Abstract
This chapter attempts to show how insights from the nature of emotive intensionality can be marshaled to bear on fundamental concepts about meaning in grammar. In so doing it will illustrate how the insights and implications ensuing from the analyses of data on emotive intensionality in different languages can impact the fundamental concept of how meaning is derived in natural language. Before we proceed, we can recapitulate the insights and observations from the earlier chapters. One noteworthy insight is that the emotion-perception homology in emotive expressions may run deeper at the fundamental level of organization of cognition, as indicated in the earlier chapters. Such fundamental commonalities between emotion and perception line up well with what has been garnered about the nature of emotive contents by means of an inspection of the behavior of emotive expressions in cases of logical equivalence and ontological equivalence. The emotion-perception homology, as dealt with in Chapter 2, may lead us believe that aspects of perception mirrored in emotive content also show significant regularities in having a non-conceptual character unaffected by inferences, reason and rationality. This is indeed the case in many visual experiences, such as change-blindness, exposure effect and the McGurk effect (for details, see Eagleman 2011). However, such a non-conceptual character of emotion is grounded in the fabric of the cognitive structures of emotive expressions in such a manner that the non-conceptual character of emotion has to be distilled from the cognitive structures of emotive expressions anyway. This suggests that the non-conceptual character of emotion may at least be representational but remain non-conceptual nonetheless. This representational form of the non-conceptual character of emotion may be due to emotive intensionality, as suggested in Chapter 2. Such cases of parallels between emotion and perception do not seem to be out of the way, as the fact that they have homologies at levels of organization and operation may well reflect the design principles of evolution which often run on replications and refinements of the existing structures.
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Notes
- 1.
It needs to be clarified that for Jackendoff (2002), conceptual structures are not about anything—that is, they are not intentional. Rather, they are meanings in the mind, and by virtue of this they cannot stand in a direct relation to something out there in the world. However, the combination of Fd with the predication function BE can allow for a specification of the intentional state of the experiencer so long as the combination is not in itself an intentional state, which comports with Jackendoff’s view. That conceptual structures as non-intentional structures are embedded in the subpersonal level of the mind need not bar conceptual structures from specifying a relation in which humans stand with respect to objects in the world. In fact, Jackendoff (2007) argues that the predicate macrorole EXP along with SENSE (which is a macrorole for visual actions) allows humans, but probably not chimpanzees, to encode the conceptualization of the ‘feel’ of their ‘relation’ to a percept which is generated from an interaction with the world out there. This indicates that a conceptualization of a ‘relation’ to a percept of some entity external to the body instantiates or specifies the formal property of intentionality—the property of object-directedness.
- 2.
One important point that should be noted is that in example (95), the object, Mary, in 2 has an assertive arrow. This is based on the assumption that Mary refers to a person in the real world. The arrow would be missing if it referred to a non-existential entity.
- 3.
It is important to underline the fact that Potts (2007, 2009) has provided a formal-semantic account of the peculiar behavior of expressives. That is, the linguistic behavior of expressives has been couched in terms of the set-theoretic and truth-conditional machinery, although the constructions in which expressives appear seem to call for a reformulation of the principles and constraints of grammar (but see Potts [2013] for a broader view of an interaction between grammatical constraints and cognitive principles in conversational implicature). Even though the whole range of intensional emotive constructions can weigh against a position that cleaves to representational redescriptions, one can also try to explain away the generalizations about emotive intensionality offered in this book by reducing all aspects of the phenomenon to set-theoretic representations. The present work has argued that it is hard to imagine how this stance, without redescribing the phenomenon in question, can account for the relevant semantic differences by just positing representational structures for those differences. One can also defend this representational approach by claiming that the semantic differences in intensional emotive constructions can be pinpointed by means of a representation of the relevant set-theoretic properties since they have nothing to do with syntax anyway. This argument is flawed because the semantic differences in intensional emotive constructions have syntactic ramifications, as we shall see in Chapter 4.
- 4.
A concern that may arise here has to do with the question of whether the formalizations in question have to meet empirical adequacy in a diverse range of intensional emotive constructions across languages. In fact, this matter will turn out to be wholly moot once one considers the role of formalizations that hold true only by virtue of sheer logical necessity rather than anything else, although this is not to deny that specific empirical data can reinforce or illuminate a certain formalization. An example can illustrate what is at stake. Take the formulation of the quantifier ‘all’ in generalized quantifier theory (Barwise and Cooper 1981). In terms of set-theoretic properties, it is characterized as ALL (A) (B) = A ⊂ B, where A is a set denoted by the noun and B is a set denoted by the predicate. That is, if we have a sentence such as ‘All singers are rich’, the set of singers in a certain domain is the subset of the set of individuals who are rich. The logical connection provided by ‘All singers are rich’ is captured in the formulation ‘ALL (A) (B) = A ⊂ B’. Now we can imagine languages in which a quantifier akin to ‘all’ in English does not match the formulation ‘ALL (A) (B) = A ⊂ B’. Is this possible? This imagination which may be psychologically valid is invalid for the plain logical reason that the formulation holds true, regardless of whether there are natural languages in which the quantifier akin to ‘all’ in English does not exist, or if it exists it is grammatically expressed by means of a phrase or a whole clause, or even by some non-segmental means such as tone. All that matters are the logical connections/properties manifest in the formulation ‘ALL (A) (B) = A ⊂ B’. The same holds true for the formalizations in this book. Therefore, there is no sense in which the formalizations here have to meet the condition of matching the linguistic data in a wider setting, if matching is taken to be identical to the procedure of verification applying to hypothesis testing.
- 5.
It should also be noted that an intensional structure, only by virtue of being an intensional structure, may not project all of its intensional features in all linguistic constructions. The case of modals is a good example; even if they have their own intensional feature structure, it varies in intensional emotive constructions, as shown in examples (9–10) in Chapter 1. Therefore, one cannot maintain that the mapping from the relevant intensional feature structures in an intensional emotive construction onto the cognitive/conceptual structures of the respective emotive expression(s) is a kind of re-encoding, chiefly because the latter may vary or emerge independently of the former. We can see its reflex in more enriched contexts in Chapter 4.
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Mondal, P. (2016). Emotive Intensionality, Meaning and Grammar. In: Language and Cognitive Structures of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33690-9_3
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