between normality and the other.
His general approach is well suited for a description of the way in which
dominant patterns of talk are instruments of upholding a particular bal-
ance of power that keeps some people in and others out, while masquer-
ading as simply representing the way the world is.
I would therefore like to draw a distinction between on the one hand
the specific contribution of Foucault to understanding the historical
changes he describes, and on the other hand what Blommaert and Ver-
schueren (cf. chapter 8) call the Foucauldian lore. For instance, Foucaults
analysis of the development of the correctional dimension of institutions,
cf. Foucault 1975, brings together an impressive amount of knowledge,
linking up language, architecture, institutional history and many other
diverse fields. In doing so, Foucault shows how the detailed and compre-
hensive historical knowledge of a range of social processes allows you to
14 Foucault and his followers are essentially only interested in statements, ways
of representing the world, and thus deal mostly with texts that might to others
naively appear to represent reality. But in continuation of Foucaults investi-
gation of social processes of marginalization and exclusion, the interest in the
role of practices of discussion and communication in setting up the borderline
between what is inside vs. outside the field of accepted practice has played a
tremendous and well-deserved role because it brought something under the
microscope that had eluded the attention of investigators. If it is assumed that
language gets its meaning from reality itself, the role of talk in making parts of
reality invisible does not arise as an issue for the analyst and thus escapes
attention, just as the deft movements of the magician keep certain acts out of
sight of the audience. The processes of social determination that lead people
to talk about some things but not others, and talk about those things in certain
ways but not in other ways, would therefore be potentially successful also in
misleading the critical investigator.
The analytic practice: discourse(s) analysis 119
bring out the rise of interwoven patterns of thought and social control that
would be inaccessible if you stayed within traditional assumptions and
discipline boundaries. I thus follow Putnam (2001) when he expresses his
admiration of Foucaults analysis of specific institutional practices, while
remaining more sceptical about the more general features of his work
(those that are taken over by the Foucauldian lore in Blommaert and
Verschuerens terms).
One common mildly diluted variant is discourses analysis used with
texts as the object of description, i. e. without an independent analysis of
institutional practices. The following description of it is somewhat boring
and not very dense in information, but this unfortunate feature is moti-
vated by the sprawling nature of the phenomenon, its dispersion in social
space (as it were), combined with my wish to provide a reasonable amount
of documentation, since I would otherwise suspect myself of tending
towards unfairness in my description.
As described above, discourses analysis begins with a distinction
between different discourses, thereby allowing the analyst to assign a
piece of discourse (non-count) to a given discourse (countable), such as
the neoliberal discourse or the discourse of tolerance. The use of this
form of analysis is characteristic of approaches that use the adjective crit-
ical about themselves, such as critical theory, critical linguistics, and
especially critical discourse analysis (= CDA). Among the most influen-
tial representatives of Foucault-inspired CDA is Norman Fairclough (e. g.
1995, 2000, 2003), which makes it natural to use his work as a point of
departure.
To illustrate the vagueness as well as the central point in the concept of
discourse in this approach I begin with a selection of quotations:
The analysis of discourse for Foucault is the analysis of the domain of state-
ments that is, of texts, and of utterances as constituent elements of texts. But
that does not mean a concern with detailed analysis of texts the concern is
more a matter of discerning the rules which govern bodies of texts and utter-
ances.
Then, from Fairclough (2003: 124125), on his own behalf:
120 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
sis is to pin down a particular point of view, a given discourse has to stay
within the defining point of view. This becomes clear when Fairclough
(2000: 24) analyses a Blair speech containing the following passage:
In the increasingly global economy of today, we cannot compete in the old way.
Capital is mobile, technology can migrate quickly and goods can be made in
low cost countries and shipped to developed markets ()
()The fourth (point, i. e., that technology can migrate quickly, PH) is perhaps
the most interesting: it is represented as an action, but technology is repre-
sented as itself an agent in a process, rather than something that is acted
upon (i. e. moved) by the multinationals. Notice the metaphor here technol-
ogy migrates, like birds in winter. The sentence might be differently worded,
for instance as : The multinational corporations can quickly move capital and
technology from place to place, and they can make goods in low countries and
ship them to developed markets. But this is not just a change in the wording; it
is a change of discourse: in the discourse of New Labour, the multinational cor-
porations are not agents responsible for what happens in the global economy.
What prevents the hypothetical reformulation from joining the existing
Blair discourse is its status as an ideological odd-man-out. Purely abstractly
there is no necessary contradiction between seeing multinationals as
agents and other elements in Blairs universe; but the ideology of agency
is different from the one Fairclough is after. It is not a matter of either
logical contradiction or strictly linguistic choices, but of ideological stance.
If Fairclough had chosen to define other ideological features as criterial or
if Blair had chosen as his overall strategy to profile the beneficial effects
of agentive corporations, this would have been part of the New Labour
discourse.15
The discourses analysis therefore and that is crucial in comparing it
with a cognitive-functional approach inherits one half of the classical
objectivist understanding of language: it assumes a truth-based semantics
The difference is, of course, that what is to count as reality is part of the
battle. Similarly, as pointed out by OHalloran (2003), it also takes over a
truth-conditionally based view of language processing, corresponding to
first-generation cognitive science: meanings provide a precise world
view although the reality claim and the world view are approached with
scepticism. There is no awareness that language could be linked to reality
in other ways, such as by its functions within a way of life.
15 One may observe that Foucaults own analysis of the way economic power
works would appear to coincide with Blairs rather than with an analysis in
terms of explicit agency.
122 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
16 How the discourse can be personified and abstracted out of the speakers can
also be illustrated by Hansen (2006), using discourse analysis in the political
science field of International Relations:
The construction of the Balkans as incapable of change and with the capac-
ity of entrapping the West functioned to legitimize a Western policy of inac-
tion. But as accounts of the warfare surfaced in Western Media, the Balkan
discourse had to engage in a debate on whether ethnic cleansing and geno-
cide warranted Western intervention. Here the Balkan discourse made a
double move. First, it homogenized the inside of the Balkans by constitut-
ing the subjectivity of anyone involved in the war in Bosnia as one of being
Balkan, more specifically as parties or warring factions.
We see how the social agent, the Balkan discourse finds a counter-ploy to a
move by an opposed agent by regrouping parts of the underlying Weltan-
schauung (more on the role of meaning and language in the theory of Inter-
national Relations in chapter 7 below).
Discursive psychology 123
representational content are the sole actors on the scene, and the analyst
(standing above the fray) can essentially choose or even construct the
object he wants to focus on.
Foucault (1969) argued that this view constituted a new phase in intel-
lectual history and provocatively claimed that the age of man was end-
ing that human being as a concept was becoming obsolete, replaced by
the impersonal forces of discourse(s). But instead of viewing this as a
world view in which human beings are mere pawns, it makes more sense
to see it as a type of analytic practice that chooses a different vantage
point compared to the individual-based perspective with the human agent
as the hero. Foucault-inspired discourse analyses such as Edward Saids
([1978] 2003) Orientalism have succeeded in bringing out patterns that are
indeed invisible to the individual speaker, precisely because they adopt a
perspective that is beyond the scope of single individuals: there is a cluster
of related but variable ways of speaking about the Orient which has
developed over centuries and which, for the individual speaker at any
given historical time, are already there before she even opens her mouth.
We can only get at that kind of pattern if we abstract from the individual
and therefore this type of analysis brings out elements that were over-
looked before Foucault, and in so doing puts a much-needed critical spot-
light on the power of social forces to determine (partly) what we think
and what we take to be real without being aware of it.
5. Discursive psychology
Discursive psychology also aligns itself with the conversation analysis that
grew out of ethnomethodology, including its commitment to close-knit
analysis of the situated unfolding of conversational practices. What the
discursive psychologists add to these foundations is the attention to the
psychological maneuvering involved in the process of online construction.
They use the work of Atkinson and Drew (1979) on courtroom interroga-
tion to illustrate how the discursive process of attribution of blame is the
key motor in the process, shaping questions and especially answers. They
note (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 89) that allocating blame takes a number
of turns, usually eight or nine, and point out that witness testimonies are
organized so as to best deflect the process. Understanding of what goes on
as well as the causal mechanisms driving the process needs to be based in
the process of blame attribution and the construction of events that goes
into that process, rather than in facts about the inner mentality of partici-
pants.
One of the analogies used is that of dancing: like people engaged in a
square dance, participants engaged in discursive interaction know what
expectations and role attributions are at work in the unfolding situation
and navigate as best they can so as to acquit themselves (sometimes liter-
ally so!) as best they can. Referring to Garfinkel (1972), discursive psy-
chologists invoke the existence of a dense network of everyday normative
mechanisms working to keep things within existing patterns, but also
shaping events when developments stray from those patterns.
Discursive psychology 125
6. Systemic-Functional Linguistics
as the central figure.17 SFL shares a number of basic beliefs with cognitive
linguistics, and Halliday has had most of those beliefs since before Chom-
sky took centre-stage position on the linguistic scene. For almost sixty
years, he has been pointing in essentially the direction that is associated
with this book, and in so doing been right from an early date about an
impressive number of important things. It is worth outlining some of
them:
First of all, following the lead of his mentor, Firth, he points to the
foundational status of actual linguistic usage in linguistics: language must
be understood as ongoing practice. Secondly, meaning rather than form is
the name of the game: the social process that is the primary manifestation
of language is a process of creating, handling and exchanging meanings.
Thirdly, as opposed to the American tradition, the issue of structuring is
not primarily associated with the formal side, but also and essentially with
the side of meaning. Meaning, as in CL, is understood as encoded in a
continuum rather than a split between lexicon and grammar, as expressed
in the term lexicogrammar Fourthly, the experiential dimension is
embedded in a larger, functional conception of what semantics is that also
includes an explicitly recognized interactive, or interpersonal, dimension,
as well as a textual dimension.
Some of Hallidays theories about links between sentence structure
and interpersonal and textual features have gained very wide recognition
both inside and outside linguistics. For example, the reanalysis of standard
notions of subjecthood (Halliday 19671968), in which are into actor, sub-
ject and theme, with roles defined in terms of the different major subcom-
ponents of the semantic system, has remained a classic.18 Halliday has also
stressed the role of construal, including what he calls grammatical meta-
phor, such as the reification associated with nominalizations (the shooting
rather that they shot him). Combined with agent deletion, it can be used to
transform the police shot a demonstrator into the shooting, a kind of
transformation with obvious political implications.
17 It should be pointed out that there are different groups within the larger com-
munity of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, and the discussion below does not
apply equally to all of them. In particular, the Cardiff community with Robin
Fawcett as a central figure would not in general agree with the positions I
criticize below.
18 Cf. Butler (2003) on the changing relations between the subcomponents dur-
ing the development of SFL.
128 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
These are among those SFL-based linguistic concepts that have had
considerable impact in discourses analysis as described above.
As a final point, Halliday (cf. Halliday 1975) has analysed the roots of
language in early embodied practice, including as a particularly important
point the role of intersubjectivity as the basis of language development,
not as something that arises when two cognitive individuals happens to
meet; his contribution there has been stressed by e. g. Trevarthen, cp.
Trevarthen and Reddy (2006).
All in all it is therefore interesting, also in the context of the history of
linguistics, to ask why (I believe) not only Cognitive Linguistics in general
but specifically this book has not been rendered superfluous by progress
in systemic-functional linguistics?
In answer to this I would like to suggest that the systemic-functional
endeavour as a whole has taken a different course, and as a consequence
Hallidays impact has perhaps been greater outside than inside linguistics.
The basic feature, which is a strength in some respects but which has lim-
ited its power to bring about the kind of overall clarification that is the
aim of this book, is its inherent user-orientation.
In a lecture in Copenhagen (2006), Halliday talked about appliable
linguistics (rather than applicable, or applied). By the term appliable he
understood linguistic concepts developed for or by the potential users
themselves, devised so as to be usable in the particular context in which
users were interested. In the preface to his collected works (Halliday 2002:
2), he talks about how
when it came to asking questions about language, I always found myself lin-
ing up with the outsiders I was interested in what other people wanted to
know about language.
Every new insight that you get when analysing a text, every addition to
your knowledge of the universe, must be understood as reflecting a part
of your semantic system. This system would have to be pretty big; but the
complexity is perhaps not the main worry the world is after all a compli-
cated affair. The problem is that it is not clear that there is a well-defined,
existent object of investigation which warrants all this complexity in the
130 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
semantic system in order for the text to be understandable (pace the quo-
tation above). This is where the understanding of natural language differs
from the understanding of a formal system.21 For that reason, there can be
no valid criteria for setting up the whole set of semantic choices relevant
for text understanding in advance setting up such a system is either
something you can do any way you like, or a circular process whereby you
smuggle the output categories into the premises of textual understanding.
In practice, the semantic categories therefore have an uncertain status,
which is perhaps best understood in terms of the concept of appliability,
cf. above: they are there because it seems a good way to analyse the text
you happen to be dealing with.22
In practice, it thus appears to be up to the individual systemic linguist
to posit any categories that he finds revealing. An illustrative early instance
of this is when Halliday (1973: 72), envisaging a sociological semantics,
sets up a network of semantic choices in the area of parental control over
children. Inspired by Bernstein, he sets up a socio-semantic network
that includes a choice between person-oriented and position-oriented
forms of control, as the first tier of semantic choices that mediates between
purely behavioural options (outside language) and the choices that are
closer to the lexicogrammar. It is fascinating to follow the path that Halli-
day outlines from the situation of confrontation between the childs and
the parents agenda to the actual, if unfortunate, choice of If you do that
again Ill smack you. It is also clear that the socio-semantic network is set
up based on both a particular sociological condition and a particular soci-
ological theory. Had the sociologist conceived of the situational options in
different ways, the semantic network would have looked different. It
would appear also to be in the spirit of this practice to import for instance
the grid of choices offered on company phones (press one for complaints,
two for bookings .) as a systemic network into the socio-semantic
domain of customer inquiries.23
This broad scope for the theorists free choice may arise also in connec-
tion with categories close to the lexico-grammar. Thus Halliday (1994:
6869) operates with four basic speech act types (seen as (discourse)-
semantic options), divided two by two: offer vs. request, and goods &
services vs. information. These can be matched to lexicogrammatic cate-
gories, in that declaratives and interrogatives are respectively offers and
requests of information, and imperatives are requests for goods and serv-
ices but what about offer of goods and services? Well, for that semantic
choice there is no congruent lexicogrammatical category. This is perfectly
true but again, it is not clear how the semantic category offer of goods
and services is validated, or whether or not the descriptive principles of
Systemic-Functional Linguistics actually entail that it needs any validation.
This is the essential issue in the critique I have presented. There can be
no argument against positing new relevant descriptive categories; there
can be no objection to users applying existing categories in a way that
suits their purposes best; there can be no objection to describing an empir-
ical object in arbitrarily fine detail. But at the end of the day there has to
be a process of evaluating and validating all descriptive categorizations, if
they are to have any claim to a status as part of the descriptive apparatus,
rather than disposable tools that have served their purpose.
I believe the grand project for a socially based semantics that Halliday
outlines is unrealizable for reasons of principle, both because of the open-
endedness of the universe of potentially relevant semantic choices and
because of the hypostatization that would be involved in attributing them
all not only to ongoing process but also to the system from which choices
are supposed to have been made. I think this explains why a number of
linguists who have at one point rightly been fascinated with the many
attractive features of the approach, do not in the end align themselves
with the overall endeavour of systemic-functional linguistics: it is not
designed to bring about clarification of issues about which one might be in
doubt it is designed for users, not scientists.
This is also reflected in the practices of the community. Logically
enough, since the issue is not really whether this is the best possible
description, systemic linguists do not concentrate on that point:
Perhaps the most common criticism of systemic practice is that argumenta-
tion is severely lacking, to the point of being non-existent. (McGregor 1997:
ix)
The result is that although much work is done, and much of it is not only
useful but also potentially valuable, there is not much sorting and selec-
tion going on:
since, as we have seen, systemicists place a very high value on applications
and their feedback into the theory, this tendency acts to reinforce the accept-
ance of hypothesis as received wisdom. (Butler 2003: 204)
24 The appeal of Hallidayan grammar that comes from the goal of basing gram-
mar in actual text thus turns out to have the drawback that once the gram-
matical description has been made, it freezes the understanding of text into a
grammatical mold. If there is no distinction between the two, there can be no
dynamic interplay between the grammar and the process of textual under-
standing in context, understood as an online process that mediates between
the general categories and the concrete act of understanding. In a number of
cases, Widdowson shows that grammatical metaphor and agent deletion does
not really hold up as an argument for manipulatory language use. One exam-
ple is newspaper headlines, where there are good reasons why full sentences
instead of nominalizations are not to be expected. Another is the critical anal-
ysis of literature, cf. Widdowson (2000), which he shows to be un-cooperative,
because literature invites readers to carry out a genre-specific language activ-
ity which the critical analyst refuses to perform.In a similar vein, OHalloran
(2003:79) points out how Hallidays assumption that grammar as a description
of the linguistic system can at the same time be a grammar of the text has the
consequence that critical analysts can use Hallidays system to analyse texts
under the assumption that clauses are mentally facsimilated in cognition. If
something is coded as a thing (as a result of nominalization), this reification
is directly copied into cognition. A sentence that does not explicitly encode
agency is copied into a cognitive representation where agency is missing (see
also the discussion in ch.7).
25 Another fairly striking failing analysed by OHalloran (2003) is the absence of
a consideration of the role of the reader: whether the text spreads a political
bias or not depends on the activities of the reader as much as on the text. As
Systemic-Functional Linguistics 135
OHalloran points out, if you read for gist rather than immerse yourself in the
text, you are not likely to be mentally molded by the text. Rather than stamp
a precise reading into the minds of unsuspecting readers, news texts are sub-
ject to experiential meaning construction which means that text-based ideol-
ogy does not translate directly into ideological mystification to the extent
presupposed by the alliance between SFL and CDA.To some extent, the prob-
lem is the same one that has been approached from a number of perspectives
above: the assumption that the text world reflects categories of a large seman-
tic system, which makes it superfluous to reserve a role for interaction with the
extralinguistic world. Since the actual reader is part of the world-text interac-
tion, it is taken for granted that he can be subsumed under the description that
characterizes the text as meaning potential. The world, in a sense, is treated as
a feature of the text.
136 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
The historical shift associated with the late Wittgenstein combined the fall
of positivism and the rise of interaction as the home ground of meaning.
In spite of the lack of a unified umbrella (soc-sci) for the social sciences,
the idea that social processes, some more powerful than others, are the
driving forces of meaning construction is widely shared within fields
including literature, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and political
science. The approaches discussed in this chapter are just a small selection
of those that directly bear on meaning.
The unity-in-diversity is reflected in criss-crossing links between these
approaches. The role of social determination and power, and the critical
attitude to it are common ground. Hallliday is explicitly committed to lin-
guistics being used as an ideologically committed form of social action (cf.
Halliday 1985: 2, as quoted in Butler 2003: 158), and the most influential
work in SFL-inspired social semantics is probably Faircloughs school of
Critical Discourse Analysis which also uses Foucault-inspired concepts.
Discursive psychology looks for the same kind of power-driven mecha-
nisms as Foucault and also reflects the hermeneutics of suspicion. Both
discursive psychology and Halliday adopt a minimalist approach to cogni-
tive content: Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) links up language in the
social domain directly with neuroscience, thus cutting out mental cogni-
tion as an unnecessary middle man, cf. Butler (2003: 158). All in all, the
foundational importance of social processes, viewed in a critical perspec-
tive, and the focus on understanding conceptual content as more or less
derivative of the social processes, makes this broad position a clear alter-
native to an emerging social cognitive position.
In the chapter I have tried to make clear both where I think there is
something in each of these approaches that a social cognitive linguistics
Systemic-Functional Linguistics 137
needs to address, and also why I think their account of it is not definitive.
The points of interest have to do with the social life of meaning above
individual level the traffic, as well as the traffic jams of meaning, to
broaden the metaphor I used in the introduction (p. 6). Of these, I take up
later two elements from Bourdieu: the idea that cognitive constructs enter
into the economic sphere as symbolic capital, and the notion of habitus
as embodiment imposed from outside. From Foucault I take up the con-
cept of a discourse understood as a collection of utterances that exerts
pressure on subsequent contributions, defining what it is (im)possible to
say. From Derrida I take up the idea that there is a powerful internal
dynamics to processes of meaning construction in society, which cannot be
grasped from the outside. From discursive psychology I take up the power
of specific language games such as the blaming game to get people to
adopt conceptual constructions on the fly, as dictated by the internal logic
of the game, rather than their own mental content, and finally Systemic-
Functional Linguistics offers an approach to language as a vast tool-box
for user-friendly meaning construction.
The reason why these approaches are not definitive have to do with
two things. The first is the part of the picture that they ignore (or actively
suppress), which in most cases includes the human mind. The second is the
vagueness in the understanding of the nature of the all-important social
process. The two are related in that the absence of a clear role for the mind
also makes it unclear how to understand the role of mental constructs in
the social process.
For the project of an integrated social cognitive account, this raises a
pervasive question of clarification in cases where what appears to be the
same issue can be addressed both as a social and cognitive phenomenon.
Thus where Fairclough (p. 120 above) speaks of the Cartesian discourse,
Lakoff and Johnson speak of the Cartesian metaphoric model (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999: 409). From a Foucauldian perspective, Lakoffs strict father
model would be an instance of the discourse of governmentality, cf.
Foucault (1975), etc. There is also an affinity between the variationist
dimension of the emerging socio-cognitive position and the Foucauldian
concept of dispersion: the fact that it is not one well-defined conceptual
framework that constitutes a discourse but a fluid and moving constella-
tion of related positions in mutual interaction reflects the same insight.
We are left with a question with a chicken-and-egg whiff about it: what is
the relation between conceptual models and discursive processes? In
order to address this issue, it is necessary to provide an account of how
mental and social facts interact. This is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive
synthesis: social reality as the context of cognition
1. Introduction
dition. The search for hard facts clearly needs to look elsewhere; and there
are a number of useful points of departure in the tradition.
Like mental facts, social facts crept out of the shadow of supposedly
objective facts in a very gradual process, whose effective starting point
was somewhere in the Enlightenment. Until that point the official assump-
tion had been that the social order had no existence of its own, but was a
reflection of the divine order (and disaffection with it was therefore a
Satanic revolt). Instead, it was gradually realized that human beings were
to some extent responsible for making their own history. The processes
that culminated in the French Revolution put social processes on the map
as something that required attention in its own right.
This development took place in many arenas simultaneously. From
being viewed as divine, the social order came to be viewed in terms of a
contract (cf. Rousseau and Burke) still binding, but now an agreement
among human beings in a social relationship. Hume put on the agenda the
more radical issue of whether our patterns of thinking were merely the
result of what was socially accepted. But perhaps most significantly, the
privilege of being the invisible hand operating behind the scenes while
engendering events beneficial to everybody, was transferred from Divine
Providence to economic, market-based mechanisms (more on this in sec-
tion 4 below).
The idea of a general science of social reality was proposed by Auguste
Comte, the founder of positivism, in a version that explicitly aimed to
throw out the old idealistic tradition and begin with solid scientific facts.
This pattern of thinking continued with Durkheim, who was the founding
father of sociology, in the sense of being the first to give substance to the
new discipline. He investigated a number of social issues based on the
conviction that social facts are just as objective as physical facts. In this, he
was right in one sense: if anything is a fact, in the intrinsic sense (cf. p. 142),
it is objective in the sense that it does not matter what an observer may
think about it. We return to this issue in ch. 7, p. 310.2
Durkheim makes two points that are central also from a linguistic per-
spective. One is about the link between covert mind-internal and overt
mind-external facts; the other concerns the nature of autonomy. First, one
should use overt facts to get at covert facts about social reality. Durkhe-
ims position is positivist in resting on a belief in objective fact, but is in no
way reductionist or physicalist. He views moral, normative ties as the basic
fabric of society; but since norms as such are not directly accessible, for
methodological reasons the scientist has to look for external manifesta-
tions (such as the law, cf. Durkheim 1893: 28). In studying whether life is
felt to be (normatively) good, getting at quality-of-life directly may be
impossible, but we can study it indirectly via the prevalence of suicide
(1893: 226f) and use it to get at the less accessible issue, the felt experience
of the quality of life. Social facts thus include a subjective as well as an
objective dimension. Secondly, the kind of autonomy proposed by Durk-
heim(1898) for social facts is not absolute but partial.3 Partial autonomy
applies also to mental facts: Durkheim argues that although mental life is
grounded in cellular mechanisms, mental representations are not reduci-
ble to facts about cells.
Some of the issues that Durkheim took up have remained striking
examples of the causal power of social facts. The study of suicide (Durk-
heim 1897) is illustrative also from the point of view of the social turn of
cognitive linguistics. Suicide clearly involves subjective experience: unless
you conceive of your life as not worth living, suicide is not a relevant
option. Durkheims point was that this apparently most private and sub-
jective of all issues could be systematically related to features of the large-
scale social order. Coining the concept of anomie for a societal condition
in which established norms and patterns of behaviour are breaking down,
he suggested that this kind of social condition had direct causal impact on
the suicide rate. What manifests itself as a subjective sense of having
reached the end of the road is therefore linked up with causal factors in
on board the moderate social constructionist insight that part of the total
reality of a social condition depends on the way people view it; that posi-
tion will be elaborated in the rest of the chapter and more fully in ch. 7.
What more radical social constructionists overlook is that since you can-
not see everything from a single perspective, it follows that there exist
things which happen to be out of sight. As long as you stay down in the
undergrowth, everything is observer relative and partial, but there is one
thing which is not subject to observer relativity, namely everything (cf.
Fink 1988: 152); the fact that no one can see it from her own perspective
does not prove that it does not exist.
On the basis of this understanding, we can now be more precise about
the relation between the three central positions in the discussion about
language and meaning: objectivism, cognitivism and social construction-
ism. They are best understood in terms of different observer positions.
Inevitably, however, each of them is imbued with some spillover from the
observer position that colours its views on intrinsic properties. They have
two shared and one distinguishing attitude to cognition, objective reality
and social process. Each regards one domain as basic and the two others
as either intangible or derivative. Objectivism takes observer-independ-
ent physical reality as its focal object and regards social practice and men-
tal representations as flaky and unreliable as sources of distortion. Cog-
nitivism focuses on individual mental representations and regards
objectivity as a mirage and social processes as generated by cognition.
Social constructionism regards social activity as basic and takes it to be
determinative of both cognitive representations and (what is mistakenly
taken to be) objective facts.
Each thus shares a minus with one of the others. Thus cognitivism
agrees with social constructionism in rejecting objectivity.4 Objectivism
agrees with social constructionism in seeing mental representations as
epiphenomenal. Objectivism and cognitivism, finally, both see social proc-
esses as derivative in relation to the nature of language and meaning.
To the extent these views reflect the stance that is adopted, they are
neither right nor wrong, just a matter of choice. But it follows from the
priority of intrinsic properties as asserted above that the matter does not
end there. There are inherent relations between physical, cognitive and
social facts that an adequate description has to capture, whatever the pre-
ferred vantage point is. Therefore a chosen observer position may be more
or less adequate, and may miss out on more or less of the intrinsic nature
of the object. In order to address that issue, one must have a picture of
what the whole rounded object of description is like. This is why it is nec-
essary to try to establish an overall view in order to correct warring half-
truths without inevitably making complementary mistakes, and that is my
excuse for offering what may appear to be a somewhat overextended
framework. The baseline position for that framework is the following:
I assume (cf. also Harder 1996), along with most of contemporary sci-
ence, that there is a hierarchical relation between different types of facts,
such that some types of fact presuppose others, and not vice versa.
Physical facts are ontologically basic. If there were no physical particles in
fields of force, there would not be anything else either (cf. also Searle
1995). But particles in fields of force enter into more complex levels of
organization. When higher levels are superimposed upon simpler levels,
new properties emerge which cannot be described in terms of objects at
the simpler levels. That is why reductionism is wrong (cf. Kppe 1990).
Attempts to describe language with reference to only physical objects
would miss almost everything of what there is to say about language,
because language only arises at higher levels of organization. Physics is
generally taken to be the most successful scientific discipline, and quan-
tum mechanics the most successful theory. Part of the reason is that it
deals with the most basic constituents of the universe and leaves the hair-
ier facts to others.
A major step upwards in the hierarchy is when physical objects enter
into the complex set of relationships that characterize the biological
world. Being a biological entity confers properties that cannot be pre-
dicted from physical components alone. These have to do with the ongo-
ing process of life. Biological properties are part of the physical world and
biological entities are also physical entities, but the difference is that bio-
logical properties exist only as long as they are alive when an organism
dies, physical mechanisms are again alone in the arena.
Within the biological world there are simpler and more complex life
forms. For social animals including ants and human beings, the group is
the most crucial part of the environment and thus adaptation to the group
is crucial for survival. The two examples illustrate that there is no one-to-
one link between sophisticated social organization and sophisticated cog-
nitive powers; adaptation to group life does not necessarily require men-
tal mediation.
Evolutionary biology is usually viewed as the second-most successful
science. Its domain is defined in terms of the mechanisms that shape the
146 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
3. Niche construction
ness edge in deserts and the desert therefore constitutes their niche. In
the standard case, a niche is thus a condition provided by the environ-
ment, into which species may find their way. The two are matched if the
niches have the right affordances for the species. Part of the dynamics of
evolution consists in mutations that create beings with coping skills that
fit into hitherto unoccupied niches as when life conquered dry land by
means of hard egg shells.
The simplest, classic relationship is one in which it is just a question of
competitive survival of organisms in a given environment (including the
social environment). This the scenario presupposed by the brute survival
of the fittest social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. However, evolution-
ary thinking about individual and social processes has passed through suc-
cessive stages of sophistication since then. Sociobiology (cf. Wilson 1975)
has shown how altruism could drive evolution by enabling co-operative
behaviour that increases overall fitness. Also, relations between niches
and organisms may change. Cultural traits have been shown to impact the
gene pool (Laland et al. 1999, citing Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza 1989), as
when domestication of cattle led to the spread of lactose tolerance in the
population (since among cattle-keepers those who could digest milk had
better chances of survival).
Niche construction is a recent extra level in this increasingly subtle
understanding of evolutionary mechanisms (cf. Odling-Smee, Laland and
Feldman 2003).The central idea is that there are processes of linked feed-
back going both ways: the species changes its environment in certain ways;
the environmental changes influence the selection processes in the spe-
cies. As a result of that altered selection, in the next round the population
has a different impact on its environment than before, thus shaping the
environment to which it is concurrently adapting. Deacon (1997) illus-
trated this mechanism with the case of the beaver. Over the years, beavers
have adapted to living in an environment with ponds (cf. their flat tails, for
instance). Simultaneously, however, they have developed a behavioural
repertoire that includes building dams thus creating ponds. Beavers are
thus adapted to environments with dams built by beavers. This is where
the nature-nurture dichotomy becomes entirely inapplicable. If you ask
whether the explanation for the beavers lifestyle is in the beavers nature
or in influence from the environment, there is no sensible answer.
Niche construction has been suggested by Deacon (1997, 2003a, 2003b)
as a scenario for the process that gave rise to language, and the discussion
in the following is based on his views. The key idea is that human beings
have been selected so as to do well in a niche that includes language pro-
duced by human beings.
148 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
8 One can postulate a fairly direct link between this feature and the rise of syn-
tactic organization, cf. Deacon (2003b), Harder (1996:26869): while calls are
indexically linked to a feature in the situation, symbolic meaning does not
have a direct link with the situation and therefore it needs to be attached to
the situation in order to get a situational function. That job can be done by
indexical (= grounding) expressions which thus form a syntactic link with
purely symbolic (= conceptual) meanings. More generally, the existence of
ungrounded meanings is a prerequisite for the possibility of evoking and com-
bining meanings freely: call-type meaning by definition depends on a situa-
tional stimulus, and any combination would therefore signal a combination of
situational stimuli not a complex combination where the meaning is more
than the sum of its parts. The step from holophrastic languages, as found in
animal communication, to syntactically complex languages, is part of the same
development that enabled the speaker to operate with meanings that are not
directly tied to immediate stimuli.
9 Responding to pointing only makes evolutionary sense if there are individuals
out there who altruistically point out food and other items of interest which
by and large does not occur in the wild (cf. Tomasello 2008: 41). Learning to do
that thus appears to require losing some of the genetically fixed response
mechanisms that may be a matter of life and death in the wild, but are less
critical than the ability to respond to socially provided information in a domes-
tic environment rather than wait for a mutational fluke. However, the point-
152 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
The central point for the purposes of this chapter is that niche con-
struction provides a scenario for how a social unit (the speech community)
can be a causal factor in its own right.
Its causal powers become apparent not by isolating it from the indi-
vidual, but by showing the causal interplay between the two factors. Point-
ing at the properties of an individual organism as the source of explana-
tion is insufficient: we can only understand the properties of the individual
by seeing her as a member of a particular kind of social community. Point-
ing at the community as the sole source of explanation is equally insuffi-
cient: there would be no community without individuals with the proper-
ties necessary for becoming members. The evolutionary spiral of niche
construction uniquely demonstrates how the mutual dependence can
arise in a panchronic perspective, avoiding the usual gratuitous assump-
tion of influence-in-both-directions.
This further reinforces the pivotal role of joint attention as described
by Tomasello. Joint attention is the crucial evolutionary novelty because it
brings a special intersubjective relation into being: a joint mental state by
definition cannot be reduced to the sum of mental states in individual
minds. When mum and dad pay joint attention to their child, this complex
mental state is not reducible to the sum of two simple mental states, mum
paying attention and dad paying attention. It follows that we is not reduc-
ible to the sum of two separate individuals, so a new and more powerful
distinction has come into being between individual and collective. Toma-
sello (2008: 6) shows how this provides an underpinning for Searles con-
cept collective intentionality, the building block of social reality. Joint
attention is thus on the one hand a constituent of the individual mind, an
ability that uniquely distinguishes human beings and at the same time it
is a building block of a new kind of community.
In both Tomasellos and Searles perspective this new and irreducible
we is viewed basically as a constituent of the individual mind: Tomasel-
los introductory chapter is entitled focus on infrastructure, and the dia-
gram in Searle (1995: 26) shows two individuals, each with a we inside the
head. Tomasello uses the term ratchet effect (cf. Tomasello, Kruger and
Ratner 1993) that is the result of joint attention allowing individuals to
learn what others know (instead of each having to learn from personal
experience). In understanding the nature of social reality, however, the
complementary external perspective must be emphasized equally. Niche
ing skill of domesticated animals still falls short of the triadic pointing, where
it is the pointers state of mind that is in focus rather than the food.
Niche construction 153
10 For the hominid individuals who are born into an emerging speech commu-
nity, the properties of the speech community are a factor outside themselves,
to which they may be more or less well adapted, i. e. their individual bodies
may be more or less adequate in relation to the crucial features of the speech
community. At this initial point, the speech community is not in their minds
but their (embodied) minds are inside the speech community, understood as
the niche in which they will live or die. Language, by implication, is also out-
side the individuals mind at that point the tool of tools (in Deweys terms)
or supreme artefact (cf. A. Clark 1997) that members have to adapt to in
order to thrive, analogous to the ponds and dams that are a feature of the
beavers niche rather than of the individual beaver. The community, saliently
including the language, is part of the human niche, just as dams are part of the
beavers niche.
154 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
With the speech community, we move from the biological to the sociocul-
tural time scale. Only its most basic features can be accounted for in terms
of biological change. Most of the features that play a role in actual speech
communities are due to changes that come on top of biological features
without necessarily demanding further genetic adaptation, i. e. changes in
community practices. Such changes also causally affect individuals in the
community, but they are epigenetic (cf. Sinha as discussed on p. 70) rather
than genetic: they bring about sociocultural adaptation that is superim-
posed on the effects of genetic dispositions. The full consequences of the
biological evolution described in the previous section therefore did not
arise immediately in the primeval speech community. They are the results
of a new round of selection-adaptation dynamics triggered by cultural
learning (cf. the discussion of Tomasello p. 76).11
This brings about a new kind of hard social facts. In the sociocultural
time scale, the mind acquires a special causal role (whereas biological evo-
lution was at work before there were human minds around). At the socio-
cultural level, two types of processes are at work: one where the social
level and the individual mind are mutually attuned, and one type where
they may diverge radically. Both types are ubiquitous and at work all the
time. The main point of this section is to give an account of the causal role
of the second, invisible-hand type of process, where the individual mind
has limited access to what is going on. But it is easier, especially from a CL
point of view, to profile its specific properties if we start with the kind
where there is a mutual relation between the aggregate level and the indi-
vidual mind.
11 Relations between individuals and collectives as we know them from the mod-
ern human scene are the product of both kinds of processes, intertwined in
ways that are hard to disentangle. In this section, however, the attention is on
the kind of causal pattern that involves cultural learning. The only relevance of
genes is to enable the relevant kind of epigenetic adaptation to community
practices.
Individuals, collectives and the invisible hand 155
12 Joint action in Clarks sense fits naturally into a theory based on joint atten-
tion, cf. Tomasello (2008: 83).
13 If you start out with an isolated individual, you cannot get him into the
charmed circle of joint activity and that is why normal human development
cannot start with such an isolated individual, cf. the discussion of Sinha p. 72.
Participation in joint activity grows out of the evolutionary gift of attunement
to the community via joint attention, plus the sociocultural gift of cultural
learning.
14 As always, the activity dimension is basic, rather than the product dimension.
The channel of initiation is the experience of taking part, not the completed
artefact (the whole football game or the whole symphony). Participant activ-
156 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
ity, which is the individual contribution to joint activity, is learnt through the
experience of being part of the whole. The state of co-ordination is not some-
thing that is guaranteed in advance; it always depends on individual, inten-
tional performance. The basic entity could not very well be a collective inten-
tion, because that would be a rather mysterious entity. But if the pre-existing
social community is understood as a causal factor, individual intentions can be
analysed in a way that makes explicit the inherent link between them and their
presupposed social embedding (Clark 1996: 61).
15 Clark (1996: 22) distinguishes between anticipated and emergent products
of individual activities. Only when the collective outcome is anticipated do we
have joint action; however, individual activities also give rise to aggregate
effects that are not anticipated. This distinction matches the distinction
between the levels of the visible and invisible hand.
Individuals, collectives and the invisible hand 157
if they want to stay in business, have to emulate your efficiency and thus
get better at what they are doing. For your customers, this means that they
get products at lower prices because goods that are produced with fewer
resources can be sold cheaper. Within this foundational fairy tale of eco-
nomic liberalism, what at the individual level is driven by pure self-inter-
est, at the aggregate level works towards the common good16.
The invisible hand does not always bring such beneficial consequences
for everybody. Another foundational story in liberalism is that of the
tragedy of the commons (cf. Hardin 1968). Traditional villages, in addition
to individual plots of land, also had a shared, communal area, where the
poor and landless could graze a cow or two. This was an idyllic feature of
traditional village life which disappeared in the transition from feudal to
capitalist societies, widely bemourned in the literature (cf. Goldsmith, The
Deserted Village). But a discrepancy between causal patterns at the indi-
vidual and the collective level tended to undermine the idyll. The poor
individual peasant would gain something by putting an extra cow on the
commons as long as it survived and gave just a trickle of milk. But above
a certain number of cows, each new cow brings about a decrease in the
aggregate yield because as the cows are nearing starvation level, the
total milk production declines. At the end of the curve, all cows drop dead,
but even if it is in no ones interest to go on till that point, the logic of the
invisible hand tended towards a situation where there were too many
cows for the common good, with overgrazing and low yield as a result.
These examples illustrate that invisible hand effects are hard facts
just as evolutionary causality in general brings about hard facts. In order
to understand the position of the individual in a social context, it is not
sufficient to address what is intuitively accessible (visible) from the indi-
vidual perspective because part of the individuals situation is due to
factors that operate over the individuals head, at the aggregate level.
Invisible hand effects were brought to linguists attention by Keller
1990.17 The individual who chooses to use a certain word rather than
another does not intend to change the language. But if enough people
make the same choice such as stop using the German word englisch in
the sense angelic, as happened in the 19th century the word used in that
sense may drop so much in frequency that it is not learnt by the next gen-
eration. At a time when the English became more and more visibly domi-
nant at world level, the possibility of being misunderstood as meaning
English when you really meant angelic was on the increase, and so we
may assume that people increasingly chose the alternative engelhaft, thus
unwittingly driving englisch = angelic out of business, as suggested by
Keller.
Evolutionary causality as manifested by the invisible hand is a key fac-
tor in shaping sociocultural reality. To sum up: a social cognitive linguistics
will have to cover three different objects of description: processes in the
individual mind, collective processes based on individual awareness (the
visible hand, by analogy with the hand of the conductor of the symphony
orchestra), and collective processes operating over the individuals head
(the invisible hand). There are connections between them; but they are
not the same thing.
Although the main point here is the invisible hand as a feature of selec-
tion-adaptation dynamics, its role in relation to cultural phenomena
including language differs crucially from its role in relation to biology and
economics, precisely because of the foundational role of the visible hand
of joint action. Visible-hand phenomena constitute a crucial middle
ground between the individual and the whole population, and the mutual
coordination between the individual and aggregate levels means that soci-
ocultural facts differ from biological facts on precisely this point. In the
area of language change, this is relevant for the disagreement of principle
between Croft (2000; 2006) and Andersen (2006) with respect to the role
of intentions and cultural factors: meaningfulness operates at collective
levels, too, as manifested by the creativity associated with reanalysis and
adoption of new forms. The Danish word for car (bil) arose as a result of
a newspaper competition in 1902. This feat the newspaper has not man-
aged to repeat in spite of several attempts but it shows the potential role
of visible and intentional process at aggregate level.
This means that the analogy between biological and sociocultural evo-
lution is not as a complete as suggested by Croft: in sociocultural contexts
neither the selection criteria nor actual processes are necessarily invisible
([1958] 1974); the new element in Kellers analysis was the clear separation of
the two sets of causal patterns.
Individuals, collectives and the invisible hand 159
and meaningless at the aggregate level. People do not only innovate inten-
tionally but also to some extent propagate innovations intentionally for
instance because they want to do their bit (like returning empty bottles
and batteries), or because they feel they are part of a joint activity (such
as a democratic election) in a Clark-like fashion (Clark 1996). But the
invisible hand is always part of the game at the aggregate level. No one
votes for a hung parliament that cannot govern, and yet it may be the
aggregate result of individual intentional votes. And those who think that
putting forward an attractive conceptualization of the future is enough to
change the world are not likely to have much experience of the process.
Putting a real social construction on its feet is hard work and depends
crucially on finding a path through the Darwinian jungle of macro-social
selection pressures.
The rise of an aggregate level at which the invisible hand can operate
is a historical process. In economics, the process involves the rise of a mar-
ket, where the value of an object can be detached from individual embod-
ied experience. In the field of language, it involves the process whereby
the meanings of linguistic expressions first became detached from con-
crete situated acts. And because of the external ratchet effect, the proc-
ess goes on. With a familiar analogy, the rise of paper money and of writ-
ten communication makes possible a radically increased detachment of
value and meaning from situated joint experience. A paper note and a
text, with the now familiar dual nature, both represent and constitute
social statuses (as value and meaning) and because of their detachment,
they can both survive beyond the moment and also undergo changes due
to the invisible hand. Money may depreciate and words change their
meaning for reasons that have nothing to do with the embodied experi-
ence of local participants.
As a consequence of this form of complexity, we also get types of com-
munication that operate at levels distant from immediate personal experi-
ence (non-basic types of communication in Clarkss term, 1996: 9). Politi-
cal and corporate communication have different ecologies from everyday
conversation. The dimension of detachment from personal experience is
also essential for understanding the social dimension of the sociocognitive
world. It has consequences both for the kind of experience that is availa-
ble in the community and the kinds of talk. Capturing such indirect rela-
tions is the key to understanding the interplay between embodied experi-
ence from below and aggregate social pressures from above; this subject is
taken up in detail in ch. 7.
Socially oriented analysis of language tends to start at the aggregate
end, with written texts for collective audiences, while cognitively oriented
160 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
5. Functional relations19
18 Ever since Adam Smith, they have been the centrepiece of economic theory
a discipline that has become increasingly formal and mathematical in the last
generation, to the exclusion of older-style economists that are disparagingly
called verbal. This is not to say that economic theory has a grasp of reality
that is necessarily on a par with its formal precision (a problem also found in
other disciplines). But it means that there is nothing inherently mushy in this
type of intuitively inaccessible facts.
19 I have discussed the issue of functional causation in greater detail elsewhere
(see Harder 1996 and 2003).
20 The point cannot be understood based on the commonsense meaning of the
word function, which can mean a range of different things including utterance
functions such as greeting, discourse functions like repair, grammatical
functions like subject, and social functions like legitimation. Moreover, the
term function is often associated exclusively with intended function (cf. Croft
2000), and functional explanations based on functions as intentions at the
aggregate level would be nave functionalism, rightly criticized by Croft
(1995): like infantile megalomania, nave functionalism assumes that the world
is tailored directly to the speakers needs and intentions. Formalist critiques of
functionalism generally take this version as their adversary, and too often it is
not clear what the alternative is, as pointed out by Tomlin (1997: 165).
Functional relations 161
they depend on causal cycles between parts and wholes and across gen-
erations. But they are dynamic also in the sense that the contribution-to-
persistence of an element may change over time. In the case of wings, a
challenge to functional explanation was how an animal ever made it from
no wing to a fully functional wing. On the powers-of-flight hypothesis, half
a wing would make no difference to survival chances (in which case wings
could arise only by evolutionary, mutational chance, rather than func-
tional selection). A suggested answer was that pre-wings might contribute
to heat regulation and only accidentally develop so as to provide powers
of flight in which case their function might subsequently shift.
The same applies to functions in the social domain, such as the buying
power of dollar bills and the meanings of words. The function of dollar
bills is to be exchanged for goods and services, and the function of words
is to convey their meaning. But in the economy, the value of money
changes with shifting market conditions, and in language, the meanings of
words change with shifting conditions of use (as corn came to mean
maize in the US). Functional relations are thus always defined by actual
replication and selection mechanisms, and have variational features (just
as wings may to variable degrees have a heat regulation function on the
side). Functions as hard facts about linguistics expressions depend on the
same panchronic scenario as the function of organs. As pointed out by
Croft (2000: 2324), the selection/replication scenario is at work also when
the language stays the same. A word that remains unchanged does so
because the aggregate invisible hand effect of individual choices repro-
duces it in identical form (just as a money can retain its value only when
invisible-hand effects cause the prices to stay where they are a far from
trivial outcome).
I began this section by saying that functions understood as individual
intended functions are not an adequate foundation for understanding
functions as part of the way the world works. There is a double dissocia-
tion between intended utterance functions and conventional functions of
words: the same situational purpose might be achieved in other ways, and
the same linguistic expressions might also be used to achieve a different
situational purpose. But there is an indirect relationship as well as an
equilibrium condition under which they match up. Individual utterances
are acts of reproduction, which feed into the aggregate process. When the
speaker means something that does not get conveyed, this influences
selection in the next round. A speaker who chooses the word engelhaft
because he intends to avoid the potential misunderstanding of englisch,
contributes his mite to the aggregate processes (like the individual entre-
preneur who brings down her production costs).
Mind in society: causal patterns and the individual 163
22 Functional relations are also emergent in the sense that they emerge from
processes of interaction with the environment and may change with those
processes, as in the case of wings. That does not mean they are emergent in the
sense that they are never really there (cf. Dahl 2004: 2737 on the flip-flop use
of the word emergence to indicate either a generous or a reductionist ontol-
ogy). Once emerged, functional relations are, by the definition above, causally
relevant features of the objects involved. If functional relations break down (if
something happens so that wings no longer enable the animal to fly), the ani-
mal may not be able to persist in its present form.
164 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
23 This does not entail that the internal aspect of mental phenomena is outside
the world of cause and effect. Brains must have the causal power to generate
what goes on in the mind, and mental phenomena have causal relevance (e. g.)
for learning abilities, cf. p. 204 n. 18. However, I emphasize the role of causality
specifically in relation to social phenomena, because it is necessary to establish
the legitimacy of functional relations as something other than an observer-
relative phenomenon.
Mind in society: causal patterns and the individual 165
pens; they can imagine the result, thus letting their hypotheses die instead
of themselves. For the purposes of CL, the representational aspect has not
been of focal interest, even if only the most dedicated internalists have
denied its existence (cf. Johnson and Lakoff 2002: 24950).
The crucial dimensions in a social cognitive linguistics is the third
aspect of mental properties, their constitutive role in sociocultural facts.
The word constitutive reflects the classic distinction in speech acts theory
(cf. Searle 1969) between regulative rules (which apply to activities that
already exist) and constitutive rules, which apply to forms of activity which
could not exist without them (without rules for contract bridge, you could
not play three no trumps).
Joint attention is the basic linchpin also in this context. It is the signifi-
cance that joint attention gives to other peoples mental states that creates
the fundamental link between the individual mind and the community.
Without the capacity for joint attention, meaning would exist in the indi-
vidual mind only. By bringing the human subject into a triadic relation
with the attended object on the one hand and a fellow subject on the
other, joint attention gives rise to a mental state that at the same time has
a constitutive role for social relationships with fellow subjects. There is a
relationship of increasing complexity from level one to level three: before
there is a mind, there cannot be mental representation; and before you
can mentally represent a national election, you cannot make it part of the
joint world you live in (as pointed out by Searle 1995).
At this third stage, the buildup from the mental end thus makes contact
with the account of social facts as described in terms of joint action in
Clarkes (1996) sense, cf. p. 155 above. Joint action requires that mental
awareness and social activity go together and link up the individual and
the collective level. The link can be described in terms of Searles concept
of status function. Just as an utterance can have the status of being a
promise or a christening, which is not derivable from the purely linguistic
properties, so a man can have the property of being President, which is not
derivable from his personal (embodied) qualities; the same goes for the
function of playing second violin in a symphony orchestra. To give some-
thing a status (function) is to give it a role in the construction of social
reality (the title of Searle 1995).24 This collective assignment gives the
object to which status is assigned some causal properties in the social com-
munity which have a magical flavour about them, such as the fact that
pieces of paper can buy you a house.
This collectively maintained extra value is crucial for understanding
linguistic meaning in a socio-cognitive picture. There is an important dis-
tinction between saying that meaning would not exist if it did not exist in
the individual mind (which is true) and saying that we can account for all
of the properties of meaning by looking at its properties in an individual
mind (which is false). The classic CL view is that meaning belongs in the
individual mind, and this view is also maintained by some of the pioneers
of the social turn. As discussed above, cf. also ch. 6, pp. 29394 Croft main-
tains that meanings can only be in an individual mind, and words under-
stood as social lineages therefore strictly speaking cannot have mean-
ings. But this reasoning depends on assuming that when we go outside the
individual mind, we have to disregard what is in the individual mind and
that is not the case. The speech community is built out of people with
minds, yet collectives do not have the same properties as the individuals
that make them up. If we see the existence of meaning at collective level
in those terms, the fact that meaning cannot exist without individual minds
is no argument against collective meaning.
I have previously spoken of traffic jams of meaning in cases when a
collection of individual minds formed larger configurations. The consti-
tutive role of mental constructs as part of social structure reflects a
higher level of organization, while the basic idea is the same. A car race
is more structured than a traffic jam, but is similar in that if you take
away all individual cars, nothing remains, while at the same time the
properties of the race do not boil down to properties of individual cars
(or drivers). Similarly, the formation of democratic governments is based
on the ability of citizens to conceive of a government as having execu-
tive power and members of parliament as responsible for legislation, but
uses these mental abilities as input to the formation of a larger structure
that goes beyond what is present in each individual considered on her
own. A democratic government therefore involves a large body of mean-
ing-in-society that is grounded outside as well as inside the individual.
The individual agent is always situated in a field of forces that includes
meaning assigned through social processes and meaning as a constituent
of her own mind.
This applies to language, too. The power of hello to create a greeting is
an observer-independent (and in that sense perfectly objective) fact about
life in the community, just as the fact that red light means stop! or the fact
that the current president of the US is Barack Obama. These just belong
to that subcategory of observer-independent facts that could not exist
Mind in society: causal patterns and the individual 167
Searle (1995) discusses Maos statement that power grows out of the
barrel of a gun, and argues instead that real power comes from status
assignments; those with the guns are usually pretty low down in the social
hierarchy. Searle mentions the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe
as a case in point: people withdrew the status-assignments that supported
communist rule, and so it collapsed. While that account may plausible as a
description of a simple cause-effect chain in 198990, I believe the event
can only be fully understood if we think in terms of the more complex
type of causality that characterizes functional relationships. The role of
physical force, including the use of guns, must be understood in terms of
its function in the social reality of political power.
A textbook feature of being in power is to have monopoly on the use
of force. That is why the presence of warlords and militias in a nation is a
sign of governance problems. In well-functioning states, only the police
and the army use armed force, and only when licensed by the proper
authorities. One of the cases where use of arms is licensed is when indi-
viduals challenge the laws of the land, including the regulations main-
tained by officials of the state which in communist countries included
border patrols, secret police and lots more besides. Once citizens stop
abiding by the regulations imposed by such authorities, power such as that
wielded by communist government behind the iron curtain loses causal
efficacy. In other words, they cease to be power holders: people who have
no influence over what other people do are not in power.
This is where the men with guns may have a crucial functional role and
at the same time be very low in the pecking order. The withdrawal of the
status function of the communist party as the power in the land occurred
partly because the authorities, more specifically Gorbachev, refrained
from activating the men with the guns as opposed to the Chinese author-
ities who at roughly the same time stuck to Maos doctrines in response to
the demonstrations at Tienanmen Square (and who are still in power). A
well-functioning government may in theory persist forever without using
armed force on its citizens, if the collective assignment of status function
is maintained by other causal factors, such as popular support. Maos dic-
tum, therefore, shows the cloven hoof of the dictator. But there has to be
something that keeps the world working causally so as to maintain the
status. Collective function assignments understood as mental content,
which is what in Searles version keeps the system in place, do not operate
on their own, any more than other mental representations. Like other
functional properties, they depend on the way the world works. For the
same reason, green light can only mean go if cars by and large stop on
red. Status assignments depend on actual events; in other words, they are
170 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
out the picture in the rest of the book. The discussion above has implica-
tions for language as an object of social cognitive description which can be
summed up in three main features. In a nutshell, the new universe
(1) works by two interdependent forms of causality, one emerging from the
individual, another operating at the aggregate level of the social community;
way the world (= niche) works. Both the world and the individual have a
role in shaping what is possible, or necessary. In order to understand what
happens, we need both sets of factors.
Finally, the relationship between mind and mechanics has become
rather more complex than in Descartes world. Both internally and in the
community, shades of grey have taken over from black and white. Central
to the position of this book, however, is that the two sides always need to
be considered together: mental processes enter into the dynamics of the
social process only by means of their role as constituents of overt, causally
efficacious behaviour, not by inner mentalization alone; and on the other
hand, social causation is mediated by the mental and normative dimen-
sion of the human niche.
Specifically with respect to language, the three-way ontology comes
out as follows:
First of all, flow corresponds to actual usage, Saussurean parole. The
basic phenomenon is the dynamic activity, as stressed by Clark (1996). The
products you can tape and transcribe and put into corpora are important
as evidence, but they are not in themselves the fundamental object of
description.
Secondly, I adopt the term competency for the properties that enable
human subjects to handle the demands of the niche with linguistic com-
petency as the central example. The term is chosen to indicate that I think
this should be seen as the (sociocognitive and meaning-imbued) successor
concept to a Chomskyan competence.26 My hope is that competency will
sound less exalted and ideal than competence. As an educational achieve-
ment (cp. Smith 1996), competencies are defined in relation to a certain
required standard, which is reminiscent of the evolutionary satisficing
perspective that my account is based on. Competency, therefore, simply
refers to the ability to cope in relation to environmentally defined selec-
tion pressure, such as the ability to take part in the linguistic communica-
tion that goes on in the speech community.
Basic to individual competency, in something like the seat of honour
that Chomsky wanted to reserve for innate formal grammar, we find the
cognitive capacity and emotional motivation for joint attention (Toma-
sello), intersubjectivity (Sinha, Zlatev) and joint action (Clark). The expe-
26 I am inspired by Langacker, who moved the other way and adopted depend-
ence instead of the more usual term dependency, cf. Langacker (1987: 306) for
the special twist he gave to the term.
Summary: the socio-cognitive world 175
In the context of this book, the general moral is that this necessary
complexity is built into the panchronic, tripartite ontology proposed
above. Its purpose is to enable the individual cognitive linguist, who nec-
essarily pursues her own specific project, to consider where that project
belongs in an expanded picture that includes the joint social world. Most
classic issues, like colour, can only be satisfactorily captured if you look in
more than one place: if you ask where the issue of colour ultimately
belongs, the answer is wrong no matter whether you choose mind, lan-
guage or the environment. There is no way to abbreviate the role of men-
tal, environmental, situational and linguistic factors into a single underly-
ing truth.
Functional causation plays a crucial role in linking up processes in the
individual and the community. It is not enough to say that there are causal
factors going in both directions the loose sense in which the word dia-
lectical is sometimes used. This idea of mutual influence reflects the
interdependence that is also captured by functional relations, but lacks
the precision and potential for prediction that is associated with the evo-
lutionary scenario in which functional relations belong, raising the risk of
circularity.27 Complex systems persist by causal mechanisms that tend
towards preserving a functional equilibrium; they create a development
over time which is kept within certain limits by the way the feedback
mechanisms work. There is nothing circular about selection processes in
evolutionary dynamics or in the market mechanism.
Based on the foundations that have been established above, the rest of
the book will now try to fill out parts of the new socio-cognitive picture. In
the next chapter, we look at the understanding of the dynamic dimension,
focusing on the basic dimension of flow. Chapter 6 discusses language as a
specific object of description, arguing that the recontextualization of cog-
nition from the mind to the community also provides the key to under-
standing the partial autonomy of language from individual cognition.
Chapter 7 presents a theory of the sociocognitive universe, focusing on
the relations between mind and society. And chapter 8 takes up a central
and problematic case, the multi-ethnic issue, as a core challenge for a
socio-cognitive theory.
27 Frank (2008: 244), taking the bull by the horns, speaks explicitly of a kind of
circular causality between the local and the global level. Functional systems,
however, could not survive if there was nothing further to be said than causal-
ity moving in two directions at the same time, like the force of gravity that goes
both ways between two bodies in space.
Chapter 5. Meaning and flow: the relation
between usage and competency
1. Introduction
lenge for the descriptive format presented in ch. 4, and the subject of this
chapter.
The threefold object of description (flow, competency and niche) con-
trasts with the traditional CL approach, which is implicitly based on an
undifferentiated, unitary object of description, roughly describable as
language from a usage-based, cognitive point of view. This contrast gives
rise to the chief claim of this chapter: if the social turn gradually relocates
meaning entirely from the mind to the flow, it will not give an adequate
account. The ongoing development is rightly concerned to redress the tra-
ditional imbalance and give appropriate primacy to the flow of usage as
the lifeblood and raison detre of language but the issue of language in
the mind does not go away. Human language is too complex to be under-
stood solely and exhaustively as online flow.
This chapter addresses the relation between usage and competency
(the langue dimension is postponed till ch. 6). Two points are important: to
capture the pervasive primacy of the flow dimension, and to show what
(distinct and irreducible) role this flow-reorientation reserves for lan-
guage as an offline feature of the mind. Even if the mind is demoted to
secondary position, and the flow takes over the primacy, there is still an
interface that must be an explicit part of the account. Interfaces are two-
way streets: how does the competency reflect the primacy of the flow, and
how does the flow reflect features of competency (which is the condition
of membership/participant status in a speech community)?
It may appear surprising that the discussion of meaning in a usage-
based model raises the issue of competency, in view of the Chomskyan
connotations of the word. But competency as understood here is totally
severed from all Platonic ties and is strictly a property of the individual
participant in linguistic interaction. The general format of the argument
against Platonic essentialism has in fact often invoked a combination of
flow and the competency of individual participants. Conversation Analy-
sis is possibly the most uncompromising approach when it comes to insist-
ing on online actual usage as the object of description, but the essential
role of pre-existing competency is emphasized by Schegloff (1991: 152),
the key figure and Garfinkels term ethno-methodology was meant to
indicate the peoples own method for making sense.1 But what is this
also in discursive psychology, the ability to create social reality online must be
understood as dependent on participant competency.
182 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
in order to make it decodable, there are also units that must be constructed
during the flow. This includes the basic unit of pragmatics, the utterance
corresponding (roughly) to what fills a turn-at-talk.
This inherent complexity means that language users have to operate
with a non-continuous dimension that can be captured in terms of three
sub-elements of the overall flow: input, processing and output. From the
production point of view, the speaker starts off with input in the form of
an intended message (of a kind), and generates an output in the form of
an articulated utterance. From the reception point of view (which will be
the preferred perspective below), the hearer gets a linguistic input in the
form of a flow that has to be assigned to recognizable linguistic units, and
then converted to an output in the form of a conveyed meaning or mes-
sage. (This process is what we discussed as meaning construction, in ch. 2).
This chapter explores the implications of this reversed role of compe-
tency and flow. The general direction is that in the beginning the focus is
on showing the importance of the flow features (input, directionality, and
the process aspects of meaning) and later the focus is on describing the
key properties of competency (as a necessary part of the whole picture).
Section 2 discusses the distinction between meaning as input and
meaning as output.
Section 3 explores the consequences of this process-oriented view of
competency for linguistic meaning. The main idea is that conventional
meanings have a directional dimension: just like utterance meanings,
they have a point of interest and a point of departure.
Section 4 discusses the relation between the procedural and the repre-
sentational aspect of participant competencies and argues for a clear dis-
tinction between skill and mental content (while emphasizing that the
two dimensions are in constant interplay).
Section 5 discusses what this distinction implies for meaning construc-
tion on the instructional and procedural premises proposed
Section 6 sums up the implications of the process dimension for under-
standing meaning, including the relation between conceptualization (as
flow) and concepts (as aspects of competency).
Section 7 sums up the argument.
(1979) on the conduit model. One of the major trends in the past genera-
tion has been a gradual movement away from this position. Instead, the
addressees role has gradually increased. Meaning works as part of a
dynamic event sequence: instead of a complete picture that is carefully
packed and then carefully unpacked, the addressee enters into a process
of (co-)constructing the meaning, based on the linguistic input.
In understanding the relation between dynamic and stable features in
cognition, a major influence in cognitive science generally is the impact of
the computer metaphor, which was at the heart of the first cognitive revo-
lution in the 1960s and 1970s. Computers and computation provided a
direct model for thinking about language in dynamic terms. A computer
program does not represent a situation in the world it consists in a series
of linked operations that specify a path from an initial state to an end-
state. The meaning of a computer program, in other words, is dynamic in
the sense that it changes the state of the system instead of merely repre-
senting it.2
This procedural dimension of computation, however, is inherently
bound up with a declarative dimension, since the procedural changes can
be exhaustively characterized in terms of the input and output states with
which they are associated. In the computational context, the procedural
approach thus does not make much difference.3 But there is no guarantee
that the operations which human addressees carry out in order to get at
the intended output are effective procedures that ensure equivalence. The
procedural dimension may therefore have more significant implications
outside a computational context.
Among the fields that were inspired by the procedural thinking that
came with the computer metaphor is psycholinguistics (cf. Johnson-Laird
1977, 1983). The program analogy (cf. above) gave rise to the phrase pro-
cedural semantics, which corresponds to a development in the psycholin-
5 In the accepted terminology, frames are evoked if they are associated with
the coded meaning, but invoked if they are brought into the picture by infer-
ential rather than conventional mechanisms. Since in ch. 1, p. 27 I suggested
that conventionally obligatory frames were identical to domains, I do not need
to use the term frame about aspects of coded meaning, but can reserve it for
the situated event of inserting the situational background against which a
meaning-in-use is understood.
188 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
and we would not want to deny that she had understood what was actually
said. Generic frames (= domains), of course, are by definition evoked with the
words: the word husband thus obligatorily evokes the marriage frame.
7 Unlike Hansen (2008:32), however, I do not see the presuppositions as parts of
the frame. Instead, presuppositions (in the sense adopted below p. 195) are
rather the result of combining clause meaning with the frame that (in this spe-
cial case) provides the content of the instruction. Thus he is still a fool, by
combining the continuation frame of still with the content John being a fool
gives rise to the presupposition that John was a fool at some earlier time.
190 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
tions, a standard of right and wrong is something we can never be without. (Fish
1980: 174).
The central point is that texts, like linguistic expressions, must be under-
stood as input to an interpretation process and there are norms in oper-
ation for how to carry out such processes. Reading does not yield totally
predictable outcomes, but nor is it the case that anything goes. When read-
ers are competent according to the standards for reading that obtain in a
given community (=niche), the coded text can instruct them to produce
outcomes with a systematic, hence describable, relationship with the lin-
guistic input.8
The habit of thinking that accords output states automatic primacy
also systematically overlooks the possibility that the process itself may be
viewed as a dimension of the successful result of the instigated action as
also pointed out by Stanley Fish. An illustration is given in relation to a
passage from Miltons Paradise Lost (IV, lines 912):
Satan, now first inflamed with rage came down,
The Tempter ere th accuser of man-kind,
To wreck on innocent frail man his loss
Of that first battle, and his flight to Hell
8 This applies not only in areas of poetic license; the same discussion has taken
place in relation to interpretations of the law, where the continuing role of the
interpretive community constituted by changing memberships of the US
Supreme Court has been recognized since the Marbury v. Madison case in
1803. Todd Oakley (ongoing research, personal communication 2009) has used
that as an illustration of the role of historical events in redefining the shape of
cultural reality.
192 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
9 In some cases, this is obvious. Thus when you say hello to someone, you achieve
the function of greeting them, thus bringing about a certain interactive rela-
tionship with them. This makes sense only as an interactive move, and cannot
plausibly be understood as an expression of a mental state in an individual
mind. This is why such greeting expressions can be slotted directly into a net-
194 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
work of interactive options, cp. Halliday (1973: 83), without intermediate con-
ceptual stages.
10 Viewing meanings as instructions already places them as parts of the dynamics
of interaction, so it might be asked, what is the difference between the instruc-
tional and the directional property of meanings? The difference is that the
instructional view looks only at the meanings as a whole, from an external
point of view. An encoded meaning works in toto at the input stage of under-
standing rather than as features of the output. The directional analysis looks
inside each individual meaning and asks: what does it do, and what needs to be
in place before it can do it?
Presupposition and the directional nature of linguistic meaning 195
depends on whether the use of the words fits into the context in such a
way that the demands are unproblematically satisfied. Not everybody
would accept that this was the case in classics like dont make a fool of
yourself again!
Presuppositional effects take the form of presuppositions of the classi-
cal kind that has been discussed in philosophy and linguistics, when words
in combination impose demands on the situation that can be spelled out
in the form of propositions. The classical example the present King of
France requires the addressee to identify a referent answering to the spec-
ifications, and thus presupposes that there is one and only one relevantly
identifiable King of France available. The dynamic implications of this
directional view are clear: the phrase is designed to change the situation of
the addressee, in that he has to move to the position of having identified
the referent of the expression. Inevitably, you thereby presuppose that it
is available for being identified. Presuppositions are the most overt and
salient manifestation of the directionality of meaning, because they signal
something propositionally explicit about the speakers point of departure.
The reason presuppositional effects are most often invisible is simply that
in the default case, the demands are satisfied: why invoke linguistic tools
in situations where they cannot work? Hence, the information that might
potentially be conveyed, such as the existence of one and only one King of
France, is already available in a default context of use, and so it is not con-
veyed but merely invoked. The phrase the weather has the same presup-
positional potential, but since the weather is always there, the presupposi-
tional potential remains dormant.
However, situations are always only partially specified. There is a con-
siderable grey area which is capable of being evoked as necessary back-
ground for utterances, but which might not be saliently available in the
absence of such invocations. This means that you can insert information
that is not taken for granted (such as making a fool of yourself last time)
with the linguistic status of being actually taken for granted.11 This can
11 This belongs in the area of presupposition failure, the subject of a book I wrote
in 1975 with Christian Kock. (Herb Clark has terrorized me out of referring to
this book as Harder & Kock!). Presupposition failure takes many forms (which
are the subject of that book), including deception (as when you pretend to
have beliefs that you do not (your munificence is overwhelming) and bullying
(stop making a fool of yourself). Generally, adeptness in distributing the status
of being taken for granted vis--vis the status of being explicitly addressed is
central in all strategic language use (not just tact and politeness). This is so
because by taking things for granted you assign them a position as being
196 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
already in place in social reality, rather than taking it upon yourself to intro-
duce them into unfolding social reality, with the risks and liabilities that such
an action involves.
12 These strategic implications of the directionality-of-meaning are also relevant
in relation to framing. This makes it useful to consider what the difference is
between strategic use of presuppositional effects and strategic use of framing.
George Lakoff, as discussed in more detail on pp. 343 and 398, exhorts his
readers to actively frame the debates they take part in. Is that the same thing
as deviously smuggling your own preferred presuppositions into taken-for-
granted reality?According to the definitions I have advocated this is not (nec-
essarily!) the case. Framing is an inherent and constitutive part of the process
of understanding; for each new introduced meaning, you have to figure out
what background to understand it against. The phrase Joes girl could be
understood as invoking a father or a partner frame. You can frame a debate
quite openly by announcing that you view the issue of energy in the context of
national security or, alternatively, in the context of global warming. Depend-
ence on oil acquires quite different properties depending on whether you
frame the issue one way or the other.The use of presuppositional effects con-
stitutes a possible form of framing, but it is a much narrower category. Its
special flavour is precisely that it comes with the taken-for-granted status of
a point of departure for the utterance in question. Thus the King of France is
bald presupposes, in the accepted reading, that there is a uniquely identifiable
King of France to refer to, and thus introduces the frame of France being a
Kingdom as a presupposition while the frames that are invoked may include
many things, possibly absolute monarchy, with trappings including courtiers
and an irresponsible nobility, with shades of Louis XIV. In the case of again, a
directional analysis would say that its point of interest (=front end or cutting
edge) has the predication of an additional event. This carries with it a point of
departure (= presupposed background) in a previous event of the same kind.
Saying that Lee called the office again thus carries a presupposition (not just a
frame) that he has called the office before. The evocation of an iteration frame
in itself does not distinguish between he did it repeatedly and he did it again
The procedural nature of competencies 197
This ends that part of the chapter which focuses on the ways in which
meanings reflect their basic role as part of the flow. The moral is that lin-
guistic meaning is best understood if it is caught in the act of making a
contribution to the flow it is not an eternal idea, but neither is it part of
the flow itself.
The two aspects are separable in terms of neural wiring. The purely
procedural setup is associated with implicit memory, while the consciously
accessible knowledge that is associated with language goes with explicit
memory, which works by separate pathways as demonstrated by both
brain imaging data and clinical data (cf. Feldman 2005: 78; Ellis 2007:
2223). Ellis refers to an anecdote about a patient who had lost the ability
to form new explicit memories. She had once been pricked by a pin while
shaking hands with the consultant, and at later meetings, she refused to
shake hands with him while denying that she had ever seen him before.
She had lost the explicit representational skill, but remembered well
enough implicitly, or procedurally i. e. in terms of what forms of action to
take.
Patients with this form of amnesia have not lost the ability to form new
procedural skills (including clearly cognitively imbued skills such a mirror
reading), but cannot acquire new consciously accessible mental represen-
tations. Avoiding behaviours that give rise to unpleasant experience
clearly is one such skill type and this has implications for the role of
adaptation. Blindsight (cf. Weiskrantz 1986) may be a glimpse of the same
type of mechanism, whereby the environment can impinge on your orien-
tation without generating any conscious awareness.
If we follow the principle of caution, there is thus no justification for
assuming that the neurocognitive underpinning of skills, including lin-
guistic skills, have any similarity at all with the kind of mental representa-
tions that are consciously accessible to us. This might appear to support a
generative, purely computational approach to grammatical processing.
But this is due to a variant of the same fallacy as the gut brain example.
Not only are computational operations insufficient for meaning there is
no such thing out there in the world that is inherently computational
(except a computer). It follows from Searles (1980, 1983) argument that
it is empirically empty to describe these processes as computational
what exists is a causal pattern with certain properties that can be simu-
lated. The workings of the gastrointestinal tract, the workings of the brain,
that used to be conscious gradually recede into the background. But on closer
inspection, this turns out to be a conflation of two processes: one consisting in
the fading away of explicit representations, the other in the buildup of reliable
neurocognitive routines. There is never a point at which the actual skill is con-
scious: at all the different stages, the sensorimotor skill as such (like all other
sensorimotor skills) is hermetically sealed. The conscious representations
stand outside and prompt the action, but they are not part of the actual execu-
tion, not even at the fumbling stages.
The procedural nature of competencies 201
15 I have elsewhere argued (Harder 2007d: 12551256) that much of what Lakoff
and Johnson (1999: 1011) see as completely inaccessible backstage cognition
is actually of the second, potentially conscious kind, an example being antici-
pating where the conversation is going.
The procedural nature of competencies 203
16 This also means that the terminology of hypothesis-testing that persists in the
language acquisition literature should be replaced by skill-testing: only lin-
guists test hypotheses about language, but all learners try out their skills and
learn from the outcomes (some children, of course, may act like linguists!). The
much-discussed issue of negative evidence also falls into two subcategories:
although few children get corrected explicitly, all children experience varying
degrees of success in accomplishing the goals of their utterances, and we must
assume that they adapt according to the pin-prick type of mechanism along-
side their adaptation to conscious feedback. If the goal includes an integrative
component, as we may assume it does in all cases of L1 acquisition, all per-
ceived deviances between own output and other-output will feed into this
process, whenever the speaker senses that she did not get it quite right. Imita-
tion in L1-learning as described by Tomasello might plausibly be understood
as driven chiefly by unconscious adaptive mechanisms. Conscious representa-
tion typically sets in in breakdown situations, where the procedure does not
come off: consciously driven readjustment may then get the process on the
rails again.
204 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
18 This is also the basis of the professional linguists use of intuitions: you draw
inferences about the properties of the linguistic input based on conscious eval-
uation of the output. These properties may themselves be consciously acces-
sible, but even if that is not the case, there is frequently no alternative avenue
of exploration. We can only get at these things via participant access. When
used responsibly, it is an experimental procedure, not simply introspection in
the sense of looking inward and describing what you find. In the so-called
commutation test, you exchange one sound segment for another (e. g. sit vs.
set), and then see whether the result makes a semantic difference in terms of
conscious understanding and that does not entail an assumption that the
procedure for articulating vowels is consciously accessible. When you describe
syntactic and semantic variation, you look at a number of different examples
and describe your conscious understanding of them and then relate your
conscious understanding to properties of the linguistic input. For semantic
properties, more may be accessible to participant consciousness than in the
case of vowels but we have to live with the fact that underneath the con-
sciously accessible level there is always an ability level where the object drops
out of sight. The difference between empirical and pure armchair linguistics is
not the use or non-use of this procedure without it, linguistics would simply
be impossible. The difference is in how much empirical input you bring to the
intuition-imbued experiment from large scale empirical data collection to
describing the object literally off the top of your head. Intuition, i. e. the use of
consciously accessible participant representations of the meaning of linguistic
expressions, is indispensable at all points on this cline.
206 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
On very preoccupied days, I can get home before conscious attention sets
in, and I may have no recollection of what happened during the trip
because all the decisions were delegated to the procedural system. If lots
of interesting things happen, on the other hand, the whole ride will be
filed away in conscious memory. Only the actual decision to start off the
whole complex procedure needs to be consciously available (in order for
human rather than zombie activity to have taken place).19
Competency in handling conventional meaning therefore has to be
defined in relation to the whole span from the almost totally inaccessible
procedural choices to the fully accessible output meanings. When I say
almost totally inaccessible, it is because the link to consciousness consti-
tutes the borderline between meaningful and zombie activity. Lakoff and
Johnson (1999: 17)s description of the amoebas ability to distinguish
between food and toxic substances as an instance of categorization can
only be correct if the amoeba has conscious access to the result, and this
conscious awareness may drive feedback to later triggering. Most people
would side with Johnson-Laird (1988: 24) in putting this down to purely
hard-wired responses. A meaningful choice potentially triggers feedback
of the kind that defines functions, and the stored feedback from the out-
put to the shaping of future response is therefore linked up with meaning
in a way that makes it part of semantic competency. The motor procedures
in themselves are not semantic but the loop from conscious output back
to the conditions for triggering action subroutines in the future, and eve-
rything that takes part in that dynamic process, are constituents of seman-
tic competency from a functional point of view.
In order for semantic categorization to be involved, there has to be a
degree of interplay between consciousness and purely neural wiring. This
is not necessarily always the case even in human beings. If you respond to
a tap on your knee by jerking you leg, it is not an act of categorization; and
this carries over to ways in which you respond to objects around you in
everyday life. From when I was six to when I was about eighteen I disliked
a subset (but not quite a conceptual category) of fruits. The reason was
that at six I had stuffed myself with a kind of not-quite-plums from a tree
on the way to school to such an extent that I was violently sick, and like
rats in Skinners experiments I steered clear of anything remotely remi-
niscent of them. The category (which gradually shrank over the years)
was defined not in terms of conventions in the niche, but due to gut feeling
(quite literally). But of course I had conscious awareness that there was a
type of fruits that I avoided and thus there was a thin conceptual layer
on top of the gut response.
This can be used as a stepping-stone to responses that form part of
Bourdieus area of habitus (cf. p. 110 above), linked by Searle himself to
what Searle (1992: 177) calls background. Searle points out the link back
to Wittgenstein, whose concept of forms of life also gets at the non-rep-
resentational background for meaning. The background contains all
embodied states such as feelings and routines that work by purely proce-
dural skills, and especially all states of being attuned to a world with par-
ticular features such as having a walking skill that depends on the ground
remaining solid under your feet. Bourdieus habitus is designed to capture
especially the kind of attunement that is the result of social pressures.
Such attunement is caused by a mixture of direct impact (acts of physical
oppression and punishment, for instance) and adaptation: if they prick us,
not only do we bleed, we also adapt our reactions so as to avoid future
prickings, thus developing embodied responses caused by social oppres-
sion. The posture of a serf in the presence of his master might be inter-
preted as indicating respect, but on a habitus interpretation it is merely
an entrenched bodily response to a potential danger. It is tempting to call
this secondary embodiment to distinguish it from the kind of embodied
responses that develop spontaneously as a result of normal human matu-
ration but since all human responses are the result of interaction between
the individual and environment, it is difficult to tell the two apart in prin-
ciple.
Is habitus-driven activity zombie behaviour? Well, yes and no. It repre-
sents a response to life in the niche that is attended with conscious aware-
ness at the margins an awareness that may expand in ways that will be
discussed later (p. 316). Well-entrenched routines that are usually dele-
gated to the neurocognitive autopilot system and thus recede into the
background may sometimes erupt into consciousness, for instance in
208 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
of how much depended on which side of the bosss desk your rsum
ended up on.
Work in progress (Casasanto, personal communication) suggests that
in some experimental conditions you are more likely to respond based on
cultural patterns and in others the embodied responses win out. This is a
neat example of how the investigation of divergence and convergence
goes hand in hand: body-specific experience gives rise to convergence
with personal categorization on the one hand (as it were) and divergence
in relation to cultural categories on the other.
Above, I have argued that concepts are better understood as ways of trig-
gering an act of categorization than as a static construct but that in order
to understand what a concept can do for the speaker, it is necessary to
understand the input to the act of categorization as a determinate entity,
even if it is not as neat as Aristotle assumed. We have seen that there is an
issue in usage based linguistics with respect to how or whether one can
postulate meanings that exist in abstraction from usage; and in this section
this debate is taken up with respect to what used to be the centrepiece of
discussions about mental content: conceptual categories as such. As
pointed out by Langacker (2001: 11), the equation between meaning and
concept in the countable sense is not an assumption that is generally
taken for granted in CL: the uncountable and process sense of conceptu-
alization is more basic.
The role I see for a concept does not apply to all linguistic meanings. But
for certain meanings, I think it makes sense to understand a word meaning
as being directly linked to a mental concept. For example, I think it makes
sense to say that a central function of the expression dog is to evoke the
concept of dog. In this respect, I see the word class of nouns as having a
privileged position (for reasons which will be discussed in greater detail in
ch. 6, p. 257). The function is especially central when the noun stands as
head noun in a complex NP, which is the grammatical slot for indicating the
category to which a designated entity belongs: a Japanese American is an
American, while an American Japanese is a Japanese. Logically enough, in
discussions about the appropriateness of different concepts, it is tradition-
ally nouns that are considered. Categorization as a sub-act thus has a privi-
leged association with nouns (while verbs predicate and prepositions
locate, etc). Outside the head position, it becomes more complex: a com-
Conceptualcategoriesandthe ow.Messyandprecisesemanticterritories 213
pound such as computer science, for instance, does not directly classify an
object as coming under the category computer, and therefore it evokes a
wider part of the potential, including the activity of computing, than the
point-blank categorizing statement this is a computer.22 The following dis-
cussion presupposes that we are talking about head nouns.
Part of the functional utility of concepts as part of an individuals cop-
ing skill depends on concepts being adaptable to the categorization tasks
that they are called upon to assist with. It follows that concepts are not
immutable over time, even though they preserve their identity as line-
ages in Crofts terms (cf. p. 89). In terms of the framework of this book,
this is understood in terms of the evolution-inspired concept of function:
each act of categorization impinges on the concept which adapts to the
process of use. It is stable in a relative sense, however, in that it persists
between events, and is never reducible to any actual instantiation. The
first time I saw a red-skinned potato in my fathers garden, it expanded my
concept of potato without destroying the concept that was there before.
Concepts are useful precisely because they reduce variation by subsuming
individual instantiations under general categories.
The dynamic coping context can throw some light on the discussion of
classical Aristotelian concepts in relation to prototypes and family resem-
blances. From a functional perspective, Aristotelian concepts constitute a
maximally simple and reliable solution to the abstract question of catego-
ries a neat separation between properties to abstract away from and
properties that make a difference when we move from instantiation to
concept. Simplicity and reliability are important when you are interested
in the properties of the categories for their own sake, as philosophers and
scientists are: for them it is central to get the categories under control,
whereas dealing adequately with a single specimen can be entrusted to
the research assistant.
However, as discussed above on p. 17, the everyday functional mecha-
nism of dividing up the world based on what is relevant to the individual
does not have to work in such a tidy manner. For practical purposes we
22 A full discussion of this issue would take us beyond the scope of this book.
Part of the problem involves the issue of what exactly a concept is including
the question of the relation between concepts as parts of mental competency
(what is discussed in this chapter) and concepts as part of the niche (cf. ch 7,
p. 318 f). The claim made here is only that (in languages like English), nouns
inherently have a semantic element that links them to a category, which makes
the link closer than for other word classes, and that this property is partly
shared with so-called classifying adjectives, as in musical (instrument).
214 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
choose categories that we find useful how precise and reliable they need
to be depends on the circumstances. In the crime story that I am reading,
the stereotypical stupid policeman complains about all the different cat-
egories of modern forensic psychology and says that the category nut
was good enough for him. Necessary and sufficient conditions are of no
interest to him. We may disagree for reasons of principle (political and/or
scientific), but this is beside the point if we want to understand the role of
categories in his everyday life.
For the same (functional) reason, the properties of a concept do not
have to match the properties of the instantiations precisely. In fact,
demanding a one-to-one match would ruin the whole point: there have to
be properties that we disregard when we align two different instantiations
under the same category otherwise the concept as such would duplicate
information that was already in the instantiation and be functionally
superfluous (cf. also Langackers use of the categorizing relationship dis-
cussed above on p. 50). When you grasp experience by means of concepts,
your grasp will be no more precise than the actual practices that it arises
from. Neatness and consistency are potential encumbrances, and fuzziness
is just a practical problem.
There is an orientation in the CL discussion towards local forms of
organization those that are as close as possible to the individual event.
On a path that starts out with classical concepts, you can then move via
prototypes to family resemblances and all the way down to a swarm of
individual exemplars, cp. Croft (2007), and this path can be seen as mov-
ing gradually closer to reality, away from abstract idealization. This is a
natural conclusion if you look for cognitive organization in the mind of
the individual, down to neurocognitive traces of individual events. How-
ever, if you view conceptual constructs as part of a social practice, you
have to look at the functional dimension. If we assume that linguistic
practices are responsive to selection pressures, what forms of conceptual
organization can this give rise to? Before we answer the question in any
detail, we have to begin by looking at the different kinds of practices that
are involved.
Roschs original distinction (1975) between basic-level concepts and
superordinate concepts already implied an important adaptive point: only
those categories that enter into everyday life on a regular basis develop
prototype effects. It takes time and processing power to build up a con-
ceptual container organized with reference to a selected cluster of proper-
ties, with a centre and a periphery. Unless you have a sufficient number of
instantiations and these are felt to be worth the effort, you simply do not
bother. For more abstract or schematic categories we therefore develop
Conceptualcategoriesandthe ow.Messyandprecisesemanticterritories 215
bird category (i. e., it is not a bomb, or a plane, or a childrens kite). Cas-
sowaries in the Karam Papua New Guinea community, on the other hand,
do not belong under the category, because their significance (as a large
ostrich-type species) is totally different from the significance of all other
kinds of bird (cf. Bulmer 1967 as quoted in Aitchison 1994: 65).
Family resemblances are thus less useful as the basis for categorization:
you cannot infer very much significant information from them. They
match the cases where the cohesive link of the term is fairly feeble, and
the centripetal forces are correspondingly strong. The extreme end of the
scale is the view of categories as constituted by a cluster of exemplars. This
approach is interesting, because from the perspective of direct relation to
psychological reality it is so attractive. As discussed by Goldberg (2006), in
non-linguistic literature on categorization evidence has accumulated that
people in fact not only store exemplars, they are also able to extract statis-
tical information from the collection of stored exemplars. This is why the
view that categories are equal to a collection of stored exemplars until
very recently dominated work on categorization in cognitive psychology
(Goldberg 2006: 46). Yet a pure collection view leaves the whole issue of
generalizations unaccounted for. As Goldberg points out (2006: 47), quot-
ing Ross and Makin (1999: 8), it takes away the categoriness of catego-
ries: only instantiations remain.
The functional properties of this cline of variability can be demon-
strated in mathematical terms. Warglien and Grdenfors (2007) have
shown that as long as their domain in conceptual space is convex, concepts
can start out as rather different in the minds of language users, and still
enable a process of homing in on the same meanings. This is because suc-
cessive rounds of attempted matching, in the course of working out an
interpretation, will make them converge on the same fixpoints. In real life,
the process can be understood in terms of Piagetian development with its
twin mechanisms of assimilation and accommodation (cp. p. 71): when-
ever a term is applied to an instantiation, it brings about an adjustment
both of the term and of the perception of the instantiation.
Of course the individuation of conceptual territories depends on vari-
ational and pragmatic circumstances also for nouns. I am not saying is
that there are really eternal invariant concepts after all: the precise nature
of the container depends on the circumstances, as all other forms of mean-
ing do. What I am saying is that noun (input) meanings are for putting
tokens in containers, and the meaning potential of a noun therefore
includes containers. This means that concepts are part of speaker compe-
tencies, even if there is no one-to-one relationship. The (niche) word dog
may designate the species or the male only (dog vs bitch) and that means
Conceptualcategoriesandthe ow.Messyandprecisesemanticterritories 217
that there are two well-defined potential containers in the semantic terri-
tory of the word. The more of those a speakers has, the more competent
she will be also for purposes of language use. If you do not happen to
know the male sense, a conversation about dogs and bitches would be
hard to follow.
Verbs are less categorial than nouns, and less sprawling than preposi-
tions (reflecting their position in the syntactic hierarchy, cf. p. 257). In gen-
eralizing about verb meaning, one should not look for containers, but for
elements that can be predicated about tokens in them.This bears on Tay-
lors argument against Searles (1983: 145f) well-known defence of mon-
osemous literal meaning for a verb like open. Searle claims that we know
perfectly well what a phrase like open the sun would mean we just dont
know what specific action it would refer to. Taylor, in contrast, suggests
that the only meanings we really know are the meanings of entrenched
combinations such as open the window, and the word open it itself has no
independent meaning apart from such usage-entrenched cases. It appears
that Taylor is to some extent presupposing a more rigorous view of seman-
tics than a cognitive linguist would adopt in other contexts. As an objec-
tion to Searles claim that we can know the meaning without knowing the
truth conditions or entailments, he argues (2006: 54):
This raises questions about the usefulness of unitary representations. If they
are not involved in determining truth conditions or entailments, what are they
for, and why should we be bothered by them?
While this argument might be the expected one from Lewis or Davidson,
it is not in the general spirit of CL in its increasingly social and dynamic
phase. Verb senses vary with different types of landmark elements and
this is part of the reason why it is difficult to define a truth-conditionally
unitary conceptual category for the verb open. The relevant form of
abstraction comes easier if you look for what the verb could predicate
about its landmark. One might tentatively propose (borrowing Talmys
concept of barrier) a core aspect of its meaning potential that involves
the removal of a schematic barrier at the boundary of the object nominal,
making its interior accessible. The nature of the barrier would then be free
to vary with the object in question (window, meeting, bank account, etc).
Sometimes it would not be easy to think of how that barrier might look or
what access to the interior would imply but that would be a task for
meaning construction, not an objection to looking for an input meaning
that is as well-defined as the data allow.
Precision, of course, also has a pragmatic dimension. As often pointed
out, you can reduce a prototype to a classical concept by defining the con-
218 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
cept in terms of the prototype case alone and then treat instances beyond
the pale as errors in terms of the norm that you describe. A statement is a
lie, cf. Coleman & Kay (1981), if (1) it is false, (2) the speaker knows it is
false, and (3) makes the statement with the intent to deceive and benefit
from the deception. This leaves us with non-core cases like white lies
which do not confer illegitimate benefits on the speaker. For everyday
purposes it does not really matter whether they are viewed as marginal
cases of lies or as non-lies but there may be external social reasons why
the distinction has to be drawn sharply in actual cases. A vow of truthful-
ness, with sanctions in case of violation, is a narrative classic instance. For
the purpose we are discussing, i. e. adding an extra layer on top of every-
day criteria for conceptualization, it functions just like the scientific ambi-
tion to get the description 100 % right by imposing, through social pres-
sure, a higher degree of order on the world than we usually have time for.
This illustrates a dimension of offline competency that is at the same
time fine-tuned in relation to the actual situational flow. The speakers
conceptual apparatus for handling potential instances of lies can be
adjusted to different degrees of strictness: the container function offers
more than a one-size-fits-all construct. This is a very non-Platonic prop-
erty of semantic competency; but it does not inevitably translate into
sophistic irresponsibility. A lawyer who is unable to adjust his legal cate-
gories to the actual circumstances of the case is not going to make it to the
Supreme Court. The situational adjustment capability, whether deviously
pragmatic or ineptly inflexible, is in all cases understandable only as an
offline property of conceptualization. If we had only the flow of actual use
of concepts, there would be no possibility of even raising the issue of flex-
ibility, ineptness or honesty.
The same basic division into online dynamics and offline resources for
coping can be applied to other basic notions of CL. It would be too cum-
bersome to go through the argument in detail, but let me briefly outline
how the account can be generalized.
In addition to the basic, non-count stream of conceptualization we
have two kinds of units of representational content, concepts and ideal-
ized conceptual models, and two kinds of presupposed background-for-
concepts, domains and frames. We also have two kinds of locations for
conceptual content: one is the default location of the current discourse
space, the other arises when there is an alternative to the basic reality
space, and we thus have two mental spaces to allocate meaning to.
In dealing with an instance of conceptualization, all these can contrib-
ute something distinct to the understanding of what goes on. If there is a
family problem, for example, the concept mother singles out someone as
Summary 219
7. Summary
This chapter discussed the relation between two of the three aspects of
language introduced in chapter 4: flow and competency. It did so with ref-
erence to meaning rather than structure, because it would be unwise to
take on two confrontations at the same time: structure vs. cognitive con-
tent, and mind vs. usage. In the case of meaning, the question of offline
properties of language is less contaminated, since no one seriously doubts
that members of the speech community have something that they carry
around in their minds between utterances, which includes an ability to use
a number of different words.
In a usage-based perspective, flow and competency meanings have the
reverse relationship of the inherited pattern of Platonic tradition. Instead
of a collection of eternal ideas that are soiled by actual use, the flow came
220 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
first and then members of the speech community developed the ability
(competency) to take part in it. The meaning of the whole enterprise is in
the flow, too: competency meaning is just the prerequisite for getting at
the meaning in the flow. And competency meanings are shaped so as to fit
into the flexible process of meaning construction that mediates between
the coded input and the output that is always necessarily constructed
online as reflected also in the literary theory of interpretation..
This perspective situates speaker competency rather differently from
the tradition, and therefore it involves different claims about what the
offline properties in speakers minds are. For instance it suggests that
meanings associated with words are in between the indeterminacy of
floating signifiers and the rigidity of Aristotelian categories. They are
untidy in the way things are untidy in a working environment but not so
chaotic that no work can get done.
Another implication is that language competencies have a considera-
ble proportion of non-mental elements. Abilities are never accessible to
conscious awareness, and without the ability dimension there would be no
competency, only unusable representations. The time-honoured concept
of the speakers knowledge of language, and with it psychological real-
ity, have to be abandoned as constituting the unitary object of description
for CL. A large chunk of the reality is not psychological at all, and knowl-
edge has to be unpacked into two entirely different things, unless cogni-
tive linguists want to make the same error as Chomsky: to postulate a
mental object that can never be accessed by the speakers mind. The two
different things are (1) knowing-how routines (such as lexical retrieval
and phonetic articulation) which can be modelled without raising the
spectre of the Chinese room because in themselves they do not need to be
interpreted, only to get done; (2) intentional representations associated
with words. The relationship between them are functional: it is the job of
the procedural ability to produce utterances to evoke representations. But
a description that flattened the whole object out into knowledge of lan-
guage would be like having an exhibition of banks that included both
river banks and commercial banks.
The new concept of competency was also used to argue against the
tendency to focus so strongly on the actual flow that the competency
dimension was too much reduced as in case of proposals suggesting that
words in the mind had no meaning, or that there was no semantic contri-
bution from individual words. The key idea was to see the competency
side of meaning as input to meaning construction: speakers have to know
what words can do for them. Meaning construction then produces output
meanings based on the competency input plus the situational circum-
Summary 221
stances (including acts of framing), which entails that output meanings are
different from one utterance to the next, because words do the jobs that
situations call for. So while it is true that words do not have output mean-
ings, i. e. meanings in the sense of message elements, and these are the
meanings that everybody else but linguists are interested in, precisely for
a linguist it is practical to assume that words have meaning.
The role of offline meanings as potential contributions to dynamic
online meaning construction also entails that meanings are directional
and may give rise to presuppositions. But they also retain their link with
the classic role of evoking concepts for the purpose of putting aspects of
reality into situationally relevant containers.
Because the division of labour between implicit and explicit dimen-
sions of action is variable and hard to track, categorization in the fully
mental sense thus has a variable and hard-to-capture relationship with
autopilot responses to situational input some of which are shaped by
social processes of the kind that generates Bourdieu-style habitus pat-
terns.
In the next chapter we look at structure and variation, and turn our
attention more in the direction of the niche dimension of language.
Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
Meaning was the first topic to be addressed in terms of the new social
cognitive framework. Now the turn has to come to structure. Because the
account of structure builds on the account of meaning, this chapter contin-
ues some themes from the preceding chapter. The distinction between
offline and online features of language, and the status of offline features
as ancillary to the flow, are also essential for understanding structure. For
the same reasons that ruled out Platonic meaning as the basic object of
description, we also have to rule out underlying Platonic structure.
However, the issue of structure involves additional complications of its
own. The discussion of meaning addressed mainly the flow and the com-
petency dimension, but in order to understand structure a closer consid-
eration of the niche dimension is necessary. It is not individual mental
content that is responsible for the way language is structured: language
structure exists in the community before it is acquired by an individual
newcomer (and we were all newcomers once).
The special attention devoted to structure may appear to be a surpris-
ing development. The social turn was introduced as a continuation of the
process of recontextualization that began when CL moved beyond purely
structural description. Why, then, do we suddenly run into structure in
making a social turn?
The reason is twofold. First of all, there is a link between the social
dimension and structure that has been consistently underemphasized in
the tradition. Secondly, in order to understand those functional and vari-
ational aspects of language that are more usually associated with the
social dimension, a revised understanding of structure is not a step in the
wrong direction, but a precondition for moving forward. The traditional
association between social facts and chaos distorts both the understand-
ing of structure and the understanding of meaning and usage. This means
that if it is used as a frame for understanding the place for structure in
a social CL, the recontextualization narrative involves a risk of distor-
tion. Putting pure structure into the dustbin of history means that struc-
ture as a property of language has to be reconsidered. Otherwise you
would misunderstand not only structure, but also usage. An adequate
usage-based understanding of structure is necessary in order to get an
Introduction: the social foundations of structure 223
complex tool use, cf. Greenfield (1991), and this procedurally imbued,
functional dimension is not reducible to (but integrated with) the concep-
tual aspect of linguistic structure (cf. also the discussion of Krifka (2007)
on the link between topic-comment organization and manual co-ordina-
tion, p. 203 above). Since this places language structure as part of the abil-
ity to act, of the competency of speakers to cope in a particular niche, an
understanding of this dimension is central to the social turn as I under-
stand it.
Accounting for the variational dimension of structure (cf. section 4)
shifts the main focus from speakers-in-the-niche to language as a constitu-
ent of the overall social niche itself. In this, it is closely linked to the
account in the following chapter of the role of language in constructing
social reality. Here, too, it is necessary to highlight the role of structure in
a new way, in order to illustrate the way in which an account of the social
significance of linguistic choices presupposes an awareness of structure
itself as embedded in social reality. For that reason also, a reassessment of
structure is a necessary part of the social turn.
It is a problem for carrying out this task that although structure is
clearly an integral part of CL, as a theoretical issue it is a contaminated
area: for cognitive linguists, it goes against the grain to focus on the nature
of linguistic structure. Since the account below includes suspicious con-
cepts like partial autonomy and arbitrariness, there is a risk of past mis-
takes creeping into the perception of what is being claimed. Care must be
taken in demonstrating how an expansion into the social domain can at
the same time introduce a more profiled role for structure and also for the
dynamic and variational aspect of language. I am therefore going to give a
brief outline of the argument in order to link up these three aims and pro-
file them in relation to classic CL, hoping to avoid such misunderstand-
ings.
In classic CL, complex structure is understood basically in terms of
complex conceptualization. A syntactic combination of two units basically
inherits the conceptualizations of the individual units, while the combina-
tion itself also has unit status (often with properties not found in the con-
stituent parts); the whole of language can therefore be described as a col-
lection of units. In the approach presented below, this is understood as one
of the two dimensions of linguistic structure, which I will refer to as the
bottom-up or unit-based dimension; it is central to construction grammar,
the dominant approach to syntax in CL.
As discussed in ch.1 (p. 49), the distinction between bottom-up and
top-down can be understood in more than one way. In relation to genera-
tive grammar, CL differs by taking the (bottom-up) path from actual
Introduction: the social foundations of structure 225
tion that begins with the units you are going to need for your purposes
which (as argued below) can be described as a list of available linguistic
constructions.
The claim that I want to highlight, therefore, is that language structure
is both a hierarchy of functional relations and a network of constructions.
There is no contradiction, only a difference of perspective. In classic CL,
the functional roles (such as trajector and landmark) arise as properties of
units (in this case, as properties of relational predications). Thus in follow-
ing a bottom-up compositional path, structural configurations arise, in
which units enter into relations with other units. Construction grammar
makes a point of this unit-based format. As illustrated in the diagram in
Croft and Cruse (2004: 256), the constructional reinterpretation of struc-
ture backgrounds the structural levels (phonology, syntax, and semantics
fade out of the picture) and instead foregrounds the inventory of units. As
you move upward in the hierarchy, more abstract units occur, which pro-
vide slots for other units to fit into. Whether you start with the units or the
roles/slots, in the end you have to include both sides but the perspective
you choose makes a difference for what you focus on (see section 2 below).
It may not be obvious that functional relations between linguistic units
have anything to do with functional relations between language and social
context. The connection is this: a whole utterance has a function in rela-
tion to the interactive context, as when Joe died functions as an informa-
tive statement, for instance as an answer to the question what happened?
In order for the whole utterance to function as an answer, its constituent
parts have to serve their functions inside the message. A central part of
those roles are that he refers to the subject (of predication), and died pred-
icates the relevant information about the subject. These two roles can only
be understood with reference to the whole utterance meaning, since a sin-
gle unit of meaning can neither be a subject nor a predicate. From this
perspective, slots/roles in relation to the linguistic context are special cases
of the slots/roles in relation to the social-interactive context (this is
explained in greater detail in section 3 below).
The interface between the larger social context and conceptualization
is also involved in the issue of variation. In terms of classic CL, linguistic
structure, like linguistic meaning, reflects conceptualization; and because
the locus for that is inside the individuals head (cf. Grdenfors 1998),
there is no obvious place for variation, which involves relations between
individuals.
Based on these basic assumptions, the chapter will defend three claims.
The first is about function-based structure and is mainly competency-ori-
ented, the third is about variation and structure as a property of the niche,
Introduction: the social foundations of structure 227
The main point of the previous chapter was that meaning as a property of
human languages is too complex to be understood solely by reference to
online flow. If you ignore the role of offline competency, the full picture is
reduced to actual online events, which is tantamount to usage fundamen-
talism. Essentially the same argument applies to linguistic structure. A
usage based description is one in which actual usage is basic, but not the
only thing that exists.
In the literature on cognitive and usage based linguistics, it is not always
easy to see what the exact role for structure is. The question of the precise
Usage, structure and component units 229
nature of linguistic structure is not one that has kept cognitive linguists
awake at night: structure was yesterdays buzzword. Owing to the strong
emphasis on providing an alternative to the pervasive role of structure in
generative grammar, agreement has been much more well-defined when it
came to making clear what structure was not (e. g., formal and autono-
mous).
When you look for descriptions of the role of linguistic structure, there-
fore, you find a type of statements that have given rise to repeated misun-
derstandings in discussions with representatives of other linguistic schools,
because they come across as denials of the role of structure in language.
Let me quote a recent example (Glynn & Robinson 2008, p. 222 in the
book of abstracts)
Within cognitive linguistics, no distinction is held between linguistic and prag-
matic semantics or between lexis and syntax3.
In their contexts, statements of this kind generally make valid points such
as linguistic meaning does not constitute an autonomous domain, but is
integrated with encyclopaedic meaning; and syntax does not constitute
an autonomous domain inside language, but is integrated with the lexi-
con. However, because there is no canonical account of what the new,
integrated-but-real role for structure is, such statements are apt to be read
by outsiders as if structure has no other role than being an area that it
3 This is a very difficult discussion indeed, possibly also because cognitive lin-
guists take for granted both this way of talking and the descriptive practices
that (as a matter of course) make reference to structural categories in lan-
guage. I have previously (Harder 1996: 260) pointed to the discrepancy in con-
nection with a somewhat similar statement from Langacker (1987: 3):
There is no meaningful distinction between grammar and lexicon. Lexicon,
morphology and syntax form a continuum of symbolic structures, which dif-
fer along various parameters but can be divided into separate components
only arbitrarily.
I described this statement as implying that Cognitive Grammar denied syntax
the status of a definable area within the larger area of language, and went on
to point out that this description is not an accurate reflection of Langackers
own descriptive practice, Harder (1996:261). Langacker (2008a:6) flatters me
by taking the trouble to correct my interpretation, pointing out that definabil-
ity does not presuppose clear boundaries, and that syntax can be recognized
even if it seen as symbolic. Since that was more or less what I was trying to say,
there is substantial agreement apart from the fact that I still believe the for-
mulation no meaningful distinction is open to unnecessary misunderstand-
ings.
230 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
would be wrong to single out for special treatment4. The index in the
Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007, has no
entry for structure and most cognitive linguists would be unlikely to
look it up anyway.
The quotation above rejects two distinctions and thereby raises two
points, both of which are central in the following: linguistics vs. pragmatics,
and lexis vs. syntax. I first discuss the distinction between usage and usage-
based structure; then I discuss the characteristics of bottom-up unit-based
structure as an integrated account of lexical units and syntax. This will
then provide the background for a discussion in the next section of the
functional dimension of structure that is backgrounded in the cognitive
approach.
The tendency to emphasize the flow of usage at the expense of struc-
ture is most marked in West coast functionalism (cf. Butler 2003), the
type of functional linguistics that is most directly based on actual usage, as
represented by Joan Bybee, Sandra Thompson and Paul Hopper among
others. Their work has affinities with conversation analysis in its rigorous
attention to the details of actual empirical data, and they have been pio-
neers in showing how grammatical properties can be understood by refer-
ence to patterns in everyday language use.5 Among the properties they
have documented are that syntactic phenomena evince the kind of grad-
ual, prototype or family resemblance patterns that also play a major role
in CL (cf. ch.1), thus making it a natural partner for CL in the broader
usage-based alliance that was described in chapter 2.
The point I am concerned to make is that just as one can endorse a
neural theory of language without believing it can provide all the answers,
so one can endorse the drive to give actual usage data the status they
deserve in linguistic description without believing that a description of
usage can take the place of the description of structure. The issue has been
discussed in relation to the understanding of complement-taking predi-
4 As pointed out in Nuyts (2007), there is a clear contrast between CL and other
functionalist approaches, especially in Europe, on this point. Function and
structure have co-existed peacefully and productively in European structural-
ism, as opposed to the polarization that took place in the US.
5 Further, they have shown how apparently basic and clearcut grammatical pat-
terns have unexpected frequency properties in actual usage. For instance,
expressions of subjective reactions, with low structural complexity, including
low transitivity, cf. Thompson and Hopper (2001), pervade ordinary conversa-
tion, making transitive clause constructions much less central in usage than
one might have thought.
Usage, structure and component units 231
cates such as think, believe, realize, etc. (cf. Thompson 2002, Boye & Harder
2007). Using conversational data, Thompson (2002) shows the prevalence
of the discourse or usage role of embedding predicates like think as for-
mulaic stance markers, arguing that I think it is a good idea is an epis-
temic modification of It is a good idea rather than a report on a mental
state. Thompson cites Langackers description in terms of which the main
clause imposes its profile on the complement clause (Langacker 1991:
436) as an example of descriptions that come out wrong in such cases. In
these examples, the speaker does not override the assertion profile of it
is a good idea by embedding it in I think. What is expressed by it is a good
idea is conveyed as asserted content, not as embedded in an elaboration
site associated with a main verb think: in spite of the apparent structural
position as matrix clause, it is really I think which is conversationally sub-
ordinate to the message conveyed by the that-clause. Thompson concludes
that this is not just a description of the statistics of actual usage, but also
the only really relevant linguistic description, rejecting the standard
account in terms of the structural relation of subordination.
Verhagen expresses a similar position, both with respect to comple-
ment-taking predicates, cf. Verhagen (2005), and generally with respect to
structure, cf. Verhagen (2002). The latter provides a compelling account of
historical developments whereby processes changed the meanings of indi-
vidual constructions in ways that would make it misleading to look for
overriding generalizations applying to for instance all resultative con-
structions in the language. However, at the end this is seen as supporting
a general conclusion, cast as a reply to linguists who are worried about the
unity of their object of description:
I suggest that the real problem here is the underlying assumption that the unity
of the field should somehow exist in the unity of the system itself. Liberating
ourselves from this structuralist prejudice, we may see that the source of the
unity of linguistic structure may well be external to it, that is, in the processes
giving rise to all these bits of knowledge. (Verhagen 2002: 434)
It is a point of this chapter to show why this reply is incomplete. Just as a
linguistic description must include an account of the potential contribu-
tion of a lexical item (pace Taylor, cf. ch 5, section 5), it must specify the
potential contribution of structural patterns (pace Thompson) but this
requires a rethinking of what the system is.6
6 As argued in Boye and Harder (2007), Thompsons account flattens out the
relationship between usage and structure, thus submerging the role of struc-
ture in the flow of usage. Among the arguments are that the diachronic rise of
232 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
between the word and the sentence levels. Such units play a massive and
previously underestimated role in understanding human languages. As
illustrated by the let alone construction (cf. Fillmore, Kay & OConnor
1988) the abstract generalizations of sentence grammar cannot account
for constructional properties such as the peculiar relation type between
the two clauses indicated by the phrase let alone itself.7
As described by Croft & Cruse (2004; 227; 247; 256) the development
from a purely generative view of grammar via a generative view that
includes constructions to a purely constructional model highlights the list
dimension of language even more strongly than classic CL.8 The general
format for language description, also for higher-level units, is an inventory
of units. As a successor concept to the narrow traditional lexicon, it was
called the constructicon (cf. Goldberg 2006, citing Jurafsky 1996): a list of
all units of form and meaning with special properties, such that a learner
needs to acquire them as individual units. Although the constructional
format focuses on larger units than words, it still reflects a bottom-up ori-
entation in the hierarchical sense: it takes the units (of whatever size) as
the basic elements, and looks on combinations as the work of the speaker
rather than the grammar. It is bottom-up also in the usage-based sense:
constructional patterns arise out of usage in a very transparent fashion (cf.
7 The concept of construction has always been used for phenomena like clefting
that cannot be accounted for either by the specific properties of the words or
by the general properties of the sentence. The Chomskyan approach, however,
was strongly oriented towards maximally general properties of sentences
(motivated by the search for innate features) and therefore did not pay much
attention to the less-than fully-regular cases. They were all put on the lexical
side of the strict dichotomy between syntax and the lexicon, which was
regarded as a lunatic asylum (cf. Goldberg 1995) of irreducible irregularities.
Construction grammar turned this priority around and used constructions as
lexical units that could be used as a format for eliminating the entire Chom-
skyan domain of totally general and abstract syntax.
8 The three stages are as follows: the first diagram illustrates the generative
architecture with its basic division into three strata: phonology, syntax and
semantics. The lexicon is the odd man out that cuts across the three strata.
Diagram two is an intermediate model, which adds another bridging sector
alongside the lexicon, consisting of constructions. At the third stage, the three
strata disappear entirely from view and all we have is the bridging type of ele-
ment: a lexicon plus a list of constructions (each with its set of phonological,
syntactic and semantic features).
234 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
Bybee & Hopper 2001; Bybee 2002), with frequency as a key factor. In
this, it aligns itself with another major trend, namely the collocational and
idiomatic turn represented e. g. by Sinclairs (1991: 110) idiom principle
as opposed to the open choice principle associated with generative gram-
mar: idioms are constructions too.
If constructions take over the entire territory which used to be popu-
lated by general categories, one may ask whether generalizations have
been lost from sight. This question has been taken up by Goldberg (2006:
45f; 2009), who emphasizes that the focus on constructions should not be
taken to imply a rejection of general laws in favour of idiosyncratic items.
Rather, the advantage of constructions is that they can accommodate any-
thing from the most general to the most local phenomena. As we have
seen, an emphasis on local cases as the basis of all generalizations is dis-
tinct from claiming that local cases is all we have: exemplars are stored,
but so are high-level generalizations (Goldberg 2006: 50).9
Construction grammar, in short, is a major advance for two reasons:
first, it provides a descriptive model that can accommodate intermediate-
level patterns that were homeless in both the traditional word-based and
the modern sentence-based approach to grammar. Secondly, it highlights
the direct pathway from usage to syntax by focusing on pattern extrac-
tion the fundamental mechanism for making structure possible. How-
ever, it does not follow that constructions are the whole story. Before I
turn to the function-based dimension of structure, I will briefly discuss
two points where the contribution of construction grammar is less defini-
tive.
First of all, considered as a general hypothesis about the nature of syn-
tax, construction grammar as such is a rather weak theory; it is hard to
think of a case that would falsify it. There is nothing to prevent generativ-
ists from using a constructional format indeed, Goldberg (2006: 205f)
presents her own approach (Cognitive Construction Grammar) along-
10 Although that is not the main point here, I would like to mention one example
of where the convenient property of accommodating all types of phenomena
with equal ease has a downside. If we want to carve language at the joints, the
theory should be explicit about where those joints are. Construction grammar
makes an important point against the 100 % separation in Pinkers words-and-
rules dichotomy (cf. Pinker 1999) but the distinction between word-level and
clause-level phenomena is not an artefact. Fuzzy borders, as we have seen, do
not contradict the existence of fundamental distinctions. A case that illustrates
the point is the fact that in Germanic languages, cf. Klinge (2005), there is in
general a very strict division between word-level and clause-level mechanisms.
Compounds, as word-formation, and phrases are kept rigidly distinct in a vari-
ety of different ways, cf. rote Wein and Rotwein, Wortbildung and *Wort Bil-
dung in German. The sole exception to this is English, where the two types (as
in red wine and apple pie) cannot be kept clearly separate; thus word forma-
tion (as pointed out in a series of publications, cf. Klinge 2005:299300) cannot
be unambiguously placed as either compound or phrase. The fact that English
lacks a borderline here is difficult to describe as a significant feature within
construction grammar. Similarly, those cases (cf. Nedergaard Thomsen 1992)
where the syntax of a language like Danish behaves in a polysynthetic way
would be just another construction.
236 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
3. Function-based structure
Jones would like the new person (Smith) to do and also what Smith turns
out to be especially good at. In any case, it raises two sub-issues that are
linked but irreducibly different (i. e. one is partially autonomous of the
other): how do Smiths talents fit with what the company does, and how do
they fit with what Jones does? Answering one question is no longer
enough.
Up to a certain point of complexity, the internal organization of a busi-
ness company may be functionally transparent. That is the case if the
internal structure reflects external functions. If a two-man company is
organized so that Jones does production and Smith does sale, internal
structure reflects external function. An analogical situation in the case of
sentence structure would be if a sentence has two structurally signalled
constituents, subject/topic and predicate/comment, and these are always
the topic and comment of what is currently being discussed. In terms of
iconicity, the internal structure is then merely a shadow of the functional
organization of the communicated message. If we know the function of
the component, we also know its structural position; there is no need to
talk about structure as a separate issue.
As the organization becomes more complex, however, the link between
internal division of labour and external function will not continue to be
equally transparent and obvious. Jones and Smith might at one point want
to employ a secretary. Customers will not feel the difference, since secre-
tarial services are only designed for internal use. As business grows, inter-
nal (including managerial) functions will proliferate, because there is
more to do in order to keep the company together. The people who are
doing production in large corporations typically grumble about the prolif-
eration of management, but if (e. g.) co-ordination between sales and pro-
duction fails, it will be bad for the company. There has to be agreement
between various elements in the flow of activity in a business company
between production and sale, between contracts and pay, between what
the managing director decides and the job specifications of the people
who have to carry out the decision. If these things do not agree, the com-
pany will not be able to reproduce its own capital base and it will go out
of business. How much management is functionally motivated is an open
question; there is a very general consensus both that it should be kept to a
minimum, and also that this tends to be a very difficult thing to do. The
differentiation into sub-functions or internal functions (structural con-
stituents) will generate positions that may or may not be strictly neces-
sary from the point of view of external function.
In relation to language, this part of the analogy reflects the second
stage of grammaticalization in the theory proposed by Boye and Harder
Function-based structure 239
pany, we can never be sure that there is an ideal match between the slot
and the filler this is why there is always a tension between formal (top-
down) and informal (unit-based, bottom-up) structure in an organization.
And this is a feature of all functional systems. The duality is obvious in
biology, as emphasized by Givn (1995, 2002), and is implicit in the tradi-
tion from Aristotle onwards. The pandas thumb, cf. Gould (1980) is an
adapted maxillary bone, not an anatomical finger, but it functions (more
or less well) as a finger; an apple crate may serve more or less well as a
bookcase, etc, etc.
In linguistic terms, we know this duality as the distinction between
functional role and structural realization. In the continental European
tradition, this is a standard feature of university grammars (examples are
Van Ek & Robat (1984), Bache and Davidsen-Nielsen (1997), and within
CL also Verspoor and Sauter (2000). In the American tradition, apart
from its manifestation as the slot-filler dichotomy in tagmemics, it is gen-
erally backgrounded: neither tree structures nor Langackers pictorial
diagrams explicate it, for instance (Chomsky 1965 explicitly eradicated it
from the heritage that he took over from Jespersen, by defining subject
based on the structural realization category NP).
The top-down orientation inherent in functional systems manifests
itself in two ways: first, because it begins with the role rather than the
filler as such and secondly because it looks first at the larger whole and
only then at the parts. Sub-functions within the company exist only by
virtue of the existence of the larger whole in contrast to unit-based
structures which exist only because of the smaller component units. A
molecule is a unit-based structure because it arises out of combinations of
atoms; in contrast, limbs are part of a function-based structure since they
arise out of the differentiation of a whole organism just as key account
manager positions arise out of a differentiation within the company. If
language was purely a unit-based structure, nouns, verbs and adverbs
could have existed for thousands of years before a bright person got the
idea of combining them into sentences. But just as the company is basic in
business, a whole utterance is basic to linguistic interaction. The utterance,
i. e. the meaningful whole contribution to interaction, has to be there
first before the sub-utterance component fragments.
A holophrase like hello or fuck, just like a one-man company, is in itself
a whole functional unit, because it may serve as a complete utterance.
From a purely external point of view, this is the minimum level: half a
greeting or half an assertion is no more useful than other half measures.
The rise of sub-utterance elements combinable into whole utterances is
evolutionarily significant, in that it is a key part of the developments
Function-based structure 241
Functions define slots that need fillers: hence, moving top-down you
move from slot to filler. The process starts with the overall slot that is
filled by the whole utterance. There is something that may appear to go
against the grain in CL here, because it seems as if this implies that there
is something abstract and contentless which comes before the component
unit. But the contradiction is only apparent: at the level of the whole utter-
ance, the basic slot is the turn-at-talk and if we go back to what was said
about the rise of intersubjectivity in chapter 2, p. 77, it will be clear that the
turn as a slot for an utterance actually arises long before the linguistic
utterance, also ontogenetically. At four months, children know that there
are forms of interaction with other people which depend on both parties
taking turns to make their contributions, and the whole felt quality of
being part of what is going on depends on making such contributions
(within the slots that arise). There is thus nothing mysterious in operating
with a slot that may or may not be filled with a linguistically encoded
utterance.11
The internal differentiation of functional systems can throw light on
one of the perennial discussions between functional and formal linguists:
can syntactic categories be understood in functional terms? This discus-
sion is typically conducted with external functions on one side and formal
categories on the other without any reference to the bridging notion of
sub-functions within a complex utterance. This leaves a gulf that gener-
ally makes the discussions unproductive. Also for functionalists, the rise of
internal slots in an utterance necessitates a two-level approach. In terms
of a sub-utterance slot, the immediately relevant function is function in
relation to the whole utterance, not function in discourse. This means
that sub-functions cannot be explained directly with reference to utter-
ance function, except when structure is functionally transparent; the con-
tribution of a sub-unit to utterance function is mediated via combination
with other constituents. Syntactic sub-functions such as subject are there-
fore, in my terminology, partially autonomous. By the same token, they
are partially arbitrary in relation to external, discourse functions. Since I
suspect that arbitrariness, in spite of Croft (1995), may still give off bad
vibrations, I will try to show that arbitrariness is in fact a functionally
motivated property.
11 Sometimes the slot may be very open but sometimes the independent impor-
tance of slot properties can be seen in cases where interactive constraints are
very specific. If you stand poised to answer the $64,000 question, the slot pro-
vides basically only two options (1) right answer (2) wrong answer. Either you
give the right answer and take home the $64,000, or you do not.
Function-based structure 243
The issue of how to bring about a meeting between slots and fillers also
arises within the perspective of construction grammar, as a feature of the
unification process. Further, construction grammar also involves a top-
down dimension. In his Radical Construction Grammar, Croft (2001: 32,
46) shows that the primitives of linguistic theory cannot be atomic catego-
ries such as nouns and verbs we have to take our point of departure in
whole constructions. Smaller units arise as (different varieties of) sub-
components of larger constructions. As larger wholes, constructions also
impose top-down properties on elements that enter into constructions. A
famous example is Goldbergs (1995) she sneezed the napkin off the table.
The verb sneeze does not in itself carry a caused-motion meaning but
when it is recruited to serve as verb in the larger caused-motion construc-
tion (S V NP PP), it assumes a reading that fits with the specifications.
Part of the story I presented in the previous section is thus captured by
construction grammar. But the underlying design feature that was dis-
cussed above, i. e. the top-down functional dimension in syntax, is not
overtly recognized because the unit-oriented nature of construction
grammar means that syntactic relations appear to be a matter of fitting
two constructions together. Construction grammars involve a taxonomic
network of constructions (Croft 2001: 58), rather than a hierarchy of
functional relations. This can be illustrated by a recent discussion in CL of
the role of slot properties.
To cover the phenomenon of a slot-determined meaning, the concept
of coercion is increasingly used about this process, also in cognitive lin-
guistics (cf. Ziegeler 2007: 99). Ziegeler is critical of the idea and discusses
tor itself and the outcome. For my purposes, the element of a decision is the
important thing.
246 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
think this account does justice both to the intuition associated with coer-
cion and the preference for a cognitive account in terms of metonymy.
The central idea is that slot properties ultimately derive from context-
driven functional pressures: linguistic expressions have to do a job in the
context in which they are used.
The point of origin for this process is that whatever component content
you put into the overall mother slot, the whole turn-at-talk, has to be
understood in a way that makes sense. This is what is captured in Gricean
pragmatics. In the smaller, utterance-internal slots, precisely the same
mechanism means that the relevant filler will be interpreted in such a way
that it can do the job that fits into the utterance-internal, i. e. syntactic, slot
in which it is used. I have suggested the term syntagmatic implicature as
a cover term for all accommodation- and coercion-type adjustments, in
order to stress the continuity between the utterance-external pragmatic
mechanism and the utterance-internal content-syntactic mechanism. So
what appears to be purely syntactic coercion, is really an utterance-inter-
nal manifestation of interactive, functional pressure to adapt to the con-
text in which the coded meaning belongs.
For instance, the slogan easy does it requires the reader to understand
easy as something that can fill the subject slot. It is complicated to trans-
late the process into a fully explicit syntactic conversion, but there is no
difficulty in understanding what it means. The meaning construction proc-
ess can fruitfully be understood as metonymic, as rightly argued by Ziege-
ler but this component-based side of the matter does not render the
top-down side of the matter superfluous: it is the insertion of the material
in the functional slot constituted by the subject position that drives the
metonymic reinterpretation of the conceptual content of the component
unit. Thus it is not a matter of the priority of syntax over semantic content,
but of the ubiquitous collaboration between bottom-up conceptual build-
up and top-down assignment of function.
The issue of slots and constructions also involves the interface between
language as individual competency and language as a property of the
community niche. Slots are not stored units of language in an individual
mind they are openings for something, like the turn-at-talk. This
comes out clearly in relation to the issue of formulaic language, which is
an inherently unit-oriented phenomenon. It can therefore be used to
illustrate what is missing if you focus strictly on (competency) units in an
individual mind: it goes for both niche properties and flow properties ana-
lysable in terms of slots that they cannot be captured from that point of
view. A discussion with reference to Wray (2002) will illustrate what the
problem is (cf. Harder 2007a for a fuller discussion).
248 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
passage from the debate on p. 458, lets for the sake of the argument that
this might occur as an utterance (an uninterrupted turn surrounded by
other turns):
. this idea that jeez I dont know, Jon, definitions in society
As far as I can see, this is only a construction if anything that has actually
been uttered counts as a construction by virtue of having been uttered, in
which case the statement becomes trivially true. On the other hand, more
run-of-the-mill utterances are not identical to constructions, they are
merely tokens of (several) constructional types. An utterance like be a
good girl and go to sleep may be an unanalysable primitive from the point
of view of the child, but from the point of view of the speech community
it is a complex instantiation of several different constructions rather than
simply a construction.13 (Crofts statement is of course true but unsur-
prising in the sense that utterances are instances of constructions just as
they are instances of vowels, intonation patterns and speech acts).
What is primitive about the utterance is its role as minimal communi-
cative act in other words the utterance as a functional unit. The utterance
understood as an instance of complex constructional patterns cannot be
understood as primitive. The criterion for being a construction in the
structural sense is that there is a shared structural pattern that character-
izes all instances and no pattern properties are shared between all utter-
ances.
The point Croft makes, however, is similar to the point I have made
above about structure beginning with the whole utterance, which is then
functionally subdifferentiated downwards, rather than with atomic prim-
itives such as nouns and verbs. The idea of top-down functional differen-
tiation is thus a natural ally of the constructional approach, at least on that
point. Constructions just do not capture the whole story. Because a con-
struction is understood as a form-meaning pairing, it is in reality co-
extensive with the concept linguistic sign. Saying that a language consists
of constructions is like saying that a language consists of signs. This is a
much better description than saying that language consists of syntactic
devices, but there is still more to be said than that.
Some of the limitations of an account in which the distinction between
grammar and lexicon is dissolved into a continuum of units have been
13 The issue involves the same principle as the adoption of a distinction between
constructions (understood as abstract types) and constructs understood as
linguistic expressions occurring as actual usage events (including utterances)
cf. Traugott (2008).
Function-based structure 251
ties. An example that illustrates the basic principle both in the local and
linguistic domain is the negation operator (NEG), which can be under-
stood as a semantic functor which applies to a proposition (P), creating a
more complex, negated proposition NEG (P). Faced with the proposition
(1) the war is over
(00) is a more complex syntactic entity both on the semantic content side
and on the expression side. On the expression side, the word not has been
added at a particular point in the linear order (after the verb and before
the adverb). On the side of semantic content, in contrast, the change can-
not be captured as a matter of linear addition. Rather, the word does
something to the rest of the semantic content, changing the whole mean-
ing of the clause.
In a number of ways, negation is an illustrative example of this func-
tional type of syntactic interaction between meanings: a semantic functor
affects the whole, instead of merely adding a small new piece to the puz-
zle; it has an obvious dynamic element: whatever P builds up, NEG (P)
undermines and finally, NEG does not represent anything out there
rather, it performs a semantic task.
The functional, task performance character can also illustrate why it
makes a difference to insist on the terminology of content syntax (cf.
Harder 1996) rather than just semantics or symbolic relations. There is
an important difference between encoded, syntactic relations between
meanings and those semantic relations which may hold between two items
in the clause regardless of their place in the clausal structure. Consider,
e. g. example (3):
(3) The biological world can be divided into the animal and the vegetable
kingdom
In this sentence there are semantic relations between the words biologi-
cal, animal and vegetable. These relations include the superordinate/hypo-
nym relations between biological on the one hand and animal and vegeta-
ble on the other. These have nothing to do with the syntactic structure, and
would exist regardless of how the words had been placed in the clauses
that contain them.
In contrast, the relation between the words biological and world is of a
different kind: it constitutes a structural, encoded relation between the
two words. On the expression side (at the phonological pole in Langack-
254 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
If we put a nominal stem such as Napoleon into the verb slot, then even if
you dont know what it means, you understand that Napoleoning has
been predicated of the girl. The name has thus been coerced into serving
an operator function.15
The predication that is the output of applying a predicate to the argu-
ments can subsequently be operated upon by a past tense form, which
once again converts the input to something more complex, namely a prop-
15 Apparently it means having a short guy come on to you in a way that suggests
he is trying to compensate for his size.
Function-based structure 257
osition (6). Past tense is a grounding operator (cf. Langacker 1991: 195),
the state-of-affairs is now viewed as applying at a particular time before
now, and the question of truth can be raised: does the descriptive content
match the situation to which it is applied?
As the last step illustrated here (7), the temporally anchored proposi-
tional content may be operated upon by an illocutionary operator (the
intra-linguistic variant of the F (p) formula). In the above example it
assigns the status content of a declarative statement to the proposition.
This is the skeleton of the obligatory clausal hierarchy in English.16 The
topmost function-assignment operation, as described above p. 242, is a
situational process of a Gricean kind, triggered by the utterance as a whole
or rather by its insertion into the situational slot, the interactive turn: it is
the interlocutors who determine (in a collaborative manner, cf. Clark
1996) what an utterance is ultimately to count as. So the bottom-up logic
of the process of constructing a (clause-formed) utterance goes from lin-
guistic input at one end via a series of coding operations in which each
step re-functionalizes the output of the previous step, to the final, situa-
tionally interpreted output.
While the dynamic (job) aspect of meaning may be easy to see in the
case of operators from the verb upwards, at the bottom end it is not obvi-
ous what the dynamic role of nouns (noun phrases) might be. That role, I
argue, is to carve out entities (= arguments) for predication to apply to.
Once they are understood, these billiard balls are conceived as static and
autonomous, as pointed out by Langacker, but the linguistic operation, cf.
also Langacker (2008a: 460), interactively instructs the addressee to access
them. Nominal meaning thus operates directly on the world as an object
of reference, cutting out those segments of it that we want to talk about.
This is also why the sub-act of categorization has a privileged relation with
nouns as opposed to all other items: nouns, unlike verbs, prepositions and
adjectives, denote things, and common nouns denote them as instances
of a category. The categorical container is part of the act of identifying a
thing as something that can be talked about. The only way not to see this
as a dynamic operation would be to assume that we talk about the world
as objectively given, with no interference from the human subject.
17 Langacker (2009) gives an account of the relation between lexical items and
the constructions they enter into which shares many of the points I have tried
to make above (including what he calls the skewing mechanism that is
involved in the verb to Napoleon, cf. example 8, p. 256). While my strategy
has been to profile the distinctive contribution of the top-down perspective,
Function-based structure 259
The previous sections have argued for the distinctive contribution of top-
down functional operators to the understanding of syntactic relations
not as an alternative to unit-based constructional networks, but as a neces-
sary addition to it. The aim of this section is to show how the two sides
interact.
The operator-operand distinction and the slot-filler distinction express
two sides of the same fundamental relationship, which is built into all pur-
poseful action: the relation between the means (~ the filler/operand) and
the end (~ the functional slot). In one fell swoop acts such as eating a unit
of food to satisfy your hunger, the relation is direct and simultaneous. In
complex actions, however, it becomes indirect and opaque: although your
intention is to wash your clothes, you start very indirectly by putting them
in the bin. This is how the split between top-down and bottom-up comes
into being, and with it the problem of making ends meet: the bottom-up
means have to be supplied before the topmost goal can be achieved. The
bigger the task, the greater the distance and the co-ordination problem. If
the goal is to hold Olympic games, a very large number of things must
happen in a co-ordinated fashion before you can declare the games open
which requires simultaneous consideration of means and ends at all stages.
This applies to the case of utterances as a species of complex action.
Even in a strictly top-down procedure, such as the one embodied in Func-
tional Discourse Grammar (cf. Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008), the
simultaneous presence of several stages is recognized (cf. Mackenzie 2004)
in that one stage can trigger the next before being completed. Speech
errors demonstrate that ends may in fact not quite meet when processes at
different levels are running simultaneously, as in she come backs tomor-
row; the quake caused extensive valley in the damage (cf. Aitchison 1998:
257), where the words have been recruited and also the syntactic structure,
but the words go into the wrong slots, short-circuiting strict top-down plan-
18 As an example of the same thing, Bakker and Siewierska (2004) also mention
that phonological elements may be recruited at a fairly early point in the over-
all procedure.
Function-based structure 261
19 Conceptual dependence goes downward in the hierarchy and reflects the fact
that operators cannot work without having some content to operate on. With
reference to the example above, if you want to predicate the concept lose, you
need a loser to predicate it about, one who can fill out the elaboration site in
Langackers terms. Similarly, in order to apply negation, there must be some-
thing to negate. But because of the functional embeddedness of utterances,
there is also a dependence that goes the other way. It applies already at the level
of the billiard-ball model, and can be illustrated with reference to the two par-
ticipants Germany and the match. Just as the verb lose cannot be understood
without reference to participants, the two NPs cannot stand alone and consti-
tute an utterance consisting in Germany. The match. You can conceptualize both
of them without needing to add a predicate to them but only when we link
them up by means of a predicate such as lose do they suddenly have a job to do
in a coherent message content. Higher in the clause, the proposition is a concep-
tually perfectly self-contained unit, which philosophers can discuss happily
without needing to attach them to a speech act operator. Nevertheless, a propo-
sition on its own does not constitute a roadworthy utterance content because
for message purposes we do not know what to do with a proposition, unless the
speaker either asserts it or raises the question of whether it can be asserted.
20 Dependency relations play an important role in understanding the continuity
as well as the discontinuity between meaning in language and meaning in the
situational environment. From a narrowly linguistic point of view dependence
can provide a rationale for two opposite situations: it can mean either than
there has to be an encoded linguistic item (otherwise the dependent item dan-
gles in the air), or that there does not have to be one (because if the depend-
ence relation is obvious, the addressee has to supply the missing item to satisfy
the dependence relation). Both cases are found in real life.
First, there are cases where dependence works so as to require an explicit
coded element. An upwards functional dependence that works in this way in
English is the proposition, as discussed above you cannot encode a proposi-
tion on its own, without an illocutionary value. Downwards, it can be exempli-
fied with a textual adverbial such as further, which needs to be followed by an
explicit textual operand that can constitute the addition that it announces.
262 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
Secondly, there are cases where dependencies allow items to work without an
encoded item to satisfy them: The potential utterance none as exemplified
below works both ways. It is conceptually dependent on a category specifica-
tion; the addressee therefore has to retrieve it from the previous discourse
context. (Otherwise he would not understand what there is none of). It is also
functionally dependent on the top end of the sentence hierarchy, including the
illocution. In the right discourse context, the addressee will recruit content to
complement both missing ends, cf:
A: How many passengers refused to pay?
B: None
In interpreting Bs elliptic reply none, we have no trouble supplying passen-
gers at the bottom end and assertion from the top end.
Languages differ with respect to the strategies they follow. Mandarin is
famous for allowing many things to be uncoded that have to be explicitly
encoded in clauses in Standard Average European languages like English. This
includes the arguments that are conceptually dependent on the verb (making
it almost impossible to classify Mandarin verbs according to syntactic valency).
This has consequences for the grammatical description, in the sense that the
strategies that you have to follow when understanding verbs in languages that
do not require explicitly encoded arguments are different and more compli-
cated: you have to do more interpretive work on your own when you are listen-
ing to Mandarin than when you are listening to English. Thus the verb gi (give)
can be used alone, leaving the addressee to figure out who gave what, and if
relevant, to whom. Mastery of these strategies is therefore part of knowing how
to use verbs in Mandarin; you simply have to make do with fewer instructions.
A somewhat similar mechanism applies in the case of agreement marking.
As pointed out in Croft (1995), it is often the case that gender classes can agree
either with classes of linguistic items and also with classes of referents. Nouns
have inherent gender in many languages, including French and German and
in the same languages referent entities have either feminine or masculine
(sociocultural) status. But the place where gender is marked is on indirectly
associated items such as adjectives. The word for crazy in French (masculine
fou, feminine folle) therefore links up the adjective with an item either with
linguistic or sociocultural gender, which do not necessarily match: thus majest
(= majesty) is feminine, also when used as the title in front of the King: sa
majest le roi. In terms of experiential content, the two cases of feminine mark-
ing are thus clearly different but functionally and instructionally there is an
equally clear parallel, cf. p. 184, because folle in both cases instructs the
addressee to pair off the property crazy with a referent that has the feature
feminine, thus reducing the scope for attaching meanings in the wrong way.
Function-based structure 263
a slot for participants. Bottom-up content units provide fillers: NPs pro-
vide fillers for participant slots, and a proposition fills out the content slot
of an assertion. This function-based structure is again generalized from the
properties of non-linguistic functional action: the labour market is a meet-
ing place between job openings and people ready to fill them, and as we
know, jobs are created top-down, while people apply for them bottom-up.
Here, too, there are bidirectional dependence relations: applicants depend
on jobs, and jobs depend on applicants; here the discussion about which is
more basic is a political issue, but again, neither side can be eliminated.
In relation to Cognitive Grammar, the dual directionality manifests
itself in the account introduced above of the English auxiliary in terms of
Functional Systems, cf. Langacker (2008b), which is a development of
the classic analysis: the grounding elements (tense and modality) stand at
the top of the scopal hierarchy (cf. above p. 255) and take scope over the
predication, with the lexical (main) verb as the head. 21 The analysis goes
beyond the classic CL account, in introducing a special apparatus for
approaching clause meaning from the functional top end rather than the
conceptual, lexical end.
The analysis also adds an essential dimension to the analysis of subject-
hood in Langacker (1999). In the linguistic literature, the top-down dimen-
sion of subjecthood (cf. Harder 2006) has been under-emphasized because
the subject has been seen chiefly as defined in relation to the verb (at
21 The grounding elements attach themselves to the topmost verb stem, which
Langacker calls the existential verb, because it specifies the reality status of
the clausal content. Subject and existential verb form a unit called the basic
existential core together with the subject, which can be separated by the rest
of the clause by an adverbial, as in (1)(2), (8a-b in the original):
(1) Will she, perhaps, be waiting for us impatiently?
(2) Has she, perhaps, been waiting for us impatiently?
The term core reflects an analysis in terms of layering, where will she and
has she is interpreted as being the centre of the clausal structure. Although it
may be confusing to have two sets of layering relations, one for functional
centrality and one for conceptual centrality, the status of diagrams as heuristic
devices means that this is a practical rather than a theoretical issue. At the
presentation, functional systems were said to have an indirect relationship
with grammatical organization, analogous to the decisive but intangible role
of dark matter (Langacker, personal communication) in the universe. As
with dark matter, this raises the challenge of providing an integrated account.
(The special status assigned to subject + topmost auxiliary corresponds to the
mood super-element in the clause in Systemic-Functional Linguistics, cf. But-
ler 2003: 173, with the rest of the clause called residue).
264 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
utterance, the functional pressure is to go for the top level and fill in the
utterance slot as soon as you can. Since the holophrase saves you from the
some assembly required condition on human language, that is the natu-
ral starting point (as it is also the evolutionary pathway, cf. above p. 240).
This again pinpoints the distinction between the utterance as the function-
ally primitive unit and the utterance as a complex construction. If only the
bottom-up path is considered, the function and the component unit end
up being conflated, as discussed above: we get the whole utterance under-
stood as a construction, cf. in addition to Croft (2001: 52) also Tomasello
(2003: 325).
From the top-down side, structure arises when you move from the sim-
plex utterance to the complex utterance. In acquisition, this works by an
emerging functional division of labour, which may take the form of a
pivot grammar stage, cf. Braine (1963). Pivot grammar does not hold
up if understood as manifesting a generative, formally inviolable subject-
predicate grammar, cf. Tomasello (2003: 9596, 124), and therefore Toma-
sello does not understand pivot schemas as syntactic (Pivot schemas
do not have syntax, Tomasello 2003: 115). According to Tomasello, the
transition into syntax proper has the following crucial elements:
Essentially what they need to learn is that whereas some linguistic symbols are
used for referring and predicating things about the world, others (including
word order) are used for more grammatical functions. (Tomasello 2003:125)
3. Relation Wug- -s
between
lexical and
grammati-
cal item
saw puzzle of negation types, and on the other using creative and general
strategies, cf. Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Theakston (2007).
The triple ontology of language, where competencies are understood
as adapted to the niche, may throw light on this issue. Tomasellos trajec-
tory of language learning constitutes a rejection of the continuity assump-
tion that was made in generative grammar: if grammar is innate, it is the
same for all, and so from an innatist perspective the child basically has the
same grammar as the adult. As Tomasello points out (Tomasello 2003:
32324), there is no evidence for this assumption: children build up their
own grammar painstakingly as they go along. But if acquisition is a form
of adaptation to the niche that contains the causal affordances (i. e. pat-
terns) associated with adult grammar, then adult grammar has a role in
the whole process nevertheless as selection pressure exerted by the
environment to which children are adapting. If relocated from an innate
module to the sociocultural environment, there may be a place for conti-
nuity as one element in the sociocognitive, functional-causal process of
language acquisition.
I regard these acquisitional implications as an important argument for
the two first hypotheses defended in this chapter: the need for a more
profiled role for the functional dimension of structure and the contribu-
tion of this reprofiling of linguistic structure to a better understanding
also of the usage based nature of language. Below we shall see how the
functional approach can throw light on variation, the third hypothesis:
adaptation is a hit-or-miss type of process, and therefore it is not surpris-
ing that individuals should respond to selective pressures in different
ways, and actual utterances do not always reflect fully consistent and fully
internalized grammatical patterns.
The general moral is that the syntactic hierarchy must be understood
simultaneously in both perspectives. There is a bottom-up path that goes
from component units to more and more abstract and complex entities
the favoured path of approach in classic CL. There is also a top-down path
from the overall function (which is the raison detre of the whole thing) to
the sub-functions into which it can be differentiated. And this bidirec-
tional approach is necessary in relation to all relevant linguistic objects of
description: whether you are interested in structural, functional, concep-
tual or acquisitional properties.
Norms and variation 269
Some readers may feel that this chapter has taken such pains to demon-
strate the importance of structure that for all my claims to adopting a
social and usage-based perspective, I have actually opted for structure
rather than usage. But as announced in the introduction to the chapter,
the aim is to show that structure is essential for understanding usage prop-
erties. This applies also to the understanding of variation: not only do we
need both structure and variation neither side can be understood except
in relation to the other.
To put it schematically, variationist linguistics belongs at stage two on
a path of increasing complexity, not at stage zero. Stage zero represents
chaos, as found in Genesis on the first day of creation, where the world is
without form. An ontogenetic stage zero is the infants babbling period,
where phonetic variation is (in principle) unconstrained and sounds have
no meaning. Variationist linguistics is not about collective babbling. What
occurs at the stage zero may therefore be called fluctuation rather than
variation.
Linguistic communication requires a state of co-ordination, as reflected
in Bloomfields (1933: 78, 147) fundamental assumption of linguistics,
that in every speech-community some utterances are alike in form and
meaning.23 There must be usage events which are instances of the same
linguistic category before linguistics can get to first base. Stage one of the
scale is therefore one in which there is structure, minimally in the form of
a set of categories of which utterance exemplars are instances.
For that reason, it is logical that structural linguistics historically arose
before variational linguistics. Variational linguistics is stage two because
it builds upon but goes beyond structural description. Labov (1972) could
not have described the variation in realization of postvocalic r in New
York City if he could not take his point of departure in the category
postvocalic r. The necessity of the structural category comes out most
23 The term alike is imprecise, because what is really at stake is that two utter-
ances or signals have to be understandable as instances of the same category
in order to have meaning at all. Speak and speech are alike in form and mean-
ing, but that is not enough to provide them with the relevant form of same-
ness. The question is really whether there is a state of co-ordination such that
two occurrences of one lexeme (two different tokens of speak, for instance)
count as instances of the same signal.
270 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
clearly in the fact that one of the manifestations is zero, i. e. there was no r
sound in fourth floor in these instantiations. Unless Labov could presup-
pose a structural description in terms of which word forms are describable
as realizations of an abstract (meta-level) unit called postvocalic r, there
would be nothing to link the two manifestations, i. e. nothing that they
would be variants of. There are very good reasons for being sceptical of
units postulated at the meta-level, prefering to stick to what can be heard
on the tape, but this does not allow you to tell significant absences from
things which informants simply happen not to say.
The path from stage zero to stage two may suggest that structure
could occur without variation, but not vice versa, as assumed in structur-
alism. But in the real world, structure can only exist as a property of a
substratum, i. e. something that is structured and when structure arises,
what used to be fluctuation turns into variation within the structural cat-
egories that arise. In this way, variation comes into the world hand in
hand with structure. As the babbling child gradually adapts to the sound
categories of the community language, a certain range of sounds (which
used to be merely different) begin to acquire the status of variants of the
same sound category. The task of providing a structural description must
reflect this process, by studying how structure is imposed upon a cline of
differences. The structural linguist has to establish structural categories
by showing how categorial (emic) distinctions relate to non-categorial
(etic) differences. Hence, the structuralist conception of a virtual level
at which there is only structure and no variation is simply a daydream
an illusion created by projecting meta-level ideology onto the object of
description.
The interdependence of variational and structural description can also
be illustrated with reference to the results of the sophisticated statistical
methods (cf. Gries 2003, Croft & Poole 2008) which have greatly increased
the descriptive power of corpus linguistics. Although these results are
achieved as a result of studying patterns of variation, what they do in
terms of the interdependence position I am arguing for is really to get bet-
ter at extracting even the most elusive structural categories (which exist
only to the extent they rise above random fluctuation).
Variationist description is thus not an optional extra, but a dimension
inherent in the overall task of describing a linguistic reality that is struc-
tured, but not just structure. The alternative to variationism is not struc-
tural description, but the misguided polarization in terms of which struc-
ture and variation are at loggerheads. Rather than being mutually
contradictory, variation and structure can only be adequately understood
as part of the same overall account.
Norms and variation 271
butional. The most abstract and general end of the spectrum is the struc-
tural principles for constructing complex utterances, i. e. the function-
based structure of the clause (cf. p. 251). The chief reason why these
syntactic properties are more tightly structured than others is the process-
ing factor, cf. Hawkins (1994): if you want to produce and understand
utterances at the rate of several words per second, you have to be able to
compile complex meanings according to a very simple and general set of
operations there is little room for superfluous idiosyncratic complexity
on that point.
As pointed out by Croft (2000: 21, citing Hull 1988: 417), it has been
assumed that the structural integrity of an animal was the paradigm exam-
ple but language structure is really more like that of a plant, where dif-
ferent parts can more easily be linked or severed without endangering the
whole organism. English could shed the remainder of the subjunctive
without problems, just as it has shed nominal gender. This looseness also
has implications for the understanding of variation. For the same reason
that the system as a feature of the sociocultural niche does not demand a
maximum of abstraction, it does not demand a minimum of variation. The
functionally regulated boundary condition is that categories have to be
recognizable: variation that goes beyond recognizability would be penal-
ized by not enabling the evocation of intended categories.26 Within that
condition, several different forms of variation can be integrated into a
usage-based reconstruction of language as system.
The most basic kind of variation is the one that is inherited from fluc-
tuation. It includes within-category differences between actualizations in
different cases. Such variation follows from the fact that superimposed
structure takes over the properties of the substratum. But fluctuations
also transgress structurally imposed boundaries, because speakers make
mistakes, leading to accidents de la parole, i. e. cases where there is a mis-
match between instantiation and relevant features of the category (note
that unless both levels exist, there can be no mismatch).
Beyond fluctuation we find the lectal kind of variation that goes with
social differentiation within the speech community. In a structural view of
language, this kind of variation is typically handled simply by transposing
the idea of a whole system to lower lectal levels dialects, sociolects and
idiolects. A lect thus inherits the same kind of structural integrity that is
to the triangle presented above, there is the ethnic dimension, the age
dimension, the subcultural dimension, the gender dimension, etc., etc. It
follows from what has been said above that a division into separate lects
would be simplistic here, too: there is no such thing as a separate closed
system for old people, for immigrants, for hipsters and for women (etc.).
The opposite extreme would be a continuous cline on all dimensions, so
that you could place yourself anywhere you wanted on a gradient from
young to old, from autochtonous to immigrant, from male to female, etc.
That would be just as unrealistic as a complete lectal discontinuity.
What exactly the reality is like can only answered by empirical investi-
gation. For all dimensions, in all communities, a large number of questions
raise themselves about what options are available for speakers when it
comes to situating themselves by their choice of linguistic forms. Actual
occurrence, however, is not enough; in order to capture the social causality
of choosing particular varieties, it is necessary to include the matched
guise type of investigation otherwise we cannot know what the force
of these choices are. This is particularly relevant in case of the type of
variation that is experimental and explorative, including the kind that is
driven by processes of identity construction (cf. Eckert 2000 and the dis-
cussion in ch. 3). The study of this type of variation, which has to some
extent replaced the attempt to explain variation by reference to fixed
static parameters (e. g., class, sex and age), is a particularly clear example
of why variational dimensions need to be seen as co-existing in one socio-
cultural niche. If each variety was assigned to a separate lect, the use of
linguistic choices for purposes of identity construction would be beyond
the horizon. In order to study such processes it is necessary to map out
both the distribution and the force of all relevant choices in the relevant
communities.
Much of the variation takes the form of differences in salience and bias
within categories, cf. the description in Geeraerts (2000: 75) of salience as
the place where structure and use meet. Salience manifests itself in fre-
quency, for example of a given meaning within the overall potential. An
example is that containment is found to be more central than inclusion
in the semantic potential of in (cf. Vandeloise 1994, as quoted in Geer-
aerts 2000: 80). This kind of salience can be seen as a structural reflection
of pragmatic phenomena because instead of placing options simply as
alternatives, as is traditionally done, salience adds a weight factor, giving
rise to probabilities rather than possibilities (Geeraerts 2000: 76). This
simultaneously introduces an essential interface between semantic intui-
tion and empirical quantification, cf. Grondelaers, Speelman and Geer-
aerts (2007: 998999): quantitative features of the object of investigation
Norms and variation 275
own idiosyncratic distributional pattern, this appears to rule out any inde-
pendent role for higher levels of the system (because they can be no more
pervasive than the elements they apply to). Similarly, if individuals can
pick and choose among available forms, there can be no more coherence
than allowed by individuals choices. It may also be suggested that since
synchronic variation is closely associated with its diachronic counterpart,
instability, it entails a state of chronic fluctuation in the system. Does it not
follow from this expansion of the system that any apparent coherence in
the system viewed as a property of the sociocultural niche is really just
epiphenomal, i. e. an artefact of the linguists urge to impose an overarch-
ing order upon his world?
However, as pointed out by Dahl (2004: 3739) in his discussion of
structural complexity, more complex levels of systems have a life of their
own. Social patterns of behaviour typically persist regardless of the erratic
behaviour of individual members; and the speech community typically has
both more stability and more variation than the speech of an individual.
Analogously, regularities at more abstract levels may persist where prop-
erties of individual elements vary: across Germanic languages, the class of
strong verbs has been more stable than individual members that belong to
it. The concept of confirmation bias is familiar in psychology, denoting
the tendency to maintain existing interpretations even in situations which
would appear to undermine them; and Hutchins (1995: 239) describes the
circumstances in which a collective body will reinforce such a confirma-
tion bias. Using the properties of a constraint-satisfaction neural network
described in McClelland 1986, Hutchins show that if there are two (sub)
sets of units, each of which satisfies the constraints of the other units in the
subset, once a network has settled into a state that fits one of these subsets,
it will be very difficult to change the interpretation state of the network.
The simple reason is that if the network changes as a result of adverse
input, the immediate result is likely to be less overall consistency/harmony
inside the (individual) network. Each unit is kept in place by the others.
If you build a network of networks, integrating all units in a society of
networks, the interconnectivity may reinforce the tendency towards find-
ing and maintaining a shared interpretation: not only internal consistency
but also external consistency may drive such a process. A speech commu-
nity is one instance of such a network of networks. This is of course par-
ticularly clear in areas subject to functional feedback mechanism, which
work by allowing individual members to mutate, while biasing selection
against dysfunctional deviations.
Norms and variation 277
The kind of existence that language can have in the niche, i. e. outside indi-
vidual minds, was described in ch. 4. The key idea is that although mental
content can only exist in individual minds, minds can interact in ways that
create larger, collective mental constructs which depend on individual
minds but create a causal pattern that works independently of the indi-
vidual mind. Like beaver dams, collective mental constructs become part
of the niche out there, even if their existence is due to properties inher-
ent in the individuals themselves. The basic channel for the rise of such
mental constructs in social space is the intersubjective permeability of
minds, which operates via the joint-attention capacity. Functional feed-
back mechanisms channel the trajectory of arising collective mental con-
structs, so that some mind-dependent collective constructs are confirmed
and replicated while others die out again because they enter into joint
attention events too rarely.
The offline existence of such collective constructs is generally under-
stood in terms of the concept of norm. This goes back to Saussure, who
took over Durkheims view of norms as the basic glue that keeps society
together (cf. the discussion p. 141); in the context of cognitive linguistics,
the foundational significance of norms has been emphasized by Itkonen
(1978; 2008). What exactly are norms, when they are viewed as part of the
landscape?
First of all, the quasi-objective status that Durkheim stipulated for
norms as part of social reality is replaced by the status as emergent prod-
ucts of interactive events. Norms exist to the extent they are confirmed in
action. As such, they work not by direct causal single-step triggering, but
by the functional mechanism that is associated with differential reproduc-
tive success. The causal power of invisible-hand level norms is that it is the
source of selection pressures. Norms (for speech, clothing, career choice
etc) therefore bias actions towards the normative standard. The mecha-
nisms are analogous to the aggregate market pressures that determine the
success rates of business companies in ways that may defy the best efforts
of the individual entrepreneur. The norm-based effect of a linguistic
expression in the community is analogous to the market price of a com-
modity: they are partly the result of forces that are beyond the purview of
the individual speakers flow of activity. The deselected variants (with
Kellers example, the angelic sense of englisch) go out, and centenarians
who have not adapted are at risk of being misunderstood if they use words
according to their own unadapted competencies.
278 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
joint action in the sense of Tomasello and Clark (and also Habermas, cf.
p. 364). Hence, the so-called highest norm, viewed as applying to linguistic
communication, in fact presupposes the existence of other norms, without
which comprehension would be a matter of natural or inferential com-
munication alone, unaided by shared linguistic expressions.
We are back, therefore, with linguistic norms as necessary behavioural
targets in social space, to which speakers have to adapt in order for lin-
guistic communication to be possible. That does not logically entail the
existence of standard norms, of course. But if there is actually a standard
language in operation, the norms that underpin it are sustained by the
interactive practices that replicate them it is not just a matter of atti-
tude. Conformity or deviation in relation to the targets is therefore some-
thing that will inevitably be recognized in the same way as conformity
with other behavioural targets even if tolerance is increased, as we may
hope, with the principle of comprehensibility as the outer limit of toler-
ance.
If the status of the standard language is to be changed in more pro-
found ways than by extending the margins of tolerance, it therefore
requires a change in the practices that sustain the standard norm (more on
the process of social construction in chapter 7). From a functional point of
view, one may be sceptical of a battle against the standard ideology
referred to by the Milroys, if it would aim to eradicate the standard
entirely. If we recognize the existence of dimensions of variability as the
normal situation in a speech community, we simultaneously endorse two
positions: one is that individuals place themselves differently on those
dimensions, and also that their practices bring them in contact with each
other (otherwise we would be back with separate lects). Abolishing the
standard would mean that shared business would always have to be con-
ducted across gaps in individual linguistic locations. As long as the meta-
norm of comprehensibility would permit it, this is entirely plausible, and
in fact I personally support this idea for the purposes of face-to-face infor-
mal communication (for instance among the Scandinavian languages).
However, it is a different matter in the case of those practices for which
a standard typically evolves: official levels of communication like the law,
political agreements, and education. They would become subject to poten-
tial misunderstanding because of undetected subcultural differences (sali-
ence, evaluative difference, etc.) of the kind that are inherent in variation.
This may be preferable from a certain point of view to the hegemony of a
standard that reflects the position of the power holders. But it would still
raise problems. In the case of English, it is hard to ignore the argumenta-
tion of Preisler (1995):
282 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
Putting the system in the niche makes the relation between the system
and the user less straightforward than assumed in the structural tradition,
where the two were supposed to match up. Saussure assumed that the
monolithic system was downloaded intact in the individual user; Chomsky
stipulated that the linguist could work with an idealization projected from
individual competence to a whole society of linguistically identical speak-
ers. The point of the distinction in this book between langue and compe-
tency (cf. ch 4) is to highlight the fact that there is no guaranteed match
and the relationship is one that needs to be investigated empirically.
The miracle of language acquisition can still be assumed to get every
normal child to a point of mastery of her mother tongue but what pre-
cisely the mother tongue is has become a more problematic issue. Adap-
tive pressure can, as always, be assumed to maintain a pattern whereby
(surviving) individuals acquire a satisficing mastery of the language in
the primary group that centrally includes the mother/caregiver. This is the
linguistic dimension of the basic socialization process that turns the child
into a member of a normative community (cf. ch 2). How does this funda-
mental competency fit into a wider social context?
Norms and variation 283
ing them; the job of the experts must be to tell others what they know
about the lie of the land, and try to keep that apart from the attitudinal
dimension. As Trudgill has also pointed out on several occasions (cf.
Trudgill 1998), the issue of empowerment remains beside the attitudinal
question.
The problem is also relevant in foreign language teaching, most directly
in the question of what form of the language is going to be the learning
target. The general unease about hypostatizing the role of the Standard
language has also manifested itself here. Many teachers prefer to operate
with a goal defined in terms of comprehensibility rather than correctness
in relation to a norm but here again, we run into the problem that the
norm of comprehensibility (as opposed to norms that underpin conven-
tions for how to express a given meaning) does not provide a learning
target. An uncompromising variationist might want to replace the stand-
ard form with the whole spectrum of variations, as the only attitudinally
acceptable learning target. But that would render the learning target
effectively unattainable (for the same reason that a predator needs to iso-
late an individual from the flock before it can attack effectively). If you do
not have a clear target, how can you define a clear path forward? A broad
and imprecise anti-normative stance is no substitute for empirically based
knowledge about what the language requirements are for relevant soci-
etal functions and against whom they constitute a barrier, coupled with
knowledge about manageable strategies for those who want to climb
those greasy linguistic poles.
A general question about the relation between individual and society
in relation to language is: exactly how much power should be ascribed to
linguistic norms in the niche as opposed to entrenched patterns in the
individual mind? After all, field work with a single speaker works: you can
describe a (whole?) language that way. Is it not an exaggeration or a dis-
tortion to say that the individuals system is merely one among other
possible ways of being adapted to a whole linguistic niche with myriad
criss-crossing norms? And even if it is, why not say that the individuals
language is his own individual possession, and societal norms are external
to it once he as acquired it?
There is both a relative and an absolute issue. With respect to the rela-
tive issue, the only generalization that can be made is that the strength of
normative pressures is variable. The absolute issue involves the uncom-
promising fact that normative pressure, strong or weak, is always part of
the picture (for reasons discussed above). There can obviously be no
objection to taking an individual speakers competency as ones descrip-
tive target, as long as it is understood that it means to carve out an ele-
286 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
ment from a larger whole: the whole variationist approach entails that
language is not complete in the individual as pointed out in the quote by
Hopper (p. 176). Variation entails that the individual is placed in a field of
forces, which are therefore part of the picture. The role of the speech com-
munity is also manifested in the breach, by the familiar experience that it
becomes difficult to describe a language when there are so few speakers
that the mechanisms that maintain linguistic norms begin to crumble.27
In relation to the scope for individual deviation, it must be emphasized
that norms are no more precise than warranted by actual practices in the
community. In the days in which a homogeneous total system was taken
for granted as the point of departure, a slogan for practically minded lin-
guists was that all grammars leak. A more accurate formulation would be
that grammars are only partially specified. Although practices are con-
strained by the partly invisible hand of community norms, a constraint is
different from a full specification. In biology it is generally accepted that
you can only explain a limited part of the properties of individuals as
adaptations to the niche; the same applies to the properties of linguistic
utterances. Also, some forms may float more than others: the double
perfect in Danish (as in I have had borrowed the book) is subject to
more fluctuation than other compound forms and has not yet (as far as
the linguistic community knows) acquired a systematic place even in a
lectally flexible conception of what the system is. But even such floating
can only be described in a universe where the individuals usage is viewed
against the background of a social field of normative forces.
It should be mentioned that there is one exception clause. You can opt
totally out of the grip of the invisible hand both as an economic agent
and as a language user. However, it means you have to withdraw from
those practices that are under the sway of invisible hand mechanisms. In
terms of economics, you can grow your own vegetables and catch your
own fish, sail by the wind and opt out of the monetary system and the
market economy. In terms of language, you can retreat from the wider
community and establish a niche of your own, modelled on communica-
tion practices known among identical twins. In those cases, your economy
and your communication will be determined by your own local practice or
usage alone, with no interference from factors operating over your head.
But as soon as you sneak down to the supermarket and say hello to the
shop assistant, you are again in the grip of the invisible hand, of overarch-
ing mechanisms that define your activities partially behind your back.
Above, we have gone from describing the system in the niche to describ-
ing its relation to individual competency. But there is also another level
that is relevant to understanding the implications of a variationist redefi-
nition of language as a system, and that is the anchoring of variation in
social processes at group level. Lectal variation is the linguistic aspect of
social differentiation, and differentiation entails an issue of how the dif-
ferentiated subsystems interact within the shared macro-niche.
The social processes that influence linguistic norms involve an element
of power, cf. (in addition to Humpty Dumpty and Foucault) also Grden-
fors (1998) on the linguistic power structure. This element by no means
disappears when we move from one integrated system or standard to a
network of interlocking subsystems. Geeraerts (2008) has taken up the
issue in relation to Putnams (1975) discussion of the difference in mean-
ing between elm and beech, where ordinary speakers defer to experts. This
is an instance of meaning being settled as part of a social process in which
individuals have unequal status; and Geeraerts shows how this pattern of
deference is only one among several possible patterns. Citing Bartsch
([1985] 1987), Geeraerts associates the standard CL concept of prototype
with a co-operative relationship driven by the highest norm of establish-
ing mutual understanding, and views this form of collaboration as an
alternative to deference. As the last of the three models, he mentions con-
flict, citing Janicki as the one author who has taken up this issue in the
context of cognitive linguistics.
Conflict is a radical example of the consequences of giving up the idea
of one homogeneous set of norms in the community, since it puts a ques-
tion mark against all other basic assumptions, including common ground.
As pointed out by Geerearts, once this issue is raised, the matter cannot
be left there you have to address the question of how to resolve the con-
flict, or what the consequences are if you do not. This issue will be
addressed in chs. 7 and 8, where the Foucauldian notion of discourse will
be reconstructed on social cognitive premises as a format for describing
288 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
social reality: being more or less attuned to the kind of action that appears
to be successful and prestigious is relevant for all interactive choices
beyond your own back yard. It is also likely that the non-representational
adaptation mechanisms have a significant impact here, with a smaller role
for conscious awareness than in relation to conceptual content (at least in
spoken communication). This is so because status is more directly associ-
ated with situational force than conceptual content. For the same reason
that the procedural memory adapts to unconscious pin-pricks, we can
assume that the procedural memory adapts to socially successful versus
socially unsuccessful action, so that we tend to adopt the more socially
successful alternatives in recurrent situations.28
In sum, the factors underlying variation, with their differential salience,
weighting and biases (in all senses of the word), are at the heart of the
integrated sociocognitive landscape that is emerging.
The aim of this book is to suggest an overall framework for the ongoing
expansion of CL into the social domain. A not unreasonable question
would be: Whats wrong with the overall format that Croft (2000, 2001,
2009) has already provided? As will be evident, my proposal owes a great
deal to ideas taken over from Croft, including the basic evolutionary for-
mat. In spite of the piecemeal sniping that is also found in various places
above, it may be difficult to see what I understand as the interesting dif-
ference.
In terms of basic orientation, the perspective I adopt attaches greater
importance to offline aspects of language; as discussed pp. 94 and 209
above, Croft understands meaning and syntactic structures more wholly
as usage-level phenomena. Very roughly speaking, the difference has to
do with the role I claim for the niche as the locus of adaptive pressure on
language use. This role has no direct counterpart in Crofts theory, which
means that more of the action is understood in strictly local, online terms.
Because Crofts theory is so carefully worked out, it is possible to trace
this difference back to an explicit theoretical assumption. Although the
argument may be hard going, I believe it is worth while being precise on
this central point.
In the following extract, Croft (2006) explains where he places struc-
ture in his theory of language as a population of utterances. A key point
is to argue against positing units that are abstract in relation to utterances.
Structure is inherent in actual use:
the paradigm replicator is a linguistic structure in an utterance. This entity
has not played a major role in grammatical theories, which have dealt with ide-
alizations the phoneme /p/, or the periphrastic future construction, rather
than the specific realizations of /p/ or the future construction occurring in par-
ticular utterances. A significant exception is variationist sociolinguistics, in
which the basic data are tokens of linguistic structures; these are called the var-
iants of a linguistic variable. These variants are sampled from the utterances
in a speech community, quantified and correlated with various social and lin-
guistic factors. The term lingueme is coined in Croft (2000: 28) to describe this
entity.
(Croft 2006: 104).
Linguemes are centrepieces in his overall panchronic theory, because they
are the structural units that persist across generations (a position that I
take over from Croft). In my view, this entails that they are reproduced by
functional-structural causality impinging on participants conscious activ-
ity. According to the argument produced above, I then have to show that
you cannot individuate such structural units at the level of usage alone, as
Croft claims we should do.
So where is the problem? The way I see it, it is the following: the pas-
sage quoted above ends up with the NP this entity, which on the face of it
could have either the concrete variant or the abstract variable as its pos-
sible antecedents. However, if Crofts argument is to hang together, it
must refer to the concrete variant otherwise we would be back at the
abstract units that he wants to get rid of. A footnote in Croft (2000: 38,
note 4) is relevant here: Croft points to the ambiguity involved in talking
about genes as types or tokens in the biological literature and concedes
that he unfortunately carries over this practice to the way he talks about
his structural units (= linguemes).
This type-token ambiguity is very hard to avoid, because the criteria
for talking about the type always license use also about a token (otherwise
it would not be an instance of the type). In the case of genes, it is not a
292 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
problem because genes are instances of physical matter with just those
causal properties that are characteristic of the type. But it is a problem
when the whole point is to avoid presupposing the causal relevance of
structural types (such as the phoneme /p/) and replace them with actual
usage events (where /p/ may be represented by the aberrant variant [f]).
The problem is that linguistic usage events do not subsume themselves
under types with identical causal properties, unlike genes which have (as
instances) the causal properties of the physical type they instantiate. The
problem emerges in the following passage which comes just after the
extract cited above:
By taking the replicator as a lingueme, this evolutionary model is fundamen-
tally usage-based: replication is language use. Replication, that is, language
use, produces variation, namely first-order variation in form, meaning, and
their pairing in grammar (section 4). The recognition of this variation is the first
step in constructing a theory of change by replication.
Change occurs at two levels in replication processes (). Altered replication is
change that occurs in a lineage of specific replications. A linguistic example
would be replication of /p/ as [f] instead of the original [p].
The interesting thing is that in the formulation above, it is /p/ that is repli-
cated (either as [f] or as [p]). But /p/ is the idealized phoneme, or at best
the variable rather than the variant. There is no way it can be the physical
and embodied variant because there are two embodied variants, first [p],
then [f]. A concrete variant [f] is not a replication of a concrete variant
[p] there has to be some abstract categorization in order to make them
the same.
This follows from the argument that was made in the discussion of
postvocalic r in relation to Labovian variationism (above p. 270). Croft
borrows the terminology from Labov, and if we are speaking of the same
variant (type), it follows that a variationist investigation of the two rele-
vant utterances would have to class them as representing the same vari-
ant (rather than two variants of the same variable) which hardly makes
sense. As far as I can see, Croft in fact continues to presuppose the exist-
ence of units based on abstractions from actual usage as indeed he must,
in order to have a criterion for what counts as structural variation rather
than random fluctuation between elements in the flow of usage.
The problem of how to understand the interaction between actual
usage events and structural abstractions from them comes out also in
relation to Crofts theory of conventions. I understand his view as basi-
cally equivalent to what I have spoken of as linguistic conventions or
norms:
Norms and variation 293
occurs in the interlocutors heads at the point of language use (speakers mean-
ing), or something that represents a memory of a history of uses available to a
speaker, albeit organized into senses and sense relations all embedded in a net-
work of encyclopedic knowledge. Reddy emphasizes this fact, that for instance
a body of texts does not have meaning; there must be a basis for readers to
evoke meaning in their heads through shared knowledge with the culture that
produced the texts.
It is not so obvious that the Lewis & Clark Model of convention avoids this
error. Instead, in the preceding section I argued that one must interpret the
notion of a recurrent situation in the definition of convention quite loosely in
order to accommodate the fluidity of meaning.
Croft (2000: 111)
Crofts claim that linguistic expressions do not have meanings is expli-
cated in such a way that it is possible to compare quite precisely with the
position of this book: for Croft, meaning exists at the level of usage (at
the point of language use) and as competency (a memory of history of
uses) but it does not exist as langue meaning. Recognizing that this cre-
ates a problem for the notion of convention, Croft points to the need for
a loose interpretation of the notion of those recurrent situations which
underlie the rise of conventions. But fluidity does not really solve the
problem: if expressions cannot have meanings, they cannot have fluid
meanings. In practice, Croft also talks about conventions as belonging at
the community level:
speech communities arbitrarily pick one solution, say the string of sounds
butterfly to mean the insect, and stick with it (Croft 2000: 97)
And he also speaks of language in a way that sounds suspiciously essen-
tialist (cf. Croft 2000: 17), and certainly is not equivalent to the definition
in terms of a population of utterances:
At this point we have a precise definition of how a language system is a conven-
tional system for communication: language is a conventional signalling system
(Croft 2000: 99).
Although Croft cashes out these notions in ways that point back to indi-
vidual speakers, I think these formulations are entirely justified in the
form cited above, i. e. as properties of the community rather than the indi-
vidual. As argued throughout this book, social entities depend on indi-
vidual minds without being reducible to them: they constitute supra-indi-
vidual configurations of mental content in the minds of a collective of
individuals. Langue meanings are more structured than mere traffic jams
of meaning they constitute continuing regularities of meaning-assign-
Norms and variation 295
ment in the niche to which speakers have adapted. Because they give rise
to selection pressure, they are in terms of the causal structure of evolu-
tionary processes necessarily in the individuals environment, not inside
the individual.
As such, a langue is a social construction, and social constructions are
the subject of the next chapter. Anticipating the discussion slightly, a cen-
tral property that goes beyond the individual mind is efficacy (cf. p. 310).
A viable social construction stands on two legs: it could not exist unless
participants were capable of understanding it mentally, but in addition it
also needs to be actually working and this is what drives adaptation. The
langue of a given community can be described as the set of affordances
that would enable strangers to participate in communication, if only they
knew the efficacious expressions and their meanings. And that can only be
the langue meanings, because at that point, there is neither a usage mean-
ing nor a competency meaning in existence for the poor outsider only a
social configuration of meanings from which he is excluded.
As far as I can see, Crofts objections against assigning meaning to lin-
guistic expressions as such do not apply to this view. In the niche view,
moreover, variation gets exactly the status described by Croft: when dif-
ferent people enact what they see as the same mental operation, it need
not be exactly the same thing that happens in each case thanks to the
mechanisms of co-ordination with other minds, [f] can be assigned the
status of a variant of /p/. Fluidity and flexibility are therefore essential to
get conventions to work, just as Croft points out. Because of that, we can
also describe how Crofts promissory note on the interplay between the
individual and the collective convention of the community works in prac-
tice: it works by causally efficacious feedback when you try out the words.
If a speaker of a Germanic language goes to Italy, he might be excused for
believing that calda means cold. If because of that mental representation
he then asks for agua calda insistently enough, the waiter might actually
bring him a cup of hot water. If he tries to blame the waiter, other people
will inform him that he was in the wrong: his mental representation did
not accurately mirror the actual causal powers of the word. He may then
adjust his own mental representation for the very good reason that it did
not match the conventions that were actually in force in the community.
The fact that the two elements are understood as the same is due to the
concrete efforts of individual minds; unless people are collaborative in
such cases, things go wrong. But the whole mechanism of conventions
works because individual efforts are aided by causal powers stemming
from co-ordination between individuals. As pointed out by Hutchins (cf.
p. 276), you can change the working of the whole system merely by chang-
296 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
ing the way the individual networks are linked up, without changing any-
thing inside an individual subsystem.
This type of causality is also at work in speech communities. Back in
the days when Rask-Grimms law was getting under way, the [p] sound in
certain words increasingly came to be pronounced as [f] so that in the
same words (as understood by members of the Indo-European speech
community) the segment could come out in two different ways. Also dia-
chronically, sameness arises from matching the different segments to
something which is collectively the same. Without the causality associ-
ated with the convention, we cannot understand why there would exist
anything shared in terms of which [f] and [p] are variants of the same
thing. If we ask where that operation of sameness-assignment comes
from, we are back at the nine months revolution and joint attention as a
basic prerequisite of speech. Children are genetically programmed to
regard fellow subjects as potential sharers of sameness experiences: they
can attend to the same things as you do, and crucially they can say things
and mean the same thing that you understand by them. Langue is the
system of samenesses that children have to home in on in order to obtain
participant access to linguistic interaction.
It is important to stress that langue, thus conceived, does not come
under Crofts injunction against essences: a language understood as a set
of conventions that are in force in a given community is still defined in
terms of a population of speakers, as he claims. Conventions are just caus-
ally empowered abstractions which have a different life history than the
population of utterances itself. Conventions therefore live and die with
the population of speakers who enter into causal relations with them
just as the population of utterances does. Also, language does not interfere
with the causal pattern that Croft needs to have to achieve his parallel
with evolutionary change. Crofts concept of language as a population of
utterances also plays a role in the picture advocated here, but as usage
(parole in Saussurean terms); it cannot be the sole carrier of structure.
This difference has implications for the way Croft (2009) uses Chafes
pear stories in illustrating the importance of the variationist dimension in
the future social cognitive linguistics. Croft describes the old CL style of
description in terms of variation in construal: informants describe the
pear story in different ways because they construe it slightly differently:
putting, dropping and filling are different verbs conveying different ways
of conceptualizing what happens to the pears. But this is wrong in terms of
the new, social cognitive linguistics that Croft is introducing. If we take the
social-interactional dimension seriously, he argues, the variations in ver-
balizations must be understood as related not just to the speaker, but also
Norms and variation 297
the hearer, and thus against two different past usage histories with the
inevitable difference that this entails. Precise conceptualization is there-
fore not available instead we have to operate with indeterminacy as the
background fact of life in communicative language use: One cannot put
too great a precision on the shared semantics of linguistic forms. This is
in accordance with the fact that language users, relying on shared knowl-
edge, interpret a range of alternative formulations as more or less alter-
native verbalizations of the same scene (cf. p. 94 above).
Although that is true enough, it does not disprove that the formula-
tions convey alternative construals, or that there is a valid and real struc-
tural difference between the potentials they evoke. Any competent lan-
guage user can tell the difference between putting, filling and dropping,
irrespective of the fact that they may use them as alternatives in describ-
ing the same event just as coast and shore may be used about the same
border between sea and land. Retelling a scene is an onomasiological task,
and it can come as no surprise to anyone that such a task can be accom-
plished in different ways and still be the same task. What description you
get out of a variational analysis depends on what type of unit you choose
(within which you then look for variation). If you choose a unit defined in
terms the task you perform, you cannot use it to say anything about vari-
ation within linguistic units
The other side of the argument is that variation adds an extra dimen-
sion of precision, which presupposes but goes beyond shared conventions.
If you just evoke the whole potential and leave it at that, your understand-
ing will be very imprecise, cf. ch. 5 you have to superimpose the varia-
tional level on the structural level to get it right (as also argued by Croft
and Cruse 2004). Cases where it does not matter what word you choose
are those where the situational target is so well-defined that it will over-
ride differences of encoding.
As a consequence, there are two interpretations of the conclusion of
the following passage from Croft (2009: 418), one of which is true, while
the other is wrong:
Language is a fundamentally heterogeneous, indeterminate, variable, dyna-
mically unfolding phenomenon, just like the human society it constitutes part
of.
In this chapter I have argued that the social turn must include a rethinking
of structure that reflects the tripartite understanding of language as flow,
competency and langue. I have also argued that a function-based approach
is necessary to understand the social embedding of structure.
Two issues were presented as central: the function-based dimension of
structure, and the role of variation. Building upon the account in ch. 5 of
meaning as input to communicative action, the account of function-based
structure argued that one dimension of structure reflected a very general
feature of complex, structured behaviour: the operator-operand relation. A
complex utterance is a recipe for how to act upon the existing usage situa-
tion, co-constructing a new step in ongoing interaction. This dimension of
structure is analogous to the structured operations of a washing machine in
bringing about an intended new situation with respect to the laundry:
speakers act on the situation with a view to carrying the interactive process
forward. The argument attempted to demonstrate the existence and impor-
tance of this dimension of structure, which is integrated with, but not reduc-
ible to the conceptual dimension of structure that takes it point of depar-
ture in the units of meaning that enter into complex structure.
This argument constituted a defence of the first two claims announced
in the introduction to the chapter: that the top-down approach to complex
linguistic structure is significant in a way that does not automatically
emerge from a unit-based description, and that structure constitutes an
affordance (a set of offline recipes) in the niche/speech community for
interactive, communicative action. Language structure is both a hierarchy
of functional options and a network of constructions, and both sides need
to be profiled in a social-cognitive theory.
The third claim was that a rethinking of the linguistic system as a prop-
erty of the community niche means that the system must be partial, include
variation, and be relatively concrete, rather than monolithic and abstract.
This proposed alliance between variation and structure is perhaps the
most unfamiliar part of the conception offered above. There are several
explanations why variational linguistics is often seen as an alternative to
structural description, rather than an enrichment of it. The fundamental
reason, however, is that structure has traditionally been understood as
being inherent, underlying, and Platonic more basic than actual usage.
Hence, if you (rightly) believe that actual usage with all its variation is the
most basic manifestation of language, you almost automatically tend to
reject a structure-based description. However, once it is realized that
Summary 299
careers to pursue, etc. What has made it appear that language was under-
lyingly uniform is its basic status as shared: a language cannot exist with-
out bridging the gap between people who may be different in terms of
other features (including clothing, eating habits and careers). The more
complex the division of labour, in fact, the more necessary it is to have a
shared language through which overall joint-but-divided labour can be
mediated. The position of langue-in-society is in the middle of this field
of tensions: between the pull towards fully shared understanding in order
to conduct interconnected tasks satisfactorily, and the pull towards an
understanding in terms of individually and subculturally different experi-
ential backgrounds.
Using the countable form a community presupposes that speech com-
munities can be individuated. This is more controversial than it may seem,
in fact very tricky once we leave the traditional idealizations behind. The
traditional approach that takes the homogeneous speech community as
the presupposed ideal condition is one extreme position; the opposite
approach would be one in which each individual was basically understood
as having his own private idiolectal variety. In order to avoid this impasse,
it is useful to view community, like other fundamental concepts such as
conceptualization and matter, as basically non-count rather than counta-
ble. Human beings depend on community for being able to survive, while
the question of exactly how to delimit a countable community-unit is an
open question in fact an empirical question about real social structure.
An isolated island tribe would be easily individuated, while anyone would
have a hard time describing the English speech community.
The basic claim of the niche theory is that there are social structures
in the community to which individuals adapt. The theory does not depend
on assumptions about the precise distribution of such social features into
neat individual boxes. Communities are not defined in terms of their
members, but in terms of collective practices; football clubs, political par-
ties, religious denominations. Individuals are free to define the scope of
their own membership ambitions: you can be a member of as many com-
munities as your social competencies, including language competencies,
allow. The speech community is therefore definable in terms of a set of
collective communication practices, which may be more or less easy to
individuate depending on the general organization of social practices in
the community. In a dialect continuum, community may be virtually
uncountable (although communicative practices may have natural units
in the form of villages and towns).
For speech communities of the kind we tend to presuppose in Europe,
this also means that there is an inherent link between the cohesion of the
Summary 301
langue and the cohesion of the whole set of practices that constitute the
society. Disruptions in the social order are likely to lead to disruptions in
the language system that constitutes one aspect of the way the world
(niche) works. As described by Dahl (2004), when channels of communi-
cation are affected by social upheavals, it may lead to degraded transmis-
sion, which may cause erosion of grammatical complexities, leading to
creole type changes in the language system. English shows signs of such
changes, which may be traced back to 1066 and all that. As a result of the
Norman invasion (cf. Blake 1996: 84), the previous standard form of the
language (originally created by Alfred of Wessex) gradually fell into dis-
use, and because the high-status positions in society were literally occu-
pied by Anglo-Norman, no new form of English began to approach stand-
ard status before Henry V, in the 1420s.30
Both events had significant influence on linguistic development, and
the core of them in both cases involved military conquest as well as the
social construction of the nation. The Norman conquest submerged
Anglo-Saxon nationhood; Henry V wanted to resuscitate it in the service
of military success in the hundred years war, warming up to the battle of
Agincourt and propagation and propaganda were disseminated along
channels such as the guilds (cf. Blake 1996: 177). To take one of Geer-
aertss examples, the fact that there is a stronger pull towards a standard
language in Netherlandic Dutch than in Belgian can be linked with the
less integrated nature of the Belgian social structure. The field of forces
that sustain linguistic norms is part of the same overall reality that sustains
1. Introduction
the world. Adaptive pressure emerges from both mental and non-mental
features. This can be exemplified with the form of adaptation whereby an
immigrant learns a new language: without the physical presence of utter-
ances in the new language, there would be nothing to drive the adaptation
process but without the mental content of other minds that enter into
the creation of shared understanding, there would be no target for the
adaptation. On the population level, selection pressure also involves both
the vehicle and the meaning: with the example of fashion, selective fitness
in the season depends not just on whether you get the message, you also
have to get the actual clothes.
The fact that the object of description is social and involves non-men-
tal factors does not mean that cognition is marginalized in the theory I
present: the whole point will be the collaboration between cognitive mod-
els and social processes. While this will sometimes show mental content in
roles relatively detached from reality (as in bullshit, cf. section 3.3), it will
also show the crucial role of mental content for underpinning aspects of
hard social reality. For instance, mental models of national identity, while
problematic in other respects, have a key role for the rise and persistence
of universally acclaimed social constructions such as democratic govern-
ments.
In the context of CL, the main point is to show that the full story of
cognitive models does not emerge from the mental dimension alone, but
depends on which of many different forms of social construction the cog-
nitive models team up with. In relation to the rival point of view that sees
social processes as primary, the main point is to show that social processes
always depend to some extent on the mental models that (at any given
time) are constituents of social reality. Either way, the aim is to provide a
balanced approach, offering a framework for studying the role of cogni-
tive models in society without having to be a cognitivist, and for studying
the role of social processes without presupposing radical social construc-
tionism.
A major aim of this chapter can be summarized in relation to two
properties of social constructions: acceptance and efficacy (cf. p. 313
below). Acceptance designates the extent to which a social construction, as
represented in the cognitive model that partly constitutes it, is endorsed
by members of the community. Acceptance it is crucial because social con-
structions can only exist if participants are willing to play along. Efficacy
designates the extent to which social constructions actually work in the
way that they are mentally represented as working. Efficacy thus high-
lights the aggregate-level causal machinery rather than the cognitive mod-
els. A key part of the academic ambition of this book is to show that it is
Introduction 305
necessary to have a place in the theory for precisely how cognitive models
are hooked up in social reality, not just in terms of the acceptance dimen-
sion, but also in terms of efficacy. The civic side of the issue is that as citi-
zens we need to worry about how cognitive models function in the proc-
esses that reproduce social reality over time. This is true whether we want
to promote them or to throw a spanner in the works.
The main claims argued in this chapter, accordingly, are:
The structure of this long but central chapter is the following: section 2
outlines the emergence and anatomy of social constructions (i. e. the con-
stituents of social reality). First (2.1), I describe the path from mind to
society, and the dual nature of social constructions as depending both on
participant awareness and aggregate-level causal factors, correlated to the
acceptance and efficacy dimensions. In 2.2 I discuss the place of social
constructions in the evolutionary framework. I then discuss first the mini-
mum and then the maximum role for mental content in a social construc-
306 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
tion: based on the habitus level, I discuss (2.3) how close you can get to
the point where mental representations play no role whatever, and I then
go to the other extreme, proposing (2.4) the notion of the Platonic projec-
tion to capture the mechanism whereby a concept can acquire an almost
self-contained status as part of niche we live in.
Section 3 focuses on the issue of acceptance and its partial independ-
ence of the efficacy dimension. This independence is relevant for socially
constructed beliefs (section 3.1), for understanding the relation between
the flow and the niche (section 3.2), and, strikingly, for assessing the role
of bullshit in society (section 3.3). Because of the real force of conceptu-
alizations, however, there is also an issue of how and why to gain accept-
ance for new conceptualizations of reality (3.4). Two socially forms of
grounding are proposed, supplementing the classic dimension of bodily
grounding: sociocultural and factual grounding, together establishing a
grounding theory with some affinity to Bhlers triangle (cf p. 82): bodily
grounding is most directly associated with the speaker, sociocultural
grounding with the audience understood as members of a community, and
factual grounding with conveyed meaning used as a map of the world.
Based on this outline of types of social constructions, the two following
sections (4 and 5) confront the social cognitive framework with poststruc-
tural discourse(s) analysis first on the level of principle, then in relation
to an illustration case where discourses analysis has played a significant
role in the analysis of meaning in a hard social science, International
Relations.The invisible hand is a crucial side of the causality that shapes
the proliferation and the functions of meanings in society and this
includes discourses. A major point is therefore that the hidden hand of
poststructuralist theory can be understood (and demystified) as a special
case of the invisible hand that enters into evolutionary dynamics: part of
the social power that shapes individual conceptualization behind our
backs boils down simply to adaptation.
Discourses thus have to take their place in a richer theory of the phe-
nomena that populate the social world. They retain a role, because there is
a well-defined, somewhat deviant type of utterances for which poststruc-
tural discourse analysis is well suited. However, it has to take its place
within a wider framework that includes collaborative agency.
The last sections return to the issue of conceptualization viewed in the
light of the social dimension. Section 6 is about the relation between con-
ceptual models and social constructions viewed from the perspective of
the individual; section 7 views the analytic framework in the perspective
of existing work in the CL tradition on meaning in society; and section 8
sums up the conclusions.
The growth and structure of social constructions 307
3 The conceptual skill of humans is exceptional in that it does not work solely
via direct causal triggering from the environment, so that it can work mind-
internally. But just as the linguistic context (cp. ch. 6) is a special and sophisti-
cated case of context in general, so is conceptualization that targets mind-
internal entities alone a special and sophisticated case of conceptualization
targeting objects impinging from the outside.
The growth and structure of social constructions 309
taneously, before you make up your mind (as it were) but when you
understand one construal as being the situationally appropriate represen-
tation of an object, you put a construction on it with potential causal
implications. If you categorize someone as a friend, it has implications for
the way you think of him in subsequent discourse, and if you have formed
a mental construction of an act you have witnessed e. g. of someone
being mugged that mental construction is potentially relevant for the
way you choose to act upon the world (e. g. by telling the police).
However, the causal relevance is conditional on some action or conse-
quence triggered by the mental construction. The second step, and the one
that more tangibly takes us beyond the individual mind, is a discursive
construction. Discursive construction is what gives an utterance further
relevance for the way interlocutors treat an object that has been spoken
of, as when someone is blamed for an accident, or when you call your
friend an idiot. Discursive constructions are part of the flow and need not
last beyond the moment, and therefore have a very uncertain causal role.
They constitute the online, situated phenomena that are central in
approaches such as Systemic-Functional Linguistics and discursive psy-
chology, cf. ch. 3, but are necessary elements in any theory of language use.4
The third subtype of construction is a full-fledged social construction.
Social constructions are the potential end products of discursive construc-
tions that stick. When a socially available target of understanding is
understood in a particular way, that achieved understanding may become
a part of its (enriched) situational identity also beyond the immediate dis-
course and thus it may get causal relevance for social life in general, not
just for linguistic interaction in the immediate situation. While discursive
constructions stay within the realm of joint-attention scenes that run their
course at a particular time and place, social constructions are part of the
furniture.5
with conceptual content: we can change the world by projecting shared mental
content into it (cf. Clark 1996).
The growth and structure of social constructions 311
ent confusion is the foundational relation between the two sides of socially
constructed entities, the mental content and the embedding in the evolu-
tionary causality of social persistence. To those who focus on mental con-
tent, social constructions appear rather like the emperors new clothes,
and the typical message is dont be fooled by apparently solid features of
social reality theyre just socially constructed! To those who focus on
the quasi-objective causal laws, such as economists (cf. the discussion in
chapter 4), social forces are just as inexorable as physical forces. We need
to integrate the two perspectives if we want to avoid being at the mercy of
competing half-truths.
As a contribution towards this integration, I think it is useful to distin-
guish between two types of causal hook-up that a social construction can
have in social reality: acceptance and efficacy. Acceptance designates the
causal power that stems solely from citizens attitude to the mental, repre-
sentational side of a social construction. Acceptance goes beyond pure
mental content in that it influences the way you act: you will tend to sup-
port the social constructions you like and resist the social constructions
that you cannot accept. As defined here, acceptance is understood as
depending solely on the idea, not the practical functioning. Efficacy, con-
versely, designates brute operationality: does it work in accordance with
the way it is represented (whether you like it or not)? Will money buy you
goods, do the police apprehend criminals, does the president exert execu-
tive power?
Both acceptance and efficacy involve causal power. The point of the
distinction is to factor out the kind of causal impact that is directly depend-
ent on citizens mental representations, in order to establish the impor-
tance of the causal power that depends on aggregate-level mechanisms of
replication. Radical social constructionism overlooks the second kind, the
efficacy dimension. Cognitivism does not necessarily overlook it, but has
no account of it because cognitivist analyses focus on the mental side
only.
This is where I hope that the account of this book can be useful mak-
ing it clearer how to inquire into the precise social significance of cogni-
tive models. In addition to an analysis of the cognitive content, it is neces-
sary to have an account of precisely how this cognitive content is hooked
up in social reality, not just in terms of the acceptance dimension, but also
in terms of aggregate-level efficacy. This is a big project, because it
demands cross-disciplinary collaboration, not just at the level of founda-
tions, but also at all levels of concrete analysis: those who know about
cognitive models must collaborate with those who know about social cau-
sation in all individual cases. The only thing I can hope to do here is to
314 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
point the way towards the appropriate form of integration between the
two sides.
This is where the operational type of construction is a useful point of
departure. In an operational social construction, the two sides mutually
depend on each other: efficacy is a condition on acceptance, and accept-
ance is a condition on efficacy, as discussed in relation to the nature of
status functions in ch. 4: red lights means stop, and therefore they cause
people to stop and the fact that people stop is what enables red lights to
continue to mean stop. This mutual dependency sounds suspiciously like
the circular see-saw kind of relationship (cf. above p. 178): paper notes can
be used to buy things, and therefore people accept them; and because peo-
ple accept them, you can buy things with them. But the full story depends
on the whole process of selection-adaptation dynamics, which crucially
includes feedback from the environment. The see-saw logic would predict
that the two sides could sustain each other forever; however, external fac-
tors may cause the functional relations to get out of the equilibrium state
which is necessary to reproduce the system. World War I is an example: for
reasons which had nothing to do with either the mental representations of
German Marks or with any unwillingness on the part of shopkeepers to
part with goods for money, the German monetary system collapsed and
the Mark lost its value. The see-saw logic cannot capture such events.
The moral of the integrated story of social constructions is therefore
that our mental representations matter, that the aggregate causal set-up
also matters, and that you need to know how the two sides interact func-
tionally. The social constructions we produce become part of the natural
world (indeed, where else could they be, cf. Fink 2006: 217) and there-
fore the combined message is take social constructions seriously!
There are other social constructions than the balanced, operational
ones. But before we move on to the other kinds, we need to add two extra
dimensions to the operational kind. First we look at the potentially mini-
mal role of the mental dimension (section 2.3); then we look at the maxi-
mally independent status that mental concepts may have (section 2.4).
under causal pressures, mental content remained the hero of the story.
There is a source of error here which can be illustrated if we approach the
relation between representations and social constructions from the oppo-
site end of the path beginning with the social constructions in the niche,
and ending up in the individual mind.
The champion of this approach is Bourdieu (cf. ch. 3), with his claim
that social processes work essentially through habitus formation, i. e. by
imposing a bodily adaptation that works at a pre-conceptual level. This
idea can be illustrated with his analysis of the situation in a radically tradi-
tional society, where the existing social pattern is taken for granted to the
extent that explicit and conscious representation plays only a minimal role
in the community. In the extreme case, the pattern may be totally embed-
ded in routine practices and no one thinks about it, giving it the status that
Bourdieu (1977: 169) called doxa. Taking this observation to its logical
extreme, one might ask whether mental representations have to play any
causal role at all: could it be that procedural causality inscribed in the
embodied habitus of community members is the only thing that matters?
For reasons discussed in ch. 5, mental representations must be assumed
to play a variable but ineradicable role. Ant communities (presumably)
have to be hard-wired by deterministic mechanisms regulating everything
from genes to pheromones in order to be feasible, whereas the thought of
a society driven by total mechanical causality is the vanishing point for
what we see as human relations. Joint attention is a mental state. More
variable is the role of conceptual understanding. The argument suggested
that Bourdieu is right in claiming that we cannot assume that the level of
explicit mental representation is necessary: elements of everyday life can
have the same pre-conceptual status as the we that arises out of elemen-
tary joint experience. Therefore we need a concept for the more elemen-
tary level of bodily wiring, when it is not assumed to be functionally
hooked up with explicit representations.
Because of the continuism of CL (adopted openly in Holland and
Quinn 1987: 6, as discussed above p. 203), this level is not traditionally
distinguished from embodied cognition in general. Intuitively, however, it
corresponds to the very basic level that is evoked by the title Metaphors
we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). When conceptual models are also in
play, we get the problem of how the two levels act together, which was
discussed at the level of competency in ch 5. The problem has interesting
dimensions also at the collective level, as illustrated by Bourdieus analy-
sis of the development from tradition to modernity.
In Bourdieus analysis, a radically traditional societys form of life is
totally embedded in actual practice and is not explicitly represented men-
316 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
tally (a status Bourdieu calls doxa). People do what they do purely out of
habit(us). Conceptual representations may arise when practices are chal-
lenged; and from a conceptual point of view, one might think that acquir-
ing an explicit representation would be a form of strengthening these
practices, but the opposite is the case:
The dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and
exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have
an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in
its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy. (Bourdieu 1977: 169)
The strongest position a form of life can have is that of being quasi-natural
habitus that members rely on in the same way that they rely on the solid
ground under their feet, representing an all-pervading adaptation among
members of the community. Explicit representations, in contrast, invite
opposition by their very explicitness, and orthodoxy therefore requires
much greater effort to sustain than doxa (which is one reason powers-
that-be in a traditional society prefer to burn heretics at the stake rather
than arguing with them).6
Because habitus states have no intentional relations to states of the
world, they do not constitute truths or falsehoods they are simply states
of bodily adaptation. Bowing automatically to the emperor is not a false-
hood while for instance a mental representation of the emperor as wor-
thy of deep respect might be false. If habitus fails you, it therefore feels
worse than simply being wrong about something; the metaphor of the
ground giving way under your feet is frequently used to describe the
mental experience of cultural change.
In sum, as suggested by Bernardez (2008) and Sinha et al. (in press),
there are strong arguments for a social cognitive linguistics to adopt the
concept of habitus, enabling it to move towards a more precise account of
the social context of cognition that simultaneously integrates the element
of bodily grounding in a more precise form. The potential in making the
distinction can be illustrated with reference to familiar CL territory in the
form of Lakoffs (1996, 2004) two family models, the strict father model
and the nurturing family model. Both are good examples of cases where
there are both lived practices and explicit conceptual models involved, as
demonstrated by Lakoff. But what about families where lived experience
does not reflect any of the two models such as radically dysfunctional
families where children are subject to heartrending practices of neglect,
abuse and violence? There can hardly be any doubt that children have an
embodied adaptation to this kind of family life, reflected for instance in
the risk of abused children becoming abusers in later life. But there is
nothing that obviously qualifies as an idealized conceptual model for this
type of family, only lived practices kept in the dark.7
More generally, if we follow the CL path of emergence, also in ordinary
families, representations come later than lived practices. Experiential cor-
relations are the basis of primary metaphors. The standard CL theory (cf.
ch.1) can be understood as representing what Max Weber would call an
ideal type where there is the kind of iconicity and continuity between
levels that would justify a complete reliance on converging evidence:
sensorimotor routines are matched by image schemas which organize
conceptual mappings corresponding to primary metaphors that underlie
complex, high-level extensions. In an ideal type situation, a child may thus
grow up in a nurturing family and acquire the corresponding habitus,
develop an explicit model of family life that reflects this pattern, and map
this on to an understanding of government as a framework for mutual
support.
While it is important to have an awareness of the canonical status of
this type of case, clearly it is not all there is to say about embodiment and
conceptualization.8 We need to have a conceptual apparatus that can
explicitly capture the types of non-canonical cases that arise, and the rela-
7 Lakoff (2008:29) mentions the lack of honored narratives for the reality of
Americans who work hard and cant climb the ladder of success because there
are no rungs on it
8 Lakoff himself is of course fully aware of this. We have models also of cases
that do not match our own experiences; including for instance both the two
family models that Lakoff discusses (cf. Lakoff 2006: 67), and align ourselves
with them to different degrees. (Even those who do not support the strict
father model can watch Schwarzenegger movies, as pointed out by Lakoff in
discussion 2008). In a similar vein, Billig (1992) found that people had both
loyal and critical conceptions of the Royal family, and rather than uniformly
support one of them, they might align themselves with both types, depending
on the local discourse context the social framing.
318 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
What makes the niche a necessary part of the world picture is its causal
role as the source of selection pressure. I take it for granted that opera-
tional social constructions have causal power as niche properties: in their
process of socialization, children adapt to money, police and (operational)
traffic lights as part of dealing with the material world. Do they also adapt
to concepts?
As already implied, I think it makes sense to suggest they do. The Pla-
tonic projection of the section heading refers to the process whereby an
entity that is wholly conceptual, hence belonging essentially in the mind,
ends up as part of the environment. This is the most radical manifestation
of the fact that the human environment is imbued with mental content. In
order to understand how this works, we can again begin with the case of
money. Money has come a long way from barter via gold via paper notes
to credit cards but it seems there still has to be a way of checking its
material existence: attempts to buy things in a shop would not succeed
unless the presence of a means of payment could be reliably checked. Yet
even in the case of money, if the level of mutual confidence is high enough,
the checkable entity can have an extremely abstract and indirect manifes-
tation. Certain people can always buy on credit, as long as their general
social standing is maintained.
The point I am making is that ultimately the basic currency, in any
monetary system, is social trust. This applies not only to the individual as
an island, but to the whole niche: trust in the currency depends on a reli-
able state of the social world. Another way of demonstrating this form of
causality is that if social relations decay, the process will begin to reverse
itself. As conditions worsen and the community slides towards chaos,
increasingly solid means of payment will be demanded by sellers credit
will be first to go, then paper money (as the currency collapses), ending up
with real goods as the only accepted means of payment when all trust has
disappeared.
The ultimate criterion, therefore, is the way things work in social inter-
action. As long as status functions are recognized, by however indirect
means, the status assignment that defines the causal potential of a social
object can remain viable. The causal underpinning depends on how peo-
ple respond in interactive situations, not on the material manifestation
itself. Myths abound of the deceased king whose reign can be perpetuated
those where there is no reasonable doubt that a concept plays a causal role in
a community. Based on such cases, we can then try to understand the more
equivocal situations.
320 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
by his surrounding minions, until the physical absence of the king one day
creates problems. People could in theory go on forever attributing the
status of king to the same person, whom they might never have seen in the
flesh anyway. This opens the way for (almost) purely conceptual entities
to come to play a role in the niche as well.
It is useful to compare with the reverse of the status assignment proc-
ess, cf. p. 85, the production of a material anchor for a mental process, as
described by Hutchins (1995) and A.Clark (1997), cf. ch. 2. The compass
and the abacus provide physical objects that represent elements of mental
processes, thus making it possible to offload part of the process into the
environment, easing the cognitive burden. In performing a calculation,
you project on to the beads of the abacus the status of units in the transac-
tion that you are carrying out that is why the presence of a certain
number of beads at the end may count as a claim that so and so much
money needs to be paid. But the abacus is a dispensable intermediary it
all boils down to the reliable functioning of the overall social process, i. e.
the transaction. Also here, the degree of materiality of representation and
status-assignment is variable.
The causal role of concepts begins with their function as containers. A
functioning concept is used to subsume phenomena in the world of expe-
rience, reducing complexity to a manageable format, cf. ch 5. As we know
from basic-level concepts, that format may at the same times go with spe-
cific motor routines, i. e. ways of dealing with instantiations. But in the case
of basic-level concepts, the actual instantiations (cars, trees, mothers) are
arguably enough to explain the causality that is at work. The concepts that
are core candidates for Platonic status are therefore those which have a
more clearly independent role in relation to instantiations and also have
a strong normative element. In such cases, there is a more clearcut causal
role for the container in itself as opposed to the actual instances.
A case which was the subject of a very well-known ethnomethodologi-
cal study, cf. Wieder (1974), is a half-way house for narcotics offenders on
the way to being released from a term of imprisonment. A pervasive fea-
ture of life in that halfway house was the convict code, a set of norms that
the residents lived by. It depended on a basic division between residents
and staff, and demanded loyalty towards the other residents and distance
from the plans and activities of the staff. Central in it was the concept of
snitching, i. e. informing staff of the criminal activities or plans of other
inmates. Basically this never happened, because it was top of the list of
what simply isnt done.
Snitching is therefore a good example of a concept with Platonic
status in the niche a concept with normatively based causal power, even
The growth and structure of social constructions 321
The causal role of the concepts associated with the convict code could
not exist in the niche if it did not exist in the minds of the participants. In
this case there is a strong element of habitus involved; many residents
describe themselves as having lived by the convict code all their lives.
Nevertheless, habitus in the form of directly embodied response patterns
cannot capture everything about the way is works. Acts of conceptual cat-
egorization (and discursive construction) of a potential act as snitching
(and therefore as motivations for a refusal to comply) constitute an impor-
tant part of the usage practice of telling the code and sometimes the
categorization task can be quite delicate (cf. Wieder 1974: 170). And in its
absence, extraordinary steps may have to be taken. Wieder (1974: 162)
describes the case of a new resident who was a bit stupid and who started
to talk in a way that the staff realized would count as a violation of the
code so the staff (!) tried to tell him to be less co-operative, and put him
in special section for a while to protect him.
The role of the staff is instructive here, because their intervention can
be explained neither by habitus nor by the force of online discursive pres-
sure. The staff do not lead lives totally submerged in the convict code, as
the inmates might be assumed to do, and they step in precisely because
there is no online discourse to warn the potential victim. Hence, the staffs
protective interference can only be understood as an adaptive response to
the way their world works because of the concept snitch, by the mere risk
of the offender being put in that conceptual container: waiting for the
actual instantiations to drive the process would be too dangerous.
Although indirect, telling the code is still a form of material manifes-
tation, which is of course necessary otherwise a (quasi-)Platonic concept
could manifest itself causally only via ESP. All such concepts depend for
their persistence on social practices that sustain them. Thus the feudal
concept of honour lost its status when the social practices that sustained
it (such as duelling) fell into disuse. The epithet Platonic therefore has to
stay within inverted commas. Nevertheless it makes an important point
which can also be generalized to concepts that have more direct material
anchoring, including frequent instantiations. Because you use conceptual
categories to reduce complexity, categories bias your adaptation proc-
esses towards the particular abbreviation defined by the concepts.12
relations between them acquire that more static and objective character with
which Durkheim is generally associated.
12 As pointed out above, p. 310, other conceptual structures are subject to the
same mechanisms as concepts. The concept of snitching is part of the whole
idealized cognitive model that is reflected in the convict code, which captures
The growth and structure of social constructions 323
the whole underground form of life, and adapting to the concept of snitch as
part of social reality enters into the larger process of adapting to the convict
code as a whole. What is special about snitching is just the lack of instantia-
tions other elements of the convict code such as staff vs. inmates are physi-
cally fully instantiated and thus less illustrative of the adaptive force of the
mental dimension. Just as there is a distinction between competency concepts
and niche concepts, there is a distinction between competency idealized cogni-
tive models and niche idealized cognitive models.
324 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
world of Kipling, being classed as a real man will have favourable conse-
quences for the options you have available; in the present-day cultural
climate there are signs that the symbolic market value of this Platonic
ideal is on the decline, judging from the social success rate of what used to
be real boys.
This status of concepts has implications for some time-honoured issues
that involve the role of language for cognition, including the Whorfian
issue, or linguistic relativity. In relation to time, Dehaene (2007) has pro-
vided evidence that suggests an influence of the availability of number
expressions for number cognition. As pointed out by Sinha (in discussion,
2007), this is not really a Whorfian effect, but rather a Vygotskyan effect,
to do with the kind of niche you live in. In the terms used above, if you live
in a community where number units have Platonic status, then these units
are part of the external, social world in which you live. Language is not the
basic, one-way causal factor that imposes categories on the unsuspecting
mind, but part of a functional equilibrium. That functional equilibrium
would probably be difficult to maintain if there were no linguistic expres-
sions available but the causal power of the linguistic categories must be
understood as part of a larger whole that includes their role as anchors of
conceptual categories, and of the success affordances (e. g. in arithmetic
classes in school) of operating with such precise number categories 13
13 Numbers (and other mathematical concepts) have always been prime candi-
dates for Platonic status. As pointed out by Deacon (in discussion, 2006), they
live up to the reputation in having properties that do not depend on how the
individual mind conceives them for instance, a civilization that found out
about numbers on their own would also some day discover the existence of
prime numbers. From the competency angle, mathematics also has a life of its
own. The existence of mathematical prodigies like Ramanujan, as pointed out
by Butterworth (1999), shows that number cognition does not depend on
beings socialized into a language of number concepts. There is thus no reason
to assume a one-way determination from a mathematically imbued social
niche to individual ability. On the other hand, the existence of prodigies does
not prove the irrelevance of adaptive processes (of which education is one
type). This type of development is also essential in relation to the discussion
about time as such, as pointed out by Sinha et al (in press) in an analysis of
cultural and linguistic practices in the Amondawa community. The concept of
time as a domain entirely separate from and abstracted out of actual events
depends both on the existence of numerical practices and on language-
dependent cultural practices that make reference to units of abstract time. For
that reason, time as such is not a universal concept, as assumed in classical CL,
but a concept that may or may not arise as a result of cultural processes.
The growth and structure of social constructions 325
14 The totality of niche concepts covers something like the same area as Foucaults
episteme (cf Foucault 1969) but has the plant-like loose cohesion that was
discussed above p. 272, and does not determine what is thinkable, only makes
some thoughts more readily thinkable than others for people with competen-
cies adapted to the niche.
326 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
but people do not believe that it is working and start pursuing their own
justice, for no other reason than what they believe. That is why justice
must not only be done it must be seen to be done (cf. Harder 2003). The
same mechanism is at work when there is a run on the bank, triggered by
a rumour that it is going bankrupt: if everybody tries to withdraw their
money at the same time, even the most solid bank will be in serious trou-
ble. The belief that a bank is going to close down may in fact close down
the bank. This shows that the acceptance dimension is causally relevant.
But it does not show that beliefs can do the trick on their own. As an
example, if the government guarantees investors deposits, the run will not
close down the bank, whatever people may believe.
Beliefs are at the acceptance-heavy end of the scale: acceptance alone
is enough to create an individual belief. At the population level, prolifera-
tion (as always) adds a non-mental dimension. The extent to which one
can speak of popular belief depends on the number of people who share
it; but I am going to distinguish between a pure traffic jam of belief (such
as a rumour that a bank is going bankrupt) and a socially constructed
belief: there has to be an element of collective status assignment in order
for a belief to have the status of a social construction. With Searles term,
it has to be a belief of the form WE believe that .
This formula still leaves room for considerable variety. Closest to idi-
osyncratic individual beliefs are shared beliefs on the lunatic fringe, such
as those of UFO societies (Wikipedia on August 27, 2008 lists 21 different
active organizations). The social dimension need not constrain the mental
representations it may consist solely in a community-of-belief among
the participants: WE take such-and-such incidents to be sightings of emis-
saries from extraterrestrial civilizations. Even so, there is the germ of a
causal structure: integration into a larger network of fellow believers will
tend to reinforce beliefs (for the reasons discussed in ch. 6, p. 276), and
loss of belief would lead to the loss of membership in the community. If
for the sake of the argument we disregard the role of actual intrusions
from outer space, communities of this kind are instances of beliefs that
owe their existence almost entirely to the acceptance dimension of proc-
esses of social construction. In general, in any closely knit discursive com-
munity, sub-lineages of belief will arise that do not necessarily depend on
any relations with the environment. Social acceptance is the only factor,
and the construction lives in a soap bubble of its own. Every scathing
deconstructionist remark in the social constructionist repertoire applies
to such constructions.
But this is a sitting duck, and is just as uninteresting as the hard opera-
tional case to social constructionists. They typically reserve their energy
328 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
The causal power of this conceptual alignment (as allied with all the his-
torical processes Anderson describes) also underpins the loyalty that a
nation can count on. This loyalty works via incorporating the tie with the
community (as conceived or imagined) into the individuals sense of iden-
tity. Among the consequences of this loyalty is not only the willingness of
citizens to go to war and sacrifice their lives for the sake of the nation, but
332 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
also to accept election results because the majority of the citizens voted
for them, even if you personally voted for the other side.
Without that loyalty, representative democracy would be impossible.
This has a moral for the projected social constructions that leftist social
constructionists are typically interested in: if you want to deconstruct
nations, but want to preserve democracy, you need to have an (idea about
an) alternative unit that can command equal loyalty, or you will (as a mat-
ter of causal efficacy rather than belief) deconstruct democracy together
with the nation. As we have seen, nations are real communities only
because they are imagined.
This section has discussed various forms of social constructions where
acceptance of beliefs play a crucial role. The general moral is that an
account of social constructions is incomplete without an account of the
relations between the representations and the rest of the world. Social
cognitive linguistics can follow in the footsteps of classic CL by capturing
this reliance on context in terms of grounding. Based on the discussion
above, we can begin by setting up a concept of sociocultural grounding as
a designation for the underpinning that a particular belief has in the com-
munity. It is meant to capture the whole status-cum-causal efficacy that is
relevant for understanding how participants will respond to utterances
evoking this belief.
Because of selection pressure, there is a link between sociocultural
grounding and bodily grounding: participants adapt to beliefs that play a
role in the community, because it would be impractical not to be able to
take part in a community life predicated on those beliefs. The alliance
between doxa and habitus also exemplifies the link between sociocultural
and embodied grounding, but constitutes a vanishing point for explicit
beliefs: the world just works that way.
right now might any moment be disrupted and replaced with processes
that bring about different constructions. It follows from the niche-based
approach, however, that there are social formations which exist also
offline, i. e. distinct from actual online processes. These offline features are
not objective or Platonic (as in the forms of realism that social construc-
tionists typically point their guns at) but understood as sediments that
emerge from and are maintained by the flow. What does this imply for the
understanding of the process dimension in social reality?
The most central implication is that there is no contradiction between
saying that social reality is basically a process and saying that at any given
time it has certain properties rather than others. Like language (cf. ch 6),
social reality as a whole is panchronic, not (just) diachronic or synchronic.
As we have seen, for operational social constructions this implies that in a
stable ideal equilibrium, the flow dimension works so as to reproduce the
niche properties at the end of each cycle: jurisdiction works so smoothly
as to uphold the laws to everyones satisfaction, etc. This also applies to
socially constructed beliefs, which are thus confirmed by a collective social
process.
This view of social reality contrasts clearly with the extreme view which
has been mistakenly ascribed to Derrida (cf. p. 113): one interpretation
gives rise to the next, and there is nothing else to say about what is the
case. No one adopts this view explicitly but it exerts a continuing under-
ground fascination. What plausibility this anything goes position has is
probably due to its association with literature (where Derridas main
influence is felt), and with an individual reader or author. In such a situa-
tion, what is involved is not a social construction, but an individual mental
construction. The lack of an adequate theory of collectively shared mean-
ing has made it easy to confuse the two, with unfortunate consequences. In
the absence of feedback from the interpretive community (cf. the discus-
sion of Fish p. 190), anything goes may not be far from the truth.
The niche view implies that the meanings people live by are those
that are shared with the community. This does not preclude individual
creativity or forays into the unknown, but contextualizes these within a
field of forces defined by meaning in the community. The causal underpin-
ning of this assumption is the constant everyday processes of mutual
negotiation and confirmation of meaning described by ethnomethodolo-
gists, cf. Garfinkel (1972): you can behave deviantly, but also in your own
understanding, it will be felt as a deviation (in accordance with the causal
structure of hegemony).
Ethnomethodology is among the frequently cited sources of the view
that there is no fixed structure, only a process. But as shown in the case of
334 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
norms of the social community. But in being so totally adapted, they con-
stitute deviations.
Recognizing the mutual dependence-and-distinctness of flow and
niche can also throw light on a continuing misunderstanding that has
plagued the debate on social construction in relation to the institution of
science. Science as an institution is interesting because of its ambiguous
status when it comes to the balance between representation and causal
underpinning. As pointed out gleefully by social (de)constructionists, the
organizational structure of the scientific community is basically identical
to that of any other subculture, including UFO societies: meetings and
discussions, disagreements, competing beliefs and groups, focusing on dif-
ferent observations and theories to account for them, with loyalties and
pressures in relation to group identification. But this does not imply that
science as a set of operational beliefs is no better than those of the UFO
society. Although science includes many representations which have
doubtful functional relations with the surrounding world, there are two
forms of flow without which science as a social construction would not
have the status it actually has.
First, in experimental disciplines conceptual representations interact
with the environment: experimentation gives continuous feedback, which
by the rules of the game counts as supporting or eroding confidence in
the predictions of the conceptual models. Secondly, based on such predic-
tions, new technology can be constructed, from the steam engine to the
cellphone: if the conceptual representations stand up as predictions of
what happens, the bridge will stand up. Both processes have to make
themselves felt via the Darwinist dynamics of publication described by
Hull (1988), and that is by no means trivial but these mechanisms are
anchored outside the online, UFO-like social process. Rather than abso-
lute truth, we may speak of the factual grounding of statements based on
experimental evidence, understood as the track record of representations
in predicting the way the world works (we return to this concept in more
detail below in the discussion of bullshit).
This has important implications for the understanding of conflicting
discursive constructions of science. Potter and Wetherell (1987: 146f, citing
Gilbert and Mulkay 1984) describe two different interpretive repertoires
for beliefs about science, roughly associated with two different sets of gen-
res (formal papers vs. informal conversation). In the empiricist reper-
toire that is found in formal papers, empirical data is the central driving
force; in the contingent repertoire, prior commitments and personal
characteristics play an important role. The discrepancies are reconciled by
reference to the truth will out device, abbreviated TWOD, expressing
The role of acceptance 337
the belief that whatever the turbulence introduced by the personal fac-
tors, in the long run the data will be decisive.
If you leave the analysis at that point, consisting in the two discursive
repertoires plus the TWOD as a rhetorical device, you have prevented
yourself from understanding relations between the conceptualizations of
science as part of the discursive flow and the social construction that con-
stitutes science as part of the human niche. In the terms of the position I
have defended, Potter and Wetherells analysis (if left to stand on its own)
is an instance of usage fundamentalism in the theory of science: letting
the properties of the flow have the last word. The point is not to vindicate
a positivist belief in the universal victory of data-driven truth. The point is
that the relation between the process of talk on the one hand and science
in the niche on the other is functional, driven by the dynamics of selection
and adaptation (cf. Hull 1988: 354f).15
The same simplistic confrontation, between a discredited eternal
objective reality on the one hand and an all-encompassing process on the
other, is also found in relation of sociolinguistics. An example that involves
both sociological and linguistic dimensions is the discussion in Eckert
(2000) of the relationship between macro-level factors and local processes
of self-construction, as mediated both by choices of linguistic variants and
self-categorization.
Eckert rightly points out the essential contribution of the local activity
against presumptions that everything can be explained by macro-social
causal factors such as gender or class. But because Eckert wants to avoid
both objectification and the notion of the cultural dope (Eckert 2000:
44), she describes her view in terms that may appear to go against the
notion of niche properties:
16 I discussed this with a sociolinguist colleague, arguing that when you entered
the community it was handy to be aware that hello would be understood as a
greeting, while defenestration would not. Without batting an eyelid, he argued
that nothing stopped people from using defenestration as a greeting if they
wanted to. My point is that it would take more than a single situated usage
event.
The role of acceptance 339
term linguistic market (Eckert 2000: 13), which means that she in fact
recognizes mechanisms that work at the invisible-hand-level of symbolic
economy.
Kristiansen (2008) shows how pre-existing features and the options
for personal choice of speech styles go naturally together in a social cogni-
tive framework; and Eckert (2000: 12) gives an anecdote about her seven-
year-old nephew that can be used to illustrate this. Shortly after his family
had moved to a lower-class linguistic community, she asked him how he
felt about it, to which he replied: Im the Jersey Jerk and I live in the
sewer in perfect New Jersey vernacular (with which Eckert was famil-
iar from her own childhood). Eckert uses it to illustrate the high level of
awareness that children have of the social dynamics around them, and
how this is reflected in their own personal linguistic and self-constructive
agency. But this triumph of personal social agency presupposes rather
than refutes the pre-existence of niche community norms (to which he
had so impressively adapted).
it sounds good in the situation, and the issue of whether it is true or not is
beside the point. There are occasions when bullshit occurs more naturally
than at other times: Frankfurts Fourth of July is a good example of the
genre that Aristotle called epideictic rhetoric, i. e. ceremonial occasions
where it is important to make the audience feel good about itself as a
group.17
Frankfurt, in accordance with the philosophical tradition, takes for
granted that truth vs. falsity is the key property of a sentence. Cognitive
linguistics, in contrast, does not have a clear-cut account of the place of
truth (for reasons outlined above, p. 18). The issue of bullshit, however,
pinpoints the need for a social cognitive linguistics to develop an approach
that can address Frankfurts concerns. The basic features of such an alter-
native can be inferred from Crofts evolutionary framework, if we com-
bine it with the distinction between internal, representational and consti-
tutive properties of linguistic meaning (cf. p. 164).
In a social cognitive context, this is an aspect of the grounding issue
the relation between meaning and its experiential basis. The dimension of
grounding that is critical in the case of bullshit is not sociocultural ground-
ing, because that captures the status of a belief in the community, and
bullshit may well have a strong sociocultural grounding. Factual ground-
ing, as briefly introduced above, designates the track record of a represen-
tation in predicting the way the world works. It may be understood as a
special case of the efficacy dimension, the one that is functionally relevant
when you use a conveyed meaning in dealing with the world: is it an effi-
cacious guide to the world? 18
It follows from chapters 5 and 6 that instead of having a presupposed
objective relation between language and the world, we need to view a reli-
able relation between linguistic description and states of the world as an
achievement. Such an achievement depends on a lineage that needs two
17 Note that this description exemplifies a specific location in the niche where
bullshit is functionally relevant. Bullshit used in situations where bullshit does
the trick is a form of adaptation a language game that you might want to
learn to play. If there is no well-founded reason for feeling good about who-
ever is staging the event, bullshit may be the only way to make the occasion a
success. The ethical problem is limited if Granny does not hear the exact
truth about herself on her 90th birthday, who cares?
18 In contrast to bodily grounding and sociocultural grounding, factual ground-
ing thus applies mainly to representations used as maps to reality, including
assertive statements made in discourse. It is less interesting, although margin-
ally applicable, to games, questions, imperatives, fiction, etc.
The role of acceptance 341
is like fiction: it is part of the rules of the game that fiction does not have
to match up with referents and properties in the world. The competent
reader builds up a universe of people and events whose point is the expe-
rience of entering into the fictitious world, whether for the aesthetic expe-
rience, for instruction, or for existential enrichment.
Bullshit, however, is less clearcut than fiction. Even on the most cere-
monial of occasions, self-congratulation works the better the more real
the achievements invoked are. Bullshit comes in different varieties, and
can to some extent be placed on a scale with fiction at one extreme and
lying at the other. When you tell not strictly truthful anecdotes about
yourself and others, listeners may take it either way. What is ethically
interesting, however, is the kind of bullshit that approximates lying. This
occurs in cases where there is an element both of making people feel good
and of dealing with the real world. The issue becomes especially salient in
relation to acceptance-heavy social constructions, where causal efficacy
plays a relatively minor role. Nowhere is this mixture more explosive than
in politics.
The most effective form of bullshit is the one that can invoke an accept-
ance-heavy social construction with solid sociocultural grounding. The
Fourth of July speaker invokes the founding fathers because he knows
they will go down well; and whether this is innocent or doubtful depends
on whether the ceremonial acceptance of the national lore is merely a
cause for celebration or it is used to promote acceptance of something
that engages with the real world. Voters need to be alert here. It would be
absurd to cavil at the fact that voters respond favourably to hearing things
they like, but it would also be cynical to deny that voters also have an
interest in whether the words of the politicians hook up with they way the
world works (both at the fact end and the promise end two different
directions of fit that are both crucial!). The functional contribution of fac-
tual information to the functioning of democracy is different from the role
of facts in speeches at Grannys birthday.
Because our world pictures are socially constructed, the social proc-
esses whereby they are constructed matter. If bullshit is spreading in the
political context, as also stressed by Frankfurt, it is in a sense more danger-
ous than lying, because in lying you take factuality seriously. Bullshit is
useless as input to the process of constructing a picture of the way the
world works, so whenever you recognize that you are listening to bullshit
you turn off the process of adjusting your understanding. The easiest way
out is to put the blame on the politicians but that would be to shortcut
the social complexity that is the issue here. Functional mechanisms are
never a single persons fault. The reason we as voters cannot avoid respon-
The role of acceptance 343
sibility is the role of the invisible (or visible) hand. We need to search our
own souls: do we favour politicians who say pleasant things to us, or do we
prefer politicians who say only things that engage operationally with the
world at both the fact and the promise end?
And the risk of oversimplifying does not stop there. There are many
grey shades between bullshit and Sunday school truthfulness. Hype may
be considered one of them, understood as the extreme positive end of the
scale of what can be said about someones merits without downright viola-
tion of the maxim of quality. It differs from bullshit in that the sender
cares about whether the description is true or not but it is similar in that
the desire to praise is motivated independently of how well-deserved the
praise is. There is a social competency issue involved in dealing with the
different shades of grey: a nave listener to hype may draw conclusions
from it that would never occur to more seasoned citizens.
This is politically significant also in relation to another grey zone genre.
Like hype, spin is different in principle from bullshit. The metaphor of
spin draws on a source domain in which you can add a property to some-
thing (e. g. a tennis ball) which nevertheless remains the same, and spin is
therefore related to construal. It would be hard for cognitive linguists to
insist on the centrality of construal while protesting against all forms of
spin; and if we follow Lakoffs advice and try to frame the debate, we can-
not blame others for doing it. Political communication has always relied
on the ability of politicians to get the public to see things their way, and
the only new thing about it is the rapidly increasing degree of profession-
alization. When professional spinners up the ante, we as participants in
the joint activity of democratic debate need to upgrade our ability to rec-
ognize what spin is being applied. It would also be a democratic advantage
if the visible hand could be mobilized to exert pressure on what is going to
be acceptable. Lakoff rightly includes the commitment to reason and truth
in his higher rationality (Lakoff 2006: 256) We may understand bullshit
in a broad sense as covering all forms of hype and spin that go too far
and try to rally voters round factual grounding and the demand for
accountability that goes with it.
Whether or not this ideal aim is successful in concrete cases, I see no
alternative once it is realized that that voters as a population are respon-
sible for the selection side of the evolution of democracy. If (s)election
processes winnow out bullshitters, bullshitting will be eliminated from
public affairs, regardless of the ethical standards of individual politicians.
If there are things we want to believe so very much that we do not care
whether they are true or not, politicians who say those things will get
elected. Both cynicism and self-indulgent lack of interest in factual
344 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
to the represented world, simply to offer a picture that one thinks is pref-
erable will not do the trick. It is the causal feedback with the environment
that has to be changed. Education is of course not the only field in which
there is a considerable public situated at a comfortable distance from the
coal face of reality. Both bullshit and radical social constructionism have
higher viability in such communities, including the academic communities,
than most other places. The Sokal Hoax would not have been possible
otherwise.
For this reason, bullshit is relevant to the discussion of the difference
between poststructural discourse analysis and a grounded socio-cognitive
approach. It is perfectly true that there are many social situations where
there is no feedback from any represented world, and discursive construc-
tions are all we have and this may be used by clever people to promote
their cause. The more short-term the perspective, the less feedback there
will be, and in the total immediacy of online communication it is therefore
largely true that there is no hors-text available. Functional feedback
takes time. In fiction, this is harmless in fact it is the whole point: we read
novels in order to get at the constructions it triggers in us, and the more
totally absorbed we are in the fictional universe, the better. But political
and corporate bullshit is a different matter. Unless our descriptive appa-
ratus includes a role for feedback from the represented world, there is
something missing.
This problem is not equally prevalent in all cultures. We may tenta-
tively posit a scale from hunter-gatherer communities, who get their living
from direct interaction with the physical environment, via a path of
increasing sociocultural complexity up to present-day postmodernity. This
is not just a question of complex hierarchical organizations. In a society
where virtual reality is a growth industry, where futures can be bought and
sold, the link between symbolic representations and tangible reality gets
more and more indirect. Typical of face-to-face cultures is a scepticism
with respect to the trustworthiness of linguistic representations (cp. e. g.
Willerslev 2007: 171), and insistence on relying on your own direct experi-
ence. In continuation of this, one might expect that the more cultural com-
plexity, the greater the scope for bullshit also in situations where repre-
sentations are actually used as a guide for action. It may still be impossible
to fool all of the people all of the time, but other people than Frankfurt
sometimes get the uncomfortable feeling that the proportion may be
going in the wrong direction.
346 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
21 As frequently pointed out, it is not quite true that tertium non datur, in that
there are persons that do not clearly belong under either the female or the
male sex. But for reasons stressed by Putnam (2001:38, following Wittgenstein
1953, par. 88), this does not really matter: The book wants to appeal to a sharply
delineated group of potential users, and is relevant to people in the grey zone
to the extent they match the precisely defined criteria.
The role of acceptance 351
women who shy away from facing and discussing sex problems, bodily
fluids, abortions and smells, and who leave it to experts, usually male, to
contemplate distasteful issues like that, should they arise.
The title thus invokes two alternative mental spaces, confronting the
reader with two options to choose between: are you ready to take charge
of your own life or are you going to stay in your self-imposed tutelage?
The emerging idealized conceptual model of the modern, self-reliant
woman beckons the reader to move away from an identity predicated on
the outdated model. But this alternative does not emerge from the usage
act itself. Both alternatives are niche concepts in variational contrast, with
fairly precise core properties that may be adapted to ephemeral and indi-
vidual circumstances in the moment of interpretation.22 The two variant
concepts, moreover, are not just available as wares on the shelf of the
mental concepticon, to be picked off when the occasion calls. They are
simultaneously placed in a social network and field of forces. The two sets
of overlapping and conflicting conceptual specifications place woman
(1) and woman (2) in a network that shares some properties with Lang-
ackers illustration example of ring (cp. Langacker 1987: 15), which
includes ring as a sound, a piece of jewelry, and boxing ring. However,
unlike wedding ring and boxing ring, the two concepts woman com-
pete for the same class of instantiations. The conceptual freedom of grasp-
ing the same instances in competing ways thus at the same time has a
performative potential (cf. the discussion of identity construction p. 337
above). The book is trying to push this potential and is thus part of an
anticipated process of social change, of the social expectations that women
are up against (including their own expectations of each other). In under-
standing the title and the book itself, female readers are thus simultane-
ously faced with a conceptual domain (the classical concept of women,
which is presupposed by both idealized conceptual models) and a social
frame (the projected identity change, within which the vocative woman
must be understood).
The collective authorship might have chosen to act as individuals pro-
ducing separate utterances in which the concept of woman was launched
into the social process. In fact they chose to join forces in producing one
22 During the 1970s in Denmark, the modern woman might have been conceptu-
alized with a scarf made from self-dyed nappy, and the conceptualizing subject
might come to think of an obnoxious sister-in-law or alternatively of a merci-
fully competent colleague who had learnt to handle all issues with both tradi-
tional male and traditional female expertise, as a result of having to compete
on both fronts.
352 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
Until now I have been most concerned with claim (1) in the introduction:
the need to have a differentiated theory of how meaning enters into dif-
ferent types of relations with society, rendering an approach solely from
the cognitive side necessarily incomplete. I have tried to give an impres-
sion of how mental representations can have very different statuses and
correspondingly different types of grounding, and in doing so I have tried
to show that the framework I have argued for can help to address those
issues.
I now turn to claim (2), which addresses the relations between the
social cognitive framework I defend and approaches which take their
point of departure in discourses understood as non-agentive social forma-
tions. The civic dimension that is addressed in claim (3) is also taken up,
but the main argument is postponed until chapter 8, which takes up a par-
ticularly salient illustration case.
Basically I am going to argue for a critical reconstruction of poststruc-
tural discourse analysis, which places it as one rather special cell in the
wider framework proposed in this book. In addressing Foucault-inspired
discourse analysis from a CL perspective, I continue a development that
Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics 355
5. You cannot step out of the discourse: since the world is only accessible
as mediated by discourses, there is no shared, non-discourse world to
seek recourse to, and thus no common ground.23
23 In Rabinow (1984: 247) Foucault makes explicit that his approach rules out
analysis in terms of foundations including foundations of power: There are
only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between intentions in rela-
tion to one another.
Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics 357
maintaining a cognitive view of meaning but his arguments are the same
ones I use to say that meanings in social contexts take on other properties than
those they have inside the individual mind.
25 This is closely related to a point made in relation to literature by T. S. Eliot
(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1920): new authors are not assessed by
their own merits alone, but in terms of their place in the overall picture. Also
in the community of high culture, the hidden hand of selection works in ways
that do not depend on the individual talent or text as deserving but unsuc-
cessful authors of all ages will agree. The cards are stacked in advance in the
shape of the field of forces that are active in the social space where the works
are placed. This is true whether we take the standards set by the panchronic
literary canon, as in Eliots case, or those set by the cultural market forces
(enabling some authors who fail to get into the canon to compensate with
what Noel Coward called the bitter palliative of commercial success).
360 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
26 Politicians therefore have to develop strategies that take both sides into
account. Exhortations to behave in a socially responsible manner can thus be
combined with taxation of unwanted behaviour the two by no means exclude
each other. This mixture, rather than a focus solely on hidden hand-level phe-
nomena, is especially relevant for understanding institutional language use, a
type of communication that is frequently analysed in post-Foucauldian terms.
In that context, when the espoused values (in Scheins terms) of an organiza-
tion are manifested in the language acts performed in the institutional prac-
tices, they constitute a discourse (orchestrated); and we have to presuppose an
ability to consciously respond to management-controlled discourse pressure
for the same reason that we have presuppose participant access to democratic
decision-making.
Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics 361
the way institutions work, and the indignation with which it is pursued,
shares with ordinary assumptions about communication the understand-
ing that there is an element of personal accountability involved. Dis-
courses analysis therefore needs to be placed in a framework where agen-
tive accountability has a theoretically motivated position.
Whether orchestrated or emergent, discourses as defined above are
clearly deviant compared with the characteristics of what everybody con-
siders the most basic form of human communication the kind of com-
munication that makes language acquisition possible, and where the driv-
ing force is the attunement to shared meaning (cf. ch. 4, p. 155). This is true
even in politics:
Language in the service of power has thus been a central concern, and perhaps
rightly so. But if one is seeking a theory of language and politics, it is not enough.
Why not? For one thing, politics involves cooperation as well as conflict.
(Chilton 2004: 198)
serves the useful purpose of telling us what position the text reflects. An
example is political campaign material: the point for the competing sides
is to impose their constructions on the topic and achieve a dominant posi-
tion. When viewed as representing one side of a conflict, such texts lend
themselves to being abstracted out of any dialogic context and regarded
as part of the political landscape: positions rather than acts. Political pam-
phlets, neon advertisements and inscriptions on monuments do not obvi-
ously involve a fellow subject relation between sender and addressee
(more on the niche for discourses analysis at the end of ch. 8).
However, if this kind of analysis is applied to utterances that have a
clear anchoring in communicative interaction, it will result in misrepre-
sentation. The analyst can only get at the interactionally dysfunctional
dimension, not the functioning collective practice. When this analytic
technique is applied to institutions which are part of the actual dynamics
of the social process, it cuts off the analyst from building up an under-
standing relationship with the practitioners. Luke (2007) illustrates this
with reference to a quotation from Chris Woodhead, a former Chief
Inspector of Schools in England, used in a text defending a Critical Dis-
course Analysis approach to education:
There is too much to do in the real world with real teachers in real schools to
waste time decoding unintelligible, jargon-ridden prose to reach (if one is
lucky) a conclusion that is often so transparently partisan as to be worthless
(cited in Luke 2007: 183 via MacLure 2003:12)
However, for those engaged in the practice of teaching, the focus in dis-
cussions about education tends to be on its grounding in the actual social
process. Contesting the existence of real schools in order to focus on mul-
tiplicities of (conflicting) meanings, as pointed out by the former Chief
Inspector, is not really helpful in that perspective. Even when social-con-
structionist academic approaches make a valid point, their analyses usurp
the place of a potentially constructive dialogue between teachers and the
rest of the community (see also section 3.3 on bullshit) and what is more,
Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics 367
as pointed out in Luke (2007: 18485), the use of critical discourse analy-
sis in relation to education is very often simply an attack under the guise
of analysis (which is a natural consequence if a discourse struggle is the
only form of communication recognized in your theory).
There is also a problem when it comes to the understanding of power:
it offers no distinction between discursive power and other forms of
power. Seeing discourse as the prime mover is problematic also on
Foucaults own premises, as argued in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982), whose
part I is entitled the illusion of autonomous discourse: sealing off dis-
courses from the rest of the world is an instance of the same fallacy that
resulted in autonomous structure. In Foucaults own case, it would also
sever the link with non-discursive, institutional forms of coercion, as in the
case of the penal system which he describes at great length in Foucault
(1975).
The basic source of this problem is the missing theoretical link with
extra-discursive practice, as discussed above. But in many cases this prob-
lem goes with a methodological fallacy that is bound up with the vague-
ness of the central concept of discourse itself, and which is easy to make
if causality is not included in the framework. In my narrow definition, I
stressed that in order to say that an utterance was an instance of a dis-
course, there must be a historically attested population of utterances
grouped by the defining features (whether classical or prototype-based)
of the category to which they belong. This contrasts with a looser defini-
tion according to which analysts are free to define a discourse as they
choose. In other words, any given text can be assigned to a discourse
merely based on certain features that the analyst points to in the text. A
text that talks about health could thus be assigned to a discourse of health,
simply based on that fact.
If a discourse is postulated merely by virtue of features of an individual
text, the concept loses its explanatory potential: you cannot without ram-
pant circularity claim that an ideological formation that you have ana-
lyzed out of the text itself lies behind the text. This does not entail that
interpretive claims about texts made in the name of discourse analysis are
necessarily wrong. It merely means that their interpretations are just that,
text interpretations. In other words, rather than being an analysis that
brings out the hidden hand behind the text, it is simply a paraphrase.31
Let me repeat that I have in no way distanced myself from the enter-
prise of critical analysis of communication in society. The Platonic projec-
tion makes niche concepts and conceptual mappings part of the world we
live in hence, we need to think about whether other ways of imposing a
mental order on the niche we live in would be better. Discourses come
and go, involving projected constructions with different causal and mental
baggage. Where social constructionism started out as a tool for critical
analysts, the weak points in the theory have made it an ideal tool for power
holders, cf. the statement cited by Lakoff (2008: 40), where an anonymous
aide of George W. Bush described the position of his administration by
distinguishing between the reality-based community committed to
enlightenment (such as the interviewing journalist) and the representa-
tives of empire who create their own reality. The tools of power holders
therefore include (1) Derrida-style semiosis (in the short term) and (2)
persistent discourses (in the longer term). The higher echelons use bullshit
for survival purposes, and in doing so try to keep it as impenetrable as pos-
sible viewed from below, minimizing the risk of self-empowerment by the
people who are at the coal face of reality.
In short, the need for critical analysis of meaning in society is growing
daily. But the growing need is also a good reason why it is necessary to
know what discourses analysis can do for us and what it cannot do. The
central thing it cannot do is situate the analysis in the context of collective
agency the natural context of human communication. Since critical
awareness is a form of participant awareness, this is a very basic flaw. The
most crucial problem, in fact, is not that discourses analysis gets it wrong
it is that too much is missing.32
32 I would like to make clear that as always, disagreements are much less striking
when you read the actual analyses in socially oriented, critical tradition, than
when you look at the credos. From Karl Marx to Jonathan Potter, very often
concrete understanding is much broader than the schematic theoretical posi-
tion (including the positions I have defined above) would suggest. Marxs
thinking is in fact based on the essential elements in niche construction (cf.
Marx/Engels 1932: 1011): the special nature of man as opposed to (other)
animals started out when human beings began to produce the conditions on
which their existence depends because this is what started the development
that made possible the division of labour and all the social consequences that
he analyses. When Marx claims that consciousness and language are socially
constituted (Marx/Engels 1932: 20), he does it in connection with an argument
that contrasts human beings with animals which he understands as being
totally submerged in a practice to which they do not have a conscious relation-
ship at all. In contrast, human beings by virtue of their shared practice also
share language as an instrument of conscious understanding, so that either
instincts become consciously manifested or consciousness (as manifested in
Meaning in hard social science: the case of International Relations 369
Inevitably, this book has viewed the issue of meaning in society mainly
from the CL perspective. In this section, however, I view it from the per-
spective of social science. The aim is to demonstrate that the framework I
have argued for is not just valid from the purely linguistic point of view. I
regard that as something I owe the reader, since the basic idea in the book
is to argue that we need to get a grip on social reality before we can sensi-
bly discuss the role of meaning in social reality.
As pointed out in ch. 3, most of the increasing interest in language and
meaning in social sciences is a part of the increasing interest in social con-
struction. In the softer social sciences such as anthropology and cultural
studies, the issues are not too different from what is the case for cognitive
linguistics. For my purposes, the most interesting case is thus the harder
social sciences those where meaning has acquired a new significance in
relation to non-cognitive macrostructural facts. This is the key testing
ground for the relation between mind and social causality that is the cen-
trepiece of the discussion above.
5.2. The need to distinguish between the niche and the flow
The first issue that I take up involves the distinction between the niche as
the causal source of section pressures and the flow. CIR is clearly inter-
ested in both the flow and the constraints that it is under, and uses dis-
course analysis for that end, cf. Wver (2002: 28): The basic idea is to let
discourse analysis deliver the coherent, well-structured constraints on for-
eign policy.
This means that CIR have to opt out of a thoroughgoingly poststruc-
tural flow-orientation. They explicitly announce that their foundations
include structuralism as well as poststructuralism (Hansen 2002: 5; Wver
2002: 23). The stable elements are thus understood as a structure that
serves as a background for the poststructural variation: a structure of
nations and governments and military and economic alliances, etc. In order
for this dual position of variation and stability to be possible, there have to
be two objects of description, one of which can vary while the other stays
the same. This means that discourses have to be supplemented with an
extra ontological domain, where the stability can reside. Put differently: we
find the variation in the (flow of) security-related texts and negotiated
positions, but where do we find the structure? A throughgoing structuralist
would refuse to answer the question of where this structure resides, because
the structure itself is the rock bottom level of the universe; but this is not
an option if you simultaneously want to allow structures to vary.
The sociocultural niche, however, has exactly the properties that are
necessary to be the home of structural constraints on foreign policy as
flow (just as langue constrains language usage in the niche): it consists of
sediments from the flow, but at any given time those sediments constrain
how the river can flow on. Unless the flow acts to change those constraints,
they stay the way they are in security politics as well as in linguistics. The
poststructural framework, in contrast, is badly suited to capture the con-
stant interplay of flow and structure not least because the key (post)
Foucauldian concept of discourse covers both flow and niche (cf. the
quotation discussed by Fairclough in ch 3). Wver realizes this (2002: 32
footnote 15): The present concept of discourse is therefore simultaneously
process and structure, realization and precondition. The problem with this
broad understanding, if the aim is to capture constraints on the flow (as
indicated in the quotation above), is that discourse operates as both the
dependent and the independent variable: it is discourse (as structure) that
constrains discourse (as flow).
This is more than a terminological inconvenience it is part of the mys-
tification about causality that pervades poststructuralism: if both stable
Meaning in hard social science: the case of International Relations 373
If we take it that structure is outside the flow, the problem is how to ground
that structure. This is the problem that structuralism in itself cannot solve,
because structure is its point of departure. Wver recognizes the problem
relations, with Hobbes Leviathan as the grim ancestor figure. The analysis
includes all major theorists and practitioners, and gives a compelling account
of the mindset dominated by Realpolitik, territorial integrity and relations of
dominance between states pursuing only their own interests. While this dimen-
sion is essential in understanding the causal trajectory of realism in interna-
tional relations (cf. also Lakoff 2008, ch. 15), the point in this connection is not
the actual form of realism, but the foundational position of realism: are there
operational mechanisms that cannot be captured by reference to conceptual
models, but only by reference to causal mechanisms that determine the condi-
tions of persistence of nations?
Meaning in hard social science: the case of International Relations 375
in relation to the issue of change, which was also an impasse for structural-
ism in language, cf. Gregersen (1991). In response, Wver introduces what
he calls a layered structure which in this context means that some levels
are deeper than others:
A main problem with much structuralism and to a large extent also with
Foucaults concept of discourse is that change appears in the form of incompre-
hensible jumps between synchronic and structural orders . One of the advan-
tages of the concept of a layered structure is that it can specify change within
continuity. Change is not an either-or question, because we are not operating at
one level only. The concept of a dominant discourse becomes relative, too.
That something is in opposition or even marginalized, means only that it is
outside and different at the level of manifest politics, most likely it shares
codes at the next (deeper) level of abstraction (Wver 2002: 31)
This can solve the immediate descriptive problem but it does not solve
the grounding problem. The where question remains in a new form:
where are the layers and the dimension of depth?
Logicaly enough, in trying to solve the problem, Wver ends up in the
company of Chomsky. While stressing as a virtue of discourse analysis that
it focuses on publicly available discourse rather than on what goes on in
peoples minds (Wver 2002: 2627), Wver as expressed in the quotation
above sees also the need for abstractions that go beyond individual texts.
Wvers rationale for not staying at the level of attested instances (2002.
33 and 41) is essentially the same as Chomskys argument against the
search for discovery procedures in taxonomic linguistics (Chomsky
1957: 5056): there is no way to go directly from empirical data to theory,
and (as expressed in a quotation from Ruggie 1983: 266; 280), deep struc-
tures are not visible directly, only through their hypothesized effects;
structures are even said to be generative (p.33), and contrast with a
surface level.34
On this point, niche construction may not just fit with the CIR frame-
work, but even be able to provide a rationale that is absent in the current
version. If there is a functional basis for layered structure, there must be
stronger feedback mechanisms sustaining the deeper layers. In Wvers
system, the deepest layer is the level of the individual national unit, viewed
as a constellation of state and nation. Higher-level units that relate to
Europe are less deep and hence more susceptible to change. In poststruc-
tural terms, there is no obvious correlate to this; Wver (1998: 105) speaks
For that reason it is not surprising that the state, the smallest unit in
Wvers layered structure, is more firmly socially constructed than the
larger unit that involves the whole of Europe. Indeed, the nation is some-
times too large a unit to (effectively) supersede lower-level units. An
example is the state of Papua New Guinea (which I have had the pleasure
of visiting in my capacity as a bird watcher). In PNG, the most substantial
units of loyalty are below the national level.36 It extends to clans and tribes,
with shared language as a very powerful constituent: wantok in Tok Pisin
being the name of someone to whom loyalty is due because you share one
talk=wantok. But identification with higher levels is very limited, and
for the national level, the celebration of Independence Day on September
16 is the one visible manifestation of widespread grassroots commitment;
a possible bid for what sustains the social construction of the nation is
simply that it is preferable to dependent status (which lasted until 1976).
A consequence of the predominance of lower levels is that it is impos-
sible to enforce a general system of taxation which in turn means that
government depends on concessions for mining and forestry extended to
international corporations which in turn means that higher level officials
are (not entirely without good reason) suspected of being in cahoots with
international finance rather than accountable to the people. The entrepre-
neurial Huli owner of a guest house in which we stayed told us that his
success had been noticed by government officials who suggested that it
might be time he agreed to pay some tax. The gestures of disgust with
which he accompanied this narrative were illustrated by reference to the
road on which we were travelling in his jeep at the time it took four
hours and a puncture to travel the 25 miles to the local airstrip, which was
situated towards the end of a national highway, just before it petered out
into nothing.
The (dys?)functional interaction between peoples conceptualization
of the overall state/nation and the causal mechanisms at work are obvi-
ously essential to understanding both the acceptance and the efficacy
dimension of PNG as a social construction. An approach that tries to take
each side separately is not going to be able to grasp social reality. Simi-
larly, it is widely assumed that the redistribution of national loyalty that
occurred with devolution in England, Scotland and Wales is partly due to
the loss of Empire: being British no longer opened the same opportuni-
ties, and Britain as a result lost ground as a carrier of identity.
Also in cases where functional feedback is solid enough to make nation
states effective agents, internally as well as externally, we must understand
the conceptual and emotional representations of citizens in relation to the
practices that sustain them. These practices are to some extent rooted in
collective habitus; for instance, embodied responses to people who speak
your own language are different from embodied responses to people who
speak a different language, and in nation states this factor underpins
national loyalty, just as it undermines it in PNG. As mentioned above, sur-
vey investigations of life in Denmark (cf. Gundelach 2002; Gundelach,
Iversen and Warburg 2008) also indicate a high level of identification with
shared values, including a high level of mutual trust, which if it is to be
effectual must have a grounding in habitus in addition to its conceptual
aspect. (This contrasts with the situation in America as described by Rob-
ert Putnam, cf. R.Putnam 1995).37
It is thus not surprising that Europe as a larger political unit can count
on nowhere near the same solidity of sustaining relations with existing
community practices. National voter populations do not hesitate to reject
proposals viewed by the elite as critical to the successful persistence of the
European project. What sustaining relations the EU has with other units
are via the member states. For that reason, Europe as a social construction
can at most be as strong as the member states, and if member states decide
to weaken the sustaining relations (as Margaret Thatcher, saliently, did),
the EU will be weakened while the national level is strengthened. The
need to look at both causal-functional feedback and at shared conceptu-
alizations does not of course entail that a clear explanation will always be
available it only specifies what such an explanation must take into con-
sideration. Once again, functional relations are only a small part of the
sum total of relations in social space.38
39 More generally, this picture outlines a format for describing what the role of a
conceptual structure is in the way the world works. In this, it goes beyond both
classic CL and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis. Saying simply that there is
a security discourse is only a beginning just as saying that there is an ideal-
ized conceptual model is only a beginning. The nurturant family as described
by Lakoff exists only in participant individuals, where it can be invoked as a
framing device for politics. In the picture offered here, we can see that it can
also have the status as part of the niche as it has in the Nordic states. In the
Danish community it exerts strong selection pressure on politicians, to which
they therefore adapt. A very visible instance is Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, who before he came to power wrote a book on the minimalist
conception of the state with a clear intellectual debt to Ayn Rand. Shrewd as
he is, in the election campaign which he won, he promised to take over the
welfare commitments of the Social Democrat government that he replaced,
and when occasionally one of his ministers openly expressed views which
clearly agreed with his own previously expressed position, he was very quick
to call them to order.
382 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
is not exactly how well socially entrenched mental models adapt the
point is that there is function-driven feedback at all.
The term flexicurity also illustrates a point of principle. The last half
of the blend is security in a sense which shares the roots of the concept,
cf. Wver 2008, in the Latin se cura without worry. In the welfare context,
the relevant worry is about standard of living, but the basic concept is
much the same. A natural way of accounting for this in classic CL would
be to posit a polysemous network of senses that included military, emo-
tional and social security with the without worry element in a schematic
position; it might even be a panchronic network which captured the paral-
lel between the schematic and etymological priority of the without worry
element. For purely conceptual purposes there can be no objection to
such a description; but it would not capture the specific lineage in social
space that constitutes the securitization issue; and its limitations would
have to do with the causal impotence of essences as stressed by Croft.
The argument is analogous to the argument about variational linguis-
tics in ch. 6 above: if we want to understand phenomena as variant mani-
festations of social constructs, we have to understand them against the
background of a structured universe, sustained by functional pressures.
Abstracting from that wider context would be to see them as fluctuations.
As with variational linguistics, in international relations, too, variant dis-
cursive articulations constitute an essential dimension of depth. In them-
selves, generalized function-based structural patterns would only give a
very skeletal account their role is to be the necessary background for
understanding the variations.
So, to sum up with reference to the key concept of security: the dimen-
sions that can be captured in classic CL include its evocation of embodied
experience in the root sense of freedom from worry, and its association
with a polysemous network of senses that can be disambiguated by col-
locates such as emotional, military and social. In terms of the increasing
emphasis on usage and variation, the process of meaning construction can
capture the process whereby any new exemplar joins the population of
utterances, situating itself at the same time in a unique new point in the
ongoing flow of meaning, and as aligned with previous actualizations of
the same linguistic meaning potential. In terms of Crofts theory of change
each instantiation, via processes of selection and propagation, may influ-
ence the form in which the concept will persist across replicative genera-
tions. Among such lineages are the countable discourses that may or may
not be part of the cultural environment but they are only one type of
inhabitants of the niche that also includes governments, laws and subcul-
tures and much else besides.
Individual conceptualization and the social constructor 383
Perhaps most importantly, the niche dimension entails that the signifi-
cance of a usage occurrence of a category such as security can never be
described adequately by simply classing it as the manifestation of a par-
ticular discourse (such as the extended security discourse). First of all, it
can be part of normal collaborative communication, in which case the idea
of a discourse struggle is misleading. As such, it can be an agentive act at
either individual or collective level, in which case it is accountable and
open to challenge; it can be linked (or not) with patterns of causality, as
when the US president or the UN security council pronounces something
a security threat; it can be part of a particular subsystem within the wider
community with its own causal patterns, such as an academic debate; or it
can be part of a political discourse in connection with an election cam-
paign seeking to impose a particular interpretation that will motivate peo-
ple to vote for the speaker. Bodily grounding, conceptual construal, fac-
tual grounding and functional-causal embedding all need to be addressed.
And that illustrates why hard social science needs the full ontology of a
social cognitive framework in order to make concepts, discourses and
explanation cohere.
children. When they act in the capacity of real people in joint activity, par-
ents and other responsible adults constitute boundaries that the children
come up against in everyday life, thus naturally imposing constraints on
childrens plans and desires. Childrens respect for boundaries as part of
the human world will then be grounded in recurring experiences of how
interaction with others comes with the constraints arising from the need
to respect the territory of fellow subjects.
If this were the way things inevitably happened, we would have some-
thing like a primary metaphor in Gradys sense, cp. Grady (1997): just as
the mapping between warmth and affection works through repeated
experience of bodily contact with loved ones, so the mapping between
boundaries and harmonious relations with the world arises from repeated
experiences of how the joys of human relationships and the ability to
adapt oneself harmoniously to other people go together. This example
illustrates that the action is at the interface between what emerges out-
ward from the body and what emerges inward from social interaction. The
socio-cognitive point is that the world has to be so constructed: it does not
come for free.
Discourse struggles, as usual, have their niche when two groups are
confronting each other rather than engaged in dialogue. Idealized cogni-
tive models, as usual, offer conceptual options that you can map on to
your experience. But there is no substitute for the patient work of making
the models you go for enter into a constitutive relationship with actual
practices. Part of the societal variation that we all know from our own
lives consists in divergencies between how we think the world should be
constructed and the way it actually works. Like beavers, we have to con-
struct our own niche; and social construction can be hard work.
The lack of guaranteed convergence can also be illustrated from
another angle. This involves another controversial area, gender identity.
Free scope for social construction is attractive to the left-wing community
because it entails freedom from being a helpless victim of biological foun-
dations (and other objective factors). A familiar way of making this point
is that instead of just two genders there are an unlimited number of gen-
ders out there. A favourite phrase is that of doing gender, stressing that
gender is not something that is inside you, it is a social-constructive activ-
ity that you actively perform as part of the online flow. So you can go out
there and be a new women, shedding obsolete and oppressive attributes
of the female gender.
In terms of the picture suggested here, however, the actual flow of
(gendered) activity has to be understood in relation to two other manifes-
tations of social reality: the social construction that is part of the sociocul-
386 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
tural niche and the underlying competency to make the role your own.
This means that the individuals flow of activity depends on two enabling
relationships: (1) at the social level, you need to create an operational
social construction, and (2) at the competency level, one that depends on
embodied competency to perform the flow of activity. The niche is defined
by the collective status assignments of fellow community members: will
they make it possible to uphold the status the individual claims for her-
self i. e. that of being a new woman?
First, the social level (the local niche of personal relations): to stress
this need may seem to be a defeatist attitude why not just state your
position and expect others to respect it, now you have defined your new
role to your own satisfaction? But there is no way round the process of
ensuring community recognition. To get oneself socially constructed as
having a new identity is a necessary part of the project. Indeed, if a new
female gender role could be defined without needing outside recognition,
there would be no need to involve husbands in the process of liberating
oppressed wives the wives could just reinvent themselves in their spare
time.
This means that the euphoria of discovering that oppressive features of
reality are merely socially constructed must be tempered with a sober
reassessment: what exactly will it take to carry out a successful process of
social deconstruction-cum-reconstruction? The inevitability of under-
standing your own doing against a social background and the need for
recognition is discussed e. g. in J.Butler (2004: 3), who concludes that when
I act as a gendered individual, my human agency starts from a baseline
that includes the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never
chose. The (in)visible hand has you by the scruff of the neck, and you
need to actually prise yourself free.
This is the implication at the level of socially constructed meaning-in-
society, of the relation between variation and general categories that was
argued in relation to linguistic categories (cf. the discussion with Croft,
p. 291). Just as you cannot understand variation in linguistic categories
without presupposing that there are such general categories (and not just
differences), you cannot understand variational social construction of
gender identity without presupposing that there are socially constructed
genders. This means that you cannot just stipulate a hundred different
genders; you are up against the socially constructed (niche) identities that
happen to be available.
The good news is that this identity in turn can only be understood as
involving the spectrum of actual variation. A category never says every-
thing there is to say about its instantiations, any more than a token itself
Individual conceptualization and the social constructor 387
will tell you what category to subsume it under in a given case (cf. p. 292).
Also when it comes to niche concepts, the overall container and the dif-
ferential instantiations are part of the same complex reality if you see
the two levels of description as competing alternatives, neither of them
will tell you what you need to know.
Secondly, at the competency level: on this second front, you depend on
your body adapting to the new role you have carved out for yourself. This
may appear to be a trivial consequence, in the sense that we always have
to live with our own decisions. But the question of embodied competency
to perform in a new role is not a matter of choice alone. The verb change
as in I change into a new identity is not a performative verb. You may
find that your sense of selfhood, your desires, and your performance of the
new identity, work differently from what you have imagined. That is, of
course, not to say that we can only be who have traditionally are. Our
great grandparents would probably not have believed the successful inte-
gration of women in the church, the police and the military. But it means
that building a new personality may involve problems for the same reason
as building a new house: the available material may not serve as well as
anticipated in the new capacity. Function and material, slot and filler, con-
stitute an irreducible interface, and convergence cannot be taken for
granted.
Status assignments that affect human identity involve an element of
sociocultural centrality: what is middle class, for instance, may be more
central than what is upper-class or proletarian. Further, it involves nor-
mative pressure: merely being an outlier in the spectrum is often norma-
tively risky. Deviant is not a term of praise. Lady Bracknell, although
unusually explicit, expresses the tacit views of the majority when she talks
about losing both parents being considerably above the proper average
that statistics have laid down for our guidance. It is also associated with
power: if you are closer to the social norm in salient respects, your views
have more clout, because you are associated with the hegemonic position
in the social landscape. Prototypes are ideals, also in terms of beauty: if
nose length (etc) exceeds certain limits, you rank yourself lower, thus con-
firming the hegemony.
In the macro perspective, low prestige comes on top of the personal
experience of not fitting in. The prototype mother thus is not just one
who has all the relevant conceptual features (is a birth mother, a nurturant
mother, is married to the childs father, etc) it is also the culturally nom-
inated standard. In some countries this entails being white, Christian and
middle-class, even if this has nothing to do with the conceptual specifica-
tion of motherhood, only with what is socially normal and normative:
388 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
single Black mothers are two down in terms of prestige as well as being
one down in terms of conceptual features.
The intellectual insight into the fact of social construction is therefore
not enough, although it is a good starting point. It is better to be up against
entrenched practices than it is to be up against the basic structure of the
universe, or the Almighty God. But exactly what this allows you to do
depends on your own agency your powers as a social constructor. This
involves the points that were discussed in relation to language change
above on p. 158: to what extent can the visible hand change things at the
collective level?
Therefore the intention to make a better world needs to do more than
point out undesirable conceptualizations or discourses the real test is to
enable practices that sustain the preferable alternatives: square holes have
to be socially constructed for square pegs to fit into, or the misfit experi-
ence will persist, and the stigma associated with the category will resur-
face as soon as the new, sanitized term becomes usage-based. The
progress from nigger to negro to coloured to black to African-American is
genuine progress precisely to the extent the usage basis in actual practice
changed along with the terminology. Factual grounding is essential, or
conceptualization practices will end up as bullshit.
There is a position according to which the goal must be to do away with
all forms of normativity because of the stigmatizing effect it has: all norms
are so many biases. This is impossible in principle, however. Harmonious
human development entails growing into a normative community, sharing
a life that is felt to be good with fellow members of the group and there
is no way something can be good without its absence being felt as bad.
Rather than eradicate all evaluation of things as being good, the strategy
must be for goodness to be extendable to all relevant categories. In other
words, the way forward is via a social construction process, not via decon-
struction.
This section has illustrated the inherent complexities in understanding
mental, conceptual models that are simultaneously under social construc-
tion. In relation to classic CL it illustrates why it would therefore be a
mistake to let a general strategy of looking for converging evidence
trick you into postulating one unified object of investigation, from which
all findings can be explained. The approach in terms of interfaces between
the levels of the tripartite ontology that has been suggested above, with
iconic relations but separate natures, is necessary in order to have the fis-
sures where seeds of change can grow, also in dealing with identity.
One last form of divergence is that between appearances and reality. A
social constructionist position would be different form a position based on
Individual conceptualization and the social constructor 389
lying and when they are telling the truth. Ekmans striking pictorial exam-
ple was a film sequence of Oliver North in (discursive) action.
As discussed in relation to bullshit above, the public should monitor
divergences of this kind, especially in relation to power holders. In addi-
tion to the invisible and the visible hand, we may therefore speak of the
concealed hand as an especially central target of critical analysis: the
hybrid case where agency is involved but covert.
In short, public and embodied understanding interact all the time, and
convergence is only one of the possible relations between them. Because
a thoroughgoing social constructionism assumes that the social process
determines embodied understanding, and a thoroughgoing commitment
to embodied grounding would entail that personal experience would
always prevail, both theories are wrong. Functional equilibrium-promot-
ing mechanisms may lend a helping invisible hand. But human agents had
better realize that no one is going to take away personal responsibility for
promoting the kind of convergence that satisfi(c)es normative optimality
criteria, especially their own
vidual mind, and what is social and cultural about these models is mainly
that they are important in the community because many individuals have
them and use them in social and cultural contexts. This makes it more
important to describe and understand these particular models rather than
others which may be less culturally central.
In terms of the cline that I am invoking, the path moves further into
the social domain when the descriptive focus shifts towards attributing
gradually greater significance to social and cultural practices as targets of
description. This does not necessarily entail any change in the under-
standing of the nature of cognitive models, only that the aim changes
towards describing communicative or institutional practices by means of
the cognitive models that they use. This entails that more independent
significance is attributed to these practices rather than solely to the cog-
nitive dimension in itself. As examples of work that has shifted its focus
further towards the analysis of types of discourse in society, we may take
Nerlichs work on cognitive models in science communication, cf. Nerlich,
Elliott and Larson (2009), Polzenhagen and Dirven (2008) on the under-
standing of global English, and the concept of discourse metaphor intro-
duced by Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich (2008). At the most social end of
the scale, we find work that is explicitly targeted on political aspects, and
which thus moves into the same territory where critical discourse analysis
belongs, such as Hart and Luke (2007), Koller (2008) and Chilton (1996,
2004).
Distinctions between different points on the scale should not be exag-
gerated. Across the board, it demonstrates the potential of CL analysis for
throwing light on the conceptual half of social reality. This covers the
dimension of meaning-in-society that can be captured by remaining within
the cognitivist perspective (cf. the discussion ch. 2, p. 58 f.). This type of
work is central also in the social cognitive linguistics I envisage, and often
it stresses some of the same basic points that recur in this book.40 One
particular strand, which has had considerable and well-deserved impact
also beyond the usual disciplinary boundaries, is work on metaphors in
the social political domain, cf. Chilton (1996), Charteris-Black (2004;
40 Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich (2008), for instance, make a point of the fact that
discourse metaphors evolve in historical time (Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich
2008: 368), and that the individualist view of cognition needs to be supple-
mented with a socioculturally situated view (Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich
2008: 379).
392 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
2005), Goatly (2007), Morgan (2008), Musolff (2008) and many more. If
the aim of this book had been primarily expository, it would have been
natural to give a full review of the literature in this area. However, the
intended cutting edge of the book is the attempt to expand the theoretical
foundations, and in doing so to highlight the role of the functional dimen-
sion in understanding meaning in society. In terms of that purpose, what I
have to add to the cognitive analysis of pervasive cultural models essen-
tially boils down to one thing, that the cognitive analysis ultimately needs
to team up with an analysis of the non-cognitive dimensions of the social
sphere. Hence, instead of attempting to squeeze a necessarily incomplete
descriptive account of this very rich tradition into the present book, I con-
fine myself to the more modest aim of trying to illustrate what advantages
the extended framework I argue for may have, taking one example from
the classic CL end of the spectrum and one example from the most social
and political end.
With respect to the most cognitive end of the spectrum, the contribu-
tion I can offer is to provide a format for discussing how cognitive facts
and social facts interact. While in a cognitivist framework it is the cogni-
tive side of the picture that drives the process, a central feature of the
analytic framework I have defended is the irreducibly two-way relation-
ship, shaped by evolution-style dynamics, between cognitive and social
structures. It is generally accepted that cognitive models both influence
social reality and are influenced by it but typically this is viewed in the
non-predictive, quasi-circular mutual influence fashion. Crucial to the
theory I defend is a functional and panchronic relationship where the
individual mind is part of a larger pattern that involves adaptation to com-
munity-level forces outside the individual mind.
Croft (2000, 2006) has shown how evolution-type dynamics can be
applied to language change; I have tried to show how constituents of social
reality are subject to the same mechanisms. Following Henning Andersen
(2006), I have also argued that mechanisms of reproduction in human
communities are different from and more complex than mechanisms of
reproduction in biology (p. 158 above): in addition to the strictly local and
accident-prone type of reproduction that is analogous to genetic repro-
duction with attendant mutations, there is the type of reproduction that is
driven by identification with community-level, cultural patterns. This is
even more important when it comes to the lineages that constitute social
constructions, because they are part of the reality we live in in a more
direct sense than the lineages that constitute linguistic items: social con-
structions are part of the furniture of the world, while linguistic items are
means of interaction with fellow subjects. Hence, the outcomes of linguis-
Cognitively based critical analysis a comparative perspectivization 393
tic interaction are more important than the linguistic means for carrying
out this interaction. Based on that, I have tried to describe a number of
different formations that arise in social space, with different types of rela-
tions between cognitive content and social causation, from efficacy-heavy
social constructions like armies to quasi-Platonic niche concepts, hoping
that this will make it possible to be more precise about the pathways that
cognitive follows may follow in the social sphere. As I see it, it may be use-
ful also in relation to analyses at the most cognitivist end of the scale to
offer a framework that makes it possible to follow conceptualization on
its path beyond the individual mind. To illustrate this, I am going to discuss
some aspects of The Political Mind (Lakoff 2008) and suggest where
aspects of the descriptive format I have outlined above may supplement
Lakoffs analysis.
Lakoff himself in fact makes reference to a number of phenomena that
are outside his own core analytic framework. An example that is particu-
larly central from my perspective is that Lakoff refers to what he calls
systemic causation (Lakoff 2008: 188) as a key factor in the problems he
is addressing. Understanding systemic causation is crucial precisely
because direct causation is easier to grasp and thus conservatives suc-
cessfully manage to get members of the public to understand problems
such as crime and Abu Ghraib to be due to bad individuals rather than to
failures of the whole system, which is a misrepresentation of the facts of
the matter.
Lakoff anchors his understanding of systemic causation in the collec-
tive interaction that is built into the nurturant family model. Regardless of
the merits of this analysis, one thing is how the conceptual model in con-
figured in the individual mind, another is how systemic causation actually
works out there in society. In the framework of this book, one central type
of systemic causation is associated with the selection processes that are at
work at aggregate levels, as opposed to reproduction-level acts by (in the
case of crime, possibly deviant) individuals. Such systemic causation would
be at work if those who commit crimes (including war crimes) are favoured
by the selection processes that occur in the relevant social system41.
Whether such processes work by orchestrated or emergent processes, the
same individual-level propensity to commit crimes will lead to a very dif-
This has implications not only for how to communicate effectively in poli-
tics it also has implications for the situation of those who are profession-
ally interested in the role of conceptualization in politics. If concepts are
essentially properties of individual embodied minds, the only way to
Cognitively based critical analysis a comparative perspectivization 395
change them is to interfere with peoples brains.42. Lakoff also uses physi-
cal facts as an analogy for his work on the family models underlying polit-
ical thinking in the US:
Newton, as a scientist, described how objects move; he had no power to make
them move that way. The same is true here. American politics does use those
models. All I can do is describe them .you cannot impose some other model
on peoples brains. (Lakoff 2008: 77)
Yet when it comes to the aim of bringing about a new enlightenment,
changing the models in peoples brains is exactly what Lakoff wants to do.
Talking about sexist models of womens life, he says
That they have become permanent fixtures in the brains of so many Americans
should make it all the more urgent that we recognize their existence and their
persistence and start routing them out of our brains! (Lakoff 2008: 28)
For the sake of the argument, let us assume that it is in fact possible to rout
sexist models out of our brains, while it is impossible to stop Americans
from thinking about politics in terms of family models. Even so, we would
need a theory that can explain why the two sets of embodied models differ
in this respect. That requires an analysis that goes beyond concepts viewed
solely as facts about individual minds/brains. This does not entail that con-
cepts exist in some abstract philosophical universe but it does entail
that they can somehow be distinguished from instantiations (pace
Lakoff 2008: 178, as quoted above).
I suggest that the theory of concepts as features of the niche and as
sources of selection pressure goes some way towards offering an account
of how concepts can exist outside the individuals mind/brain, and of how
they may enter or be routed out of the minds of individuals: if life
in a niche where they are entrenched (e. g. one in which gender roles are
differently conceived) appears to have more to offer, that will give these
concepts a selective advantage on the acceptance scale (cf. above, section
3.4).
Another example of the need to operate with an aggregate level as
well as an individual level of meaning in society is the conceptualization
of politics in terms of the left-right scalar model. Lakoff wants to elimi-
nate that conceptualization because he thinks it glosses over the funda-
mental differences between progressive and conservative values as
embodied in the two family models. In order to do that, however, it is not
enough to consider the level of the individual you have to take into con-
sideration what role this model has at the aggregate, population level. As
we saw on p. 312 above, analysis of voting patterns (McCarty, Poole and
Rosenthal 2006) has shown that the left-right axis has emerged as the sole
aggregate dimension, while a previous scale of racial attitudes has disap-
peared. Lakoff (2008: 47) stresses that the left-right model is real because
it is in peoples minds but in order to understand the issue fully, it is also
necessary to understand that it is real also in the sense of being part of
social reality: voting patterns are analogous to market forces in belonging
at the invisible hand level, outside the individual minds. Like the success
or failure of entrepreneurs, the success or failure of political candidates
reflects selection pressures at population level. If selection pressures have
been reconfigured so as to reflect the left-right axis alone, individual
attempts to avoid being placed in terms of left-right axis will be unsuccess-
ful until the aggregate pattern changes.
This does not mean that one should desist from arguing against
unwanted conceptualizations, of course but it means that unless candi-
dates take mechanisms working at the aggregate level into consideration
(e. g. by developing a strategy that formulates the protest against the left-
right scale in a way that optimizes selection possibilities while the scale
remains in operation), it is more likely that selection pressures will weed
them out.
Once again, I see this analysis, as a natural part of Lakoffs new enlight-
enment and the associated metadiscourse (reminiscent of Diskurs in
Habermass sense, cf. Habermas 1971) that Lakoff calls for. The project
presupposes the possibility of taking conceptual patterns out of the cogni-
tive unconscious and subjecting them to conscious examination: in several
places (e. g. 2008: 19; 34), Lakoff describes his aim as trying to change
reflexive thought (the type that is associated with automatic, unconscious
cognitive processes) into conscious, reflective thought. This is in the best
enlightenment tradition, reminiscent of a long line of positions from
Kants Aufklrung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschul-
deten Unmndigkeit. (Enlightenment is mans release from his self-
incurred tutelage Was ist Aufklrung?, 1784) to Freuds motto (usually
traced to a lecture at a Psychoanalytic congress in 1933) Wo Es war, soll
Ich werden (Where id was, there ego shall be).
This may seem at odds with Lakoffs rejection of the 18th century mind
in the subtitle of his book (Why you cant Understand 21st-Century Poli-
tics with an 18th-Century Brain). Lakoff (in my view rightly) claims that
there is no conflict between seeing reason as embodied and often uncon-
scious, and the deeper rationality that he argues for. What is missing,
Cognitively based critical analysis a comparative perspectivization 397
however, is a clear account of how the two go together. Based on his own
account, Lakoff is in fact making himself dependent on the 18th century
mind to drive out the unwanted mental baggage that voters are carrying
around in the 21st century, when he says Reflective thought is what I
have called old Enlightenment reason (2008: 223). A niche-based theory
can provide foundations for a Lakoff-style re-enlightenment because if
offers a foundation for rationality that lies outside the individual mind.
In Harder (1996: 131) I argued that the traditional Platonic reliance on
underlying eternal ideas to correct deception in the social flux needs to
be replaced by the realization that the social force of true (factually
grounded) knowledge depends on a social knowledge contract. Only if
knowledge is backed up by social endorsement will it have a chance to
prevail over more immediately convenient falsehoods. In other words, to
strengthen rationality in the political realm we need to think in terms of
strengthening its sociocultural grounding, not just attempt to rewire peo-
ples brains. Institutions such as schools, universities and public debating
fora need to work so as to establish a selection pressure that favours
rational argument. In the social sphere, the status of rationality is to be a
norm and if it is to prevail, it needs to be part of the normative com-
munity that young minds adapt to when they graduate into full member-
ship of civil society.
I see that as being essentially what Lakoff is arguing for, and again
offer the theory I have defended above as an extended social-cognitive
foundation for what he and other cognitivist analysts of meaning in soci-
ety are trying to do. I believe it has advantages also for analyses which
follow the classic CL trajectory by taking their point of departure in con-
ceptual structures.
The argument I have pursued above also has implications for how to
understand the central concept of frame. Lakoffs use of the term
expresses his broad, fundamental point against Cartesian Reason under-
stood as operating in an abstract domain separate from human experi-
ence. In order to make sense to people, all communication has to tap into
experience as manifested in the conceptual patterns in their minds, and
the basic units are frames (Lakoff 2008: 22). While this is certainly true, the
concept frame is too broad to provide the underpinning for Lakoffs
enlightenment project. In the introduction (p. 5) I claimed provocatively
that conceptual frames do not exist, in the sense that they do not consti-
tute a specific class of conceptual units. Any meaning-imbued part of the
social cognitive world (however constituted) is a potential frame: there
is nothing that is characteristic of a frame as opposed to an idealized
conceptual model, a domain, or even a concept, cf. the choice between
398 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
crime and war on terror for framing the response to 9/11.43 The crux is
the framing, rather than the frame.
This means that the concept in its undifferentiated form spans two very
different cases. In Fillmores seminal calendar example, the act of under-
standing the word Sunday has to work via accessing the calendar frame
without that frame, the term simply makes no sense. This is a good exam-
ple of how (as Lakoff stresses) the basic process of understanding works
below the threshold of consciousness and so does not lend itself to agen-
tive control. But in political communication, the central issue that Lakoff
addresses is that conservatives are so much better than progressives at
framing, and progressives therefore need to take a leaf out of their book.
This presupposes a very different type of process, one in which the to-be-
understood unit can be inserted into alternative frames and the trick is
to frame the issue in a politically effective way. The act of framing as it
applies to politics thus involves a rather sophisticated form of agency,
which is rather different from what follows from seeing frames as part of
the cognitive unconscious. It is a form of strategic action, which presup-
poses the ability to detach issues from the frame in which they are pre-
sented by other people and furnish them with preferable frames.
As such it not only presupposes that the political communicator has
changed reflexive into reflective thinking, but also raises issues in relation
to Gricean and Habermasian ideals of communication. For those who
want to occupy the moral high ground, it raises the issue of what kind of
strategic framing is compatible with that ambition. Without a specific
analysis, the zero hypothesis would be that one framing is as good as
another, and it is just a matter of a battle for who gets most votes. Lakoffs
use of conceptual engineering, by introducing the concept of privateer-
ing as a way to capture the piracy- and racketeering-like aspects of priva-
tization as practiced by Enron, from a strictly strategic point of view is not
in principle distinct from the Bush administrations use of personal
accounts (cf. above p. 348). More generally, the advice against using the
opponents framing is no different in principle from the Bush administra-
43 As pointed out by Lakoff (2008), at first 9/11 was framed as a crime, but later
it was framed as an event in the war on terror. Both are frames, but the war
on terror is at the same time a metaphor while crime is simply a concept: it
applies literally to what happened, since it is against the law to bomb high-rise
buildings, killing thousands of people. This shows that it is the act of framing
that is distinctive: there is no way to define what a frame is (as opposed to a
metaphor) based on purely conceptual characteristics.
Cognitively based critical analysis a comparative perspectivization 399
tions policy of not giving opportunities for taking photos of coffins return-
ing from Iraq.
As is evident from Lakoffs emphasis on new enlightenment and
deeper rationality, this is not what he has in mind. This is another reason
why charting the social embedding of framing may be useful. The poten-
tial of this extended foundational exercise can perhaps be illustrated via a
comparison with (a mildly caricatured version of) post-Foucauldian dis-
courses analysis. Viewed as a free-for-all framing battle, Lakoffs strategy
is not too different from starting a poststructural discourse struggle. The
inaccessible force of unconscious cognitive models would be similar to the
inaccessible force of the hidden hand of prevailing, power-imbued dis-
courses. However, from the perspective of an analysis based on the hidden
hand of power as manifested in discourses, Lakoffs concrete project
would come across as hopelessly nave. Not only is there a whiff of positiv-
ist belief in objective facts in his comparison with Newtonian physics,
there is also and more fundamentally a lack of awareness of impersonal
social power of the powerful discourse of regimentation (governmental-
ity) which, backed up by large-scale corporate capital, is lurking behind
his individual-based model of the strict father family. Attacking such a
formidable position of social power by a strategy based on changing indi-
vidual minds makes the charge of the light brigade appear like an odds-on
bookmakers favourite in comparison.
As against this, the foundational understanding I have argued for may
offer a way of understanding Lakoffs project that assigns a more promis-
ing status to it. The issue can be viewed as a matter of grounding in rela-
tion to the social dimension. By relating his agenda to ideals embodied in
the American constitution, Lakoff (2008: 6) addresses what I have called
the sociocultural grounding of his projected reconstruction of American
politics. By subjecting the rational actor model to an analysis in terms of
inaccuracies in relation to historical and future effects, Lakoff (2008: 217)
is testing the conceptual model in terms of what I have called factual
grounding. Both reflect an understanding of conceptual modelling as
being subject to evaluation in terms of the standards of a normative com-
munity. Although reframing is a strategic type of action, the type that
Lakoff argues for operates under Habermas-style normative rules: it is
accountable to (culturally entrenched) norms of right action and of truth-
ful communication.
This does not say anything about what precisely the odds are for
Lakoffs project to succeed but it specifies why it has a chance. As
opposed to the poststructural view, the social cognitive view implies that
there is a social reality behind discourses, even the most powerful ones.
400 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
Closest to my own position is perhaps the work of Paul Chilton (e. g.,
1996, 2004, 2005). Chilton situates his work equally in a conceptual and an
interactive perspective (e. g., Chilton 2004: 197), analyzing politics as a
matter of mental representations intertwined with discursive action, and
at one point his position involves a combination of CL and CDA:
A cognitive approach, however, is only half the story. The impetus for the appli-
cation of a reinvigorated understanding of metaphor to the particular domains
of politics and international relations springs also from the critical discourse
analysis developed by British, German and Australian linguists in the 1970s
and 1980s. Of particular relevance is the work of Fairclough and Fowler, Hodge
and Kress. (Chilton 1996: 3)
However, if one compares formulations from 1996 and 2005, some disen-
chantment is discernible, cf. the concluding paragraph of Chilton (2005),
summing up a detailed criticism of CDA:
The upshot of these ruminations is that CDA may not be the field within which
the most perplexing questions can be pursued that concern the nature of the
human mind, of human language, of human language use and of human society.
(Chilton 2005: 46).
This may be part of the reason that Chilton (2004: 198) adopts what he
calls a broadly cognitivist perspective. This characterization reflects that
a larger proportion of his detailed analyses of texts and political events
deals with the representational universes that politicians and political
analysts construct which are at the same time mental spaces in the sense
of Fauconnier (1985), and text worlds in the sense of Werth (1999), cf.
Chilton (2004: 57, 61). In terms of the classification used in chapter 2, the
focus of his work comes under the heading of meaning construction the
study of cognitive structures and mechanisms to build up meaning as part
of utterance understanding in context. From the point of view of the
approach presented in this book, this reflects a focus that is chiefly on the
cognitive side rather than the social sphere: although it is an account of
discourse understanding, it is primarily a description of how meaning can
be constructed in a text by an (expert) observer, not a description of
events as constituents in a social process.
However, the hedge broadly reflects the fact that his analytical appa-
ratus is by no means strictly cognitivist. Among other things, it explicitly
includes strategic action, divided (2004: 4546) into three types: coercion,
(de)legitimization and (mis)representation. From my perspective, this
constitutes a functional dimension that serves to contextualize the repre-
sentational side of the analysis (the functional dimension is saliently illus-
trated for example in Chilton 2004: 125130). Viewed in the context of
402 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
This chapter has argued for three main claims that were listed in the intro-
duction. The first, which was the main focus in sections 2 and 3, was that
something important is missing if you approach meaning-in-society only
from a cognitive perspective. The role of causal efficacy was demonstrated
in a range of contexts, beginning with operational social constructions, as
a necessary supplement to mental representation in understanding the
social role of conceptualization.
Section 2 presented a series of analyses designed to show that the same
conceptual content could team up with the way the world works in very
different ways, as shaped by the same type of evolutionary dynamics that
is behind language change. Among these ways were, at one extreme, the
minimal role in habitus-driven practices and at another extreme, the
independent causal role that conceptualizations may have in their capac-
ity as quasi-Platonic constituents of social reality in their own right. More
generally, the distinction between competency concepts and niche con-
has inherited the problems inherent in the familiar fuzzy CL sense(s) of the
word, as discussed above and in ch. 5: frames comprise everything from long-
term knowledge in general (including schemata, scenes and conceptual mod-
els) via areas of experience in a particular culture (cited from Werth 1999) to
the type of frames that enter into the meaning of specific verbs (cf. Fillmores
FrameNet project). Further, they are theoretical constructs, while at the same
time they are said to have some ultimately, neural reality. For reasons pre-
sented above on p. 397, I think this vagueness may be inevitable if the aim is to
talk about what is in the individual mind, since there is a very indirect relation
between the politically relevant sense of frame and constructs in any indi-
vidual mind. As pointed out, what one can hope to be precise about is the act
of framing, i. e. of situating a focal message against a particular background.
Because it is then presented as having presupposed status, challenging it would
be a face-threatening act (Chilton 2004: 64). In other words, the status of some-
thing as a frame and the conditions of success of framing have a great deal to
do with the social dimension, while the purely conceptual side is compara-
tively vague.
Similarly, although the concept of frame as used in the articles in Nerlich,
Elliott and Larsson (2009: 68) focuses on the core functional sense, i. e. the
issue of how a scientific topic can be inserted in different contextual frames,
they maintain the very broad sense in which frames can also be scripts, inter-
pretive packages and story lines (p. 6), and to frame something can be to
select some aspects of perceived reality and make them more salient (cited
from Entman 1993: 52).
404 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
tion with the accountability issue but the main discussion is the subject
of the next chapter.
A continuing undercurrent in the argument of this chapter is the
importance of divergence (in addition to the focus in classic CL on con-
vergence). There is no guarantee that concepts downloaded from com-
municative interaction will automatically match up with concepts that
emerge from personal embodied experience, or that niche concepts and
competency concepts will always match up or that socially constructed
entities actually work the way they are mentally represented as working.
Convergence, however, is normatively preferable: it is a constitutive prop-
erty of conceptual grasping that it is expected to grasp the world as it
really is, and that understanding is a joint property between individuals.
The potential divergences become more and more important as we
move along the cline from the categories and conversational exchanges of
familiar everyday life towards the larger and more abstract macro-social
events and contexts. The balance between what is due to immediate per-
sonal experience and what is downloaded from linguistically mediated
sociocultural practices gradually shifts, and this necessarily has conse-
quences for the role of bodily grounding. Ordinary people may tend to
become more and more suspicious as they move along that cline: what
does this have to do with reality?
Social constructions that persist even in spite of their increasingly dis-
tant links with everyday experience are not phoney as a general rule.
Large corporations and social institutions are real enough. But the scope
for partial divergences with other parts of reality increases with the dis-
tance. This is where the issue of bullshit comes in and where the question
of causal-functional underpinning therefore increases in importance. The
whole point of this book depends on the assumption that there is a natural
relation between meaning and personal experience. But the conclusion
cannot be that only personally grounded meaning really exists. Rather, we
have to take large-scale social constructions seriously, too: in the human
context we can no longer distinguish between nature and civilization,
because we adapt to the niche as we rebuild it. Therefore there has to be
a way of thinking and speaking also within large-scale social constructions
that does not surrender to bullshit and floating signifiers. That is why the
question of factual grounding increases in importance, as we move towards
the macro-social end of the scale. We need them to find out when signifi-
ers float away from reality, and when communication turns into bullshit or
even orchestrated conceptual fraud.
The ecology of socially constructed entities that arise when constraints
based on personal experience become weaker includes the sense of dis-
406 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
1. Introduction
This final chapter is about perhaps the most important challenge for con-
ceptualization in the social domain. The topic has been a subject of focal
interest for critically oriented, social constructionist discourse analysis, and
their analyses have been the most salient type of academic work in the
area. The issue may appear to be tailor-made for this approach: one of the
central concerns in social construction and discourse analysis is the distinc-
tion between us and them, the question is associated with Foucaults
concern with marginalization as analysed in the history of sexuality and
prisons, and the exercise of power by the dominant group constitutes a link
with intellectual lineages from Marx, cf. the discussion in ch. 3.
When the distinction is systematically invoked in opinions about life in
multi-ethnic contexts, it constitutes a discourse of us and them, also by
the restrictive definition (cf. p. 355) of the term. This discourse is at work
when divisions are discursively constructed (i. e. invoked in communica-
tion) such that one population group is regarded as the central in-group
and the other is the marginalized out-group. As such it is the mother of all
power-wielding discourses, implicit in various more specific discourses
such as orientalism (cf. Said 1978) and tolerance (Brown 2006). Among
broadly left-wing debaters, the discourse of us versus them is regarded
as a key cause of ethnic division. A position that combines this causal
explanation with an analysis of (1) us and them as being due solely to
social construction (i. e. without factual grounding) and (2) support for
this distinction as being due to xenophobia and prejudice, has had some-
thing like hegemonic status in some contexts.
The analysis presented below aims to point out what is wrong with this
position, academically as well as from a problem-solving point of view,
and thereby to promote a preferable alternative. To take a concrete
example: In the introduction (p. 1) I quoted an influential leader of the
critical Muslim community in Denmark for the statement that every-
thing starts with the language meaning that the discursive distinction
between us and them is where it all begins. For reasons discussed in
chapter 7, I think this analysis captures so little of what is going on that it
The ethnic other: an ultra-brief historical overview 409
must be regarded as seriously flawed. The flaws affect both the analytic
and the political dimension, and I am going to address both of them. The
goal of this chapter is to show what is missing and how an approach
grounded in human experience and collaborative communication can
both offer a better analysis and a better foundation for civic and political
action.
The point is not to reject the results of the critical approaches; I accept
most of the points and share most of the concerns of analysts such as van
Dijk (1998), Blommaert and Verschueren (1998), Riggins (1997) and
many others. That is in fact precisely why the flaws in the analytic practice
need to be made clear. Not only do the flaws prevent analyses in terms of
discourse struggle from getting a grip on important parts of the processes
they describe these analyses thereby also become part of the problem
rather than part of the solution.
The question of how to conceptualize other peoples has been part of west-
ern history from the days of slavery until today. The battle lines have been
drawn in terms of two continuous, contrasting lineages of beliefs and prac-
tices. Very roughly, one side is efficacy-heavy and grounded mainly in eth-
nocentric economic and political practice, although with legitimizing
beliefs in idealized cognitive models of European biological, cultural and
religious superiority. The other lineage is acceptance-heavy and involves a
gradually evolving idealized cognitive model of universal humanism: peo-
ple of different races and cultural backgrounds are human beings like us
and essentially equal. The global expansion of successive western empires
raised the question (among critical voices) in all those places where west-
ern emigrants settled and made their power felt.
European expansionism reached a high point in the first half of the 20th
century. A turning point was reached with the Second World War, which
left Britain, the last traditional empire, in a state of exhaustion, and the US
as the dominant world power. At the same time, the war was won against
powers representing the most repulsive manifestation in history of beliefs
in racial and cultural superiority. No one wanted to be anywhere near that
dustbin of history in which Nazism and Fascism were dumped in 1945. In
this way the war against Hitler gave a powerful boost to the lineage of
universal humanism. The founding of the United Nations and the Charter
of Human Rights empowered this belief construction with an interna-
tional formal grounding.
410 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
people(s). In the west, it also involved the task of coming to terms with
the now somewhat less glorious heritage of imperial supremacy.
The tension between official equality and factual marginalization has
been a continuing source of political disagreement, as manifested in cases
where measures taken to improve conditions for minorities collided with
group interests, with the Nimby type of response (Not In My Back Yard)
as a recurrent feature. It has been a hallmark of the broad left to insist that
principles should be followed up by political action, and politically ori-
ented linguists contributed to the process by documenting pervasive bias
in news reporting and administrative practices against minority groups, cf.
Van Dijk (1991, 1998). In the US, the principle of affirmative action rep-
resented an attempt to redress imbalances that had a tendency to repro-
duce themselves because people in privileged positions tended to favour
successors that belonged to the same groups as themselves. The much
reviled movement of political correctness was an attempt to eliminate
forms of speech that positioned minority members as marginalized and
defective. For a long time, the policies of the broad left met with little
explicit resistance, because it was bad form to defend a situation of de
facto discrimination.
However, at a certain point there was a significant reversal. Vocifer-
ous groups arose in a number of countries re-asserting the traditional
beliefs against multicultural and post-colonial tendencies. As a result, the
political climate with respect to the multi-ethnic issue has gone through
phases of more or less drastic social and conceptual reconfiguration in
(among others) the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, Canada, and Den-
mark. The threat of Muslim terrorism, with 9/11 as the focal point, caused
conceptualisations such as the clash of civilizations to gain widespread
currency.
Among the factors in this movement was the increasing salience in the
social landscape of minorities who used to keep their heads down. In some
countries, this was partly the result of immigration. However, there was
also a historical backlash against sixties permissiveness, i. e. youth cul-
tures and dissolution of established structures associated with 68 and all
that. Traditional nationalist feelings, most strongly in areas where national
and ethnic group relations had always been a source of conflict (e. g. Bel-
gium), also blended in. Whatever the mixture in actual cases, there arose a
new position in the overt political landscape, where parties sprang up and
started to defend what had until then seemed not to require active defence,
namely the traditional white conservative community, against perceived
risks associated with increasing presence and visibility of minorities,
including their cultural practices. Examples are the British National Party
412 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
Various unifying factors, such as language, religion, and color of skin, seem nat-
ural. I propose that none is. Language, culture, a real or assumed historical
origin, and religion, form identities for an us in our minds, and only so long as
they exist in our minds as unifying factors do the entities of us persist.
ch. 7, natural essences (whether phoney or real) do not capture the dynam-
ics of constructed niches.
However, Blommaert and Verschuerens analysis of the discursive con-
structions involved in reinvented national supremacy is compelling,
including the hollowness and hypocrisy involved. They make an additional
point which is also central in the position I defend: they show that the
mechanisms that marginalize ethnic minorities have a much broader base
in the community than hard-core right-wing groups. There is much less
difference than one might expect between the way immigrants are discur-
sively constructed by the right wing and by the mainstream, including peo-
ple who understand themselves as model citizens when it comes to rela-
tions with minorities. Citing a host of sources including laws, pamphlets,
political statements, white papers and UN reports, they show that minori-
ties are understood as potentially threatening, as people who need to be
kept under control and surveillance, and who ultimately may need to be
sent back where they came from. As they say,
Not a single member of what we designate as the tolerant majority will recog-
nize him- or herself in the Western or colonial ideas or attitudes sketched
(almost by way of caricature) and criticized above. But this is exactly why this
book had to be written. Our analysis reveals that professed awareness of a
Foucauldian perspective on social life i. e., the common philosophical and
socio-scientific lore referred to does not stand in the way of rhetorical opera-
tions which, at various levels of implicit meaning, clash with overtly accepted
critical beliefs and attitudes. In particular, there is a level of ideological work
which is shared by mainstream pro-migrant rhetoric, i. e. the rhetoric of toler-
ance, and anti-migrant rhetoric alike.
(Blommaert & Verschueren 1998: 21)
In the terms defined in chapter 7, they unmask as bullshit a large part of
the high-minded official talk about immigrant issues. Blommaert and Ver-
schuerens critique of the actual role of the common Foucauldian lore is
in harmony with the point I have made about the absence of a role for the
human subject in post-Foucauldian analysis. The impersonal force of dis-
courses as social macro-agents decouples the analysis from personal
understanding and agency. What better confirmation of this impotence
than the massive documentation offered by Blommaert and Verschueren
that members of Foucaults own natural constituency remain in the grip of
the hidden hand that they point to?
The problem of social grounding is also relevant in relation to an argu-
ment in the book quoted from Richard Lewontin (1982: 113): migration
and fusion of groups are pervasive features of human history, not an
abnormal situation that must be stopped. This is true as a critique of pho-
A social cognitive analysis of the distinction between us and them 415
ney assertions of ethnic purity, but the invited inference that migration
is not a problem does not follow. Again, naturalness is not enough: an
equally pervasive feature of human history is the violence that has accom-
panied migrations. An example without racial overtones is the disruption
that happened in the US in the thirties, as familiar from Steinbecks
Grapes of Wrath. The dispossessed sharecroppers from Oklahoma who
went west had impeccable credentials as Americans, and did not come as
enemies; they were affected, like most of the nation, by bad times. Never-
theless the encounter with the residents of the area to which they emi-
grated gave rise to the formation of a malignant us-them dichotomy com-
plete with a derogatory (dysphemistic, in the word of Talbot, Atkinson
& Atkinson 2003: 15) categorisation of the newcomers as Okies.
Identity construction as an issue is becoming common ground between
sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, and thus the distribution of the dif-
ferent agendas is becoming more blurred in the academic landscape. The
position I am defending here reflects some of the features of classic inter-
actional sociolinguistics. As an example, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz
(1982) describe an instance of interethnic communication where it would
be natural to focus on the confrontation between two very different dis-
cursive positions, and there is something going on that might well be
described as a discourse struggle. Since the case involves a confrontation
between the view of an immigrant social worker and the view of an offi-
cial committee, the potential for a critical analysis is not hard to see. How-
ever, they focus instead on the interactive sequence of events, showing in
what way the initial bureaucratic position makes sense, and also by what
mechanisms it becomes possible to establish a platform that allows ends
to meet, in spite of the evident risk of an impasse.
The bottom line is: the analytic approach to pernicious exercise of
social power in connection with othering and us-them divisions needs
to be re-assessed from a perspective that includes sociocultural and fac-
tual grounding, instead of using a socially ungrounded conceptual model
of universal humanism as the presupposed point of departure.
in managing their lives at various levels of joint activity from family life to
all-tribe ceremonies.
It is immaterial to the argument whether this ever happens. The fact is
that this is not the way life standardly works out for everybody provided
they steer clear of the us-them- discourse. Conflict among groups arises
frequently for non-discursive reasons, such as competition for scarce
resources. In Papua New Guinea, where life is still largely shaped by vil-
lage-size units, there is fierce rivalry at many levels, including among clans
and tribes. What is perceived as unfair distribution is pointedly addressed
in ways that create very clearly defined divisions of us and them. During
my own visit, our group visited a village by agreement with a clan that was
willing to receive us and allow us to enter their clans land in order to
watch a lek of lesser birds of paradise (for which we had paid an agreed
fee). We had good contact with several in the group and trade started for
the locally made bilums and other artefacts, with everybody having a
good time until a neighbouring clan felt that they were unfairly left out
of this unexpected bonanza. Feelings ran high, demands for money were
made and our group had to be evacuated in a hurry. And if this may appear
to be an artefact of our intrusion from the outside into Papuan natural
life, the ancient practice of raiding neighbouring villages, leaving no adult
males alive, illustrates that operational distinctions between us and
them antedated colonialism. Nearer home, many will remember child-
hood rivalries with kids from another block (of which parents were gener-
ally blithely ignorant) as an instance of how social experience may deviate
from the undisrupted extension of us to wider circles. The fact is, just as
us in various shapes is part of social reality, so may various manifestation
of them present themselves as unavoidable parts of social experience.
In the multi-ethnic context, this process works in essentially the same
way. The features that make it difficult to construct an us that includes
the whole population, however, are simultaneously the features that can
very easily construct a number of they experiences. To the extent minor-
ity members speak their own language, go to their own schools, practice
their own religion and befriend only each other, they are as a matter of
social fact partitioned off from members of the majority culture. This
would make it functionally natural for mainstream members to categorize
minority members as them rather than us, because there would be little
underpinning of an understanding of such minorities as partners in joint
activities. The same would apply, of course, to members of the minority, for
whom the mainstream are naturally them.
Some of the force behind the argument against speaking in terms of an
us-them distinction is due to the standard case in which us is always
A social cognitive analysis of the distinction between us and them 419
and them rather than denying it. If parents did not teach their children
that this was so, they would have been extremely derelict in their parental
duties.
A social constructionist theory of marginalization in a multi-ethnic
society would fit with a hypothesis that differences are created solely by
the negative side of Rosenthal effect (cf. Rosenthal and Rubin 1978): if we
categorize people as different and less employable, they will live up to
such a categorization. And even if that is not the whole truth, why not give
them the benefit of a positive Rosenthal effect following from a full rec-
ognition of them as citizens, exactly the way they are, with no need to
adapt to majority culture? Unfortunately, Koopmans (2006), discussing
what went wrong for multiculturalism in the Netherlands, provides figures
suggesting that there is a direct relation between the strength of a multi-
cultural immigration policy and factual marginalization of immigrants
and that the effect is strengthened by the existence of a strong welfare
state based on universal entitlement. The process is described for Den-
mark in Matthiessen (2009), documenting in detail the link between on
the one hand the marginalisation of immigrants and on the other hand the
mounting pressure on the finances of the welfare state.
Hall (1976: 210) also sees the problem as having a different explana-
tion than overt attitudes:
Theoretically, there should be no problem when people of different cultures
meet. Things begin, most frequently, not only with friendship and goodwill on
both sides, but there is an intellectual understanding that each party has a dif-
ferent set of beliefs, customs, mores, values, or what-have-you. The trouble
begins when people have to start working together even on a superficial basis.
of groups that are outside these, and which therefore are naturally referred
to as them. Of these two types, the us experience is the basic and pri-
mary one, and reflects a fundamental value that is constitutive of human
life. They, or the others, are basically negatively defined as non-mem-
bers of us. How such groups are understood depends on their experien-
tial status in individual and collective life in the niche as presently con-
structed. The basic feature of their causal history is actual events in relation
to which two groups take different roles: where you live, what school you
attend, who gets invited to birthday parties, football teams, what educa-
tion you take, where you work, who you vote for. Hostile they construc-
tions basically arise from conflicts of interest, such as competition for
scarce resources (whether in indigenous communities in New Guinea or
among marginalized groups in Denmark). Discourses as understood in
this book do not necessarily play any role. We return later to cases where
they do.
I now turn to the second phase in the development that brought down
the anti-racist discourse in Denmark: the so-called cartoon crisis. This was
one of the few events where Denmark has really hit the headlines world-
wide. It began with the publication of cartoons of the prophet Moham-
mad in a Danish newspaper and culminated in riots and embassy burn-
ings in the Middle East. In this context, an interesting aspect is the role of
polarization for understanding processes involving meaning in mind and
society.
Polarization is one of those cases where there is a very direct relation
between embodied, emotional response and macro-level social processes
(cf. Harder 2005). What drives it is the sense of being under threat and
the more massive the external threat, the stronger the internal embodied
response. When groups are involved, responses on each side of the divide
are reinforced by fellow subjects via the mechanism of confirmation bias
(cf. Hutchins as discussed on p. 276).
Discourse struggles can in principle have many parties as in general
elections but the classic case is the two-way variety that is construed in
terms of the battle between right and wrong. This makes an approach in
terms of discourse struggle easily susceptible to the mechanisms of polar-
ization. As argued in Harder (2005), this puts conceptualization under
pressure: the higher the level of polarization, the less emotionally accept-
able it is to have nuances in between black and white. The mechanism puts
social pressure on framing: the freedom to frame issues against other
backgrounds than the division between us and them is greater, the less
polarized the situation is. Wagners music used to be framed by many
against the background of its status in the Third Reich, putting pressure
on the alternative framing of Wagner as an element of high culture, which
has gained ground as the memory of World War II recedes. Conversely,
concessions to a perceived enemy become more and more like treason,
the higher the level of polarization.
While the anti-racist discourse had hegemonic status, its adherents in
fact practiced a degree of strategic polarization. When the topic of prob-
lems associated with immigration reared its ugly head, a formulation such
as immigrants are not a problem, but a resource was a widespread slogan
used to silence it again. This reflects the defining characteristic of polariza-
tion: it does not allow something to be a mixture of good and bad; the
possibility that immigrants can be both a resource and a problem is not
admissible.
However, two can play at that game. The embassy burnings created a
situation where the nation was under attack. In the media, the whole
world saw irate Muslims treating Denmark as a hostile them. The appear-
Where discourses fail 425
with the choice between mutual respect between religions and freedom of
speech, he chose freedom of speech.
While Gallies argument that rationality can be preserved in argu-
ments about contested concepts is entirely valid, this turned out to be
impossible in practice. In principle, consenting adults in private could of
course weigh the factors that counted in favour of an interpretation that
ruled out criticism of the publication of the cartoons and another that
allowed it, but it is interesting to note that otherwise astute observers
were having visible difficulties in actually understanding (at the time) the
position of people who on the one hand supported the right of the news-
paper to publish the cartoons and at the same time maintained that it
would have been better not to do it.2
There was little effective opposition to this polarized interpretive pres-
sure. Mehmet Necef (cf. the Danish newspaper Information, February 26,
2006) suggested that the cartoon crisis caused the definitive collapse in
Denmark of the anti-racist discourse, because its standard discourse
choices (mutual respect between religions, etc) were identical with those
found in statements published by representatives of Syrian and Egypt dic-
tatorships and fundamentalist imams.
The force of social pressures on conceptualization is an illustration of
the type of phenomenon that the whole idea of the hidden hand depends
on, and of the reality of discourse struggles as a fact of life. To that extent
it is a textbook case for post-Foucauldian analysis. That is why it also
starkly illustrates what is missing: it had no account of what caused the
defeat of the anti-racist discourse apart from superior social pressure on
the wrong side.
In the period after the crisis, the anti-racist constituency manifested
itself chiefly in the weaker form of deploring the tone of the debate. This
once more revealed lacking awareness of variational sociocultural
grounding and put them in the same losing frame that had been involved
in the 2001 electoral defeat. The source domain of the tone metaphor is
music: the right tone is harmonious, others are jarring or shrill. The
metaphor gained ground during the 17th and 18th centuries in the target
domain of language. In the history of the concept, the code of upper-class
polite society had the status of harmonious while lower-class language is
a jarring deviation. This was not just a conceptual model, but also a niche
model that partitioned social space in a way that underpinned social
2 The Prime Minister actually cited, in good faith as far as I can judge, the Vol-
taire position in defence of his own position.
428 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
exclusion: lack of the right tone meant that you were excluded from
polite company.3
Tone therefore resonates differently depending on your social back-
ground: if you are well brought up, you tend to regard tone as a good
thing, designed to minimise face-threatening acts (cf. Brown and Levinson
1987). If your social background is in the lower half of the spectrum, you
are likely to associate tone with the tyranny of upper-class manners over
your own everyday forms of speech. The tone model thus historically
reflects the same social variation that we saw above in the PMs attack on
pundits and arbiters of taste. In Denmark, the linguistic split between an
increasingly hegemonic polite society and the vulgar people is part of the
same historical development that created a dominant standard language
that has all but wiped out classic forms of lectal variation in Denmark
over the past 150 years.
After the sixties (including 68), there has been a considerable erosion
of the traditional hegemony of taste (cf. Bourdieu 1984). Good taste, good
manners, and being cultured, have lost much of the status they had fifty
years ago. Linguistic prestige norms also felt the impact; although it came
too late to save Danish dialects, active suppression of them in the educa-
tional system ceased. Sociolinguists are by and large united in condemn-
ing as oppressive the hegemony of the standard over varieties, and adher-
ents of the broad left would in most cases align themselves with this
position also in its broader implications for low vs high culture. It is
ironic therefore that by criticizing the tone, the broad left became part of
the same once-hegemonic social lineage. What is more, they confronted
the enemy on the most unfavourable territory imaginable a battleground
that had in effect already been lost. The counter-move was a walkover: to
reject (once again) the right of the cultural hegemony that lost the 2001
election to tell the people what they could or could not say.
The previous section argued that the discourses approach is seriously defi-
cient both in terms of how much of the relevant process it can account for
and in terms of its strategic potential. So what can be put in the place of
the discourses-based strategy that simply consists in exhorting everybody
to stop conceptualizing ethnic minorities as a problem, as them, and
instead understand them as part of an extended us?
This book has argued that we need to address issues of meaning-in-
society in terms of three dimensions: flow, competencies and niche, and
that there are two levels of causal factors involved, the individual level
and the aggregate level. The basic directionality is bottom-up, so let us
begin with that.
Constructing a we bottom-up involves joint attention and activity so
the basic process must be one in which individuals from different ethnic
groups enter into a flow of joint activity. This is not without problems,
however. Most joint human activity depends on language, and language is
not unproblematically shared in multi-ethnic contexts. If people do not
speak the same language, this option not only requires extra efforts (more
on this below), but is also not guaranteed to be available few situations
offer the possibility of me-Tarzan-you-Jane interaction. Even if there are
some shared linguistic resources, they do not ensure shared understand-
ing; there has been extensive research in the kind of discrepancies that
may cause misunderstanding in cross-cultural situations (e. g., Blum-
Kulka, House and Kasper 1989, Hofstede 1980, Pan, Scollon and Scollon
2002). More generally, adaptation to different sociocultural niches, for
reasons discussed above, entails that not just words but also things have
different meanings in different ethnic groups. In short, common ground is
not unproblematically achievable in multi-ethnic contexts.
This means that basic human competencies are inoperative when we
venture out of our own ethnic context. When normal input and output
conditions do not obtain, with Searles (1969) formulation, your speech
acts are liable to misfire. Bluntly speaking, leaving your cultural home
ground means that you become incompetent. The feeling of being out of
your depth has the natural consequence that you do not go out of your
way to seek out such experiences as part of everyday life. Unless there is
a special occasion to do it, you stay within the territory where you feel you
can cope. A likely consequence is that cross-ethnic flow may not get off
the ground. The most basic process of we-formation simply does not hap-
pen. An experienced field linguist once summed up his experience of
430 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
working with face-to-face communities by saying that the ground rule is:
if you dont know people you dont talk to them. If anything can be said to
be the natural situation in multi-ethnic contexts, it is certainly not for
universal humanity to prevail automatically.
To get beyond this, you need competencies that are not automatically
obtained as part of human primary socialization. A bottom-up strategy
literally depends on people being willing to go out of their way to build
extended wes. The good news is that this is not an outlandish skill it is
merely one that cannot be taken for granted. It is not only in multi-ethnic
contexts that there are groups that do not interact. In all societies except
face-to-face communities, people have to some extent to be able to handle
situations where common ground needs to be negotiated.
A central dimension is the scale between high context and low con-
text cultures (cf. Hall 1976), where high means that there is a high level
of shared knowledge that people feel entitled to take for granted with-
out a need to be explicit about them. The dimension is known in modern
communities from the contrast between city life (where you do not know
your neighbours) and village life (where everyone knows everyone). City
people therefore get used to taking less for granted, and more trained in
filling the gap as they go along which means they talk far more, and far
more explicitly, than people back in the high context village. It may be
regarded as a skill that enters naturally into a broadly understood sec-
ondary socialization, and one that is part of the (post)modern experi-
ence. The capacity for bricolage, with Baudrillards term, i. e. building
culture out of available fragments, has a role also in this one-on-one con-
text.4
This path is a useful point of departure for developing a strategy for
handling multi-ethnic contexts. To explain what it takes, the concept of
common ground can be extended by what I shall call a common platform
because if you have to communicate in an unfamiliar context, neither
shared knowledge (in the relevant form) nor shared practices are availa-
ble. The word platform is meant to evoke two associations: it shares with
common ground the property of being something you can stand on, but
it is something that needs to be constructed and it is less stable that the
ground itself.
ronment and this process can only succeed if migrants regard their tra-
ditional set of practices as negotiable to a satisficing extent.
Naturally, the same principle applies to established majorities: when
new population groups arrive, the residents must regard traditional prac-
tices as negotiable in the interest of getting the future sociocultural niche
that they would like to have. Those who feel a visceral rage at the idea of
letting the arrival of strangers muck about with the niche that they know
and love have to realize that change is not optional. The passage of time
along with the presence of new population groups is going to change
things anyway; the question is whether we try to make the best of it or not.
I am going to make one more possibly controversial but in my view self-
evident observation: if the process works, the balance between the forces
of reconstruction will be such that it reflects the norms and values of the
indigenous group more than the new arrivals. Nature and culture do not
work by completely new deals from brain evolution to educational
reforms, it always works with what is there.
The other possibility is that the process does not work, and no new
community comes into being. The result is then a state of Durkheimian
anomie. As far as I know, no one wants that outcome. This is one reason
why the deconstruction of national identities is a dangerous enterprise (cf.
p. 141). One of the key concepts used in the debate about the conse-
quences of immigration in Denmark is social cohesion. This concept is
suspicious for the same reason as integration, because it appears to call
for the subjection of minorities under a majority code. However, this risk
does not eliminate the need to consider the social reality that the concept
points to. In a number of international surveys (cf. Gundelach 2002; Gun-
delach, Iversen and Warburg 2008), Danes come out as having a high level
of trust in each other. (An informal confirmation of this came from the
British ambassador to Denmark 198386, James Mellon, who said that
Denmark was not a nation, but a tribe, cf. Mellon 1992). This is a form of
social capital which cannot be taken for granted; as mentioned above, its
decline has been a much-discussed topic in America following a seminal
article by Robert Putnam (1995). With high levels of trust you can do
things together which are impossible if you instinctively expect others to
cheat you may even be able to reconstruct a shared niche in sensible
ways in collaboration with immigrants.
The broad left is suspicious of the notion of social cohesion, because it
is used as a stick to beat immigrants with, and it is suggested, cf. Holtug
(2009), that it may not be immigration but rather anti-immigrant move-
ments that undermine social cohesion by marginalizing immigrants. From
the point of view I have been defending, however, these are not two com-
Strategies based on collaborative agency 435
peting theories there is every reason to think that both processes con-
tribute to eroding cohesion. Only if the debate is seen as a blaming game
rather than an attempt to understand what is happening are the two theo-
ries in conflict.
Recognizing the need to build a niche for an extended us entails that
the statement I am in favour of the multicultural society is either
untenable or merely pious. It is untenable if it means that subcultures are
entitled to play entirely by their own rules. It is merely pious if you mean
that you are in favour of members of different subcultures living side by
side peacefully. So is the vast majority, but that does not address the
problems.
The principles I have laid out in general form above, I believe, are not
just abstract stipulations they constitute a pointer to concrete social
practice. In this, they contrast radically with the anti-racist point of depar-
ture in an abstract universal humanity. The ban, in polite society, against
speaking of problems related to immigrants or members of non-main-
stream ethnic groups as something that calls for political initiatives
because associating immigrants with problems reflected a discursive con-
struction of immigrants as them made it impossible for a long time to
start constructing a new enlarged niche that would be different from what
both groups knew. During the 1970s and 1980s this ban was imposed
upon a number of Social Democrat mayors of towns with large immi-
grant subcommunities. The mayors pointed to economic and social prob-
lems due to the fact that a significant proportion of the population did
not speak the language, had low employment frequency and low educa-
tional success rates, and called for the party to define a way forward.
However, while the socially constructed ban was in force, the only per-
missible option was to speak instead of socially disadvantaged persons.
Since their problems were not identical to the problems of majority mem-
bers with social problems, the growing number of immigrants presented
the local authorities with tasks they could not handle with the means at
their disposal. And so the immigrant communities were left in their mar-
ginalized position.
This is an illustration of the pernicious consequences of thinking in
terms of discourse struggles in cases where collaborative communication
is an untried option: well-intentioned intellectuals steeped in the post-
Foucauldian lore contributed to making the problems worse by waging
discourse war on people who tried to address problems associated with
immigration on the ground. The situation today might have been differ-
ent if representatives of the broad left had found a way to discuss collabo-
ratively how to address the problems (or issues, if that had been more
436 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
I started out this chapter by saying that I agreed with most of the analyti-
cal points made by critically oriented discourse analysts. Since then I have
given a number of arguments to show that this form of analysis is aca-
demically, civically and strategically inadequate to address the issue. So
what part of the picture is it that discourses analysis can safely be allowed
to address?
I said in ch. 7 that the natural context for discourse struggles is com-
munication between two conflicting (sub)communities, especially mes-
sages that are best understood as position statements. In the terms
described above, that means that discourse struggles belong in situations
where there is already a well-entrenched them available. This is not an
unusual situation. It follows therefore that there are many cases where
discourses analyses have a job to do. In ch. 7, political campaigning was
offered as the obvious context for an exchange of mutual us-them con-
structions. This goes for all political parties and candidates that are up for
election. People who are attuned to this form of communication will find
it natural to analyse linguistic communication in terms of discourse strug-
gles, and this may be one reason it comes naturally to politically active
academics. When you are dealing with texts that enter into political con-
flicts, there is a legitimate academic and civic point in an analytic proce-
dure that looks for what interests, discursive constructions and values the
text is designed to propagate. Faircloughs (2000) analysis of the New
Labour discourse is an example of this type of analysis, dealing with pub-
lic, asymmetric communication that is designed as a blueprint for how to
(re)construct the social and political situation in Britain. Discourses anal-
ysis that avoids the problems discussed on p. 367 can thus bring out the
ways in which the openly advertised priorities and aims go with less appar-
ent and problematic sides of the position defined by the sender (the small
print and the gaps) and thus help readers articulate their own position.
The same obviously applies to the analysis of international relations, as
discussed in section 7.5.1. Dialogue between nations on the international
scene can safely be assumed to involve careful considerations of where to
situate the national we and its interests in relation to them, i. e. the other
nations involved in negotiations or exchange of position statements. CL-
inspired metaphor analysis goes naturally with this critical agenda, as
exemplified and argued by Chilton (1996).
Also in other institutional contexts, whenever statements are binding
for official bodies, it is necessary to formulate texts that define the official
position in ways that do not put institutional rules or commitments at risk.
Management position statements, for instance, need to construct company
practices in a way that reflects current policies. Abstracting from dialogic
orientation is a relevant strategy for understanding texts of this kind, pre-
cisely because they are designed to safeguard the interests of the sender
rather than reaching out towards the addressee.
There is also a personal dimension involved in understanding language
as defining a position rather than entering into an interactive relationship.
For people who speak or write in a professional context, their products
are important parts of their own social identity construction in A.Clarks
(1997) terms, they are parts of the person that extend beyond the body.
This function ideally collaborates with an attempt to ensure understand-
ing but ideal collaboration can never be taken for granted. The desire to
present a position that constructs the world in a particular manner may
438 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
lective in the first place, the question of whether invisible hand mecha-
nisms cause it to persist or erode away does not arise, and even more
obviously, there is no question of visible hand initiatives (which depend
on collaboration among people with membership status and participant
awareness). That is why status functions, such as those assigned to child
birthday parties, do not allow shared activities where ethnic divisions take
priority.
Nevertheless, joint activity and functional relations constitute the pre-
supposed foundations of the entire discussion in this chapter. This is
because the normative foundation of the argument (which Blommaert,
Verschueren and I share in complete agreement) is a commitment to the
goal of establishing societies where all have full membership status. The
argument in this chapter is based on the assumption that such a situation
can only be a sustainable part of social reality if there is an aggregate
social construction of which individuals can see themselves as members,
such that functional relations between individual and population-level
practices cause it to persist. It follows from the functional and joint-activ-
ity-based apparatus of the social cognitive framework that I have argued
for that the only way forward is to set about establishing what is missing.
Since the basic direction according to this framework is bottom-up, the
place to start is what I have called platform-building: establishing com-
mon ground on a face-to-face basis. This is because once there is common
ground, we can rely on universal human competencies to start pulling in
the right direction. On the ground, everybody prefers joint activity to
anomie or conflict.
This position would be touchingly nave if it went with a denial of the
top-down perspective. As frequently pointed out, however, once higher
levels have emerged they are part of social reality. Although in multi-eth-
nic contexts there are problems with perceived membership status across
dividing-lines, in societies like Denmark and Holland there are sociocul-
turally well-grounded democratic governments, law enforcement, public
health care, welfare and lots more besides. Ethnic divisions do not prevail
over all these socially constructed practices. The platforms need to work
at all socially constructed levels, and people in positions with enhanced
visible-hand type influence have a special responsibility for extending this
activity to more aggregate levels. The point of stressing platform-building
is just that you cannot build a community by working only from a top-
down perspective. This is where the strategy predicated on universal
humanity and legally enshrined equality failed.
People with special responsibility include intellectuals and academics.
This is where the civic agenda of this book comes in. Whether or not
440 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
Myrdals report and the retraction of scientific claims about white superi-
ority actually played a significant role for the dismantling of institutional-
ized racism in America, you have to be a very vulgar Marxist or anti-
humanist6 to deny any role to a normatively based and factually grounded
understanding of the way the world works in shaping policy decisions. The
most remarkable and deeply moving example in living memory is the role
of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in avoiding wholesale bloodshed
after the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. If it had not been for just
these two people in key visible-hand positions, there is no knowing what
would have happened. Crucial in this context, however, is that what is
special about them is not that they were for harmony and against may-
hem; they were hardly alone in that. What was special was that they found
a way to make their visions prevail in the process of getting a new society
up and running.
This is a daunting example to set. But the point that I think applies at
all levels of understanding and influence is this: the key issue for all those
who would like to use their understanding of policy issues to promote
civic causes is to have a theory about how this can actually work. How can
a conceptual understanding, with its necessary normative foundation,
enter (efficaciously) into the social process?
On this key point, I suggest that the social cognitive framework I have
put forward has advantages over both a purely cognitivist and a purely
social constructionist approach. What I hope to contribute is a theoreti-
cally founded approach to the relations between conceptual understand-
ing and social reality. The functional perspective is essential because it
points to the conditions under which social constructions that we support
in principle need to be supported also in terms of patterns of actual
causal relevance. In the case of ethnic division, the central implication is
that we-formation above face-to-face level is grounded in collective prac-
6 Bourdieu analyses education (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990) and language use
(Bourdieu 1991) as aspects of the mindless reproduction of social power. I
have tried to show that in the social cognitive framework such processes,
understood as pin-prick driven adaptation, are part of the picture, and it
would be nave to see individual understanding as the only player on the scene.
Even worse than ignoring such processes, however, would be to conclude that
they are the only thing that is real. Bourdieu (1991: 109) claims that the
spokesperson is an impostor endowed with the skeptron, where the skeptron
is analogous to the conductors baton that constitutes his visible hand but if
we take that statement as the whole truth, there could be no point in ever
choosing a spokesperson to address issues of common concern.
Final remarks 441
may situate the whole analysis as a move in the blaming game. As also in
non-academic contexts (cf. above p. 334), this language game is likely to
replace whatever other business is at hand with its own powerful agenda.
Its purpose is to allocate blame (cf. p. 124), and when that has occurred the
game is over. This makes a symbiosis with the language games of science
and scholarship, whose purpose is to understand what the object of
description is like, a risky business.7
I believe that if academic analysis of meaning in society is to serve its
civic purpose, it needs to be unambiguously committed to understanding
what is going on in the object of description, rather than to apportioning
blame. Even when allocation of blame is fully justified and serves a clear-
cut civic purpose, academics have no privileged role in that process they
need to make common cause with the rest of civil society in order to
achieve democratic legitimacy. For civic purposes, this is the most impor-
tant reason why a framework for critical analysis of meaning in society
needs to include collaborative agency, factual grounding and functional
relations like the social cognitive linguistics I have tried to outline.
(1) Divergent and variational properties are part of the same reality that
also includes convergent and invariant properties; the two sides are interde-
pendent and equally important parts of the picture
fact of the matter, and which could be viewed as belonging in the mind
while also manifesting itself as part of culture (cf. Holland and Quinn
1987: 6, as discussed on p. 203). From such a generalizing and cognitivist
view, divergences across the community or between mind, language and
society are essentially noise. However, in a differentiated account, prop-
erties of individual minds may diverge from properties of usage events,
which in turn may differ from sociocultural facts as a result of variation
at all levels.
In the differentiated framework, convergent evidence reflects an ideal
equilibrium condition in which there is full participant agreement, the
sociocultural world operates the way participants believe, and perform-
ance error does not occur. Although such cases are interesting as ideal
types in Webers sense, they do not provide insight in the dynamic rela-
tions between cognition and society. Just as Labovian variation may pre-
dict language change, divergence between cultural norms, usage events
and individual conceptions may reflect or predict social change (as in the
example of Gunnar Myrdal pointing to the discrepancy between sociocul-
turally entrenched norms in the US and actual discriminatory practices).
This means that investigating the full differentiated picture of concep-
tualization in society requires an extensive collaboration between two
types of analysis: on the one hand, categorization based on qualitative
participant awareness, and on the other, empirical and quantitative
description of the variation within categories. Such collaboration depends
on recognition of this as a genuinely joint project: categories are void
unless linked up with instantiations, and variational description presup-
poses shared categories within which one can identify variation (as
opposed to mere fluctuation or difference). In a linguistic context, this
is exemplified with for instance the Leuven group (cf. p. 67); in the area of
meaning as a force in social change, it ultimately demands a wider cross-
disciplinary alliance.
ity is at best only part of the truth. Because conceptual structures that enter
into sociocultural reality are lineages, there are functional mechanisms at
work, which are responsible for non-random patterns of persistence.
Such patterns have a privileged status both for scientific and civic pur-
poses: in both cases, it is essential to get at the patterns that prevail. This
perspective thus has a key anti-reductionist role: only in a panchronic per-
spective can the properties of an individual usage event be divided into
idiosyncratic and functional features. This applies both to meaning as
competency and meaning in society, in the niche. In a strictly local per-
spective, a conveyed meaning cannot be factored out into conventional
meanings (either by the learner or the linguist) this requires reference to
other instances of the same lineage.
Part of what this book has tried to show can be expressed by saying that
the words conceptuality, semantically and linguistically are insufficient to
capture what is going on here.
What is at stake is a social process, consisting in changes in niche con-
cepts ways of dealing with the world as part of lived practices rather
than mental and linguistic competencies in individuals. In terms of the
framework I defend, there are at least three steps from conceptualization
to this type of historical process: first of all, the concepts have to enter into
a construction of the relevant part of reality in this case, into (conflict-
ing) constructions of the French Republic. Secondly, these constructions
must acquire a sufficient amount of acceptance in the community. Thirdly,
in order to gain efficacy they need to be anchored in social processes with
the requisite form of causality. Mere opinions are not enough, any more
than mental processes. It was not conceptualizations, word meanings and
language that brought down successively the Bourbons, Louis Philippe
and post-imperial authorities in Paris it was the causality of social struc-
ture in France as shaped by a complex interrelationship between language
and conceptualization on the one hand and social processes on the other.
This is clearly part of Kosellecks view, too, as shown by the reference
to economic interests the vocabulary just does not include a clear dis-
tinction between concepts as part of the mind and conceptually imbued
parts of social reality 8; 9
and causal elements would probably fall under his concept of total history, a
project which he regards as impossible (ibid.).
10 In discussing the history of the discourse of tolerance, at one point she makes
it explicit that the use of the actual word is not required: Not named tolerance
but tolerance it was, Brown (2006:57): in other words, if it instantiates the
concept as she has defined it, it qualifies as a discourse the way she uses the
term.
450 Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives
(7) Discourses are historical lineages and are therefore susceptible to func-
tional feedback mechanisms
In other words: reality strikes back! Where an individual usage event can
conceivably be divorced from all discernible relations with anything else
in the world, discourses cannot both be historical objects and be under-
stood as exempt from the forces of differential selection that apply to all
other phenomena in social space. If discourses are part of the fray, they
must be subject to impact from it; and that impact, including functional
relations, is part of the full account of discourses.11
Although feedback includes many other factors, for representational
speech acts one source of potential feedback is the reality that is the target
of discursive construction (as in the case of experimental evidence). In
that case, factual grounding may shape successive representations in ways
that bring about gradually improved correlations between predicted and
actual experience with the object of representation.
Viewing social reality solely as a flow unchecked by constraints in the
environment is equally damaging in the understanding of language and in
the understanding of other social processes. Pretting (2009) shows how
closely poststructural thinking in terms of floating signifiers matches
thinking in the financial sector before the crash in 2008. Just as there is no
hors-texte foundation for endless ongoing successions of meaning con-
structions (to the Derrida-inspired sorcerers apprentice), there is no
external foundation for the endless repackaging of debts in successive lev-
eraging operations (to the young financial wizard). The dynamics of
unconstrained flow is extremely interesting, just as Derrida suggested
but this is not least because it is part of the way the world works, and at
some point (the rest of) reality strikes back.
Even if or rather, especially if the chief analytic purpose is critical,
functional relations are crucial: if you want to enter into a discourse strug-
gle, it is practical to know whether the opponent discourse is bullshit with
a track record of defective factual grounding, a utopian project with
unknown viability, or a hegemonic discourse grounded in well-entrenched
habitus.
12 The lure of this kind of irrationality, however is one of the great paradoxes of
intellectual history. It was pointed out by Kierkegaard in relation to Hegel,
who he said described the world as a vast palace only to place himself in a dog
kennel outside it. In actual events it was even more strikingly exemplified by
Marx, whose deterministic analysis of the progress of history was driven by a
strong indignation and unleashed the greatest agentive attack in history on
class-based power. Foucauldian analysis of impersonal power typically reflects
the same indignation.
13 Foucaults precise position is famously elusive when it comes to ontological
commitments, and this includes the precise ontological status of the forces that
are behind the (deceptive) appearances that he analyses. In two interviews in
Rabinow 1984 (pp. 376 and 384), Foucault answers questions about his posi-
tion by referring (with some complacency) to the fact that he has been placed
practically everywhere in the philosophical landscape. This elusive quality is a
logical consequence of his central descriptive strategy, i. e. not to ask how
452 Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives
tainer actively exerts force on the contained object an early OED quote
speaks of containing the people in good order (which is necessarily agen-
tive). The exertion of agentive force makes the state-of-affairs more
dynamic and raises the possibility of a termination (if the force-dynamic
balance shifts).
This case is the main (most salient) sense associated with the nomi-
nalization containment, which therefore designates the reified process of
keeping something from crossing the restraining barrier of the container.
This involves the beginnings of a metaphorical mapping from the pure
domain of spatial relations to the domain of agentive activity.
These aspects are all within the territory of classic CL. In order to
understand the term as applied to security issues, however, we need to
include its causal history in the social world. The term can be traced back
to seminal discursive constructions: its use in the so-called long telegram
and later the X article (The Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs,
July 1947) by the State Department official George F. Kennan (cf. Patter-
son 1973: 24). He used it to describe how the US should respond to Rus-
sian expansionist tendencies in areas of vital interest. It did not take long,
however, for these discursive constructions of the state of US interna-
tional relations to give rise to a causally anchored social construction in
the form of an American foreign policy. It was implemented by Harry Tru-
man and continued with variations all through the cold war, and its basic
logic was that the US must ensure that the Soviet government was not
allowed to extend its area of influence anywhere in the world. As such, it
demonstrated the efficacy of a very visible-hand type of social trajectory.
This social construction had a reality of its own whose sociocultural
grounding included an efficacy dimension in the form of American mili-
tary power and a acceptance dimension in the form of widespread and
hegemonic belief among Americans and westerners in general that this
was the role of the US in the world. The need to distinguish the discursive
construction from the ensuing social construction as well as from Ken-
nans own mental construction can be seen from the fact that Kennan
criticized the policy that was based on his discursive construction, and
eventually left the State Department (cf. Patterson 1973: 210211 and the
detailed study of containment and the cold war in Chilton 1996, Part
Two14). The central point of disagreement was the question of whether a
level of subtlety of Chiltons analysis, but simply refer the reader to Chiltons
account.
Final remarks 455
the case of Saddam Hussein and the war against Iraq, containment was
understood not as an alternative to an alliance, but as the alternative to
war. Thus in New York Times, an article on February 2, 2003, a month
before the attack, described containment as the preferable option,
under the headline Keeping Saddam Hussein in a Box evoking the basic
spatial scenario as basis for a full-fledged metaphor.
The development illustrates how exemplars of containment (words,
discursive constructions, discourses and operational social constructions)
gradually filter into word meaning, and also how these contribute to the
persistence and proliferation of the word itself as a panchronic lineage.
The noun containment was described as rare in the 1933 edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary (and in one example has a sense that is close
to contents); but after the cold war it has become a household word (253
records in the British National Corpus, as opposed to 12 for containable,
which was not said to be rare in 1933). It has also entered into new social
constructions in the form of foreign policies such as those applied to North
Korea after disillusion with the Iraq intervention set in, cf. Containment is
challenging, but better than using force.15
In order to understand containment in the context of international
security, it is clear that you have to understand all dimensions at the same
time: at the macro-level, the causal (including military) power of Ameri-
can politics and its alignment with the concept; at the other end, the con-
ceptualization and its grounding in elementary experience. Security and
insecurity are linked; causal and conceptual links have to be studied as
part of the same overall enterprise; concepts, discursive and social con-
structions, discourses and feedback patterns all have to be kept distinct
and ultimately related in an integrated understanding.
The final example is an analysis of a TV debate (on The Daily Show,
December 8, 2008) between Jon Stewart and Gov. Mike Huckabee on gay
marriage. The debate ran as follows: 16
JS: I want to talk to you about social conservatism. This is really about you
wanting the Republican Party to get back to those basics. And respectfully
speaking, the one thing I guess I dont understand about social conservatism
is I get pro-life and I think thats probably the No 1 issue, its very easy for me
to understand it () the gay marriage issue and why conservatives are against
15 San Jose Mercury News, January 19, 2006 by Daniel C. Sneider (http://aparc.
stanford.edu/news/, accessed May 9, 2009).
16 The transcription makes no claims to anything else than reasonably accurate
representation of the words prosodic, proxemic, gestural, and I blush to think
how many other dimensions are totally absent, for which I apologize.
Final remarks 457
it. You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society why would you not
want more couples to buy into the stability of marriage? Why would you want
that precluded for an entire group of people?
MH: Well, marriage still means one man one woman, life relationship. I think
people have a right to live any way they want to, but even anatomically, lets
face it, the only way that we can create the next generation is through a male-
female relationship For 5000 years of recorded human history thats what
marriage has meant 30 states have had it on the ballot and all 30 states its
passed, even in states like California that nobody would suggest are social con-
servatives
JS: 30 states had Mike Huckabee on the ballot, and they went with McCain
Listen, you cant trust the voters the voters dont know
MH: In those states, Jon, an average of 68 % across America have affirmed tra-
ditional marriage. Its not that they try to say theyre gonna ban something as
much as theyre going to affirm what has always been
JS () I guess my question is: reaffirming the traditional marriage of 5000
years, which takes us back to the Old Testament where polygamy was the norm,
not a heterosexual marriage between two couples that choose each other
marriage has evolved greatly over those 5000 years from a property arrange-
ment polygamy, weve redefined it constantly. It used to be that people of dif-
ferent races could not marry. It strikes me as very convenient to go back to the
Bible and say, hey, man, we gotta look at the way they . define marriage
not the way they did slavery
MH: If we change the definition, then we really do have to change it to accom-
modate all lifestyles .well have to say to the guy in West Texas who had 27
wives, thats okay and Im not sure that I hear a lot of people arguing that that
is a great idea
JS. I dont know why polygamy has the issue here it seems like a funda-
mental human right you write in your book that all people are created equal
and yet for gay people you believe that it is corrosive to society to allow them to
have the privileges that all humans enjoy
MH: Well theres a difference between the equality of each individual and the
equality of what we do, and the sameness of what we do. I mean the fact is mar-
riage is under our law is a privilege, not a basic
JS: So what do you make it that the Hispanics cant vote
MH: I am not sure thats a really good idea I am not sure we should do that
JS: So why cant gay people get married?
MH: Because marriage still means a male and female relationship
JS I disagree you know, segregation used to be the law until the courts
intervened
458 Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives
MH: Theres a big difference between a person being black and a person prac-
ticing a lifestyle and engaging in a marital relationship
JS: Actually this is helpful, this gets to the crux of it. I think it is the difference
between what you believe gay people are and what I do I live in NYC so Im
just gonna make the supposition that I have more experience being around
them and Ill tell you this: Religion is far more of a choice than homosexual-
ity and the protections that we have for religion we protect religion and
talk about a lifestyle choice that is absolutely a choice gay people dont
choose to be gay at what age did you choose to not be gay?
MH: Jon, religious people dont have the right to burn others at the stake, they
dont have the right do anything they wish to do
JS: Youre not being asked to marry a guy theyre asking to marry the person
they love
MH: Theyre asking to redefine the word and frankly were probably not going
to come to terms but if the American people are not convinced that we
should overturn the definition of marriage then I would say that those who
support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the
rest of us, and as I said, 68 % of the American population have made that deci-
sion
JS: You know you talk about the pro-life movement being one of the great
shames of our nation. I think if you want No 2, I think its that I think its an
absolute Its a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to
have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights
MH: I disagree with that, I really do and one of the things I want to make sure
that people understand that if a person does not necessarily support the idea of
changing the definition of marriage, it does not mean that they are a homo-
phobe it does not means that theyre filled with hate and animosity
JS I was in no way suggesting that
MH No you were not saying that, but I think there some people would like to
throw the epithets at people, whether theyre like me or someone else
JS () The question is WHY? You keep telling us: jeez It would be redefining a
word and it feels like semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity
and especially someone such as yourself who is I think an empathetic person
who is someone who seeks to get to the heart of problems . this idea that
jeez I dont know, Jon, definitions in society I mean, marriage was not even
a sacrament until the 1200s
MH: Words do matter, definitions matter and I think we have to be very
thoughtful and careful before we say that were going to undo an entire social
structure. I mean lets face it the basic purpose of a marriage is not just to cre-
ate the next generation but its to train a replacement and its in the context of
Final remarks 459
This debate is meant for the public and is designed to highlight a disagree-
ment between two positions and the groups that identify with them, and
thus fits into the type of context I have suggested as typical of discourse
struggles. It would in fact lend itself fairly easily to an analysis in terms of
discourse struggle, with Jon Stewart representing a human rights dis-
course, and Mike Huckabee a traditional marriage discourse. Such an
analysis would capture the fact that both parties have a nodal point in
the sense of Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 112), associated with an ideology
and also that while Jon Stewart may be judged to score more points, the
discussion does not change the positions held by the two speakers. In the
following I am going to try to illustrate how questions highlighted by the
framework of this book, while leaving room for the element of discourse
struggle, can cover important elements of what goes on here that would be
left out by an analysis that focuses on the discursive conflict alone.
Among those are the features due to collaborative, understanding-ori-
ented aspects of communication. Strikingly, appeals to shared values and
common ground pervade the interview. In the introduction, Jon Stewart
talks about the pro-life movement as a case where he can understand
Huckabees stance, thus establishing partially common ground as the basis
on which he is going to address the crucial difference. Other appeals to
common ground involve issues such as empathy, human rights, the stabil-
ity of marriage, not equating defence of traditions with being a homo-
phobe, etc.
Agency is part of collaboration: I think it is obvious that Jon Stewart is
making a determined agentive effort to reach out as part of the attempt
to make his own focal point as strongly as possible: if we can agree on all
these other points, how can a nice man like you rob gay people of the right
to get married?
460 Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives
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1 $WWKHVXJJHVWLRQRI0RXWRQGH*UX\WHU,KDYHRSWHGIRUDFRPELQHGLQGH[LQ
ZKLFKRQO\DXWKRUVWKDWPD\EHYLHZHGDVVXEMHFWVKDYHEHHQOLVWHGZKHUHDV
DXWKRUV WKDW IURP WKH SRLQW RI YLHZ RI WKLV ERRN DUH HVVHQWLDOO\ UHIHUHQFHV
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506 Index
Beliefs 45, 60, 93, 107, 109, 115, 141, 181, 185186, 196, 206221, 234,
170, 306, 32630, 332333, 335336, 236, 239, 254, 257, 259, 269274,
337, 409, 411, 414, 420, 455, 460 278, 288289, 309310, 318326,
Berger, Peter 105 337338, 346354, 355, 361, 367,
Berlin, Brent 177 383, 386388, 406407, 415,
Bernardez, Enrique 316 418420, 436, 445, 447449
Billiard-ball model 29, 5152, 86, 255, Aristotelian (classical) categories
257, 261, 264, 17, 23, 29, 39, 50, 74, 215, 220, 350,
Billig, Michael 317, 365 362, 367, 386, 447
Blame (= the blaming game) 124 Linguistic or structural categories
126, 309, 334335, 342, 426, 435, 24, 41, 5152, 55, 78, 9293, 129
441442 132, 134135, 177, 206, 212, 213,
Blank slate 33, 74, 108, 124 229, 234, 236, 239242, 245, 246,
Blending 42, 9599, 431, 436 254, 257, 269274, 292, 299,
Blommaert, Jan 118119, 409, Causality (causal power, causal
412414, 420, 439 structure) 4, 7, 9, 29, 3233, 45, 78,
Bloomfield, Leonard 269 8891, 104105, 108, 110, 122,
Bourdieu, Pierre 83, 109111, 130, 125126, 138, 141178, 199201,
137, 207208, 221, 315318, 329, 204205, 244, 268, 274, 277,
331, 338, 428, 440 289315, 318345, 352, 359.
Boye, Kasper 231, 238, 267 361362, 369384, 400403, 405,
Bottom-up vs. top-down 11, 34, 38, 407408, 410, 413, 421, 429, 432,
4851, 54, 8586, 130, 211, 224227, 440449, 453455
230232, 237, 240242, 245247, Knee-jerk causality (=one-way
250268, 298, 307, 318, 349, 376, causality) 161, 164, 168, 177, 244,
416, 429432, 436, 439 324, 335, 445
Bhler, Karl 71, 82, 86, 88, 306, 354 See-saw causality (=influence-
Bullshit 339345, 348, 438, 450 and-be-influenced by) 143, 152,
Butler, Christopher 127, 129, 133, 168, 178, 314, 328, 392
136, 230, 254, 263 CDA see Critical Discourse Analysis
Butler, Judith 386 Charteris-Black, Jonathan 391
Bybee, Joan 88, 230, 234, 335 Chilton, Paul 2, 63, 362, 373, 391,
401403, 437, 442, 453
Canonical viewing arrangement 86 Chomsky, Noam 18, 48, 51, 7374, 77,
Capital (= financial capital; see also 127, 148, 174, 198, 201, 208, 220,
symbolic capital) 11, 121, 338, 399 227, 235236, 240, 282, 375
Carnap, Rudolph 223 Civic purpose 13, 114, 305, 354,
Category, categorization 12, 1730, 400409, 421, 438442
39, 4142, 5052, 5556, 65, 72, 74n, CL (=cognitive linguistics, passim)
80, 9293, 101, 104, 108, 122, 125, Clark, Andy 153, 320, 437
129132, 134135, 142143, 177,
References 507
Clark, Herbert 10, 9394, 155156, 294295, 298, 302, 310, 315, 321,
159, 165, 171, 174, 176, 184, 195, 323325, 334, 338, 343, 34647, 358,
257, 281, 293294, 308, 310, 431 386387, 403, 405, 444, 446447, 455
Coercion 22, 245251, 260261, 367, Component-based/unit-based struc-
401402, 452 ture 224, 226227, 230, 232,
Cognitivism 5, 5863, 66, 84, 144, 304, 235236, 240241, 246247, 259,
313, 326, 348, 391394, 397, 298
401404, 440, 445 Concept 7, 12, 1522, 2529, 32,
Collaboration 118, 257, 287, 295, 305, 3940, 56, 60, 64, 67, 73, 101, 182,
346, 362, 364, 380, 383, 409 185187, 189, 212219, 221, 306,
Collaborative agency (see also visible 310, 314, 318326, 331, 346357,
hand) 306, 362, 364, 380, 383, 400, 382, 393395, 397, 400, 446447,
404, 429442 454456
Collins, Harry 389 Competency concept 12, 325, 346,
Colour categories 1719, 92, 177 403, 405, 423, 425, 447449, 455
178, 446 Niche concept 12, 73, 318326,
Common ground 87, 94, 155, 287, 346354, 368, 372374, 382, 387,
293, 312, 356357, 364, 429430, 393395, 403, 405, 417, 427,
439, 459 447449, 454, 461
Communication Conceptual engineering 348349,
Human communication 75, 148, 398
362, 364, 368, 404 Conduit metaphor 95, 183, 293
Animal communication 75, 81, Confirmation bias 276, 424
148n, 150151, 244 Conflict vs. collaboration 9, 287288,
Community 1012, 42, 70, 76, 79, 362366, 418421, 436442
8384, 87, 9495, 105106, 109, Connectionism 74, 176
115116, 138, 148156, 165, Constitutive role of meaning 7, 82,
171175, 178, 180181, 190192, 86, 164172, 193, 331, 340, 374, 385
219220, 228, 244, 269302, Construal 2122, 47, 87, 94, 100, 127,
303462 189, 209, 296297, 307309, 343,
Community of practice 94, 416 346, 350, 380, 426
Interpretive community 190192, Construction, see Discursive construc-
333 tion, Meaning construction, Social
Scientific community 105106, construction, Syntactic construc-
336, 380, 450 tion
Speech community 1012, 42, 70, Construction Grammar 34, 88, 92,
148156, 159, 165166, 180181, 99, 176, 211, 224258
193, 219220, 222, 228, 244, 269302 Container (schema) 12, 21, 29, 31,
Competency 1012, 103n, 174175, 6162, 66, 72, 87, 185186, 206n,
179222, 224, 226, 228, 236, 216218, 221, 257, 274, 320,
247248, 252, 258, 282285, 287, 322325, 331, 352, 387, 452453
508 Index
Frank, Roslyn 93, 178 Grice, Paul 38, 76, 100101, 184, 247,
Frankfurt, Harry 339345 251, 257, 389, 398,
Function (see also status function) Grondelaers, Stefan 6668, 274, 275
15, 911, 2829, 46, 56, 160170, Grounding 3, 5, 10, 12, 15, 2021,
175179, 185186, 193, 204206, 3032, 5760, 7988, 94, 110, 151,
213216, 218220, 222227, 153154, 176177, 254, 257, 263,
236462 306, 308, 316, 326, 332, 336, 339
Function-based structure 226227, 349, 354, 358, 366, 374383,
234235, 236268, 298, 373, 382, 388390, 397, 399, 402, 404405,
Functional Discourse Grammar 225, 408410, 413415, 419422, 427,
259 438, 442, 446, 450456, 460
Functional Grammar 265 Bodily grounding (see also
Functionalism 73, 92, 135, 160, 179, embodiment) 3, 15, 30, 53, 83,
227, 230, 242, 243 110, 153, 176, 306, 316, 332, 340,
Functional relations 2, 4, 9, 12, 138, 353354, 383, 405, 420, 446, 452
160164, 167169, 171, 178, 204, Factual grounding 12, 306,
225226, 237, 243, 244245, 303, 339346, 348, 379383, 388389,
308, 314, 336, 376, 379, 404, 438450 402, 404405, 408, 410, 415, 419,
422, 438, 441, 450, 454455, 460
Gallie, W. 425, 427 Intersubjective grounding 86, 94,
Grdenfors, Peter 6, 26, 216, 226, 287, 308, 354,
358 Sociocultural grounding 306, 332,
Geeraerts, Dirk 3, 14, 19, 41, 6369, 340, 342, 346, 348, 354, 358, 380,
72, 100, 116, 210, 215, 230, 274, 275, 397, 399, 404, 413, 427, 446, 453, 455
279, 287, 301, 417 Subjective grounding 86, 389
Gender (gender roles) 103, 112, 117, Gumperz, John 415
227, 262, 274, 323, 328, 337, 352,
357, 385386, 395, 417, 441, 461 Habermas, Jrgen 78, 281, 364365,
Generative linguistics 14, 29, 4850, 396, 399, 431
7374, 198202, 224229, 233236, Habitus 108, 110, 137, 207208, 219,
254, 260, 264268 221, 306, 314318, 322, 332, 334,
Gergen, Kenneth 123, 124 353, 361, 378, 389, 403, 447, 451
Gesture 75, 8182, 148, 208 Hall, Edward T. 420, 430
Gibbs, Raymond 61, 62, 100 Halliday, Michael A. K. 126136, 194
Givn, T. 240 Hansen, Lene 122, 370, 372, 373,
Goldberg, Adele 216, 233234, 245, 378379
258, 267 Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
Gould, Stephen Jay 146, 240, 349 187189
Grady, Joseph 36, 37, 385 Hart, Christopher 355, 391, 400
Gramsci, Antonio 109 Hawkins, Bruce 6163
Hawkins, John A. 272
References 511
Hegemony 74n, 109, 115, 281, 323, 257, 269272, 291292, 320325,
333, 371, 387, 408, 421, 423424, 346355, 375, 386387, 394395,
428, 451, 453 407, 425, 445, 449
Hengeveld, Kees 254255, 259 Instructions (instructional semantics)
Hermeneutics of suspicion 113, 136, 182194, 209, 212, 251, 254, 256,
171, 356357, 365, 452 262,
Hilpert, Martin 35 Intersubjectivity (see also grounding,
Historical linguistics 88, 167 intersubjective) 2, 10, 58, 70, 72,
Hjelmslev, Louis 18, 9293, 177 7988, 94, 101, 128, 152, 174, 242,
Hobbes, Thomas 175, 374 277, 280, 308, 354, 364, 404, 431,
Holophrase 151, 212, 237, 240241, 443, 451
252, 266267 Intertextuality 112, 120
Honey, John 284 Intrinsic (=observer-independent)
Hopper, Paul 176, 230, 234, 286, 335 features 138146, 164, 166, 201
Hull, David 8990, 108, 163, 272, 323, Invisible hand 138, 140, 154163, 172,
336337, 380, 450 244, 277, 286287, 293, 305306,
Hutchins, Edwin 59, 8485, 276, 295, 329330, 335, 339, 343, 352,
320, 424 359361, 380, 386, 390, 396, 404,
422, 432, 439, 441, 444, 451452, 460
ICM, see idealized conceptual model Itkonen, Esa 69, 78, 277
Idealized conceptual model 2729,
46, 56, 112, 218219, 289, 307, 317, Jackendoff, Ray 318
351, 353, 381, 397, 423, Jespersen, Otto 240, 302
Identity (identity construction) 69, Johnson, Mark 3, 3031, 3537, 80,
112, 116117, 142, 274, 288289, 96, 124, 137, 165, 198, 202, 206, 315
304, 331, 334, 337338, 351, Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 183, 206,
373378, 385388, 413, 415, 420, 215, 308
437, 449 Joint action or activity 7, 10, 78, 93,
Ideology 6063, 98, 109, 115, 121, 101, 155158, 165, 172, 174, 281,
135136, 280281, 328, 356357, 365, 343, 357, 360, 365, 385, 416
369, 413, 459 418, 429, 439, 441
Image schema 3035, 42, 57, 83, 87, Joint attention 7, 10, 7079, 82, 93,
317, 452 101, 151153, 155, 165, 174, 277,
Imagined community 331332, 376 296, 308309, 315, 364, 384, 404,
Implicature 100101, 247 416, 425, 429, 431, 443
Individual level 89, 154159, 293,
311, 393394, 436 Kay, Paul 177, 218, 233
Individual instance vs. collective or Keller, Rudi 157158, 277
general category 6, 12, 17, 19, 23, Kemmer, Suzanne 58
28, 29, 31, 40, 49, 65, 129, 130, Klinge, Alex 235
185186, 213219, 225, 249250,
512 Index
Turner, Mark 36, 42, 9599, 192, Verschueren, Jef 118119, 409,
288289 412414, 420, 439
Viability 295, 312, 319, 323, 330, 345,
Universal humanism 409, 412413, 352, 359, 363, 389, 451, 455
415416, 421, 423, 430431, 435, 439 Visible hand 9, 156159, 172, 286,
Usage based linguistics 58, 6364, 66, 305, 328, 343, 346, 352, 359, 360,
7374, 90, 101, 116, 148, 180181, 379380, 386, 388, 390, 400, 404,
212, 219, 222223, 227228, 230, 419, 425, 432, 439441, 444,
235, 260, 265, 269, 273, 292, 335, 451453, 460
341, 400 Vygotsky, Lev 7172, 103, 324
Usage fundamentalism 8, 181, 210,
212, 228, 337, 346 We (as a social construction) 7, 77,
Usage based structure 235 152153, 310, 315, 363, 416417,
Us vs. them 112, 408, 415421, 429431, 437, 449450
424426, 429, 432, 435438, 449 Weber, Max 317, 329, 445
Whorf, Benjamin Lee 73
Validity 107, 132, 134135, 402, Widdowson, Henry 134135
van Dijk, Teun A. 369, 409, 411 Wieder, Lawrence 320322, 419
Variation (variability) 1011, 40, 42, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 40, 80, 83, 98,
58, 6469, 92, 9495, 98, 101, 104, 107, 124, 136, 171, 179, 207,
116117, 137, 162, 167, 171, 175, 350, 357
190, 205, 216, 221, 222302, 312, Wray, Alison 247249, 258
323, 329330, 346353, 362, 372, Wver, Ole 125, 370382, 448
381382, 385386, 389, 417, 423,
425, 427428, 443445, 447, Ziegeler, Debra 245247
453454. Zlatev, Jordan 4, 10, 77, 8083, 174,
Verhagen, Arie 10, 8688, 94, 193, 198, 308
204, 231, 271, 308, 354