Abstract Using a cognitive-semiotic framework, we investigate to what degree consecutive bilingual speakers of Russian and Swedish who reside in Sweden experience themselves the Semiotic Hierarchy stands in a relation of Fundierung when using their first and second language. We distinguished between three basic levels of selfhood: bodily, enculturated and linguistic, based on a revised version of a theoretical model known as the Semiotic Hierarchy , and performed phenomenological interviews with 13 participants, looking for evidence for how they experienced themselves on these levels, and how changes occurred over time. The results showed more stability on the bodily level, more variance of features related to selfhood on the linguistic level, with the enculturated level falling, predictably, in between. These findings and analysis support a view of bilingual selfhood as based on processes of continuous negotiation, giving rise to “hybrid selves” marked by both continuity and transformation.
Abstract Contemporary embodied cognition theories often assume the existence of a mental representation of bodily experience, without explaining how this representation emerges from pre-reflective bodily processes. This paper turns to Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference, developed in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Whitehead distinguishes two modes of perception: causal efficacy (the vague, affective, bodily feeling of the world acting upon us) and presentational immediacy (the clear, spatialized presentation of sensory data). Symbolic reference is the dynamic integration of these two modes, generating the embodied facts that constitute conscious experience. We argue that Whitehead’s framework offers a non-mentalistic, process-based account of how bodily feelings become meaningful symbols, thereby shedding light on the residual Cartesianism in both phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and cognitive linguistics (conceptual metaphor theory). The paper concludes by outlining implications for a Whiteheadian cognitive semiotics, in which meaning emerges from the environment’s causal efficacy on the living body.
Abstract Isocolon is a special form of repetition, aligning sequences of words, phrases, or clauses through prosodic parallelism. It is the mainstay of poetry and ritualistic genres, a feature of oratory, ubiquitous in slogans, proverbs, and other widespread, culturally robust expressions, and a crucial instrument of conversational coordination. It very frequently collocates with other figures and has a special affinity for parison (syntactic parallelism). I develop isocolon as a paradigm case of endophoric (or ‘intrasemiotic’) iconicity. Similarity of form evokes similarity of meaning. I argue for a rhetorical homogeneity activated more broadly by schemes of repetition, and a particular role for parallelism in providing a setting to amplify the semiotic functioning of other figures. My case brings together the work of Kenneth Burke with empirical results in cognitive psychology and theoretical work in neuroscience. Experimental work revealing a ‘credibility bonus’ for aesthetic language demonstrates Burke’s notion of formal assent, and the theory of predictive coding explains his related notion of collaborative expectancy. Prior and current forms prime our receptivity for future forms.
Abstract I present a critique of a central claim of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, namely, that metaphor is a conceptual form of thought. Metaphor is deeply cognitive, I argue, but it is not based on concepts. Instead, metaphor rests on the conflation of things, thinking of one thing as another, a cognitive act which directly violates the aims of conceptual thought: 1) to categorize things or 2) to provide a rule for experience. Metaphor ignores categorical meaning, flagrantly so, and operates without any clear rules. For these reasons, metaphor has historically been rejected by cognitive theorists who privilege conceptual thought. Conceptual Metaphor Theory argues that metaphorical cognition is in fact conceptual, but this is a mistake, because metaphor is manifestly conflational and serves a very different cognitive purpose than conception. Its primary aim, I argue, is to specify experience, to characterize experience in a closer, finer sense – not more generally, as concepts do. I show that metaphor is a concrete, specifying operation that employs concrete elements of experience to characterize abstract experience in a more concrete way – precisely as the abstract is conflated with concrete elements. Such a view provides a much simpler, clearer understanding of metaphorical cognition and its essential aims.
Abstract Investigating the semantic specificity of inner speech means addressing one of the most elusive and underexplored sides of language studies: the irreducible mark of subjectivity, long marginalised in 19th- and 20th-century comparative and structuralist approaches as a non-formalisable residue of analysis (Bergounioux. 2010. Les trois sources de la théorie de l’endophasie: phonologie, psychologie et clinique. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 32(2). 9–22; De Palo. 2022. Le langage intérieur, le sujet et le paradoxes de la dimension métalinguistique. In S. Smadja & F. Dubor (eds.), Pratiques monologales , 39–61). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study integrates the Egger–Vygotsky hypothesis on the idiomatic and existential value of inner personal sense – distinguished here from more stable and socially shared meaning – with recent perspectives offered by embodied semantics and the Default Mode Network theory. Inner speech is interpreted here as an intrapsychic site of continuous individuation of sense: socially acquired meanings are not simply stored, but are resemanticised and reshaped through the subject’s experiential and autobiographical imprint. The first half of the paper revisits key analogies between the philosophical and psycholinguistic analyses of Egger (1881. La parole intérieure. Essai de psychologie descriptive . Paris: Germer-Baillière) and Vygotsky ([1934] 1986. Thought and language , edited and translated by Alex Kozulin, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), proposing a model of “ inner idiolect ”, marked by semantic condensation and creativity, where sense [ sens / smysl’ ] emerges as the fundamental unit of analysis: a semantic microcosm refracting consciousness, whose idiomatic density might be almost untranslatable into external speech. Reframed in cognitive and neuroscientific terms, this meaning/sense dialectic may be interpreted in relation to the neural overlaps between multimodal semantic hubs and DMN areas (Binder et al. 2009. Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex 19(12). 2767–2796), suggesting a process of multimodal semantic integration as a plausible functional background for sense-making operations carried out by the brain in resting-state conditions and mediated by spontaneous states of inner speech.
