Research seminar: Matteo Tarsi, Uppsala University
Seminar
Date: Thursday 3 April 2025
Time: 15.00 – 16.30
Location: C307, Södra huset
Title: Metaphorical pathways to human cognition: Evidence from Indo-European.
Abstract
In my talk, I want to explore the big question of ”what is universal?” with regard to the data I gathered for Indo-European verbs of cognition. Data was sampled and analyzed for the following meanings: ’believe’, ’forget’, ’know1 (to know something)’, ’know2 (to know someone)’, ’learn’, ’remember’, ’remind (someone of something)’, ’teach’, ’think’, and ’understand’.
The project ”Conceptual metaphors and the organization of the lexicon: the case of verbs of thinking, knowing, and saying”, aimed at tracing the organizational patterns of selected verb meanings in a wide array of Indo-European languages, ancient and modern.
The method unfolds from a historical onomasiological perspective (i.e. which lexical tokens express a certain meaning?) to deeper layers of analysis, such as the etymological and the morphological.
Behind all this, lies a cognitive linguistic approach to linguistic-historical studies, whereby lexical items belonging to the concrete domain (source domain) come to be used with an abstract meaning, i.e. is mapped onto an abstract target domain.
This instantiates a so-called ”conceptual metaphor”, e.g. learning is following a track (sc. a way, a teacher) as found in PIE (Proto-Indo-European) *lei̯s- ’to follow a track’ (according to my recent analysis, Tarsi 2023, PIE *lei̯s-, Hist. Sprachf. 136): Go. laisjan ‘teach’: laisjan sik ‘learn’ Ger. lehren : lernen etc. The same conceptual metaphor is found e.g. in Japanese, e.g. Jap. 道 dō in 剣道 kendō ’Japanese fencing’ (lit. ‘the way of the sword’) and many other names of disciplines, which express the same idea of following and learning, and surely elsewhere in the world’s languages, not only in single lexical items but also in bigger units such as expressions and idioms (e.g. to follow a teaching vel sim.).
This to exemplify the wider topic.
In my Japan-based project, funded by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, JSPS, March 2024–March 2025, I delved into this topic for verbal meanings in the sphere of cognition and of saying.
The languages from which data was excerpted span the whole of Indo-European in time and space. Whenever possible, data from different stages of a language was collected.
One branch is of course not enough to declare something ”universal”, but the diachronic dimension of data gathering I believe casts an interesting light on recurrent polygenetic conceptualization patterns that, on paper, would be good candidates.
Matteo Tarsi is researcher at the Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University.
Last updated: March 5, 2025
Source: Department of Linguistics