HCH use the notion of problem solving to mean reaching a goal
that is not readily available.
Three aspects:
Example: Suppose that we need a (new) way to express future tense.
Result: lexical sources are used to express grammatical meanings. Unidirectional! Unusual, and Useful; the inventive type of creativity, using old stuff for new.
HCH say grammaticalization begins with individual creativity, is then taken up communally, then influenced by universal strategies of conceptual manipulation. All these things interact.
basic --> derived2 --> derived3Basic stuff are the most useful names for things, or most usual states or verbal activities ('sit, stand, lie';). Some source concepts are of higher order ('person, thing, do, go'; 'have, be, take, give, make, come')
Egocentricity, or relationships-to-ego, are important (remember the speaker-centered strategy?)
Linguistically, we are talking about lexemes i.e.
Wierzbicka (1989) uses two main parameters, defining power and universality
But some things can't be explained: frequency of use, conceptual simplicity, semantic unmarkedness, pragmatic silence, may not be sufficient to explain what are used as source concepts... Some languages use unusual sources for pronouns (e.g. southeast, East Asian languages) esp. when there are marked social hierarchies that must be observed in those societies. The Spanish pronoun usted may be derived from Arabic ustad 'master, expert' (instead of the commonly thought source, a shortening of vuestra merced 'your grace.')
| Example | Type of Proposition |
|
|---|---|---|
| (1) | "X is at Y" | Locational |
| (2) | "X moves to/from Y" | Motion |
| (3) | "X does Y" | Action |
| (4) | "X is part of Y" | Part-whole |
| (5) | "X is (like) a Y" | Equational |
| (6) | "X is with Y" | Comitative |
These state things like where Ego is, where Ego is moving to or from; what is moving toward or from Ego, what kind of spatial relations exist between Ego and others or the world; what kinds of temporal relations exist; which are dynamic, which are static.
The locational proposition may be used for aspectual/mood distinctions,
such as progressive etc. e.g. Tamil pooy-irukeen
'I have gone' Kannada hoogiddiini 'ibid.' or French je
suis en train d'aller 'I am in (the process of) going' or
je suis sur le champ d'aller 'I'm about to go ('on the
field of') German Ich bin im Begriff zu gehen 'I am in
(the concept of) going';
Note Sapir's types of concepts:
| Type of Concept | Degree of Abstractness | |
|---|---|---|
| I | Basic (concrete) | Concrete |
| II | Derivational | Less concrete |
| III | Concrete relational | More abstract |
| IV | Pure Relational | Purely abstract |
Another treatment of abstraction: Diehl (1975) correlating a continuum of egodeictic remoteness with the concrete/abstract continuum. Proposes 4 types of space:
which are increasingly progressively remote unlike, or 'distant from' EGO.
Other kinds/uses of abstraction.
This latter kind is what HCH feel underlies grammaticalization; concerns the way we conceptualize the world around us.
| Table 2.2 Characteristics of Metaphorical Abstraction | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | Vehicle | Replaced by | Topic |
| Ideational | Clearly delineated, compact | | Fuzzy, diffuse |
| Physical (visible, tangible) | | Nonphysical, mental | |
| Thing-like | | Qualities | |
| Sociophysical interactions | | Mental processes | |
| Process | | State | |
| Space | | Time, cause, manner | |
| Individual | | Mass, class, noncountable | |
| Autonomous | | Relational | |
| Textual | "Real World" | | "World of Discourse" |
| Less discourse-based | | More discourse-based, more speaker-based | |
| Referential | | Nonreferential | |
| New Information | | Old Information | |
| Interpersonal | Expressive | | Nonexpressive |
Of the kinds of metaphorical abstraction that exist, for linguistics, 2 are important:
As we have seen, metaphor is defined/used differently, sometimes broadly, sometimes including metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole etc. HCH prefer a narrow definition, but see it as one of the main processes underlying grammaticalization
They quote Bybee and Pagliuca, acc. to which metaphorical extension
"A concrete lexical item is recruited to express a more abstract concept ... this emptying of lexical content is a prerequisite to grammaticalization because grammatical functions in themselves are necessarily abstract."
Willet compares three ways to account for grammaticalization :
and concludes that metaphorical extension hypothesis offers the best explanation.
Hopper & Traugott of course prefer metonymy to metaphor; but others talk about "semantic assimilation" (Schlesinger) etc. but they really mean metaphor. HCH then give the example of going to used first spatially/locationally ('he is going to town') vs. futuratively ('he is going to work; the rain is going to come').
(We also know that the 'locational' use of going to cannot be truncated phonologically to gonna while the future use can:
Reasons for the explanation of metaphor are as follows:
(15) I am going to work.
Other explanations: (HCH quote Jackendoff; Traugott; Peirce quoted by Brinton). But HCH feel that these explanations are somehow evasive, or attempting to avoid 'metaphor' when what it really is, is metaphor, or more specifically, metaphorical transfer. The argument of metonymy, offered by Traugott (and Hopper and Traugott) is, HCH say, too strong; actually what is happening (they say) is a combination of metaphor and metonymy. The strong involvement of a continuum with transfer along the chain of the continuum, is characteristic of metonymy, but metonymy is not the whole picture.
There is a scale or chain of metaphorical abstraction, thus:
PERSON > OBJECT > ACTIVITY > SPACE > TIME > QUALITYThese categories are
The kind of metaphor we are dealing with here is experiential rather than expressive or taboo (e.g.). Experiential metaphors describe abstract/complex phenomena in terms of concrete/simpler phenomena . Further, only experiential metaphors seem to be involved in such use of grammatical categories. Developments in the lexicon don't follow this 'rule.'
Examples of categorial metaphor of SPACE-to-QUALITY is Lakoff & Johnson's up vs. down metaphorical vehicle, which encompasses many expressions, e.g.
HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWNThey refer to categorial metaphors as root metaphors whereas conceptual metaphors are typically conveyance metaphors The latter are more limited or special in scope; the former are more universal.CONSCIOUS IS UP; UNCONSCIOUS IS DOWN
MORE IS UP; LESS IS DOWN
GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN
VIRTUE IS UP; DEPRAVITY IS DOWN
RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTIONAL IS DOWN
The point of this distinction is to establish a difference between what one might call grammatical metaphors (the categorial) that are probably more universal, and perhaps 'built-in' to language ["used to comprehend an entire area of human experience or of the physical world"], and the conceptual metaphors that are more specific ["isolated, limited"] examples of the categorial (but in many ways also universal.)
Example of the use of 'with' (comitative) in many languages for difference purposes:
(Seymour examples from G. Lakoff).
These are entirely different categories and experiential domains, but metaphor is used to include all three. (In English at least; in Tamil, comitative would be with -ooDu and the others would be with -aale .)
The categories, of course, are related to word-type and constituent type in an almost (as my son would say) DUH! manner:
| Category | Word Type | Constituent Type |
|---|---|---|
| PERSON | Human Noun | NP |
| OBJECT | Concrete Noun | NP |
| ACTIVITY | Dynamic Verb | VP |
| SPACE | Adverb, adposition | Adv. Phrase |
| TIME | Adverb, adposition | Adv. Phrase |
| QUALITY | Adjective, Stative Verb, Adverb | Modifier |
Taking another view, Croft (1984) argues for correlation between syntactic categories and their pragmatic and semantic behavior, combining Jakobsonian markedness with prototype research, to get these "natural" correlations:
| Syntactic Category | (Pragmatic) Discourse Function | Semantic Class |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | Reference | (Physical) Object |
| Verb | Predication | (Physical) Action |
| Adjective | Modification | (Physical) Property |
Or, correlate the prototypical categories with case functions, a la Givon:
| Case Function | Prototypical Category |
|---|---|
| Agent | PERSON |
| Benefactive | PERSON |
| Dative | PERSON |
| Accusative | OBJECT |
| Locative | SPACE |
| Instrument and others | QUALITY |
HCH give a visual representation of the 'expansive' nature of the chain of categorial metaphors, (Fig. 2.2,) beginning with a core ("egocentric"?) with the person, and moving out ("egodeixis?"), a progression with human category at the center, moving out to more and more abstract categories.
Interrogative pronouns tend to show this very nicely, with a different pronoun for each (with some exceptions) in many languages. Here their chart with Tamil examples added (and also a box for QUANTITY, which they omit):
| Category | English Gloss | Tamil example |
|---|---|---|
| PERSON | 'who?' | yaaru |
| OBJECT | 'what?' | enna |
| ACTIVITY | 'what?' | enna |
| SPACE | 'where?' | enge |
| TIME | 'when?' | eppoodu |
| QUALITY/MANNER | 'how?' | eppaDi |
| PURPOSE | 'what for?' | edukku |
| CAUSE | 'why?' | een |
| QUANTITY? | 'how much/many?' | evvaLavu/ettane |
As they note, most languages don't distinguish object from activity, and use the same pronoun for it, indicating some cognitive connection? Moreover, the pronouns for PERSON, OBJECT/ACTIVITY, SPACE are 'monomorphemic' (except for 'submorphemic' stuff like wh- (and e- in Tamil)., while the categories TIME, MANNER are more complex, esp. in Tamil, where we can detect grammaticalization of some N's ( paDi, poodu, aLavu ) incorporated into these PN's. Is this "complexity in thought reflected in complexity of expression.'? Are PURPOSE and CAUSE more complex and abstract? Cf. Jackendoff's ontological categories.
Pidgin/Creole languages tend to be multi-morphemic (examples from KPSwahili and Ewe)
Summation: we are dealing here with
Metonymy involves contiguity of some sort, either transfer of meaning from contiguous unit in the discourse (e.g. evolution of negation in French from the ne particle to other particles such as pas, personne, point etc. and then deletion of ne ), or "part for whole" usage (referring to someone as 'bigmouth' or 'Goofy' etc.). HCH want to use a broader definition, involving also synecdoche .
HCH claim that "grammaticalization is the result of an interaction of both metaphor and metonymy" which they provide more evidence for later on. Based on Jakobson and Halle (1956) who note that these two expressions reflect a "bipolar structure of language" that is fundamental for all verbal behavior. Both processes are always operative (say J&H) but different cultures, personalities, styles result in different emphases. (Note different loss with different aphasic disorders etc.) Goossens shows that metaphor and metonymy are different, but are not always kept separate in figures of speech etc. such as human vs. non-human sounds:
| Metonymic (human?) | Metaphoric (non-human?) | |
|---|---|---|
| "Why yes," she giggled. | "Not at all," he barked. | |
| "Absolutely never," he sniffed. | "Come right in," she purred. | |
| "And why not?" he snorted. | "Be right with you," she squealed. |
