Concreteness

How abstract is language? We show that abstractness pervades every corner of language, going far beyond the usual examples of freedom and justice. In the light of the ubiquity of abstract words, the need to understand where abstract meanings come from becomes ever more acute. We argue that the best source of knowledge about abstract meanings may be language itself. We then consider a seemingly unrelated question: Why isn't language more iconic? Iconicity-a resemblance between the form of words and their meanings-can be immensely useful in language learning and communication. Languages could be much more iconic than they currently are. So why aren't they? We suggest that one reason is that iconicity is inimical to abstraction because iconic forms are too connected to specific contexts and sensory depictions. Form-meaning arbitrariness may allow language to better convey abstract meanings. This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

A B S T R A C T Deficits in action (verb) fluency have previously been reported in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The degree to which this reflects difficulties generating verbs in different semantic categories is unknown. Here, action fluency responses of 46 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and 76 healthy controls were classified as action or mental state verbs, using well-established taxonomies. The word length, frequency, age of acquisition , valence and concreteness of the verbs produced were also examined. Participants also completed measures of cognitive function, and clinical symptoms. Independent inter-rater agreement of semantic categorization was high. The percentage of action verbs produced was significantly lower in patients than controls, whilst the percentage of mental state verbs produced did not differ. Patients' action verbs were: significantly less concrete; positively correlated with memory and intelligence; and negatively correlated with interpersonal symptoms. Impaired action verb, but intact mental state verb generation is consistent with the neural separability of these processes.

It has been suggested that the concreteness effect in short-term memory (STM) is a consequence
of concrete words having more distinctive and richer semantic representations. The generation
and storage of visual codes in STM could also play a crucial role on the effect because concrete
words are more imaginable than abstract words. If this were the case, the introduction of a
visual interference task would be expected to disrupt recall of concrete words. A Dynamic
Visual Noise (DVN) display, which has been proven to eliminate the concreteness effect on
long-term memory (LTM), was presented along encoding of concrete and abstract words in a
STM serial recall task. Results showed a main effect of word type, with more item errors in
abstract words, a main effect of DVN, which impaired global performance due to more order
errors, but no interaction, suggesting that DVN did not have any impact on the concreteness
effect. These findings are discussed in terms of LTM participation through redintegration
processes and in terms of the language-based models of verbal STM.

In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called concreteness ratings. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test the intuited concreteness of word forms as opposed to concepts. This ignores the ubiquitous phenomenon of lexical ambiguity. Second, the criterion of abstract concepts that the instruction texts of rating studies rely on does not capture the notion that psychologists working on abstract concepts are normally interested in, i.e., concepts that could reasonably be sensorimotor representations. For many concepts that pick out physical objects, this is not reasonable. In this paper, I propose a characterization of concrete and abstract concepts that avoids these two problems and that may be useful for future studies in psychology.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the conceptualisation strategies in gesture of blind and visually impaired children.

The human nervous system evolved for the control of complex physical actions. Yet, we are far from understanding the human capacity for complex abstract thought. One theory suggests that both abstract and concrete thinking is based on a single perceptual mechanism grounded in physical experience. Asking the question posed by psychologist Daniel Casasanto whether "abstract concepts are like dinosaur feathers" we investigate the evolutionary processes that allowed humans to deal with abstract phenomena by putting them in concrete terms. After all, we frequently resort to analogies, similes or metaphors when describing the intangible. We may say "put that into words" as if words were containers into which thought can be stored. Conceptual Metaphor Theory goes a step further by saying that not only do we speak about abstract concepts in physical terms, but we think about them in this manner as well. However, the theory itself has been vigorously criticised because its principal theses are considered impossible to falsify. The author of this book proposes a new perspective on the conceptual role of metaphors. Filled with theoretical analyses and empirical research on the speech and gesture of seeing, blind and visually impaired children, this book demonstrates that the basis for abstract thought may well lie in physical experience.

Over the past five decades, psycholinguists have uncovered robust differences in the processing of concrete and abstract words.  One of these findings is that it is easier for people to generate possible contexts for concrete words than for abstract words; that is, concrete words seem to have higher "context availability" (CA).  It is not clear why this difference exists, but some have suggested that concrete words may be used in a smaller variety of semantic contexts.  In this paper, we review the relevant psycholinguistic literature and report on a previous corpus-based attempt to investigate this property of abstract and concrete words.  We then extend the current methods by introducing an information theoretic measure that we use to test the validity of CA.  The result runs counter to current thinking in psycholinguistics and suggests a rethinking of context availability.

In the past two decades the cognitive neuroscience of language processing has been expanding at an unprecedented pace, for a large part thanks to novel brain imaging technologies. Even though metaphors are highly frequent in everyday language and crucial in scientific reasoning, processing models and experimental results are inconsistent. Profound questions are still open in their comprehension such as the role of the right hemisphere or whether there is a dedicated neural substrate for figures of speech. The experimental part of the present work attempts to resolve some of the contradictions by controlling the numerous variables suspected to pose a processing load on the right hemisphere, such as the effects of novelty, sentential context, imageability, emotional valence and arousal. According to the results, metaphors levy classical left hemispheric language areas, and require no specialized computations. Studies showing right hemispherical involvement could have observed poetic and/or contextual effects. In the second part, I propose a metaphor comprehension model based on abstract conceptual substitution, with an attempt to integrate the semantic and pragmatic aspects of metaphor processing. The extra cognitive effort necessary for metaphor comprehension is discussed in a relevance theory based framework, where I suggest two key pragmatic roles for metaphors: (1) covering up meaning in socially risky situations by letting the hearer make inferences, hence making meaning negotiable; and (2) highlighting meaning by creating analogies and mappings utilizing their expressive power. Finally, in a neural model of scientific endeavor, the cognitive dispositions (e.g., hemispheric preferences) of researchers are proposed to translate into various schools of scientific research programs via inventive metaphors. Thought-as-language might be preferred over thought-as-vision, or vice versa, by researchers whose personal brain architecture favors one work method over the other. In conclusion I suggest that instead of trying to resolve the ever debates of cognition between competing approaches, these perspectives could be reinterpreted as products of the human mind and could be integrated into a unified epistemological system.

U ovome radu iznio sam pregled odabranih studija i rasprava koje se bave evolucijom semantike i sintakse. Fokus je bio na psiholingvističkoj i neurolingvističkoj literaturi. Uočeni su mnogi problemi u studijama i raspravama o evoluciji semantike i sintakse: nedostatak empirijskih studija, manjak komunikacije između stručnjaka različitih znanstvenih disciplina te mali udio lingvističkih studija i rasprava. Akumulirano znanje o evoluciji jezika sugerira da je jezik egzaptirao iz postojećih kognitivnih domena, suprotno modularnim pretpostavkama evolucije jezika. Također, neke životinje pokazuju određeni semantički i sintaktički kapacitet u svojoj vokalizacijskoj komunikaciji. Studije leksičke semantike pokazuju da je ona utjelovljena, tj. ovisna o senzorimotoričkim informacijama. Najutljelovljenije su riječi koje označuju radnje te konkretne riječi u usporedbi s apstraktnim riječima koje pokazuju manji stupanj utjelovljenosti. Ipak, moguće je da apstraktne riječi filogenetski proizlaze iz konkretnih. Također se čini da su određeni aspekti sintakse utjelovljeni, pri čemu su se najutjelovljenijima pokazali semantički tranzitivni događaji, no postoje i argumenti da je i obrada sintaktičke tranzitivnosti barem djelomično utjelovljena. Nadalje, razne studije ukazuju na pravilo istaknutosti agensa odnosno subjekta na temelju kojeg agens odnosno subjekt načelno u određenim tipovima rečenica dolazi na prvo mjesto u rečenici. To potvrđuju dominantna frekvencija redova riječi SOV i SVO u jezicima svijeta, kognitivna istaknutost agensa tijekom obrade tranzitivnih događaja, prevladavanje nominativno- akuzativnih jezika u odnosu na ergativno- apsolutivne te neurofiziološke studije koje pokazuju da se prva sintaktička sastavnica kognitivno automatski obrađuje kao agens dok morfosintaksa rečenice ne pokaže drugačije. Moguće je da je istaknutost agensa odnosno subjekta rezultat načina na koji Brocino područje obrađuje prototipne tranzitivne događaje. U posljednjem dijelu rada tematizira se model protojezika i teorija jezičnih fosila, no nema jasnih zaključaka. Konačno, pregled literature podupire tezu da su semantika i sintaksa evoluirali gradualno egzaptacijom iz određenih kognitivnih domena te da su i semantika i sintaksa u nekakvoj filogenetskoj vezi sa životinjskim komunikacijskim sustavima.

This study explores the relation between lexical concreteness and narrative text quality. We present a methodology to quantitatively measure lexical concreteness of a text. We apply it to a corpus of student stories, scored according to writing evaluation rubrics. Lexical concreteness is weakly-to-moderately related to story quality, depending on story-type. The relation is mostly borne by adjectives and nouns, but also found for adverbs and verbs.

This study is the first attempt in the literature to define the semantic prosody (contextual properties) of extended lexical units (ELUs) according to the psycholinguistic variables ‘valence’ (emotional positivity), ‘arousal’ (excitement, mood-enhancement), and ‘concreteness’. The object of investigation are the verbal phrases feel blue (unambiguous idiomatic ELU, without a literal counterpart) and see red (ambiguous ELU, idiomatic or literal).

The cognitive neuroscience of language processing has been expanding at an unprecedented pace in the last two decades, thanks to neuroimaging technologies. The wide availability of computers made psycholinguistic experimentation highly accessible, while the rapid expansion of the web opened previously unimaginable dimensions of computational linguistics. Despite the methodological breakthroughs, the study of figurativelanguagestill represents a serious challenge for cognitive linguistics. One of the key features of this layer of language is that a literal and a non-literal sense are both available simultaneously. This duality could be one of the main reasons why semantic content beyond word meaning has so far remained invisible for computers. After reviewing the diverse and often contradictory neuroscience results of metaphor research, I attempt to present a comprehensive framework of the semantic, pragmatic, and neural processing of metaphorical expressions.

Ce texte explore la possibilité de traiter méréologiquement
(i.e. dans les stricts termes de la 3ème Recherche Logique) l’idée
de concrétude phénoménologique. Après avoir montré la
structure méréologique de l’attitude naturelle et sa
connivence avec l’ontologie de fond des Recherches Logiques,
nous nous efforçons de traduire méréologiquement le
passage à la phénoménologie transcendantale. Finalement,
nous fixons le sens d’une réduction méréologique comme
pendant formel de la réduction transcendantale et nous
tentons de redéfinir le sens proprement phénoménologique
de la tâche de légitimation qui incombe à la phénoménologie
à l’aune de ce paradoxe (en fait apparent, car il ne relève que
de la confusion de l’ontologie avec le phénoménologique)
qui couple l’absolue dépendance méréologique des parties
concrescentes avec l’absolue irréductibilité de leur sens.


Mots clés
Concrétude, concrescences, tout, partie, méréologie, Husserl,
réduction phénoménologique, réduction transcendantale,
rien que partie.



Abstract
This paper explores the possibility of a mereological
approach (i.e. within the very terms of the 3rd Logical
Investigation) of phenomenological concreteness. After
exhibiting the mereological structure of the natural attitude,
shared by the Logical Investigations’ underlying ontology, we
dare a sort of mereological translation of the transition to
transcendental phenomenology. We finally set up the sense
of a mereological reduction as the formal counterpart of the
transcendental reduction. We therefore redefine,
accordingly, the proper phenomenological sense pertaining
to the task of legitimizing constitutions. We, thereupon, deal
with the apparent paradox relying on both an absolute
mereological dependence between the parts (in
concrescence) and the absolute irreducibility of their senses.
This paradox is said to be apparent (there isn’t such paradox)
for it overlooks the difference between the ontological and
the phenomenological point of view.


Keywords
Concreteness, concrescence, whole, part, mereology, Husserl,
phenomenological reduction, transcendental reduction,
nothing but part.

Embodied simulations or entries in the mental lexicon? Abstract concepts in the language and gesture of blind and visually impaired children.
Despite a plethora of research on the subject, the human capacity for abstract thought remains a mystery. We may know brain activation patterns evoked by the word love, but we are far from understanding how it is conceptualized. Research demonstrates that a vast majority of abstract concepts in language and gesture is represented in concrete terms (Cienki & Müller, 2008; Lakens, 2010; Lakoff, 1987), and many abstract subjects, including communication, are commonly described as sensorimotor experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Szwedek, 2002). We speak about hurtful words and force of argumentation, as if speech had a physical effect; communication is defined as exchange of information, as if meaning was an object handed over to an interlocutor. In general, everyday metaphorical language suggests that abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete experience. However, there are two competing explanations regarding the possible conceptualization mechanism.
Casasanto (2010) suggests that we speak about abstract concepts in concrete terms because humans use brain circuits designed to deal with the physical world to understand both physical and non-physical concepts via a process called exaptation (Gould & Vrba, 1982). Understanding abstract concepts would be, therefore, based on the existing mental representations of concrete concepts and exhibited in metaphorical language. On the other hand, mirror neuron theories claim that language and thought depend on sensorimotor simulations, so that the same circuits are activated when we perform an action and when we think (or speak) about it (Arbib, 2006; Fogassi & Ferrari, 2007; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Evidence for this theory can be sought in correspondences between language and gesture. To compare both theories we looked at the representation of abstract and concrete concepts in the language and gesture of blind and severely visually impaired children. We searched for correspondences between their descriptions of different concepts: both in terms of metaphorical language used and exhibited gesture. Results indicate abstract and concrete concepts are primarily explained using concrete, sensory based language, with participants using descriptors from a variety of sensorimotor domains, including hearing, touch, movement and, to a lesser extent, vision (with the notable absence of smell). The congenitally blind participants in their descriptions of abstract concepts relied on reenacting (simulations of) real life situations rather than metaphorical language. Our preliminary findings imply that understanding of abstract phenomena need not be based on a mental lexicon type network of concrete concepts. The presence of simulations in the descriptions of both types of concepts suggests an involvement of the sensorimotor cortex, in addition to or instead of a semantic network structure.
References
Arbib, M. A. (2006). Action to language via the mirror neuron system. Cambridge University Press.
Casasanto, D. (2010). Space for thinking. Language, cognition and space: The state of the art and new directions, 453–478.
Cienki, A. J., & Müller, C. (Eds.). (2008). Metaphor and Gesture. John Benjamins Publishing.
Fogassi, L., & Ferrari, P. F. (2007). Mirror neurons and the evolution of embodied language. Current directions in psychological science, 16(3), 136–141.
Gould, S. J., & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation-a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology, 4–15.
Lakens, D. (2010). Abstract concepts in grounded cognition. Dissertatie reeks Kurt Lewis Instituut, 2010-3. Retrieved from http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2010- 0114-200203/UUindex.html
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things–What Categories Reveal about the Mind. University of Chicago, Chicago.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annu. Rev. Neurosci., 27,
169–192.Szwedek, A. (2002). Objectification: From object perception to metaphor creation. Cognitive
Linguistics Today, 159–175.