poster-dynamicphenomenaininventorylinguisticunits

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Summary of theargumentCognitive linguistics (primarily through thegroundbreaking work of Lakoff, Langacker andCroft) has made great strides towards establishinga credible view of language as a “structured

inventory of conventional linguistic units” (i.a.Langacker, 1990). In particular, their refusal toseparate syntax, semantics and pragmatics, hasmade it possible to view phenomena previously thought aberrant as an integral part of language.However, much more has been implied than saidabout how this ‘structured inventory’ isstructured. What processes operate within it and when do they come into play? It appears to begenerally accepted that blending theory provides areliable blueprint for how these ‘conventionallinguistic units’ are activated and integrated intoconceptually coherent and linguistically cohesive

utterances but what of the relations among the building blocks themselves? We know from Lakoff and Langacker that they are not atomic and thattheir relationships are hierarchical and schematic.Croft further adds that the operations performedon them are minimal. But the question of how they receive their schematicity and how they enterinto the hierarchical relationships is leftunanswered. Both cognitive grammar and blending theory operate with the concept of entrenchment but the details of the processesthrough which entrenchment occurs are left to ourimagination. Similarly, the processes through

which language speakers retrieve units are alsothought to be mostly uniform and largely unconscious, and as such outside the scope of linguistic investigation.

This paper suggests that in order to understandhow the ‘unit inventory’ of language is created,maintained and utilized, and how units areretrieved, we must investigate language morerigorously at the arena (I purposely do not use theterm level) of discourse (both dialogic andexpository). Specifically, I will introduce examplesof two processes that occur in discourse and thatare illustrative of the functioning of the unit

inventory of language. They are hypostasis andschema negotiation. Both of these phenomenapoint to the dynamic nature of unit repository butthey do it in such a way that illustrates thepractical impact of some of the most basicassumptions behind cognitive grammar.

Hypostasis is a term that has fallen out of favor with linguists since the 1950s. When it was firstintroduced by Bloomfield it referred to aparticular use of synsemantic (i.e. supposedly meaning-less) lexical items with a reference totheir function, as in ‘I’m tired of his buts and ifs’ .Cognitive grammar, of course, does not recognizethe synsemantic/autosemantic lexicon dichotomy but claims that both ‘but’ and ‘butt’ have the same

type of ‘lexical meaning’ which differs in its levelof schematicity. Significantly, even grammaticalconstructions are seen has having substantially the same kind of meaning. However, to my knowledge no attempts have been made toinvestigate the processes through which levels of schematicity are negotiated in language. Thispaper’s principal claim is that far from being the

peripheral anomaly of Bloomfield’s time or theforgotten curiosity of today, hypostasis and othermeans through which schematicity of linguisticunits is negotiated are ubiquitous in discourse andthat speakers’ ability to process them is probably crucial to our view of language as an inventory of units rather than rules and units. It is what makesit possible for units previously thought to be polesapart in the level-based view of language (such as‘tired’ and ‘if’) to integrate together seamlessly indiscourse. I contend that linguistic units are not‘stored’ with their schematicity but rather that thedegree to which they are schematic is constantly

being negotiated through hypostasis-likeprocesses. I will present examples of thisnegotiation from various types of discourse fromtask-oriented conversation to academic expositionand demonstrate how hypostasis in utterancessuch “Making common sense more common.” or“Today’s pins and needles day … and I got me on… them.” is being used to negotiate theschematicity of linguistic units.

Levels of hypostasisHypostasis is not used very often in linguistics

today and as such doesn’t have a fixed definition. Iuse the term in two related senses. First andforemost, hypostasis is part of the humanlinguistic competence. It is as important aprinciple of language as the ability to blendconstructions. In a sense it could be seen as a kindof “reverse blending” but a better way of looking atit is as a special kind of blending constraint wherethe process itself becomes part of the mappings between mental spaces. In this sense, hypostasis isa process underlying the whole process of frameand schema negotiation. This process is essentialfor much of humor, double entendre, polysemy

disambiguation, language policy, languageinstruction and indeed linguistics itself. It isubiquitous at all levels of traditional linguisticdescription from sound, through morphology andsyntax, all the way to discourse. Bolinger’sdefinition of hypostasis as a process through which “language becomes an instrument to probeitself rather than some other part of reality” ismost apt. However, I also occasionally refer tohypostasis in a way only slightly expanded fromthe original Bloomfieldian sense, as a “deviationsfrom the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form withdictionary meaning”, i.e. something that happens

at the level of the word/phrase. In this, it isdistinct from schema and frame negotiation whichoperate at the level of discourse.



Polysemy negotiationHypostasis is apparent in instances of negotiatingpolysemy, even when the potential for confusion israther low.

Rafe: The last time [pause] I had a smallfracture in my hand. and. So I went to the doctor

and she took the X-Rays [interruption]Tom: [interrupting] The last time? Does thishappen to you often?

Rafe: No, no, no. The last time I went to thedoctor. It was for a small fracture.

Buzz Out Loud, 20 Aug 2007, ep. 542 min 32

This and the following example are extendedinstances of Third Turn Repair (constructionssimilar to 'I don't mean X, I mean Y') described by Schegloff (1997). In both these cases, the speakers become aware of a potential interpretation (anopportunistic blending) and feel the need tomanage this conversationally.

AM: The first thing this George Bush does whenhe comes in, he starts to redecorate to get rid of the stain of the Clinton years.

Guest: Yes, and the [suppressing laughter] factthat it is the White House is very important.[interrupted]

AM: [Interrupting] Not literally I hasten to add.

All: [Laughter]

BBC 4, Start the Week, 24 Apr, 2007

A brief survey of recorded semi-formalconversations would reveal this to be a commonfeature of semi-fluent speech. It can be used

locally or employed as a cohesive device across alonger stretch of text (see below).

Usage negotiation What this data (these data?) implies is that thereis a scale between language instruction andlanguage usage negotiation such as the following:

Molly: Cumin is a very handy spice. You say cumin, you say cumin?

Kelly: Yeah. And I say tumeric.

Molly: Oh, really?

Kelly: I do and I think I'm wrong. [sigh]

Molly: Anyway.Gadgettes, 2 Aug 2007, ep. 54, min 2

Pinker’s Language Mavens fall on this continuumsomewhere in the middle, as does languagepurism and folk etymology. The followingexample shows that usage negotiation is not just alocal matter quickly to be abandoned and canindeed persist across an extended discourse. Thetwo speakers (quoted from an official transcript)refer to the fact that the device they are describingdoes not have an established term in a variety of ways. This fact clearly disrupts the flow of theconversation but it nevertheless adds to thecohesion of the whole text. In fact, they refer to itafter a substantial gap (both of time and topic)

and can nevertheless refer to it simply by stressingthe term in question. At least three differentstrategies are used to push the negotiation along,all of them relying on the ability to hypostasize. A more detailed inventory of these strategies isneeded.

Leo: He also says he’s now usingpip.verisign.com as his primary OpenIDaccount, changing from ClaimID. I use ClaimID,too. So I will switch over because that means

when I do my OpenID verification I’ll use thedongle. Right? A fob.

Steve: Exactly. Whatever we call it.

Leo: Whatever you call it.

Steve: There was some discussion about that,too, in our mail. Apparently the official word isthat a dongle is something that you plug intosomething, like the old parallel port donglesthat were used for protecting high-valuesoftware, and in fact even to this day are still

used for, like, expensive vertical marketsoftware. Whereas a fob is a freestanding, youknow, standalone thing that you don’t plug intosomething. So, like, okay.

Leo: That actually is what I thought. Well, tome a fob is something you put on your watchchain or your watch. But anyway, that’s anothermatter.

15 minutes later

Leo: Mark Paynter, Sydney, Australia, has aninteresting observation, again about thefob/dongle/key.

Steve: Doohickey.

Leo: Doohickey . He says, I obtained a PayPalsecurity fob dongle key , which is a good idea.But it occurred to me that a spoof PayPal sitecould do a pop-up window for the key andsimply accept any number that is entered. The

way to test it would be to enter a completely wrong number, and if it accepts it, then it didn’tcheck. So security needs to be checked by using"not" logic rather than "and" expressions.

Steve: I thought that was sort of an interestingobservation. Of course the point this brings up isthat there are two different things that we wouldlike to have happen. The dongle fob key doohickey is used normally when you’re tryingto authenticate yourself to the remote server.Mark’s point is that, by lying, by deliberately lying to the site which may be spoofing, you’reauthenticating it.

15 minutes later

Leo: I have to say I love that feeling. That’s justso cool. And I’m going to right away go topip.verisign.com and make that my OpenIDprovider because that means - I’m correct inthinking that that means that whenever I did anOpenID login, I’d have to use the fob now;right?

Steve: You would have to use the fob, exactly,given that you use VeriSign as your OpenID

provider. Nothing would prevent you fromhaving also a different OpenID provider. And

what I like about the VeriSign approach is that

Dominik Lukeš Hypostasis and schema negotiation



they do have the ability to simultaneously register multiple credentials and non-fob - I just hate that word, but you know - non-fob authentication alternatives also. So, I mean,they’re really coming up to speed nicely. And

we’re going to be talking about it in greaterdetail next week.

Security Now (http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-106.htm)

Lexical meaningnegotiationIt is not simply the usage of words (frompronunciation to syntax) but also their meaning.In the following example, the speaker describesthe usage of the word, points out a ‘logical’inconsistency between different uses and makes a judgment regarding the ‘correct’ use and meaning. Again, any speaker of English will recognize thatas a common feature.

Reviewer: It's a grown up film. It has maturethemes. In the way that word should really beapplied. Nowadays 'mature' means QuentinTarantino jumping around with an axe.

Interviewer: So the mature themes here are what?

Reviewer: Immature, stupid, adolescent. Imean, [I have] nothing wrong with imature,stupid and adolescent, but please don't call itmature. You know.

Interviewer: But the mature themes here…

Reviewer: I'm sorry. ….

Mark Kermode, Film Review, Podcast, April 27,

2007, Radio 5 Live, min 37

Domain mappingnegotiationThis area is perhaps of most interest to cognitivelinguistics. The following example shows anextremely common strategy of negotiating domainmapping.

President Bush was hired to know more than thepeople, to be told all the deep inside intelligence,all the facts Americans are not told, and do theright and smart thing in response.

That’s the deal. It’s the real “grand bargain.” If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who livesin New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire apresident and tell him to take care of everything

you can’t take care of–the security of the nation,its well-being, its long-term interests. And youin turn do your part. You meet your part of the

bargain. You work, pay your taxes, which are your financial contribution to making it all work, you become involved in local things–the boy’s ball team, the library, the homelessshelter. You handle what you can handle within

your ken, and give the big things to thepresident.

And if he can’t do it, or if he can’t do it as well as

you pay the mortgage and help the kid next

door, you get mad. And you fire him.OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

Like with the examples in previous sections, thiscan happen both locally, as well as provide acohesive link to a larger stretch of discourse, orindeed intertextually. A recent example of this isthe various negotiations that surround the war inIraq. One of those is exploring how well the Iraq war corresponds to the Vietnam war. Countlesstexts, most recently including a speech by president Bush, explore the various possibilities of domain mapping including the possible inferencesthat can be drawn from these mappings. (Thesetexts also interestingly reveal folk theories of metaphorical inference).

How clearly accessible to reference the process iscan be illustrated on a repeated quip by AmericanTV satirist Stephen Colbert (quoted below on amessage board):

As it was put on The Colbert Report : Iraq is not Vietnam (Iraq is dry, Vietnam is wet). They're asdifferent as butter and margarine (I Can'tBelieve It's Not Vietnam!).

(Reader comment onhttp://savetheamericanfamily.blog-

city.com/bush_jokes.htm)

In this instantly comprehensible joke, Colbertrefers to the process, makes a statement regardinghis assessment of it, and opens a discursive spacefor further critique. The use of his joke in adiscussion forum (similar uses constituting acommon argumentative strategy) illustrates the

effectiveness of Colbert’s hypostasis.

Frame negotiation:Schemas, scripts, imagesThis process described in more detail elsewhere(Lukeš, manuscript, please email for details) isaptly illustrated by the following example of how images of heroism are negotiated throughreference to popular narratives.

Conservatives continue to use Fox’s 24 tosupport hawkish policies …conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host BillO’Reilly: “The average American out there lovesthe show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that’s close to a nationalreferendum that it’s OK to use tough tacticsagainst high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’regoing to get.”

…

On the November 30, 2006, edition of his CNNHeadline News program, Beck responded to anemail that asked about the “ill treatment of ourprisoners in Guantanamo” and asserted: “Now me, I’m for more Jack Bauers. The Jack Bauerthat has to extract information.” Media Matters

Process reflection As was apparent event from some of the previousexamples, the entire process of linguistic


http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010326






negotiation can be open to introspection throughhypostasis. This can take on collective features asdemonstrated on http://www.popvssoda.com, a website that invites visitors to register theirpreferred term for referring to soft drinks along with their locale to help determine US-wide usagepatterns. This can even be lexicalized as evidenced

by the use of the words meta and meme in current web usage (metafilter.com, techmeme.com) butmore extended stretches of text also recur as a sortof discourse topos, for instance the frequentreference to the fact that so called “Web 2.0companies” often use names with the last vowelomitted (e.g. Flickr.com).

This can also happen in a smaller discoursecommunity. Another example can be found in apopular technology podcast Buzz Out Loud: A caller suggests an analogy and the hosts discuss both the aptness of the analogy itself as well as the

medium of analogies for elucidating certainissues. In effect the speakers are negotiating aframe and the framework (i.e. the medium of communication) at the same time. (Seehttp://www.hermeneuticheretic.net/analogies-in-public-discourse-negotiation-of-frames-and-hypostasis-of-channels for audio). The followingexample suggests that the process is not limited to‘higher-level’ phenomena:

One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong “That’s one small step for man, onegiant leap for mankind” they heard him say ashe dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft tomake the first human footprint on the lunar

surface.

But from the moment he said it, and for 37 yearssince, debate has raged over whether the Nasaastronaut might have fluffed his lines. Mr

Armstrong has long insisted that he meant tosay “one small step for a man...” which wouldhave been a more meaningful andgrammatically correct version, free of tautology.But even the astronaut himself could not besure.

http://www.hermeneuticheretic.net/local-grammars-and-space-exploration

Entrenched hypostases and hypostasized entrenchmentsMuch of social linguistic convention (includingprescriptive grammar and manuals of style) can be seen as a consequence of hypostasis. But evenframings that remain unexposed to consciousexamination and are often considered goodexamples of the ‘unconscious’ nature of cognitiveprocessing, can be hypostasized, as in thefollowing ‘blonde joke’.

A blonde walks into a library and shouts, "CAN IHAVE A CHEESE BURGER AND CHIPS?!?"

The librarian replies, "This is a library."

"Sorry," the blonde whispers in a barely audible voice, "can I have a cheese burger and chips?"

http://www.funny-games.biz/jokes/blonde-in-library.html

Clearly, the joke refers to the woman’s inability tomake the correct frame adjustment. The frame of the library contains schemas of forms of talk andpurpose of visit. The blonde only understands theformer.

Conclusions and caveatsIt is astounding, how little attention have theseprocesses received in cognitive linguistics and inlinguistics in general. There is no doubt thathypostasis is a frequent occurrence that goes beyond the few examples Bloomfield used toillustrate his point. Neither is it a mere deviation.Rather it is a central process that probably plays a

significant role in how the “inventory of linguistic”units is structured. At the very least, there isevidence that alongside the “automatic” changesin the inventory (cf. Labov 1994, 2001), at leastsome parts of it are structured and modifiedthrough negotiation of its hypostasis.

Of course, it is the very definition of language thatthe vast majority of usage cannot be hypostasizedas a matter of course. However, what is importantthat anything in language and linguistic behaviorcan be and is subject to hypostasis. Hypostasisoccurs spontaneously at all levels of language.There are several caveats to keep in mind:

1. Not all parts of the linguistic inventory areequally amenable to hypostasis. This was pointedout by Talmy at ICLC 2007 with respect tointrospection. For instance in a daily podcast, twopresenters (Leo Laporte and Dick di Bartolo) referto a special segment as either “turn the tableTuesday” or “turn the tables Tuesday”. Over thecourse of a year, they have settled into each usinga different variant after a certain amount of idiolectal variation. Quite obviously, this is aprime candidate for hypostasis and explicit usagenegotiation but it never took place (even thoughother instances of hypostasis and negotiation wereattested). This could be due to a lack of awarenessor simply a lack of suitable device for reference.Or it could be entirely coincidental.

2. It is possible that not all speakers are equally able, willing to hypostasize (see also Talmy). This would accord well with research on learning styles but needs further investigation since it might haveconsequences for the nature of mental processingof language.

One last question that needs to be posed is whether the commonality of these languagestrategies is language specific. Hypostasis, it would seem, has to be a universal feature of language, but the inventory of devices that can be




used to express it is certainly varied. For instance,“no pun intended” is an English device to managehypostasis in conversation that doesn’t have aparallel in many other languages. More research,particularly of languages where hypostasis is notgiven a formal educational support, is needed. Butthere appears to be variation even among

European languages. English speaking culturesseem to have institutionalized word play to ahigher degree than, for instance Czech although word play is of course equally common in bothlanguages.


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