Zoltan Kövecses
Language, Mind and Culture
A Practical Introduction
Oxford University Press 2006

What is the nature of reality? Does the world come in a structured or unstructured form?

Reality does not come in a pre-structured form; it does not come in well-defined categories. Categories are defined with respect to prototypes and have a family resemblance structure. One of our most essential abilities to survive is the ability to categorise the objects and events around us. By creating conceptual categories we make sense of the world; when we encounter new objects and events we assign them to already existing categories or create new ones to accommodate them.

How do we mentally represent categories in our heads? I have considered three modes of the mental representation of categories: classical categorization, prototype categorization, and exemplar models.

The classical model is based on rulelike definitions of categories that operate with semantic features. The mental representations of the categories can be taken to be minimal definitionsgiven in terms of essential features.

The model of prototype categorization claims that instead of necessary and sufficient conditions, categories are represented in the mind as prototypes, or best examples, for categories. These are abstract idealization is of category members. Prototype based categories do not possess single sets of essential features to define them.

The classical theory of hierarchic categories operates with the notion of logical feature inclusion. However, on such a view, it would be difficult to explain why the middle of the hierarchy has a distinctive status for speakers. Basic level categorization accounts for the psychological primacy of the middle level by claiming that this is the level where categories can simultaneously meet two basic demands: the pressure for maximal similarity among category members and the pressure of maximal dissimilarity between neighbouring categories.

Categorisation and general and levels of categorization for particular people is just as much a matter of culture as it is a matter of cognition. The cultural contexts in which the categorization takes place play a crucial role in why people categorise particular objects and events at particular levels of abstraction. In sum, the world does not come in pre-structured fashion; categorization is an imaginative act that relies on human cognition and culture.

What is the relationship between the mind and external reality? Does the mind reflect or create reality?

The mind is not a mirror of reality; it reflects the world as we experience and perceive it. The world is built up by the mind in an imaginative way, as we just partly saw for prototypes and hierarchies of categories. We have additional cognitive processes at our disposal to create a “projected” reality - a reality of our imaginative powers, such as frames, metonymy, metaphor, mental spaces, blending.

The knowledge we have about the world is given to us in highly schematic, or idealized, forms: in frames. Frames capture our prototypes for conceptual categories. They are cultural products shared by smaller or larger groups of people. They can take the form of folk an expert theories. Much of our knowledge about the world comes in the folk theories repossess. One extremely important feature of frames is that they help us to account for multiple understandings of the same situation. Alternative construal made possible by multiple frames made possible by multiple frames for the same “thing” is the norm in our meaning making activity. (metonymies, metaphors, mental spaces, conceptual integration)

Given such imaginative processes of the mind, we can conclude that a large part of reality is actually defined by the mind.

What is the relationship between the mind and the Body? Is the Mind independent of the Body (Is it Transcentent, Abstract?) or is it based on the body?

Thought is not independent of the body, it is not abstract, and it is not like an abstract machine that manipulates abstract symbols. In a very real sense, thought is embodied. The categories of mind are defined by interactional properties; this is especially clear in the case of basic-level categories.

Image schemas are recurring, dynamic patterns of our perceptual interactions and motor programmes that give coherence to experience. Image schemas arise from our most basic bodily experiences, and the use them to make sense of the world around us (container schema, whole-part schema,source-path-goal schema, etc.).
Cultural models for abstract concepts can only be a metaphor based. Figurative abstract meaning seems to be just as much a design feature of thought as literal concrete meaning is.

What is language? Is it mostly a matter of form or conceptualization?

Language uses many of the same operations that other cognitive faculties of the mind use. Aspects of attention, figure ground organization, force dynamics, metaphor, metonymy, blending, and so on are a part and parcel of grammar. This suggests a holistic, rather than a modular, structure of the mind.

Grammar reflects the ways we conceptualise the world at a highly schematic level. There are no rules of the Choskyan kind in cognitive grammar. They are replaced by schemas.
The basic elements of cognitive grammar are constructions. Constructions are combinations of form and meaning. Constructions include both vertically and horizontally extended linguistic signs. In the new view, particular morphemes and highly schematic grammatical structures can both be thought of as constructions. Constructional schemas also have meaning; their meaning is constituted by commonly occurring scenes in a culture (such as the meaning of “agent effects patient”in the transitive construction.)

Cognitive grammar operates with the notion that regularity is relative and that some constructions are more regular than others, while some other constructions are less regular, or idiomatic. Cognitive linguists doubt the existence of a core grammar, where everything is completely regular and predictable.

What is meaning? What is meaningfulness? Can it be defined in terms of truth conditions? How does the meaning arise? How does language acquire meaning?

The symbol grounding problem receives an elegant solution if we take into account the role of image schemas in making sense of experience. Abstract symbols and linguistic expressions get their meaning through image schemas. Image schemas are based on our bodily experience; this ensures the meaningfulness of symbols and expressions. We rely on our bodily experience in understanding the world around us.

Constructuals are particular ways of understanding the world. The relationship between language (linguistic expressions), construal,and the world is manifold. We can construe the same situation in different ways and indicate this by using different expressions, we can construe different aspects of the same thing by means of the same expression, and we can construe different situations by means of the same expression.

There are many cognitive operations at our disposal to conceptualise the world in alternate ways. Alternative construal adds a new dimension to our conception of meaning. In the new view, meaning is not simply some conceptual content but also some construal of that conceptual content.

The meaning of complex linguistic units is taken to be compositional in most modern approaches. This is the idea that the overall meaning of a phrase or sentence derives from the meanings of the constituent parts and the particular grammatical ways in which the constituent parts are put together. However, we saw that strict compositionality cannot be right and has to be replaced by a looser version in order to account for the meaning of complex units. Since in most cases this weaker version of compositionality is the only available and reasonable option, I suggest that idiomaticity is the default feature of natural languages and the meaningful (nonlinguistic) complex units of cultures.

Kövecses