29Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics

GILLES FAUCONNIER

As we start a new century, rich and diverse evidence from the social and cognitive sciences continues to provide an ever sharper conception of the way we humans think. It is now widely understood that brains and cultures play a major role in constructing the world as we see it. They are not, and we are not, passive interpreters of that world. Distinctive and powerful cognitive capacities such as analogy, framing, metaphor, schematization, recursion, reference-point organization, and conceptual blending lie at the heart of perception, conception, and action, and suffuse our lives with rich meaning – sometimes unbearably rich meaning. For the most part, the operations and processes that correspond to those powerful capacities are carried out massively below the level of our consciousness.

Language, which we do experience consciously through sound, gesture, or writing, is a spectacular but far from transparent window into this backstage cognition of our minds. Conversely, many of the seemingly complicated, irregular, and “illogical” properties of language structures become intelligible when their cognitive underpinnings are discovered.

In everyday life, when we use or hear words in a language we know, in a culture we know, meanings form instantly. Consciously, we experience words, word combinations, and the automatic sensation of knowing what they mean. Quite naturally, we feel that the meanings are in the words and in their combinations.

Twentieth-century attempts to study meaning most often reflect this intuition by assigning to every form its “meaning” independently of context. But important work in pragmatics over several decades of the same century has shown the assumption of invariant meaning to be simplistic. Context matters. A popular scheme to emerge from work in pragmatics preserved the intuition that form had meaning ex tempore, but added to the arsenal of meaning theorists a very powerful pragmatic component that could use context and pragmatic principles to derive from the pristine meaning of a form in isolation the messier meaning of that form when mired in context.

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In modern linguistic and philosophical research, the best-known efforts in this direction are the Gricean scheme of maxims and implicatures and the theory of speech acts developed by Austin and Searle. Interestingly, Grice’s work was originally motivated by logical considerations – keeping the logic of semantic meanings simple and standard by accounting pragmatically for apparent complexities. Linguists in the late 1960s, and through the 1970s and beyond, noted many features of grammar that were associated with pragmatic properties, and that in turn led linguists to study pragmatics in its own right and for its own sake. There was a convergence of issues of common interest to philosophers, linguists, and others who ponder the mysteries of meaning. Pragmatics exploded into a rich, but not particularly well-defined, field of inquiry.

However, the very linguistic work that had contributed to an explosion of pragmatics was about to lead to its reassessment. It became clear to an evergrowing number of researchers (e.g. Ducrot 1972, Fillmore 1982, Jackendoff 1983, de Cornulier 1985, Fauconnier 1985, G. Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1987, Sweetser 1990) that the line in the sand between semantics and pragmatics was not an easy one to draw. The “meanings” spontaneously associated by informants with isolated forms were not the pristine core meanings that we yearned for; they were only defaults made extremely probable by culture, norms, and lack of imagination.

Just as a rigorous description of syntax in the 1950s, using the resources of computability theory, revealed its immense complexity, a rigorous description of meaning using the resources of cognitive science reveals far greater complexity than commonly assumed. Language is only the tip of a spectacular cognitive iceberg, and when we engage in any language activity, we draw unconsciously on vast cognitive and cultural resources, call up innumerable models and frames, set up multiple connections, coordinate large arrays of information, and engage in creative mappings, transfers, and elaborations.

Thus we find that language does not “represent” meaning: language prompts for the construction of meaning in particular contexts with particular cultural models and cognitive resources. To do so, it draws heavily on “backstage cognition” that is not accessible to our consciousness. When scientific analysis brings out backstage cognition explicitly, it highlights the contrast between the extreme brevity of the linguistic form and the spectacular wealth of the corresponding meaning construction. Very sparse grammar guides us along the same rich mental paths, by prompting us to perform complex cognitive operations.

Language forms do not “carry” information; they latch on to rich preexistent networks in the subjects’ brains and trigger massive sequential and parallel activations. Those activated networks are themselves in the appropriate state by virtue of general organization due to cognition and culture and local organization due to physical and mental context. Crucially, we have no awareness of this amazing chain of cognitive events that takes place as we talk and listen, except for the external manifestation of language (sounds, words, sentences) and the internal manifestation of meaning, experienced consciously with lightning speed. This is very similar to perception, which is also

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onto z (in the quicksand example, this element could be the traveler who does not notice the quicksand and falls into it). In Money is the root of evil, the target domain is the complex social world of humans, money, greed, good and evil. The source is the domain of plants. y is “the root,” the missing w is the plant; the counterpart of “the root” (y) (in the source) is “money” (x) in the target domain. The counterpart of the plant (w) is evil (z). Some inferences transfer from the source to the target:

root “causes” plant money causes evil

without a root there is no plant without money there is no evil

we see the plant, not the root we do not see the link between money and evil

There are two important points about the way in which the construction “NP be NP of NP” prompts for a systematic xyz(w) mapping scheme.

First, the grammar prompts us to look for two domains and a mapping between them, with a certain counterpart structure (e.g. root corresponds to money, and something (w) corresponds to evil). From this very minimal information, we are supposed to retrieve the right domains and the efficient inferential structure. Since the domains are not specified by language, their retrieval belongs to what is usually called pragmatics. But no meaning, even partial or schematic, except for the xyz mapping scheme itself, can possibly be constructed without the domains needed for the mapping. It follows that there cannot be a minimal, independent (“literal”) meaning with truth conditions, linked solely to the linguistic form, from which the contextual meaning would be pragmatically derived. Rather, the form is a direct prompt to perform the pragmatic operations needed to satisfy the mapping scheme licensed by the linguistic construction. The truth conditions for the expression can only be computed after the connections and domains have been selected.

Second, the mapping scheme is not specialized in any particular type of surface phenomenon. One might think from the examples cited above that the xyz construction has the function of setting up metaphors, since indeed that is what it does in those examples. But in fact, the construction fits other kinds of mappings. So, if “NP is the NP of NP” is the English sentence Paul is the father of Sally, it will prompt for exactly the same xyz mapping scheme as in the other examples (see figure 29.2). This time, Paul and Sally (x and z) are mapped onto the kinship frame containing father, and the missing element w is child in the kinship frame.

Choosing a mapping from a kinship frame to individuals in this case is the default, but there are many other possibilities, all within the same mapping scheme, as in Paul is the father of Sally for today (as when a neighbor takes over some fatherly duties, e.g. taking Sally to school, reading her a story, cooking her lunch); The Pope is the father of the church; Newton is the father of physics; Fear, father of cruelty, etc. Constructing meaning in all these cases is a matter of finding domains and structure that best fit both the context and the mapping scheme. It is what used to be called pragmatics, but there is no longer an

Figure 29.2 xyz mapping scheme used for Paul is the father of Sally

intermediate, core “semantic” content from which meaning in context is derived. Rather, the language form is a prompt to go directly to the context, using cognitive resources like memory, schemas, and cultural models (Fauconnier 2000). In fact, such examples highlight the often spurious nature of “core semantics” and the sometimes dubious application of Gricean maxims: why go to the trouble of trying to process a nonsensical “literal” meaning of Money is the root of evil, when the grammatical construction invites you to find and match separate domains directly, with money and evil in one, and root in the other? Strikingly, the grammatical construction makes no distinction between the case where the required matching is felt to be metaphorical (vanity and quicksand) and the case where it is not (father and Paul). The point is that the most elegant and general account of meaning construction in cases like this does not require, and in fact does not allow, an intermediate “literal” or “logical” or “core” meaning to intervene between the syntactic form and the intended meaning. It is useful to appreciate this, because in much of standard pragmatics, pragmatic principles apply to the semantic output of a grammar. The direct construction of meaning on the basis of (often minimal) prompting by grammatical constructions is not just an exotic property of xyz constructions; it is a pervasive, and arguably constitutive, property of language and meaning.

To achieve the desired generalizations, it is useful to forget notions like “meaning of an expression,” “semantic representation,” “truth function,” and the like, and to think instead of the meaning potential of a language form. Meaning potential is the essentially unlimited number of ways in which an expression can prompt dynamic cognitive processes, which include conceptual connections, mappings, blends, and simulations. Such processes are inherently creative, and we recognize them as such when they are triggered or produced by art and literature. In everyday life, the creativity is hidden by the largely unconscious and extremely swift nature of the myriad cognitive operations that enter into the simplest of our meaning constructions. It is also hidden by the necessary folk-theory of our everyday behavior, which is based quite naturally on our conscious experience rather than on the less accessible components of our cognition. In doing away with distinct semantic and pragmatic components, cognitive theories actually highlight the centrality of pragmatic operations in meaning construction.

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2 Opacity and Presuppositions

Opacity and presupposition projection are classical problems for the logic of language. A very general way of looking at these problems within a cognitive approach to meaning construction is to study the connections between the mental spaces that are set up in ongoing discourse.

Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk for purposes of local understanding and action. They are partial assemblies containing elements and are structured by frames and cognitive models. They are interconnected and can be modified as thought and discourse unfold.

Mental spaces proliferate in the unfolding of discourse, map onto each other in intricate ways, and provide abstract mental structure for shifting anchoring, viewpoint, and focus, allowing us to direct our attention at any time onto very partial and simple structures while maintaining an elaborate web of connections in working memory and in long-term memory.

Consider the following simple example of mental space construction prompted by sentence (1) coming at a certain point into a particular discourse in context (from Fauconnier 1998):

(1) Max thought the winner received $100.

The language form prompts for setting up two mental spaces. One is the Base space, B, the initial space with partial structure corresponding to what has already been introduced at that point in the discourse or what may be introduced freely because it is pragmatically available in the situation. Another mental space, M, subordinate to this one, will contain partial structure corresponding to “what Max thinks.” It is structured by received $100. That form evokes a general frame of receiving of which we may know a great number of more specific instances (receive money, a shock, a letter, guests, etc.). The expression Max thought explicitly sets up this second mental space. Max and the winner are noun phrases and will provide access to elements in the spaces. This happens as follows: the noun phrase is a name or description which either fits some already established element in some space or introduces a new element in some space. That element may, in turn, provide access to another element through a cognitive connection (a connector). In our example, the name Max accesses an element in the base space; the description the winner accesses a role in a frame of winning appropriate for the given context (winning a particular race, lottery, game, etc.). Roles can have values, and a role element can always access another element that is the value of that role. So we can say The winner will get $10, without pointing to any particular individual; this is the role interpretation. Or we can say The winner is bald, where being bald is a property of the individual who happened to win, not a condition for getting the prize; this is the value interpretation. The two mental spaces B and M are connected, and there can be counterparts of elements of B in M, as diagrammed in figure 29.3. The ACCESS PRINCIPLE defines a general procedure for accessing elements: If

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a: NAME Max

a

Base space B

a’ WIN

a’

Belief space M

Figure 29.3 Mental space construction

two elements a and a′ are linked by a connector F (a′ = F(a)), then element a′ can be identified by naming, describing, or pointing to its counterpart a.

What philosophers and linguists traditionally call the number of readings of a sentence like (1) is the number of accessing possibilities compatible with the explicit instructions of the linguistic form. But that number varies with the available types of connections between mental spaces and the available mental spaces in a particular discourse and pragmatic environment. So the number of “logical” readings of a particular language form is itself a pragmatic property, and constructing the appropriate reading in a particular context is itself a pragmatic exercise: finding a particular access path through a mental space configuration.

In Fauconnier (1998), several accessing possibilities for example (1) are outlined that are all equally sanctioned by the grammatical form. Typically, a particular context or discourse creates a strong bias for following a particular accessing path, and other paths formally possible for the single sentence form are not even considered consciously. These paths can remain available, however. Coulson (2001) has shown experimentally some neural correlates of frameshifting and reactivation of accessing paths in the case of jokes. The punch line of a joke often forces a frame shift and a reconfiguration of the accessing path.

For a grammatical form like the winner example above, the accessing possibilities in the simplest contexts depend on whether the access principle is applied across spaces and from role to value. The grammatical form does not force a particular access path.

In a pure role interpretation within space M with no application of the access principle, we have readings in which Max thought there was a contest and thought it was a feature of that contest that $100 would be awarded to whoever won. This accessing strategy is noncommittal as to whether the speaker also assumes there was such a contest, whether an actual winner was ever selected,

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and whether Max thinks that a winner was selected. The sentence under this strategy would be appropriate in mini-discourses like the following:

(2)The Boston Marathon will take place next week. Max thought the winner received $100, but it turns out there won’t be any prize money.

(3)My friends were under the impression that I was running a lottery in my garage. Max thought the winner received $100. But they were all wrong – there was no lottery.

Suppose now that the access principle operates, but only within the subordinate space M, linking the role “winner” to a value of that role. As before, Max believes that there was a contest and, moreover, that somebody won, and he has additional beliefs about the person who he assumes won. Although a likely default is that the $100 was prize money, this interpretation is no longer obligatory. Max may believe that something else happened, causing the person who had won to receive $100 independently.

In the two accessing possibilities just considered, a word (winner) simply evokes a script within a single space. but the access principle may also operate across spaces. The speaker may have a particular contest in mind, for which there is a role “winner,” set up as an element w in the base B. That role can have a value (e.g. Harry) with a counterpart in mental space M. The access principle allows the winner to access the role, and then its value, and finally the counterpart of that value.

The interpretation, then, is that the speaker presents Harry as the winner, and says that Max thought Harry received $100. This is compatible with Max knowing nothing about the contest, or believing that someone other than Harry won and that Harry got the $100 for selling a used car or as a consolation prize in the contest.

Other accessing paths are available for this simple sentence if counterpart roles are considered, or if the extra space introduced by the past tense is taken into account, or if other spaces are accessible at that point in the discourse to provide counterparts. Typically, an understander does not have to consider all possibilities. The intended path will be favored by the space configuration in the discourse at the point at which the statement is made: we might already have the role “winner” in space B, or in space M but not in B; we might already have different values in M and B for the same role (w and its counterpart w′); and so on. In other cases, of course, the understander will lack sufficient information and may have to revise a space configuration or may simply misunderstand a speaker’s intent.

Our example had a subordinate space corresponding to “belief.” There are many other kinds of mental spaces, but they all share these complex accessing possibilities. For instance, time expressions are space-builders and set up new spaces in discourse. Consider (as part of a larger discourse) the following sentence: In 1968, the winner received $100. As before, we have a base B and a

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subordinate space M, corresponding to 1968 and set up by the space-builder in 1968. Also as before, the noun phrase the winner can access a role in M, or the counterpart role in M of a role in B, or the counterpart in M of a value in B, or a value of a role in M. Situations that fit these respective strategies might include:

•There was a certain type of game in 1968 (no longer played today) in which you got $100 for winning.

•There is a certain sports competition, say the Boston Marathon, that exists today (role w in space B) and also existed in 1968 (counterpart role w′ in space M). In 1968 (as opposed to today), whoever won got $100.

•The winner of the chess championship held today is Susan. Back in 1968, in unrelated circumstances (e.g. selling her used car), Susan received $100.

•The winner back in 1968 of the contest we are talking about was Harry, and that year Harry received $100 (perhaps for selling his used car).

The access paths available in this example involving time (1968) are exactly the same as the access paths in the previous example involving belief. Even though time and belief are conceptually quite different, they give rise, at the level of discourse management considered here, to the same mental space configurations. More generally, we find that mental spaces are set up for a wide variety of conceptual domains that include time, belief, wishes, plays, movies, pictures, possibility, necessity, hypotheticals and counterfactuals, locatives, and reality. The connectors, the access principle, and the role/value distinctions work uniformly across this broad range of cases.

The study of accessing strategies is developed in great detail in Fauconnier (1985, 1997), Fauconnier and Sweetser (1996), and Fauconnier and Turner (2002). What we see is that phenomena traditionally viewed as logical, such as opacity, attributivity, and presupposition projection, and others traditionally viewed as literary, such as the xyz phenomena discussed in section 1, are all part of the same uniform and powerful prompting by language for connections across mental spaces.

Indeed, presupposition projection finds an elegant and general solution in these terms. The principle which guides presupposition projection can be formulated as:

(4)Presupposition Float

A presupposed structure Π in mental space M will propagate to the next higher space N, unless structure already in M or N is incompatible with Π or entails Π.

Informally, a presupposition floats up until it meets itself or its opposite. To say that a structure “propagates” from space X to another space Y is to say that if it is satisfied for elements x, y, . . . in X, it is satisfied for their counterparts x′, y′, . . . in Y, via some connector C. As usual, we find structure mappings involved in matching processes that transfer structure.

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So, consider for example a familiar case like that presented in (5):

(5) Sue believes Luke has a child and that Luke’s child will visit her.

In this example, grammatical clues prompt for the construction of three spaces: the base B, a belief space M, and a future space W. The three spaces contain

counterparts a, a′, a″ for Sue and b, b′, b″ for Luke. The presupposition in the future space W that b″ has a child meets itself in the form b′ has a child

in the higher belief space, and therefore does not float up. Because the presupposition does not float up to M, it cannot, a fortiori, float up to the base: it has been halted at the W level. This ensures that the piece of discourse does not globally presuppose (or entail) that Luke has children.

Notice that although the presupposition does not float all the way up, it is not canceled, but rather remains in force in the future space: a presupposition will float up into higher spaces until it is halted. It will then remain in force for the mental spaces into which it has floated. In other words, inheritance is not an “all or nothing” process. The general issue is: Which spaces inherit the presupposition? The vast literature on presupposition projection typically focuses on asking if the “whole sentence” inherits the presupposition, i.e. if the presupposition floats all the way up. To account for the full range of entailments, a more general question has to be answered: How far up does the presupposition float? The answer to the general question, given by the Presupposition Float Principle, subsumes the answer to the special question: Does it float to the base?

3 Word and Sentence Meanings

Sections 1 and 2 illustrate the fundamental but counterintuitive idea that language forms do not in themselves have core meanings that get modified, adjusted, or expanded through pragmatic elaboration. Rather, language forms steer the construction of meaning along certain paths in particular contexts. Thus there is no “autonomous” semantics separate from pragmatics, context, and cognition. The impossibility of drawing this line is well documented: detailed and forceful arguments are given in Haiman (1980b), Moore and Carling (1982), Sweetser (1999), and no doubt many others. Haiman finds that “the distinction between dictionaries and encyclopedias is . . . fundamentally misconceived” (1980b: 331). Langacker (1987) is unequivocal: “Certainly an autonomous semantics . . . can be formulated, but the account it offers of the meanings of linguistic expressions is apt to be so restricted and impoverished relative to the full richness of how we actually understand them that one can only question its utility and cognitive reality. Only limited interest attaches to a linguistic semantics that avoids most of the relevant phenomena and leaves recalcitrant data for an ill-defined ‘pragmatic’ component” (1987: 155). And he goes on to write: “The assumption that language (and in particular semantics) constitutes an autonomous formal system is simply gratuitous” (p. 156). He explains how

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framed by the French political and social system with Nixon as president and Watergate as a French scandal. In the selective projection, Nixon loses his American characteristics (English language, former vice-president, etc.). Watergate, similarly, loses most of its specific geographical and American characteristics. It becomes a French scandal with some properties analogous and others disanalogous to those of the American scandal. Emergent structure in the blended space includes the specification that Nixon is unharmed and the inferences (and emotions) that this may lead to. For most understanders, it projects back to the inputs, telling them something about the French mentality, or political system, and perhaps inviting value judgments in one direction or the other.

But of course, this is only one of the very many ways to construct a counterfactual blend licensed by example (6). Here are some other perfectly fine uses with completely different intended meanings, corresponding to different choices of selective projection:

(7)a. In France, Watergate wouldn’t have done Nixon any harm because Nixon is loved by the French.

b.In France, Watergate wouldn’t have done Nixon any harm because French presidents are not affected by US scandals.

c.In France, Watergate wouldn’t have done Nixon any harm because spying on American political parties is supported by public opinion.

d.In France, Watergate wouldn’t have done Nixon any harm because he would never have been elected president in the first place.

Here again, we see that there is no single special meaning of the expression that would serve as a core and to which further pragmatic operations would apply to produce the other readings. Rather, the grammatical construction is from the outset an invitation to set up a counterfactual conceptual integration network, but it leaves highly underspecified much of the construction of that network – in particular, prominent aspects of the input mental spaces and selective projection (Mandelblit and Fauconnier 2000). Building the right network in context is clearly part of pragmatics; but there is no contentful meaning for the language form independent of the pragmatic construction. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) show that conceptual blending is highly constrained by numerous constitutive and governing principles. In addition to those cognitive principles, appropriate constructions of blends for a given context will be guided by pragmatic principles of the usual sort: goals and focus of the language activity, prior discourse, and general relevance.

Blending also plays a central role in constructing meanings for words in context, and once again it turns out that contextual meanings are not derived from prototypical or basic meanings. Rather, it is the other way around: what we take intuitively to be basic meanings are simply defaults for situations with minimum context. These defaults are not a basis for constructing the

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more elaborate meanings, rather they are special cases under special conditions (minimum, widely available context). They are psychologically real, but not theoretically fundamental.

Consider now the morphosyntactically simple forms of language that consist of putting two words together: e.g., noun-noun compounds like boat house, adjective-noun combinations like angry man, and noun-adjective combinations like child-safe or sugar-free.

Complicated integration networks lie behind these kinds of words. Take for example dolphin-safe, shark-safe, and child-safe: in all of these cases, one input has the abstract frame of DANGER and the other input has a more specific content, involving dolphins, sharks, or children. We build a specific counterfactual scenario of HARM in which dolphin, shark, or child is assigned to a role in the DANGER frame. In the counterfactual scenario, a victim is harmed. The word safe implies a disanalogy between the counterfactual blend and the specific input.

Dolphin-safe, as it is currently used on cans of tuna, means that measures were taken to avoid harming dolphins during the harvesting of the tuna. Shark-safe, as applied to, say, swimming, means conditions under which swimmers are not vulnerable to attack by sharks. Child-safe as applied to rooms can mean rooms that are free of typical dangers for children or rooms immune to children. In every case, the understander must construct elaborate counterfactual scenarios from simple forms.

How the understander does this mental work may differ from case to case. In dolphin-safe tuna, the role of the dolphin as potential victim is taken to be useful. In dolphin-safe diving, said of mine-seeking human divers who are protected by dolphins who are not themselves at risk, the blend uses dolphins in the role of agents of the safety. In dolphin-safe diving, said of diving that imitates the way dolphins swim and is therefore safe, the blend uses the manner of swimming associated with dolphins. If we assume that dolphins eat goldfish, then dolphinsafe goldfish casts dolphins in the role of predators. Genetic engineers who are concerned not to produce anything resembling a dolphin might refer to a technique that is known never to lead to a dolphin embryo as dolphin-safe. The dolphin this time does not fill the role of victim, victimizer, causal agent, or role model. And of course, a compositional theory of meaning immune to the dolphin examples would be hailed as dolphin-safe. There is a vast and insightful literature in linguistics dealing with compounds and the obvious fact that their meaning is not derivable from their form (e.g. Downing 1977, Ryder 1994). The deeper point, already made by Travis (1981), and Langacker (1987: 271–4) in his work on active zones, is that whatever operations are needed to construct meanings in such cases are also needed for the everyday cases like black kettle, red pencil, and brown cow. Fauconnier and Turner (2002: chapter 17) analyze in some detail the role of conceptual blending in understanding such simple forms.

Examples like dolphin-safe are useful because they highlight in a transparent and uncontroversial way the nature of the blending process. Furthermore, they abound. Think of cruelty-free on bottles of shampoo or the variety of noncompositional integration running across waterproof, tamper-proof, foolproof, and child-proof or talent pool, gene pool, water pool, football pool, and betting pool.

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Sweetser (1999) considers the case in which likely candidate, in a political context, means not someone likely to become a candidate or succeed as a candidate but, for instance, a candidate likely to grant an interview. As she writes, “So long as we can think up a scenario relative to the candidate in question, and evaluate that scenario for likelihood, likely candidate can mean the candidate who figures in the scenario we have labeled as likely.” On her analysis, conceiving of such a scenario and evaluating it consists of finding a blend of the frame for likelihood, conceived of as probability of occurrence in a sequence, and the frame for candidate. Like safe above, likely prompts for a conceptual blend. Likely requires the recruitment of a scenario of likelihood and another input space in which the noun prompts for a frame and an element filling a role in that frame. In the blend, the element must play a role in the specific scenario of likelihood, but there are many possibilities for the nature of this role. One general possibility is for the scenario evoked by the noun to already be a scenario of likelihood, as in likely candidate, meaning someone likely to become a candidate or a candidate likely to be chosen. Likely suspect is similar, meaning alternatively a person likely to be deemed a suspect or a suspect likely to be guilty or a suspect likely to be convicted. However, the scenario of likelihood in the blend need not be the one evoked by the noun. Sweetser’s reading, “a candidate likely to grant an interview,” does not use the likelihood of either becoming a candidate or being chosen. If every year the governor pardons someone in the jailhouse, we might bet on who is the “likely suspect.”

Sweetser’s examples make the point clearly that the scenario of likelihood need not be one evoked by the noun itself, as we see, for example, in the case in which possible textbook refers to a textbook that might possibly be chosen as the one to be used in a college course. Just as the different meanings of safe may go unnoticed, so the different meanings of possible and likely may go unnoticed. But a possible textbook, in the sense of one that may be adopted, is not the same as a possible textbook in the sense of one that might exist, or might be written, or a trade book that could double as a textbook. Humans have the crucial ability to construct the elaborate integration networks appropriate for each of these cases. This is not a special-purpose exotic capacity – it is the very foundation of meaning construction, and children master it early in their development. A semantic analysis that merely said that the meaning of possible ranges over unspecified elements would miss the heart of the problem.

Coulson has shown that fake is an adjective that carries an especially elaborate blending and mapping scheme (Coulson and Fauconnier 1999, Coulson 2001): it calls for two input spaces with a counterfactual connector, such that an element in one space is real, but in the other space its counterpart is not. For example, the fake of fake gun prompts a mapping between an actual scenario with an agent and an instrument and a counterfactual scenario in which the counterpart of that instrument is a real gun and some other participants, if there are any, react accordingly. In the blend, the reactions and beliefs of other participants are projected from the counterfactual scenario, while the nature of the object and the beliefs of the gunman are projected from the actual scenario.

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In the case of fake flowers meant to decorate a dining table, there is an input space in which the object is flowers and a space in which it is not because it is, for example, silk or rubber. There is a counterfactual connector between the flowers in one space and the silk or rubber object in the other space. This counterfactual relation is compressed into a property of the object in the blend: it is now a fake flower. Note that there need be no indication that any of the participants believes the object is a flower. It can be treated as a flower, perhaps for aesthetic purposes, by projection from one space and as not a flower by projection from the other space. One might enjoy it but not have to water it. Fake money likewise requires two spaces: one in which the object is money and the other in which it is just, for example, paper. There are many possible projections to the blend. For example, the fake money might not be legal currency but still have monetary value since it is issued by a gambling house for in-house use; it cannot be stolen since it can only be redeemed by the in-house cashier. Alternatively, it could be used to fool someone by making them a worthless payment. In that case, the space where it is money is also the belief space of the person fooled, and the space where it is paper is the belief space of the crook. Whether the belief of the crook is shared by the speaker of the utterance depends on overall aspects of the discourse mental space configuration. In (8) it would be shared, but not in (9):

(8)The crook paid them with fake money.

(9)The crook thought he was paying them with fake money, but in fact it was the new European currency.

4 Performatives

The general finding that much of language and grammar is devoted to prompting for mapping schemes between mental spaces opens up an interesting way to rethink the key pragmatic questions raised by Austin (1962).

Sweetser (2001) develops a unified and elegant approach to performativity. Her general definition of performativity is that it involves a particular relation of fit between a mental space that is a representation and the corresponding represented space. If the representation is taken as fitting the represented space, then the relation between the spaces is depictive, or representational. It is the success or failure of depictive fit (of representation to world) which is described as true or false, accurate or inaccurate. If, on the other hand, the represented space is taken as fitting (being causally influenced or changed by) the representation, then the relation is performative. Sweetser’s account maintains Searle’s (1979, 1989) crucial distinctions between using a representation descriptively and using it performatively, and between performing an action by describing it and performing it by other means, but it generalizes the approach to non-linguistic phenomena and reveals that performativity is a special case of compression of vital relations in integration networks.

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A non-linguistic example offered by Sweetser (2001) is that of a painting of a buffalo hunt on a cave wall, discovered by archaeologists who know from associated artifacts that the members of the social group that produced the paintings were also buffalo hunters. In the painting, buffalo fall prey to successful hunters: the painting could be depictive (describing a successful past hunt) or performative (made with the intention of bringing about success in a future hunt). (See Searle 1975b for a similar case, the “shopping-list parable.”)

In both cases, we have a conceptual integration over two inputs, the mental space of the image and the mental space of the hunt (as it happened or as desired). In the depictive usage, the vital relation of representation is compressed into identity in the blended space. In the performative usage, it is the vital relation of cause–effect that is compressed into identity. These very compressions are widely attested independently of speech act phenomena (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and so Sweetser’s account places Austin’s initial observations about performative vs. constative utterances in a significantly broader cognitive and cultural framework.

In particular, as Sweetser (2001) and Sorensen (2000) observe, non-linguistic performative examples abound in ritual and magic. An extreme example is voodoo death, in which manipulation of the representation produces a desired effect in reality. The belief in the efficacy of the conceptual integration network is basic for the community and for the victim, and so the effect of this deeply constitutive way of thinking is that the social body and the physiological body conspire to make the death happen.

Sweetser (2001) also notes that names, like other representations, are susceptible to referential use for either depictive or performative purposes. A name applied to an entity is depictive referentially if the entity is present, but names are also used as invocations or evocations of the named entity. Names of gods, for example, are powerful because they may invoke the presence of the deity. A second kind of performative use of names is the one that establishes a naming convention by using a name or a nickname.

Sweetser generalizes her analysis to include common types of rituals, such as that of a newborn baby being carried up the stairs of its parents’ house as part of the celebration of its birth in a European ritual. The ritual is meant, symbolically, to promote the child’s chances of rising in life and is supported by a conceptual integration network. One input in the network is the ordinary action of carrying a baby up the stairs. The other input is the schematic space of life, already structured so that living a life is metaphorically moving along a path, such that good fortune is up and misfortune is down. In a partial match between these inputs, the path up the stairs corresponds to the course of life, the baby is the person who will live this life, the manner of motion up the stairs corresponds to how the person goes through life, and so on. In the symbolic ritual, the two inputs are blended so that the ascent of the stairs is the course of life: an easy ascent signifies an easy rise in life for the person that the baby will become, and stumbling or falling might take on extraordinary significance. Vital relations hold within the network: cause–effect (success in climbing the stairs will (help

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to) cause success in life), part–whole (the ritual itself is a necessary part of the entire life), time (the short time it takes to climb the stairs is mapped onto the much longer time it takes to live a life), change (within the life input, the person will change considerably from birth till death), analogy (through metaphor, “going up” the stairs is similar to “going up” in life). In the blended space, these vital relations are compressed: cause–effect, part–whole, and change are all compressed into uniqueness – the cause (climbing the stairs) is the effect (leading a good life), the part (being carried up the stairs) is the whole (the entire life), and change becomes uniqueness. The baby doesn’t change physically as it is carried up the stairs – there is a unique, unchanging person. Time is scaled down from the duration of life to the time it takes to climb the stairs. Such compressions are the rule in integration networks. The ritual of the newborn baby, although non-linguistic, is both metaphorical and performative.

Much religious ritual, notes Sweetser (2001), is both metaphorical and performative in this sense. The circular shape of a ring metaphorically represents the unending permanence of marriage, but its use in a wedding ceremony is to bring that permanence into social being, not just to describe it. The white dress worn by many Christian brides can metaphorically depict (truly or not) the bride’s virgin status, but white ritual garments can also be worn by penitents for purification, thus metaphorically purporting to bring about purity, not to describe it. Sorensen (2000), in a similar vein, offers a detailed analysis of Catholic communion, which can be understood as describing spiritual union and also being intended to bring it about.

5Cognitive Approaches to Some Other Classical Pragmatic Issues

Another topic that played a central role in the healthy development of modern pragmatics is the study of pragmatic scales, stemming from the pioneering work of Horn (1972) and Ducrot (1972). Horn discovered the exceptional importance of pragmatic scales for syntactic and semantic phenomena in language. Ducrot developed an elegant theory of argumentative force to explain a wide range of phenomena, including the meanings of notoriously difficult connectives such as but, however, French puisque, parce que, and scalar operators such as English even, and French presque, à peine. Fauconnier (1978b and elsewhere) introduced the powerful concept of implication reversal, proved a weak extension of De Morgan’s laws for the general case of implication reversal, and showed that the extended De Morgan’s law was one of the keys to a unified understanding of polarity phenomena of different stripes – grammatically entrenched, semantically marked, or pragmatically motivated. In his new book, Israel (to appear) explores the cognitive underpinnings of what he calls the rhetoric of grammar, extends previous analyses of scale reversal in a number of insightful directions, and achieves a unified cognitive semantic account of a broad spectrum of polarity phenomena.

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Coulson (2001) is another cognitive scientist who takes pragmatic scales seriously and develops a realistic account of the power and hidden complexity of everyday human reasoning. As she explains early in her book, discourse participants, like paleontologists, “have the task of combining different sorts of information to derive the overall meaning of the discourse event, to exploit their imaginative capacities and derive the life of the organism from its grammatical bones” (2001: xii). Coulson emphasizes that, rather than compiling meanings, people use linguistic information to help them assemble cognitive models of the discourse event. Building pragmatic scales is part of the rhetorical strategies that participants deploy, often unconsciously, in constructing and manipulating cognitive and cultural models relevant to particular discourse events. This is not done in addition to the construction of some basic meaning, rather it is a necessary and central aspect of the construction of any meaning. Coulson shows how scales can be linked, forced upon participants, transformed into different scales, or rejected by switching frames and cultural models.

In the past ten years, cognitive linguistics has grown exponentially with findings and analyses that extend far beyond the usual boundaries of linguistics. Applications to many fields of human inquiry include musicology, art, literature, philosophy, political science, theology, and mathematics. To understand how classical pragmatic issues are re-evaluated, readers will want to add to the illustrative examples in the present entry the more general perspectives of seminal work on metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), cognitive semantics (Talmy 2000), cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987, vol. 1), and conceptual integration (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The exemplary studies of anaphora by Van Hoek (1997), of signed languages by Liddell (1998), and of gesture by McNeill (2000) are also of exceptional importance. Coulson (1994) provides an excellent overview of the relevance of cognitive science to research in pragmatics. Mandelblit and Zachar (1998) explore the notion of dynamic unit in the conceptual developments of recent cognitive science.

The study of pragmatics in the second half of the twentieth century revealed many fascinating aspects of human thought and action that we take for granted in everyday life. We are not inclined to pay much conscious attention to pragmatics in everyday life, or even in the behavioral sciences, because pragmatics is largely part of invisible backstage cognition, with exceptionally sparse formal or symbolic marking. And so it belongs, like Erving Goffman’s social framing (Goffman 1974), or Edwin Hutchins’s distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995), to the realm of what is obvious and pervasive and yet invisible to its expert users and participants. A contribution of cognitive linguistics in recent years has been to show that this invisibility is a general feature of meaning construction, linguistic or not, pragmatic or not.