Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Overview: on the relationship between language and conceptualization
- 2 From outer to inner space: linguistic categories and nonlinguistic thinking
- 3 Spatial operations in deixis, cognition, and culture: where to orient oneself in Belhare
- 4 Remote worlds: the conceptual representation of linguistic would
- 5 Role and individual interpretations of change predicates
- 6 Changing place in English and German: language-specific preferences in the conceptualization of spatial relations
- 7 Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: the role of attention in grammar
- 8 Growth points cross-linguistically
- 9 On the modularity of sentence processing: semantical generality and the language of thought
- 10 The contextual basis of cognitive semantics
- 11 The cognitive foundations of pragmatic principles: implications for theories of linguistic and cognitive representation
- Subject index
- Index of names
8 - Growth points cross-linguistically
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Overview: on the relationship between language and conceptualization
- 2 From outer to inner space: linguistic categories and nonlinguistic thinking
- 3 Spatial operations in deixis, cognition, and culture: where to orient oneself in Belhare
- 4 Remote worlds: the conceptual representation of linguistic would
- 5 Role and individual interpretations of change predicates
- 6 Changing place in English and German: language-specific preferences in the conceptualization of spatial relations
- 7 Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: the role of attention in grammar
- 8 Growth points cross-linguistically
- 9 On the modularity of sentence processing: semantical generality and the language of thought
- 10 The contextual basis of cognitive semantics
- 11 The cognitive foundations of pragmatic principles: implications for theories of linguistic and cognitive representation
- Subject index
- Index of names
Summary
Introduction
The overarching problem I address in this chapter is the real-time interaction of speaking and thinking during discourse. Specifically, I use the gestures that co-occur with speech as a way of accessing visual thinking tied to speaking, and with this resource investigate the interaction of speaking and thinking as they are taking place. The theoretical concept with which I propose to picture the nexus of thinking and speaking is the ‘growth point’ – a concept referring to the primitive form, psychologically, from which the full utterance is claimed to emerge. The growth point is a theoretical entity with defined properties that predict empirical data. These data, if observed, serve to confirm the hypothesis.
I have organized the chapter as follows. First, I briefly explain the nature of gestures and how they can be taken as real-time windows on the mind, specifically on visual thinking processes. Secondly, I explain the concept of a growth point itself, and I present some gesture data that illustrate this concept and take into account the interlingual comparisons promised in my title. Thirdly, I describe a type of experiment that might be carried out to test a prediction of the growth-point hypothesis. Fourthly, I sketch how the production of an utterance could proceed from a growth point. And finally, I relate this microgenetic process to the concept of a dialectic, as presented originally in Vygotsky (1987).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and Conceptualization , pp. 190 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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