by Mark Turner
168 .9 THE LITERARY MIND
environment of adaptiveness that must be part of an adaptive account. In the parabolic environment, the lone genetically grammatical person would be sur- rounded by a grammatical community and would have an advantage over other members. Over time, genetic specialization in the species might take up sorne of the responsibility previously shouldered by parabolic mechanisms in the indi- vidual mind.
The view that parable explains the origin of language makes it possible to conceive of parabolic thinking and genetic specialization for grammar (if there is any) as historically connected in the evolution of the species and commensu- rate and reinforcing in the contemporary individual mind. Whether genetic spe- cialization for grammar exists, to what degree it might exist, how it might be expressed in the individual brain under development, and how it might cooper- ate with other conceptual processes are all open empirical questions. But parable alone, without genetic specialization, gives us what we need for the origin of
language. (Bl
The storyl have offered reverses the view that language is built up from the sober to the exotic; that out of syntactic phrase structures, one builds up language; that out of language, one builds up narrative; that out of narrative, literary narrative is born as a special performance; and that out of literary narrative comes parable.
It works the other way around. With story, projection, and their powerful combination in parable, we have a cognitive basis from which language can origi- nate. The dynamic processes of parable are basic to the construction of meaning and the construction of language. Story precedes grammar. Projection precedes grammar. Parable precedes grammar. Language follows from these mental capa- cities as a consequence; it is their complex product. Language is the child of the literary mind.
Parable is the root of the human mind—of thinking, knowing, acting, cre- ating, and plausibly even of speaking.
.253 NOTES 6;.
page 3, “There was once a wealthy farmer”: N. Dawood, trans., Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973), p. 20.
page 7, C. S. Lewis on parable: See Louis MacN eice’s discussion of literary critical perspectives on parable in The Varieties of Parahle [The Clark Lectures, 1963] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 5. C. S. Lewis’s obser- vations appear in The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 44.
page 15, “after the fact”: After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One An- thropologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2.
page 16, “How do we recognize objects, events, and stories?”: How we learn to partition a stimulus field into concrete objects and to categorize those con- crete objects is a central problem of the cognitive sciences that has received only highly speculative answers. Gerald Edelman, in Neural Darwin ism and The Rememhered Present:A Biological Theory of Consciousness, describes the central difficulty: “The world of stimuli available to a newborn animal does not exist in prior information simply to be manipulated according to a set of rules, similar to those followed by a computer executing a program. VVhile the real stimulus world obviously obeys the laws of physics, it is not uniquely partitioned into ‘objects’ and ‘events.’ An organism must contain or create adaptive criteria to develop information allowing such a partition. Until a particular individual in a particular species categorizes it in an adaptive fash- ion, the world is an unlabeled place in which novelty is frequently encoun- tered.” Gerald Edelman, The Rememhered Present.-A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 41.
page 17, “Hanging his head down”: W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 50, lines 9-12.
page 18, “Abstract reasoning”: See Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in theAge of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chap. 3 and 7.
169
170 .6 NOTES
page 18, “William H. Calvin”: The Cerehral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness (New York: Bantam, 1990).
page 19, “We recognize small spatial stories on the basis of partial information": The possible mechanisms of such “pattern completion” are the essential subject of a highly influential two—volume work, Parallel Distributed’ Pro- cessing: Explorations in the M icrostructure of Cogn ition, ed. David Rumelhart et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
page 21, “Recognizing objects . . . as having sensations”: Conceiving of the mecha- nisms of sensation also appears to depend upon parabolic projection of image schemas of movement. The most common of these parabolic projections conceives of sensation as the result of small objects moving and hitting the sensory apparatus of the actor, thus making an “impression” or “impinging” upon the sensory apparatus. In antiquity, that sensory apparatus might have been regarded as the soul. In contemporary science, it is more likely to be regarded as the retina, or taste buds, or cilia in the inner ear, or sensory neu- rons in the skin. The modern theory of taste is a case in which an ancient image-schematic notion of sensation has come to be regarded as literal: The sensory apparatus of taste consists of certain spatial docking stations that allow molecules of only certain shapes to dock. VVhen a molecule of the right shape encounters a docking station that it fits, the result is the particular “taste” of that molecule.
page 21, “Aristotle surveys theories”: See the opening sections of book 1 of On the Soul.
page 23, “His model ‘rejects a single anatomical site’”: Antonio R. Damasio, “Time—locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems—level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition,” Cognition 33 (1989), 25-62. Qlotation from p. 26.
page 24, “How to Build a Baby”: Psychological Review 99:4 (1992), 587-604.
pages 26-27, “EVENTS ARE ACTIONS”: See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Turner, Reading Minals; George Lakoff, “The Con- temporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphorana’ Thought, 2d ed., ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 202-5 1.
page 27, “Many were the men”: Homer, Odyssey, book 1, lines 3-9. Homeri Opera, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917), unpaginated.
page 29, “modal structure”: For a full analysis of the relation of force dynamics to modality, see Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1990).
page 30, “The rain set early in to—night”: Robert Browning, Poetical Works (}40f1‘ don: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 358.
NOTES (2.171
page 33, “I feel a hand”: Euripides,Alcestis, lines 259-64, in Euripia’esI V (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press [Loeb], 1912), pp. 426-28; translation by Philip Vellacott in Euripides,Alcestis, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris (Har- mondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1974), p. 51. page 39, “George Lakoff and Mark Johnson”: Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). page 40, “Yet I do fear thy nature”: This example was provided by Donald C. Freeman. page 42, Michael Reddy: “The Conduit Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 284-324. page 44, “And now, I realized”: Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 206-16. page 44, Saint John of the Cross: “En una noche oscura,” in Gerald Brenan, St. john of the Cross: His Life and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 144. The original poem includes the following phrases: “por el camino de la negacion,” “por la secreta escala,” “iOh noche, que guiaste,” “Qmdéme,” and “dejando me cuidado.” page 45, “ou-verture”: Marcel Proust, xi la recherche du tempsperdu, édition publiée sous la direction de Jean~Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1988), vol. 1, pp. 3-9', Rememhrance of Thin gs Past, 3 vols., trans. C. K. Scott- Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and Andreas Mayor (New York: Ran- dom House, 1981),
vol. 1, pp. 3-8. The original includes the following passages: “j’entourais completement ma téte de mon oreiller avant de retourner dans le monde des réves,” “ma pensée, s’efforgant pendant des heures de se disloquer, de s’étirer en hauteur . . . ,” “Et avant méme que ma pensée, qui hésitait au seuil des temps et des formes, efit identifié le logis en rapprochant les circonstances . . .” page 45, “And even before my thought”: My translation. page 47, Leonard Talmy: See “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition,” Cognitive Science 12 (1988): 49-100, and the references quoted there. page 47, Eve Sweetser: From Etymology to Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). page 5 3, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mina’, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). page 53, “constraints . . . on the projection of progeneration”: Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty, pp. 143-48. page 55, “Its mother was a mainframe”: I am grateful to Eve Sweetser for this example. page 56, “mother of all battles”: The expression quickly became a template for other versions: Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, a man not known for
172 .6 NOTES
verbal flair, reported to the American Legion that the mother of all battles had become the mother of all retreats. ABC news anchor Peter Jennings observed that for Saddam the mother of battles had become the mother of corners. The Washington Post of February 28, 1991, stated that the allied attack was the mother of all maneuvers and that General Norman Schwarz- kopf’s remarkable report to the press was the mother of all briefings. The New York Times of March 1, 1991, printed on its Op—Ed page the “Mother of All Columns.”
page 57, “nor did Alice think”: Lewis Carroll,Alice’sAd-ventures in Wonderland, in TheAnnotatedAlice, with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1960), pp. 25-26.
page 58, “Blending has been studied in detail”: See Gilles Fauconnier and l/Iark Turner, “Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces,” UCSD Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401 (San Diego: UCSD, April 1994); Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “Blending and Metaphor” (manuscript, 1996); Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression,” journal of Metaphor and Symholic Activity 10, no. 3 (1995): 183-204; Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Blending as a Cen- tral Process of Grammar,” in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, ed. Adele Goldberg (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and In- formation, in press); Mark Turner, “Conceptual Blending and Counter- factual Argument in the Social and Behavioral Sciences,” in Counterfactual ThoughtExperiments in World Politics, ed. Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, in press); Seana Coulson, “Analogic and Metaphoric Mapping in Blended Spaces,” Center for Research in Language Newsletter 9, no. 1 (1995): 2-12; Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press); Nili Mandelblit, “Blending in Causative Structures” (manuscript, 1994); Nili Mandelblit, “The Theory of Blending as Part of the General Epistemological Developments in Cognitive Science” (manuscript, 1995); Todd Oakley, “Presence: The Conceptual Basis of Rhetorical Effect” (Diss., University of Maryland, 1996); Douglas Sun, “Thurber’s Fahles for Our Time.‘ A Case Study in Satirical Use of the Great Chain Metaphor,” Studies in American Humor, n.s. 3, no. 1 (1994), pp. 51-61.
page 61, “Perch’io parti’”: Inferno, canto 28, lines 139-42.
page 62, “In general, we understand proverbs”: George Lakoff and I have previ- ously analyzed this kind of projection to a generic space in More than Cool Reason, pp. 162-66 (“Generic Is Specific”).
page 64, “So foul a sky”: William Shakespeare, King john, act 4, scene 2, l.ines 108-9.
NOTES (2.173
page 67, “As we went to press”: “Great America II,” Latitude 38 190 (April 1993): 100.
page 68: “It is even possible, as Seana Coulson has shown”: Coulson, “Analogic and Metaphoric Mapping,” pp. 2-12.
page 72, “A Buddhist monk”: Aversion of this riddle appears in Arthur Koestler, TheAct of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 183-89.
page 74, “Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric ofFiction”: 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), especially pp. 3-20 and 207-9.
page 74, “in general we keep the space of what is narrated”: There are in fact spe- cial cases of highly imaginative actual intrusion, as when the narrator magi- cally enters the narrated story to interact as narrator with the characters.
page 75, “Before I introduce my Readers”: Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 207-8.
page 79, “Lakoff and I originally noticed a constraint on personification”: Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, p. 79.
page 81, “the plants at the end of their life cycle are harvested”: Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, p. 75.
page 85, “Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink”: I am grateful to Robert Keohane for this example.
page 87, “George Lakoff and I have given one argument”: Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, pp. 162-66 (“Generic Is Specific”).
page 91, “When one absorbs”: Proust, Rememhrance of Things Past, vol. 3, p. 184. French original: Proust,H la recherche du tempsperdu, vol. 3, p. 691.
page 92, “For we talk of ‘Death’ for convenience”: Proust, Rememhrance of Things Past, vol. 3, pp. 197-98. French original: Proust, H la recherche du tempsperdu, vol. 3, pp. 703-4.
page 93, “NIH has become a bit of the Beirut”: “ NIH Chief Announces Plans to Resign,” Losflngeles Times, 27 February 1993, A18.
page 95, “artificial life”: See John Markoff, “Beyond Artificial Intelligence, a Search for Artificial Life,” The New York Times, 25 February 1990, Week in Review section, 5. Gilles Fauconnier alerted me to this article.
page 95, ‘“artificial life’ will not belong to the category ‘life’”: A letter to the edi- tor in US. News and Worla'Report complains that only insane people could see category connection as arising out of the analogybetween computer simu- lations and the evolution of living creatures. “People who begin to believe that electronic images, portrayed on a computer screen, are the same as liv- ing creatures need help.” 31 May 1993, BC-20.
page 98, “Cold War without End”: The New York Times Magazine, 22 August 1993, 28-30, 45; illustration on 28.
page 99, “This inference can arise in the target space”: Actually, this inference
174 .8 NOTES
arises in the target as understood through a difierent conceptual projection according to which the termination of something that is not a physical object—in this case, political control-—-is understood metaphorically as a physical object that disappears.
page 100 “An unexpected surge in wholesale prices”: Sylvia Nasar, “Prices at Wholesale Surge 0.6%, Fanning Worry about Inflation,” The New York Times‘, 13 May 1993, A1.
page 105, “In this way he acquired a vast hoard”: Mark Twain, Lifie on the Mis- sissippi (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 393.
page 105, “technological bake sales”: “To keep research afloat, these institutions have had to pump in big sums of their own money. And they are raising it by hold- ing technological bake sales.” Udayan Gupta, “Hungry for Funds, Universities Embrace Technology Transfer,” The Wall Street journal, 1 July 1994, 1.
page 110, “at the most basic levels of perception, . . . blending is fundamental”: For an introduction, see Barry E. Stein and M. Alex Meredith, The Merg- ing of the Senses (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
page 110, “Objects and many of their properties are perceived as having a uni-
' tary appearance”: Edelman, The Rememherea’ Present, p. 43.
page 110, “This is known in neuroscience as the ‘binding problem”’: See An- tonio R. Damasio, “The Brain Binds Entities and Events by Multiregional Activation from Convergence Zones,” Neural Computation (1989): 123- 32. For a popularjournalistic sketch of the binding problem and of a pro- posal by Rodolfo Llinas to solve it, see Sandra
Blakeslee, “How the Brain Might Work,” The New York Times, 21 March 1995, Science section, B5 and B7.
page 111, Antonio Damasio and convergence: Antonio R. Damasio, “Time- Locked Multiregional Retroactivation: A Systems—Level Proposal for the Neural Substrates of Recall and Recognition,” Cognition 33 (1989): 25--62. See also Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, “Cortical Systems for Retrieval of Concrete Knowledge: The Convergence Zone Framework,” in Large—Seale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, ed. Cristof Koch and Joel L. Davis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 62-74; and Antonio R. Damasio, Descortes’Error (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994).
page 111, “involves parallel sampling”: Edelman, The Rememhered Present, p. 65.
page 111, “acts to coordinate inputs and resolve conflicts”: Edelman, The Re- memhereol Present, p. 72.
page 112, “include functional correlations important to concept formation”: Edelman, The Rememhered Present, p. 70.
page 116, “O Lord”: Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine—Coff1n (Har- mondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1961), book 1, section 13, p. 263.
NOTES (2.175
page 120, focus and viewpoint in linguistics: See, for taxonomies of linguistic phenomena involving focus and viewpoint, and for surveys of scholarship on these issues, Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, TheoreticalPrerequisites, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 122-26; Eve Sweetser and Gilles Fauconnier, “Cognitive Links and Domains,” chap. 1 in Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, ed. Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Faucon- nier, chap. 3 in Mappings in Thought and Language. See also Ronald Lang- acker, “Reference—Point Constructions,” Cogniti-veLinguisties 4, no. 1 (1993): 1-3 8.