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Line Brandt Fulbright-scholarship: University of Washington, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Linguistics, 1997-1998 MA in Philosophy and English at Roskilde University, 2001 Visiting scholar: University of California, San Diego, Department of Cognitive Science, 2001-2002
RECENT ARTICLES Line Brandt Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt In this paper we propose an analysis of the metaphor "This surgeon is a butcher!” discussed in Grady, Oakley & Coulson 1999, introducing it into a mental space framework derived from conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), blending theory (BT) and cognitive semiotics. The method of analysis is to work backwards; we attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the butcher-surgeon metaphor by giving a step-bystep description of the cognition involved in understanding an occurrence of the metaphoric expression, and hypothesize a general framework for analyzing metaphoric blends and other kinds of rhetorically potent integrations of semiotically distinguishable conceptual contents (mental spaces) in expressive blends.
Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt Imagery is manifestly a basic and omnipresent constituent of the mental life of human beings, a cognitive prerequisite of symbolization and thought. The study of the poetic functions of imagery offers us a window into the cognitive semantics of the imaginative mind, but the literary contribution should not limit itself to illustrating the generalities of the mind; it should also address the issue of literature as such: what compelled humans to create art, poetry, and fiction, and in which sense can we be said to have a ‘literary mind’?
THESIS Explosive Blends
Brief summary of the research project Project title: "Enounciation in text and speech – a semiotic-cognitive inquiry with special focus on humour" The research project is a phenomenological inquiry into
the various aspects of enounciation in communication, i.e. the element
in language that marks the presence of a speaker and this speaker's
relation to a hearer and to a topic. This relation is of crucial importance
to the meaning of any text, spoken or written, and can be viewed as
an independent part of the semantics of an utterance. Phenomena such
as viewpoint, focus, perspective and epistemic scope will be studied
based on analyses of factive and fictive texts, employing speech-act
theory and models developed within the field of cognitive science, including
mental space theory. The empirical data consists in audio-visual recordings
of face-to-face interactions, e.g. instantiated by stand-up comedy shows,
as well as literary texts, mainly experimental short prose. Special
emphasis is afforded the occurrence of humor in communication, as humorous
intersubjectivity may be viewed as particularly complex; the guiding
principle behind the selection of examples is that they be humorous
or otherwise theoretically challenging.
Description of the research project Enounciation is a classic semiotic topic, which, regrettably, has remained theoretically unresolved for too long, both in philosophy of language, in semiotics, and in literary studies. Now, however, cognitive semantics is starting to probe the overlap between semantics and pragmatics, and 'enunciation' (T. Oakley, S. Coulson) has become a cognitive-semiotic concept which is introduced into the analysis of mental spaces and conceptual integration (blending). In my master's thesis ("Explosive Blends – from Cognitive Semantics to Literary Analysis", October 2000), I sought to show that there are certain enounciational structures that do not occur in"authentic" or pragmatic communication but are exclusive to literary texts. Whereas my main interest in this work was to investigate the efficacy of cognitive semantics applied to the tasks of literary reading and interpretation, the topic of the current research project is enounciation specifically, as it concerns the various possibilities of the communicator to manifest a situated subjectivity in discourse. The methodological hypothesis is that the issues of enounciation lend themselves to analysis within the framework of a cognitive semio-linguistics. The empirical hypothesis is that the challenges presented by the domain of humorous utterances offer a particularly fruitful basis for the inquiry at hand. Humor is a particularly interesting phenomenon, abundant in compound viewpoints and embedded voices. Irony is perhaps a clear example of this: presenting two viewpoints simultaneously to emphasize the one. I intend to systematically investigate enounciation in a variety of communicational contexts – in everyday speech as well as in literature – and seek to determine its significance for meaning construction. Focusing on the production and interpretation of humorous effects in communiction seems a suitable strategy, since humor relies on intersubjective premises and purposefully toys with the communicative participants' implicit assumptions as to the formal conditions of discourse and the inherent expectation that these conditions be fulfilled. In humor, there often is a contrast between the literal meaning of a given utterance and the 'deeper meaning' of the utterance. By 'the deeper meaning of the utterance' I mean what is intended, that is, what the speaker's intention is. We know this distinction – between the meaning of a linguistic expression and the intended meaning (in Danish: betydning versus mening) – from speech-act theory, and it becomes highly relevant for understanding how humor comes about in human interaction. In humor, the expectations as to the formal conditions of the discourse (as well as material conditions, i.e. expectations regarding what the discourse is about) are both challenged and confirmed; these norms can only be challenged insofar as they are already established. The semiotic structure of language becomes more apparent or more easily discernible, because the immediate comprehension of what is funny about a given utterance presupposes an elaborate (though usually not conscious) mental account of who is speaking, the setting in which the interaction takes place, the contextual framing of what is referred to, and the relevance of the speaker's intention in that particular situation. The idea is that by analyzing the structure of humorous gestures, as they manifest themselves in and around speech and written text, it will be possible to make generalizable observations and achieve greater insight as to the cognitive mechanisms underlying language. It is a philosophical as well as semio-linguistic project which might also benefit literary studies; in order to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of what a text is doing, I suggest we need a better understanding of what language is doing. We need a cognitively realistic model to describe the semiotic process of ordinary, non-fictionalized communications, as well as "artificial" literary textuality. In literary texts, enounciation is staged and thus involves an element of theatricality. Likewise, you can stage your enounciation in everyday speech so that the utterance appears in a kind of quotation marks. Again irony is the prototypical example: here the enounciator's evaluation of some scenario or state of affairs is expressed by a dissociation from the evaluation directly expressed in the utterance. The quotation function can also manifest itself in enounciation when someone is being facetious, is making self-ironic comments, or is teasing someone else, and a similar instance is the phenomenon (which I believe yet lacks a suitable term) of saying something you sincerely mean but saying it in a way that stages the utterance theatrically, for instance by speaking in dialect or by picking a syntax or a style of expression foreign to your own idiolect, with the goal of amusement or perhaps to mask an aspect of the pragmatic interaction. This tension between the utterance and the intention can function as a humorous device, both in speech and in writing. Another humorous device is a tone often referred to as faux naïf, where the enounciator presents himself as so naive that belief must be suspended.The faux naïf speaker is taken to represent an impossible stance; he is literally incredibly naive. In all these examples a discrepancy is construed, a discrepancy which – I think – is a key element in humor in general. This contrast between what can reasonably be expected in a given situation and an actualization that 'disappoints' this expectation should figure in a mental space analysis of humorous occurrences in artificial and natural texts. Here is a provisional sketch of possible structures characterizing "the element of surprise": 1) Humor in everyday situations of communication: a contrast between expected possibilities inherent in the situation (expectations regarding the speaker and the situation in which he is speaking) and the actualization of unexpected possibilities (example: in place of his acceptance speech, a Nobel Prize winner gets up to recite nursery rhymes or tell dirty jokes), or between elements in the narrated content – in this example the (meta-)level of enounciation is implicit, that is, the humor is embedded in the narrative content – between the conditions of the narrated situation and a surprising twist of events (as when, for instance, the aforementioned jokes succeed in being funny). 2) Humor in pragmatic written language: a contrast between the textual constraints (the textual genre) and the concrete features of a text, for instance with respect to its length, its form of address and/or its narrative content. (Example: In a notification of claim, the insured engages in a novel-size report of the proclaimed injury, full of pathos-ridden metaphors, waxing philosophical on the cause of injury and including an annotated bibliography.) Or between elements in the narrated content, for instance in reviewing causal factors. (Example: After an otherwise sober description of the nature and extent of the suffered loss the injured is to fill out the Cause of injury box and writes "God's wrath (I have been very naugthy)") 3) In a literary context: a contrast between the genre (the situatedness of the text in the history of literature) and the expression and/or referential topic of the narrated content. What I have in mind here is formal violations (for instance as concerns style of tone: high-flown versus low-brow syntax and vocabulary, the duration of paragraphs, long-winded versus terse etc.), and subject matter which breaks the norms for what a specific genre can be about. Or a contrast between particular elements in the text in relation to the whole, either with respect to expressive means (whereby attention is intensified, as in stylistic breakdowns) or with respect to content, i.e. between individual parts of the overall narrative course of events (as when all of a sudden the narrator becomes thoroughly unreliable or gets lost in off-topic digressions, thereby abandoning the original pledge to tell some story). Or a contrast between the intention of the narrator and that of the text itself (as in satire). The empirical material of the project will partly consist in American short prose (the relatively new genre that goes under the name of short-shorts) and partly in taped recordings of situations in which humorous effects emerge in the communication. Short prose offers particularly interesting data since it is intrinsically a fit and likely medium of literary experimentation. Within the genre of short-shorts you will find texts that play with enounciational structures, viewpoint shifts, embedded forms of discourse etc. and which are often very funny. Examples of humor that arise in communicative situations, in contrast to written text, can for instance be found in live television shows (e.g. late night shows), where situational humor erupts spontaneously, and comedy series, where laugther is the desired and calculated effect, carefully prepared by scriptwriters (e.g. the British sitcom Fawlty Towers). Moreover I want to relate empirical findings in humor research (cf. e.g. P. Derks et al., P. Shammi et al.) to my own observations. It will be reflected in my approach that I do not view the methodological dissimilarity between humane and natural science as a barrier, and I anticipate a rewarding exchange. Although any single person's expertise may be limited, I believe cognitive research prospers in an interdisciplinary environment.
Kort beskrivelse af forskningsprojektet paa dansk Projekttitel: "Udsigelsen i tekst og tale –
en semiotisk-kognitiv undersøgelse med særligt henblik
på humor" Projektet består i en fænomenologisk undersøgelse af udsigelsesaspektet i kommunikationen, både i den pragmatisk orienterede tale og den konstruerede litterære skrift. Det empiriske materiale udvælges ud fra princippet om, at det skal være humoristisk eller på anden måde teoretisk udfordende og vil hovedsagelig bestå i amerikansk kortprosa samt videooptagelser af stand-up comedy, live tv-programmer og lignende. Der lægges særlig vægt på humor i betydningsdannelsen, eftersom eksempelmaterialet er rigt på sammensatte synsvinkler, indlejrede stemmeføringer, perspektivskift, mm. – fænomener, som forsøges beskrevet inden for rammerne af en kognitiv semiotik, bl.a. ved hjælp af teorien om mentale rum. Hovedvejleder : Svend G. Østergaard, lektor, Center for Semiotik, AU
Synopsis of master’s thesis: “Explosive Blends - from Cognitive Semantics to Literary Analysis” (2000). My key interest is language as it is used in everyday communication and particularly in literature, incorporating a view of semantics and pragmatics as two interrelated dimensions that ought to both figure in the analysis of linguistic products insofar as what we are after is phenomenologically realistic descriptions of the cognitive processes active in text production- and comprehension. The intended endeavor here is an inquiry into the possibility of a theory of literature within the framework of cognitive semantics, and I attempt to demonstrate, through practical analysis, how such a theory might be conceived. My object of analysis is a piece of fiction, that is, a whole text, leading me to a hypothesis on how the process of reading and textual comprehension might be construed. You will see that conceptual integration theory as well as the more general theory of mental spaces prove useful in a description of the process of reading and interpreting a text. In the first chapter I explicate how I understand the term “conceptual integration” (or ‘blending’) and how this theoretical construct is used in my analysis. The object of analysis is an *explosive* short-short (a short piece of literary prose) by the American author Fred G. Leebron. In the course of the analysis I draw parallels to James Joyce, Marquis de Sade and Guy de Maupassant, among others, though the main focus remains on this one piece of fiction. The analysis spans over three chapters (3-5), following a short introduction (2) to the short-short genre and Leebron’s text - entitled “Water”. Viewpoint as well as what I call enounciation (following Emile Benveniste) is discussed at length, and here I work out a distinction between the subject of the utterance (possible enounciational constructions - in answer to the question “who is speaking?”), the viewpoint implied by the enounciation (possible speaker viewpoints), the viewpoint under which a content is presented (viewpoint scope) and the epistemic scope of an utterance (who, in principle, can have access to what the utterance refers to? - insofar as it refers to anything at all (as we have been aware for quite some time now, language has other functions besides the referential!). In the future, I would like to work more on the various non-referential language uses and incorporate in this framework additional dimensions of expressive functions (which, I predict, requires a systemization and revision of speech-act theory). In the fifth chapter I attend to the question of literary interpretation and ponder such matters as what it means to read between the lines, the relation between narrator and reader, textual scale shifting, as well as discuss different moral, aesthetic and epistemological predispositions in the act of interpretation. I argue against a nominalistic approach to textual interpretation and criticize Richard Rorty’s rejection of the view that some interpretations are more motivated and hence more qualified than others. Enounciation, plot structure and interpretation are all analyzed as integrations within a larger network, and I show that reconstructing these levels in a model network is a means of inquiring into the cognitive processes underlying textual comprehension. The overall hypothesis is that the cognitive network of blended spaces, which are constructed in the reading of a text, consist of three - interdependent - levels (which may be subdivided into sublevels). The construction of these levels is to be understood as a process requiring various degrees of conscious effort, a process that can be architecturally modelled, at the level of phenomenological description, by the means of graphic diagramming and orthography (i.e. blending networks): the enounciational level, the semantic level of (possibly narrative) content, and the level of interpretation. In my concluding remarks, I single in on some problematic areas and open questions as regards blending theory in general and with respect to the (prospectively) continued collective project of uniting cognitive semantics and literary analysis. In the kind of literary criticism presented here, meaning construction is viewed as an intentional process, of which conditions of enounciation and contextual framing are central aspects. The idea is to investigate the structure of the mental operations at work in the act of writing and the act of reading alike, with the further goal of acquiring greater insight into the imaginative mind, insight from which we stand to gain whether we are interested in human cognition, or textuality, or both.
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Updated March 10, 2006 by jpt. © Center for Semiotics. All rights reserved.