9) Profiling

A special kind of figure/ground relation is the relation between an expression and its conceptual base. Profiling means designating a conceptualisation by means of a linguistic expression, and the base is the immediate larger conceptual content characterising it. For example, when we speak of Sunday, we profile this particular day relative to the base ‘week’.

Likewise, elbow profiles the joint between the upper and lower arm and evokes the conception ‘arm’ as its base, and arm profiles one of the two upper limbs and evokes the conception ‘human body’ as its base.

We sometimes need to distinguish between an expression’s maximal scope in some domain, i.e. the full extent of its coverage, and a limited immediate scope, the portion directly relevant for a particular purpose.

The immediate scope is thus foregrounded vis-à-vis the maximal scope. Metaphorically, we can describe it as the “onstage region”, the general region of viewing attention. Consider a word like elbow. Clearly, one domain it selects—quite central in its matrix—is the conception of the human body. But it is equally clear that elbow is not characterized directly with respect to the human body as an undifferentiated whole. A body has major parts, including arms, and an elbow is first and foremost part of an arm. In conceptualizing an elbow, the conception of an arm in particular is most directly relevant (“onstage”). There is a conceptual hierarchy, such that BODY figures directly in ARM, which in turn figures directly in ELBOW, but BODY figures only indirectly in ELBOW (via ARM). For elbow, then, we can say that BODY functions as maximal scope and ARM as immediate scope.

It is, however, common for expressions that profile relationships (like those which profile things) to have the same conceptual base and yet be semantically distinct because they profile different facets of it. For a grammatical example, consider any verb and its corresponding progressive (e.g. examine vs. be examining). The verb designates an entire bounded event, while the progressive, without altering the overall content, singles out just an arbitrary internal portion of that event for profiling. A lexical example is come vs. arrive. As their base, both verbs evoke the conception of a thing (represented as a circle) moving along a spatial path (arrow) to an end location (LOC). Each verb invokes a relationship in which the mover, through time, successively occupies all the positions defining the path. The difference in their meanings is that come profiles the full motion event, in which the mover traverses the entire path, whereas arrive designates only the segment in which the mover finally reaches the goal.