#construal

On the multiple sutras and Taoist injunctions against construal (see 15 May post) -- where are equivalent sentiments in the ancient West? Proverbs 3:7, ”Do not be wise in thine own eyes,” mostly takes up the question of pride in a particular case of construal, but does introduce the crucial Taoist question of self-perception -- construing oneself as wise may involve more self-reflection than, for example, taking pride in one’s wealth, etc.

I’ve always been a big proponent of linguistic universals (see post http://mindlanguage.tumblr.com/post/12525036765/universals). Without linguistic universals, it’s arguable that we couldn’t learn other languages. But university study has ripped apart what I thought I knew. Universal grammar and the associated theory of a language instinct always appealed to me, but they seem to be lacking in a really big area: meaning. Neither theory really focuses on language as meaning, more from a purely computational, even mathematical, perspective. But language is all about communicating meaning. So a linguistic theory that ignores meaning is seriously endangering itself as useless.

So what are the alternatives? Well, actually, I found out that there are quite a few, some of which I’ve even already posted about: interactional pragmatics and natural semantic metalanguage, for example. But these two are not the theories that have impacted on me most. The theory which has sparked my interest most keenly is cognitive linguistics. Although I had encountered this theory briefly back in my Bachelor’s degree, I had never really learnt anything about it. This time round, however, I have been exposed to at least its fundamental concepts.

There are two things I really like about cognitive linguistics that appeal to my experience. One is that the theory claims that learning a language is not a separate and innate ability in and of itself, but rather is related to cognition in general. An important consequence of this is that learning a language is just like learning any other skill. Having watched hundreds (if not thousands) of students learn over the past 8 years, I think of all the really bright and aware students I had who managed to pick up great language skills in a short period of time. But not all of them. For me, however, those students who couldn't pick up the language skills were not necessarily stupid, but rather less skilled in the specific areas of cognition that language as meaning seems to rely on. This relates to the second part of the theory that I really relate to: the five basic concepts of cognitive linguistics: construal, perspective, foregrounding, metaphor, and frame.

While it would take far too long to explain each concept in detail, the terms themselves are relatively self-explanatory, and I will give a very brief, if not overly general, description of each. Construal essentially refers to the fact that any situation can be interpreted or understood from a different perspective – ask ten people what Lord of the Rings was about, and you will get ten different answers. Perspective is highly connected to construal in that how you describe something reflects your point of view – a person looking at Mt Everest from the top will describe it differently to a person standing at the bottom. Foregrounding relates to what information you prioritise in your description – a politician is a master of stating things in ways that avoid putting their own actions in the foreground, for example. Metaphor seems to be common across most languages and is something that we can all relate to in English: the use of imagery to describe situations and events – last week I explained the metaphor of ‘getting your head round something’ to a student involving a huge amount of body language to express the simple idea of ‘understanding’! Frame, last but not least, refers to the inherent networks and relationships between words – ‘brother-in-law’ only makes sense if marriage is understood or known, thus creating a frame in which this word dependently exists, a bit like background knowledge connected to a word.