The Literary Mind

by Mark Turner

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  There are basic abstract stories. A basic abstract story is projected to create a basic kind of grammatical structure. For example, the basic abstract story in which an animate agent performs a physical action that causes a physical object to move in a spatial direction is projected to create the grammatical structure we see in

  LANGUAGE Q. 143

  “John pushes the ball onto the court,” “David tosses the can into the yard,” and “Mary throws the stone over the fence.” The abstract narrative structure is pro- jected to create the abstract grammatical structure. The abstract narrative struc- ture includes an agent, an action, an object, and a direction. The abstract gram- matical structure includes a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase followed by a noun phrase followed by a prepositional phrase, with the first noun phrase as Subject and Agent and the second noun phrase as Direct Object and Patient.

  The first abstract structure is conceptual and narrative. The second abstract structure is grammatical. If we think of these two structures as residing in two spaces, then there is a generic space that contains just the structure they share. This generic space is more abstract than either of them; its structure is not spe- cifically conceptual or grammatical; it includes only elements, distinction of elements, some relations between elements, and so on.

  The story in which Mary throws a stone and the story in which Bill flips a coin are different in nearly every specific detail, but we take them as sharing an abstract story structure. “Mary throws a stone” and “Bill flips a coin” are, as vocal sound, different in nearly every detail, but we take them as sharing an abstract grammatical structure. The abstract story structure and the abstract grammati- cal structure share generic structure.

  Let us consider an example of the way in which story is projected to create grammar. Consider the small spatial stories in which Mary throws a stone, John pushes a ball, and David tosses a can. These small spatial stories are all instances of the same basic abstract story.

  This basic abstract story has certain kinds of structure. One kind of struc- ture it possesses is distinction of certain elements—Mary, the act of throwing, the stone. Notice that if we actually see (or imagine) Mary throwing a stone, we cannot distinguish the perception of throwing from the perception of Mary and the perception of the stone. Nonetheless, conceptually, in narrative imagining, we distinguish these three elements.

  These three elements have category structure. Mary, for example, is placed into the category of animate agents; throwing is placed into the category of events; the stone is placed into the category of objects.

  The story also has combinatorial structure. The distinguished elements of the story include Mary, the stone, the causal relationship between Mary and the throwing, the causal relationship between the throwing and the movement of the stone, the causal relationship between Mary and the movement of the stone, the event shape of the throwing, and our temporal viewpoint with respect to the throwing, all of which are combined as simultaneous: the act of throwing involves all of them at once. This combination has /yierarcbical structure—l1avin g a view- point on a story depends upon the existence of the story, for example.

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  In sum, the abstract story has certain kinds of structure: reliable distinction of elements, distribution of elements into categories, simultaneous combination, hierarchy, and so on. Other basic stories show recursive structure: if Paul catches the stone Mary threw, then one story (Mary throws a stone) feeds into a second story (Paul catches the stone).

  Vocal sound itself—as sound, not language—does not have this structure. The elements of the story have a reliable structure of distinction but the sound “Mary throws a stone” is more or less a continuous stream that, if divided up at all, could be divided up any number of ways. The elements of the story have a reliable hierarchical structure of oined but conceptually distinguished elements (e.g., the event and the temporal viewpoint on the event) that the sound—again as sound, not lang11age—does not mirror. The elements of the abstract story have category structure that the sound does not mirror: If Mary throws, John pushes, and David tosses, then Mary, John, and David belong to a category, but the sounds “Mary,” “John,” and “David” belong to no such reliable category. The causal struc- ture in the abstract story has nothing to do with the causal structure of vocal sound. The temporal structure of vocal sound is always linear sequence but the te.mpo— ral structure of this story involves highly complex simultaneity; other stories involve even more complicated temporal structure. In sum, story and vocal sound are two very different sorts of things. Story structure is projected to create struc- ture for vocal sound that vocal sound does not intrinsically have.

  The distinction of elements in the abstract story is projected to make “lVIary,” “throws,” and “a stone” precisely distinct not as sound but as grammatical ele- ments. The category structure in the abstract story is projected to vocal sound to put “Mary” and “a stone” into the same grammatical category—noun phrase. As sound, “Mary” and “a stone” share no reliable category, but as grammar, they do. The different roles of Mary and the stone in the story are projected to give “Mary” and “stone” different categories of grammatical relation (Subject versus Direct Object) and semantic role (Agent versus Patient). The structure of temporal foci and viewpoint in the abstract story is projected to give the sentence grammatical tense.

  Abstract stories are projected to create abstract grammatical structures. The storyin which Mary throws a stone is an instance of an abstract story; that abstract story is projected to create an abstract grammatical structure. The abstract story has indefinitely many instances; the corresponding abstract grammatical con- struction has indefinitely many instances. Mary throws a stone, John pushes a ball, and David tosses a can are all instances of the abstract story; “Mary throws a stone,” “John pushes a ball,” and “David tosses a can” are all instances of the corresponding abstract grammatical structure.

  LANGUAGE Q. 145

  The abstract story, in one mental space, has conceptual structure. The ab- stract grammatical structure, in a second mental space, has grammatical struc- ture. The very abstract structure they share resides in a generic space. It may sound odd to say that we blend the abstract story with the abstract grammar, but noth- ing is more common: In grade school, we are taught that a Noun is a person, place, or thing, a Verb is an action or event, and so on. Of course, a Noun is certainly not a person, place, or thing, and a Verb is certainly not an action or an event. Nouns and Verbs are grammatical; people, places, things, actions, and events are not grammatical. But in the blend, we join them. “lVIary throws a stone” seems to be both a grammatical sentence and a story. Sentences are stories. Draw- ing inspiration from work done by Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay and later work done by Adele Goldberg, I call a blend of story structure and grammatical struc- ture a grammatical construction. In a construction, certain story structures go with certain grammatical structures. VVhen we want to tell that story, we use that grammar. When someone uses that grammar, it prompts us to think of that story.

  Let us take a broad look at some of the principles of this “parabolic” view of language. The projection of story structure to create grammatical structure for vocal sound is not one projection but indefinitely many. There are indefinitely many specific projections of story to voice; the vastly complex network of all these specific projections is “the projection of story onto voice to create grammar.” As narrative structure is not one thing but rather a mental activity that coordinates very many stories at many levels, so grammatical structure is not one thing but rather a mental activity that coordinates very many grammatical structures at many levels. The origin of grammar is the establishment of a dynamic coordinated complex of different but related grammatical structures that arise from projec- tions of story structure. Grammar is not the beginning point of language: par- able is the beginning point of language. Grammar arises originally from con-
ceptual operations. Rudimentary grammar is a repertoire of related grammatical constructions established through parable. The backbone of any language con- sists of grammatical constructions that arise by projection from basic abstract stories.

  Story and grammar have similar structure because grammar comes from story through parable. Let us consider some of the similarities between them.

  Story depends upon constructing something rather than nothing. A report- able story is distinguished from its assumed and unreportable background. It is impossible for us to look at the world and not to see reportable stories distin- guished from background, even though distinguishing in this fashion is hard to justify from the point of view of physics and biology. If we look out of the win- dow and someone asks us what is out there, we can reply “Nothing” and mean it,

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  so long as what we are looking at seems like background: a tree and a lawn on a quiet day. But if a lightning bolt strikes the tree, it looks very different, and becomes reportable. We believe that the same laws of physics and biology hold for both scenes and that in a scientific sense a great deal is going on in both scenes. Yet the lightning strike looks like a little story and the other scene looks like background, nothing remarkable.

  This distinction of story as opposed to no story projects to the distinction of speech as opposed to no speech. Silence is part of grammar and is the counter- part of no story. We grant to certain elements of our perceptual experience. spe- cial distinguished status. We think of things as happening against a background. Analogously, we think of speech as happening against a background of silence. The silence reports the background; the speech reports whatever is distinguished against the background. This is not always the case, of course: modern languages have developed many highly intricate instruments that go far beyond the basic grammatical constructions for basic stories. But radically, we report that the light- ning struck the tree or that one person hugged another or that the rains flooded the tunnel or that the branch waved back and forth in the heavy wind. Report- ing a nonevent is less common, unless the event was expected, in which case the nonevent is itself conceived of as an event. The form of reporting nonevents— “The lightning did not strike the tree”—is also much less prototypical. It would be odd to make this report if the event had not been expected; the negation pays homage to the story that did not happen rather than the nonevent that did.

  Narrative imagining partitions and categorizes wholes into related elements, as when the small spatial story of Mary throwing a stone is perceived and cat- egorized as involving different elements in different categories that stand in nar- rative relationships. Narrative partitioning, categorizing, and relating project to create grammatical partitioning, categorizing, and relating. The result is gram- matical categories and grammatical relations.

  Story groups elements. For example, the image schema pat/J-to—goal groups the elements in the motion of the stone toward the window into a single unit. Story grouping projects to create grammatical grouping: “Toward the window” is a grammatical group. In English, this grammatical grouping is not simply a matter of sound adjacency. “Mary threw the rock toward the-ifI’m not mistaken —window” still has “toward the window” as a grammatical group. Nonadjacency in grammatical grouping is even more evident in a language like Latin.

  Narrative imagining combines finite elements into infinitely many prod- ucts—Mary,John, throws, catches, pushes, flips, stone, ball, and coin, as con- ceptual elements of narrative imagining, combine into a great number of particular stories: Mary throws the stone, John throws the stone, Mary throws the ball, John catches the ball,John flips the coin, Mary pushes the coin, and so on. This

  LANGUAGE Q. 147

  structural property of story is projected to create a structural property of gram- mar: Finite grammatical elements combine into infinitely many products. “lVIary,” “John,” “stone,” and “ball,” as grammatical elements, combine into a great many grammatical products: “Mary throws the stone,” “John throws the stone,” “lVIary throws the ball,” and so on.

  Narrative imagining is exceptionally adept at nesting—putting one story in- side another. Story nesting is projected to create grammatical nesting: “The house that Jack built fell down.” Literary stories like the Odyssey or The T/Jouszma’ and OneNig/Jts have stories nested to several layers, but it is hard to track all these lay- ers at once, a fact Shahrazad exploits repeatedly to great rhetorical effect. As has often been observed, the same is true of grammatical nesting: “The house thatJack whom my aunt who came from Germany named built fell down” is hard to track.

  Different basic stories are organized in a network; they are not independent of each other. They share structure. For example, the story categories Agent and Action show up in very many different basic stories. Just so, the different gram- matical constructions that come from different basic abstract stories are orga- nized in a network. They are not independent of each other. For example, the basic grammatical categories Noun and Verb show up in very many different basic grammatical constructions. Basic kinds of elements in stories have status of their own: Agent is a unit in the conceptual network of story. Just so, basic kinds of elements in grammatical structures have status of their own: Noun and Verb are themselves constructions in the network of grammar. Narrative imagining works with a network of related story structures; grammar works with a network of related grammatical constructions. Although modern language has developed many tricks, the original principle of networking persists: modern grammar is a dynamic and adaptive network of constructions, new ones evolving over time as basic ones continue to do their job.

  The projection of basic stories accounts for the existence of corresponding basic grammatical constructions. That is a small beginning. Now we add a crucial development. We saw repeatedly in the early chapters of this book that the struc- ture of a basic story can be projected onto other conceptual targets. For example, the structure of an agent beating an object can be projected onto the story of what the wind does to the sailor; the structure of taking an object away can be pro- jected onto the story of Death. The target of such a projection has, by parable, structure that matches the source. Suppose a basic story projects to both a target story and a grammatical construction. Then the structure of the grammatical construction matches the structure of the target story. In that case, the gram- matical construction can be used to express not only the basic story but also the target story. In sum, grammatical constructions that represent a basic story rep- resent any conceptual target structured by projection from that story. We say both

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  “Mary threw the stone out the window” and “Mary threw the job out the win- dow.” The first is a small spatial story. The second is not at all spatial. The nonspatial story has structure projected from the spatial story. The grammatical construction has structure projected from the spatial story. Therefore, the gram- matical construction represents both the spatial story and the nonspatial story. This phenomenon—the same grammatical construction for expressing stories of profoundly different features—is such an indispensable part of our thought and language as to seem unproblematic. But something this profound requires an explanation, and the explanation is parable.

  A great range of things that are not prototypical objects, events, agents, or actions in a story can be conceived by projection as if they were. For example, times are not moving objects, but by parable we can think of them so, and this target can then be expressed by the grammatical construction that corresponds to the source: We say “The deadline is approaching” in the same way we say “The car is approaching.”

  The event of thinking is a process, not an object or an agent, but it can be conceived as an object—agent through parable. Conceived in this way, the target can be expressed by the grammatical constructions that correspond to the source story: We say “His thinking is moving in the wrong direction” just as we say “His truck is m
oving in the wrong direction.” We say “I cannot grasp the idea” just as we say “I cannot grasp the handle.” We say “I am turning it over in my mind” just as we say “I am turning it over in the pot.” We say “I grasped the idea” just as we say “I grasped the object.” We say “He accepted the explanation” just as we say “He accepted the gift.”

  There are other ways in which rudimentary language can be extended. A grammatical construction like Subject Noun Phrase that arose by projection from one part of story structure like Agent can be exploited to express related parts of story structure like Instrument: “John broke the stick” has a grammatical con- struction that can be exploited to say, “The stone broke the stick.”

  Where the patient in a small spatial story seems itself active in an activity induced by an agent, we may exploit the Subject position to express not the prin- cipal agent but rather the “active” patient: “The stick broke.”

  And so on. For parable to be the root of language means that it supplied the beginning of language. That beginning was developed and was exploited for the great additional range of communicative purposes.

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  Let us take, as an example of how grammar comes from parable, some features of tense in English. I pick tense as an illustration because although it has been studied explicitly, intensively, and intelligently for at least two and a half millen-