Toward a Multimodal Analysis of Quoting Verbatim in English
In-depth video analyses of 70 verbatim quotations found that US speakers in diverse public settings do neither translate the quotation marks of their written sources into their assumed vocal equivalents (pauses, pitch, intensity); nor do they call on kinesic cues (gestures, gaze), leaving the other voice suppressed unless introduced by a quotative.
Again firmly rooted in Leonard Talmy’s Cognitive Semantics, this new study moves beyond the analysis of single schematic systems in language contributing to the linguistic task of conceptual integration. It investigates for the first time effects of linking up Force Dynamics, a conceptual category generalizing over the traditional notion of the causative, and the Attention system of language, as detailed in Talmy’s most recent extended draft version. To accommodate the conceptual and formal complexities involved at the interface of Attention, Force Dynamics, and Cognitive State and to allow for an appropriate degree of fine-grainedness the analytical framework affords, the exposition has been constrained to the golf scenario, where forces are at work in the physical and sociodynamic domains.
Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics, this study, anchored in Cognitive Semantics, offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmy’s groundbreaking model of linguistic attention, applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical network of emo(tion). Some fifty basic attention-related factors combine to yield increasingly complex patterns of interaction, convergence, and conflict affecting all levels of linguistic recombination, from simplex morphemes up to the text format. Differences in attentional profiles of linguistic representations may well account for conceptual alternativity, another fundamental cognitive principle in language: In their verbal interactions, interlocutors, in production and reception, will have to attend to bottom-up mechanisms and top-down strategies of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.
Diese Arbeit folgt in weiten Teilen der sich etablierenden interdisziplinär ausgerichteten Kognitiven Linguistik; für diese formuliert George LAKOFF zwei grundlegende wissenschafts theoretische und methodologische Prämissen, „initial commitments“: Es sind dies das Generalization Commitment, das eine linguistische Untersuchung zur wissenschaftlichen E rforschung genereller Prinzipien menschlicher Sprache verpflichtet, und das Cognitive Commitment, das eine linguistische Arbeit in interdisziplinäre Forschungen zu kognitiven, psychologischen, anthropologischen und neurologischen Aspekten menschlicher Sprachverarbeitung und allgemein mentalen Prozesse einbindet.