Interesting article by Karen Sullivan and Eve Sweetser: Is ‘Generic is Specific’ a Metaphor? in Meaning, Form and Body, Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin, and Mark Turner (eds.), Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications: 309-327, 2009.
Their article doesn't provide a formal mechanism describing generics and metaphors in unison but our own article on the subject does by providing a Montague's type theory for a unification in Bertrand du Castel and Yi Mao: Generics and Metaphors Unified under a Four-Layer Semantic Theory of Concepts in the proceedings of The Third Conference on Experience and Truth, November 24, 2006, Taipei, Taiwan.
However, Sullivan and Sweetser provide a means to construct the formal model of our article, using the blending theory developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
So here is another unification. Gilles Fauconnier helped me back in the 70s by suggesting a facet of an article I wrote for Linguistic Inquiry: Bertrand du Castel, Form and Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English, Linguistic Inquiry Volume 9 Number 2 (Spring, 1978) 275-289, MIT Press. Here is note 1 in the article:
1 I am greatly indebted to Gilles Fauconnier for having suggested, after reading an earlier version of this article, the ideas that are similar to those developed in Fauconnier (1976) on other grounds.
Well, life has interesting twists. We both worked for the same laboratory in France, and then we went our separate ways, both in the United States. And we've not seen each other since then except now we have again two complementary theories -- or so I think.
0 comments:
Post a Comment