Harder, P. - Meaning in Mind and Society

Meaning in Mind and Society
Cognitive Linguistics Research

41
Editors
Dirk Geeraerts
John R. Taylor
Honorary editors
Rene Dirven
Ronald W. Langacker
De Gruyter Mouton
Meaning in Mind
and Society
A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn
in Cognitive Linguistics
by
Peter Harder
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-020510-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-021605-9
ISSN 1861-4132
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harder, Peter.
Meaning in mind and society : a functional contribution to the
social turn in cognitive linguistics / by Peter Harder.
p. cm. (Cognitive linguistics research ; 41)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-020510-7 (alk. paper)
1. Cognitive grammar. 2. Sociolinguistics. I. Title.
P165.H37 2010
306.44dc22
2010020071
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York

Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Gttingen
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Acknowledgements
I have been trying to write this book for about seven years. As usual, it
would never have happened without the encouragement and help of a
number of people. I am grateful to Anke Beck from Mouton de Gruyter
for starting the discussion that led to the book, and to her and Birgit Siev-
ers for remaining patient with me. Dirk Geeraerts on various occasions
discussed key ideas and offered a penetrating critique of a previous ver-
sion of chapter 6. I am grateful to Eve Sweetser for making it possible to
be a visitor at Berkeley at a formative phase of the project.
Without the pragmatics circle, an informal reading group that has
existed since 1977, I would never have discovered many of the perspec-
tives that made it possible to think of the possibility of writing a book of
this kind.
It has been extremely rewarding, as well as a great personal pleasure,
to be able to draw on the expertise of my sons Christoffer (in biology) and
Jonathan (in political science) in addressing the interdisciplinary issues
raised in the book.
Chris Butler, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Hans Fink, Lars Heltoft, Lis-
beth Falster Jakobsen, Ronald Langacker, Chris Sinha, Ole Togeby, Ib
Ulbk, Peter Widell, Niels Erik Wille and Jordan Zlatev read various
parts of the book and gave helpful suggestions. Niels Davidsen-Nielsen
generously offered to proofread the book in the final phase. I am grateful
to my wife, Birthe Louise Bugge, both for remaining patient and for the
passages she read and discussed with me.
For all I owe to these and unnamed others, the faults remain my own.
Contents
Introduction
1. What this book tries to do 1
2. A summary of the argument 5
2.1. There is no such thing as conceptual frames
(But theres a whole social-cognitive world) 5
2.2. On-line vs. off-line features 8
2.3. Social cognitive linguistics vs. analysis in terms
of discourses 9
2.4. Functional relations and adaptation 9
3. The progression of the book 10
Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics

1. Introduction 14
2. Conceptualization and concepts 16
3. Frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models 22
4. Embodiment and image schemas. From conceptual
to neural patterns 29
5. Figurative meaning 35
6. Linguistic meaning: Polysemy, ambiguity, and abstraction 39
7. Mental spaces 42
8. Cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar 47
9. Final remarks 55
Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes:

aspects of the ongoing social turn
1. Introduction 58
2. Cognitivism and conceptualization in the sociocultural
sphere 58
3. Variation, lexical semantics and corpus linguistics 64
4. The developmental perspective: epigenesis, joint attention
and cultural learning 70
5. Extended grounding: situational, intersubjective
and cultural aspects 79
VIII Contents
6. Language as a population of utterances: an evolutionary

synthesis 88
7. Meaning construction 95
8. Final Remarks 101
Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses

1. Introduction 103
2. The social construction of reality 105
3. Power, habitus, marginalization and discourse:
the French poststructuralists 108
4. The analytic practice: discourse(s) analysis 114
5. Discursive psychology 123
6. Systemic-Functional Linguistics 126
7. Socially based theories of meaning: overview and issues 136
Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis:

social reality as the context of cognition
1. Introduction 138
2. Social facts: objective and subjective, intrinsic
and observer-relative properties 139
3. Niche construction 146
4. Individuals, collectives and the invisible hand 154
5. Functional relations 160
6. Mind in society: causal patterns and the individual 163
7. Summary: the socio-cognitive world 172
Chapter 5. Meaning and flow: the relation

between usage and competency
1. Introduction 179
2. Meaning as process input 182
3. Presupposition and the directional nature
of linguistic meaning 193
4. The procedural nature of competencies 197
5. Usage, competency and meaning construction 209
6. Conceptual categories and the flow. Messy
and precise semantic territories 212
7. Summary 219
Introduction IX
Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation

1. Introduction: the social foundations of structure 222
2. Usage, structure and component units 228
3. Function-based structure 236
3.1. Structured division of labour and arbitrariness
as a functionally motivated property 236
3.2. Slots and constructions: coercion
as construction-internal functional pressure 245
3.3. Functional upgrading: the dynamic dimension
of syntax 251
3.4. The interdependence of the top-down
and bottom-up perspectives 259
4. Norms and variation 269
4.1. Introduction: the interdependence of structure
and variation 269
4.2. Variation and the linguistic system 271
4.3. The role of norms 277
4.4. Norms and individual competency 282
4.5. The social dynamics of linguistic variation 287
4.6. Usage, structure and variation in an evolutionary
framework: a discussion with Croft 290
5. Summary: function-based structure and langue
in a social cognitive linguistics 298
Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality

1. Introduction 303
2. The growth and structure of social constructions 307
2.1. The bottom-up trajectory. From construals
to social constructions 307
2.2. Acceptance and efficacy: the evolutionary dynamics
of social construction 310
2.3. Habitus vs. conceptual models:
do we really need mental representations? 314
2.4. The Platonic projection: concepts as part
of the niche 318
3. The role of acceptance 326
3.1. Beliefs as social constructions: causal power
and grounding 326
X Contents
3.2. The interface between niche and flow in social

construction(s) 332
3.3. Bullshit: function and factual grounding 339
3.4 Re-conceptualization and social reality 346
4. Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics 354
4.1. What precisely are Foucault-style discourses? 354
4.2. How can discourses be understood in terms
of a social cognitive linguistics? 358
4.3. Where Foucault-style analysis belongs
and where it is inadequate 364
5. Meaning in hard social science:
the case of International Relations 369
5.1. The Copenhagen school of international
relations (CIR) 369
5.2. The need to distinguish between the niche
and the flow 372
5.3. Niche construction and the grounding
of layered identity structure 374
5.4. CIR, agency and factual grounding 379
6. Individual conceptualization and the social constructor 383
7. Cognitively based critical analysis
a comparative perspectivization 390
8. Summary: Conceptualization in society 403
Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies:

discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
1. Introduction 408
2. The ethnic other: an ultra-brief historical overview 409
3. Social construction and universal humanity 412
4. A social cognitive analysis of the distinction
between us and them 415
5. Where discourses fail: the decline and fall
of the anti-racist discourse in Denmark 421
6. Strategies based on collaborative agency:
platform building and niche (re)construction 429
7. Asymmetric communication and the pathological they:
the niche for discourses 436
8. Final remarks: why critical analysis needs functional relations
and collaborative agency 438
Introduction XI
Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives 443
References 463
Index 505
Meaning in Mind and Society.
A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn
in Cognitive Linguistics
Introduction
1. What this book tries to do
This book was undertaken with two purposes in mind, one academic and
one civic.
The academic purpose is to describe and contribute to the process
whereby cognitive linguistics is expanding to include the social side of
language and meaning. This development is one aspect of an even broader
intellectual challenge for the 21st century: cognitive science successfully
integrated a number of disciplines, including linguistics, in an umbrella
discipline to study the human mind but the very success of that endeav-
our has now carried it from a beginning where cognition was viewed as an
autonomous domain (the brain in the vat) into the study of cognitive
processes in society. Since there is no umbrella social science no soc-
sci that expanding cog-sci can team up with there is no easy blueprint
for how to take this step. No matter what ones preferred approach may
be, however, it will have to take the role of language into consideration
which makes it an exciting challenge for a language person.
Even more important than the academic motivation, however, is the
civic purpose. Recently, a prominent spokesperson for critical Muslims in
Denmark opened a debate on immigration by saying everything begins
with language and went on to argue that divisive ways of speaking were
at the root of the problems. Cognitive linguists would tend to disagree
with this statement, pointing instead to cognitive models in the mind.
Most ordinary people (and politicians) would ignore both and point to
social realities as they see them. The academic community can offer no
obvious way of making these different perspectives cohere. The book tries
to achieve its academic purpose in such a way that it can address this gap.
The specific focus of this book is expressed in the word functional. As
I use the term, cf. also Harder (1996), it refers to relations between a
dynamic object of description and the context more specifically the type
2 Meaning in Mind and Society
of pattern in which feedback from the environment helps to shape, pro-

mote or undermine their continuing role. I try to show that a full under-
standing of meanings must include an account of such functional relations.
This includes feedback from all relevant factors, including intersubjective
understanding and non-mental aspects of the way the world works. In
order to understand what for instance security means, ongoing feedback
across the whole spectrum, from the individual experience of being under
threat up to international relations, needs to be part of the framework.
The lengthy subtitle expresses the trajectory that the account follows:
the subject is Cognitive Linguistics (= CL); it describes the ongoing devel-
opment in CL that I describe as the social turn and it suggests that a
functional approach can add an essential dimension to it.
The topic of meaning in society has become increasingly focal for many
interconnected reasons in linguistics, in cultural studies, in organization
theory and management studies, and last but not least in politics, where
professional operators in the form of spin doctors have proliferated in the
last decade. It is becoming more and more important that those of us whose
fields involve meaning equip students as well as we can to understand and
engage with social processes of meaning creation and proliferation.
The problem is not that nothing is being done: there is a plethora of
different approaches on offer, and Cognitive Linguistics has done its
share e. g. Chilton (1996, 2004); Lakoff (2004, 2006, 2008); Kristiansen
and Dirven (2008). However, the book is based on the conviction that
both the academic and the civic issue have a shared and unsolved problem
in the present intellectual landscape, in that there is no clear answer to the
question: how does the analyst manage to get a full and integrated picture
of cognitive and social aspects of the topic of meaning in society?
The words full and integrated are crucial in relation to the academic
analysts civic obligations: if you go solely for those specific aspects that
constitute your special interests (personally as well as professionally) and
leave the rest to others, the field will be a prey to competing factions. This
may be okay or inevitable from an academic point of view; active research
never deals with more than a small part of the truth anyway. But the war-
ring half truths on the academic side tend to team up with warring inter-
ests in society leaving the field as a free-for-all.
This prevents the academic community from serving civil society as
well as it should as illustrated by the ethnic issue discussed in chapter 8.
An important factor is the influential academic approach that takes
discourses as the fundamental object of description. In this approach, the
free-for-all has the final word: the world consists of a cauldron of ongoing
processes of meaning creation that are caused by, and simultaneously caus-
What this book tries to do 3
ing, other social processes of the same kind. Since the distinguishing fea-
ture of this heterogeneous collection of approaches is that it operates with
the plural form discourses, I use the plural attributively to avoid confusion
with the uncontroversial non-count singular: a discourses approach is
something much more specific and problematic than a discourse approach.
From an individual perspective, the discourses perspective has the
attraction that it allows you to be the founder and sole proprietor of your
own local processes of meaning creation. Significantly, however, it is also
attractive to power holders who want to make sure that such processes
work so as to promote their interests. The claim that meaning is detached
from all foundations beyond the immediate process was originally put for-
ward by critical intellectuals, who wanted to tear the mask from estab-
lished interests parading as ultimate reality. Now it has become common
property, which means that those who have more power use it more effec-
tively. The civic position does not stand much of a chance if the winner
takes it all, also when it comes to meaning in society. That makes it worth
while looking for a different approach.
The book tries to show that a social cognitive linguistics can serve the
civic purposes I have described, and make the academic and the civic
agenda go hand in hand. Two basic features of the CL approach are essen-
tial arguments for thinking so.
First of all, as pointed out by Geeraerts (2003b; 2007), CL is inherently
oriented towards recontextualization. What created and continues to
unite the whole CL enterprise is the movement of going behind language
to set it in a wider cognitive context. What I call the social turn can be
understood as a new operation of the same kind: language-and-conceptu-
alization needs to be set in the wider context of meaning-in-society1.
Secondly, in the context of CL, the issue of foundations has been recast
in terms of grounding, which is an attractive way of thinking about the
relation between a focal object of description and the context in which it
belongs. In classic CL, the central form of grounding is bodily grounding
(cf. Johnson 1992). This dimension retains its crucial role, but in a social
cognitive linguistics, grounding also includes the anchoring of meaning in
feedback from the environment, outside the individuals body. This is in
keeping with the broader agenda in CL of experiential grounding.
Grounding contrasts on the one hand with dogmatic foundationalism,
where everything is rigidly determined at some basic level, and on the
other with the deconstructionist detachment of meaning from all founda-
1 This is a continuation of the agenda of Harder (1999) and Sinha (1999).

tional moorings. Where exactly between these extremes the description

ends up is an empirical matter. In this, it reflects the same point as the
concept of partial autonomy: certain facts stand on the shoulders of other
facts, which means that they depend on them without being reducible to
them.
The scope of the book calls for a comment. It may appear that I am
trying to tell everybody in the social sciences and the humanities how to
do their jobs. But the academic purpose is actually quite specific: to show,
from the point of view of cognitive linguistics, how meaning as a feature of
individual minds is woven into the larger fabric of meaning in society.
Unfortunately I cannot address this issue without having to make a con-
siderable number of assumptions about meaning, language, human minds
and societies. While it does not quite amount to the universe and other
related matters, it may be a little too close for comfort.
One thing I clearly owe the reader is a definition, or an account (if
definition sounds a little too Aristotelian!), of what I understand by mean-
ing, so that it becomes clear how that entity can be both in mind and soci-
ety. As I understand it, meaning presupposes conscious experience, but
only experience understood as associated with a vehicle counts as mean-
ing. The most basic vehicle (cf. Sinha & Rodriguez 2008: 36468) is a mate-
rial object, such as a cup or chair which are meaningful entities to mem-
bers of communities in which they are associated with certain types of
experience. In this simplest case, meaning is a side effect of the objects
role in a form of life.
With the rise of signs, meanings acquire independent status in relation
to their vehicles. In human languages, this status gets its most sophisti-
cated manifestation. With the development of languages, the human form
of life becomes dependent on collective recognition of meaning, and that
in turn brings about a proliferation of objects whose causal powers depend
on what meanings they have (thus superimposing a new level of complex-
ity on the issue of meaning).
Of special importance in this book is the functional perspective (cf.
ch. 4). In the trajectory of meaning, it begins with the functions of objects
and continues via the functions of linguistic expressions to functional
relations between meanings and social structures (cf. also Zlatev 2001).
But the perspective extends beyond linguistic meaning to the general
issue of how the functional dimension interacts with the cognitive dimen-
sion in understanding what goes on in institutional, social and political
processes. Functions work at all levels, not only those that involve mean-
ing and the specific role of meaning needs to be understood in this
larger perspective.
A summary of the argument 5
The functional dimension of meaning-in-society constitutes the basis

of the specific contribution this book has to offer. Thus the book does not
pretend to give an equal and full account of all aspects of ongoing socially
oriented work in the cognitive tradition (which would also take more than
one book). It aims to describe the types of development that together
constitute the social turn, and show what a functional approach has to
contribute to it.
To sum up: this book tries to show how cognitive linguistics is expand-
ing from the classic version predicated on conceptualization towards a
social cognitive linguistics that grounds conceptualization in its social con-
text, and to show how a functional approach can provide the extended
foundation that this development requires. In doing so, it tries to show
that this will provide an approach to meaning in society that can do justice
simultaneously to the embodied experience of the individual and to social
reality.
For obvious reasons, the book does not try to give all the answers that
one might want such an approach to provide. What it does try is to show
that the approach addresses the relevant questions. Hopefully, it gives
readers a glimpse of what is missing in some of the partial answers, and
prevent these from turning into reductive half-truths.
2. A summary of the argument
The overall question is: how should Cognitive Linguistics (= CL) expand
in order to be an adequate framework for describing meaning as part of
social reality?
Some of the central parts of the answer are introduced in list form
below:
2.1. There is no such thing as conceptual frames (But theres a whole

social-cognitive world)
A very brief summary of this book is to say that what a cognitivist sees as
conceptual frames is the tip of an iceberg that constitutes the whole social
universe, and a frame-based theory of meaning needs to broaden out to
encompass this perspective. In order to understand cognition-in-action, a
social cognitive linguistics needs an account of the social grounding of
meaning including relations between cognitive and non-cognitive
dimensions. This in turn involves the following issues:
(a) First of all, it requires a format for describing social facts as distinct
from cognitive facts: the book therefore presents and argues for such a
format.
(b) A central claim about that format is that it involves various forms of
interaction between meaning in the individual mind and meaning in the
environment.
This is less trivial than it might appear at first glance. To say that there
is meaning in the environment, just as there is meaning inside the mind, is
one of those ideas that are sort of obvious but have not been given a clear
and consensual descriptive format. Cognitive Linguistics is basically pred-
icated on putting meaning inside the head (cf. Grdenfors 1998: 21), and
two of the authors I build on in moving into social territory also locate the
essential mental elements inside the mind of the individual. Searles (1995:
26) definition of social facts is based on a we-intention inside an indi-
vidual mind; and Croft (2000: 111) defines meaning as something that
occurs in the interlocutors heads.
In contrast, I place the individual agent in an interface position between
meaning emerging from within the body and meaning impinging from
outside. The approach that enables me to do so is entirely unmysterious
and implies no assumptions about a collective mind existing independ-
ently of individuals. Basically, it is a matter of levels-of-analysis. I do not
dispute what Searle and Croft are claiming the individual level just does
not capture all there is to say (as they are the first to point out in other
respects).
The rationale has two steps. The first can be illustrated with the proper-
ties of a traffic jam as opposed the properties of a car. Even if a traffic jam
consists entirely of cars, it has not just additional but apparently contradic-
tory properties; thus the location of a traffic jam that starts if two lanes out
of three are suddenly closed will quickly get extended backwards on a
congested freeway, although all the cars in it separately move forward.
And if we identify a traffic jam with the individual cars it consists of, how
can it be that the traffic jam persists while individual cars escape?
This issue reflects a basic ontological point that is related to Russells
theory of types (the implications of which were central to Bateson 1980).
At the basic level where the issue is the existence of assemblies with prop-
erties that differ from those of the individual instances, meaning-in-soci-
ety as understood in this book includes the traffic jams of meaning in the
human environment, an example being a rumour that arises and prolifer-
ates accidentally: it may have to be taken seriously while it lasts, but may
also disappear without a trace. But although I will occasionally refer to
this level of collective meaning, the focus is on more specific and struc-
tured forms of collective, meaning-imbued phenomena. These depend on
the uniquely human ability to engage in joint attention (cf. Tomasello
2008).
Joint attention (as part of joint activity) means that mental as opposed
to merely behavioural properties of others acquire the status as parts of
the world I live in. The most fundamental meaningful collective entity in
the human world is we understood as a group of which human indi-
viduals are members, and which is not reducible to the sum of its parts. In
other words, it is not the case that the we inherits all its mental properties
from properties of the individuals there are also mental, cognitive prop-
erties that the individuals have because they are members of a we. Evo-
lutionarily speaking, human beings are adapted to a world where it is
meaningful to be members of such collective wes and all other forms of
collective meaning are differentiated and specialized forms of the basic
we-type of experience. At this more advanced level, meaning enters into
structured and constitutive relations with the social world (cf. especially
ch. 7).
A special methodological difficulty is that when individuals relate to
meaning in the social and cultural environment, they do so by means of
representations in their individual minds there is no other form of access.
This means that much of the time it is difficult to know when you are deal-
ing with the content of your own mind and when you are talking about
meaning in society. But this problem has to be addressed rather than
denied. Cognitive linguistics can only successfully expand from the mind
into society, if it can tell the difference between what is going on in an
individual mind and what is going on in the social world.
(c) An account of meaning in society involves the causal interplay between

mental and non-mental factors. Not everything can be captured in terms of
mental facts. In the social environment, part of the way meaning operates
depends on causal patterns at the collective level.
An example is the proliferation of concepts across a community: the
spreading awareness of this seasons fashionable colours occurs outside
the individual and is interwoven with the proliferation of non-mental
objects such as this years fashionable clothes. Also inside the individual,
there is interaction between non-mental facts (including neural wiring)
and mental representations (cf. colour-blindness). The two sides interact
because impact from the environment affects both mental and non-men-
tal aspects of the individual (cf. ch 5).
2.2. On-line vs. off-line features
An adequate account of meaning in a social perspective needs to provide

a theory of the relation between the process (online) side and the product
(offline) side. This calls for a difficult balancing act, based on the following
two assumptions:
(a) The process or flow dimension is the basic and fundamental aspect
of social reality (as widely recognized after Wittgenstein, e. g. Toma-
sello (2008: 34243), citing Searle (1995: 36).
(b) There is more to social reality than facts about online processes
most obviously because there are constraints on the flow which are
due to factors outside it.
In relation to point (b), it is significant that interest in the product side of

social structure has gone out of fashion since the Marxist 1970s. As part of
resetting the political agenda, Margaret Thatcher once claimed that there
is no such thing as society and she is not the only one who thinks so.
Believers in free enterprise have always emphasized the sovereign indi-
vidual, and left-wing interest has by and large shifted to the issue of differ-
ent discourses.
The difficulty of maintaining the balance between (a) and (b) is partly
due to the fact that if you pursue what you think is the most interesting
dimension of the topic, you can very easily slip into thinking (or saying
things that presuppose) that this is the only dimension that needs to be
pursued. This happened when structure was discovered, and structuralist
pioneers went on to say that structure was the only thing that existed. At
present, the same risk is observable in the movement towards the flow
dimension. In linguistics, it takes the form of what I call usage fundamen-
talism, cf. the discussion in ch. 6. Elsewhere, it takes the form of the bot-
tomless semiosis, cf. the discussion of Derrida in ch. 3.
The book makes a point of understanding offline features in the flow
perspective, rather than in the traditional Platonic perspective where only
eternal features are real and flow is ephemeral. In chs. 5 and 6 it shows
what implications this has for understanding both linguistic meaning and
linguistic structure but in so doing, it also makes a point of showing that
offline features still need to be taken into account.
2.3. Social cognitive linguistics vs. analysis in terms of discourses
The book argues that a social cognitive linguistics is more adequate

approach to meaning-in-society than the discourses approach. This claim
can be broken down into three subcomponents:
(a) Non-agentive and conflictive aspects of meaning-in-society cannot

be properly understood as an autonomous domain. Although such
aspects exist and need to be addressed, approaches based on conflict-
ing discourses are at risk of producing dangerous half-truths about
their objects of description.
(b) A social cognitive linguistics (that integrates the process and the
product dimension) provides a framework that includes the founda-
tional role of agency and cooperation as part of the necessary context
for understanding impersonal and conflictive processes
(c) An analysis that combines cooperation with impersonal causal

pressures enables an ecologically valid approach to the normative
aspects of discourse conflicts. This will also enhance the critical poten-
tial of the analysis in comparison with the discourses approach, where
the norms are only in the eyes of the beholder.
2.4. Functional relations and adaptation
The book argues that functional relations are an essential part of the off-
line causality that structures meaning-in-society (including its linguistic
encoding). This claim builds on an extension of evolutionary dynamics
from the biological to the sociocultural time scale, whose basic features
are taken over from Crofts version (2000; 2006). In comparison to Croft,
there are two main differences: first, this book places greater emphasis on
the (off-line) concept of function, while Croft focuses more on the online
flow of usage; and secondly, it follows Andersen (2006: 59) in arguing that
there are significant differences between the transmission of genotypes
and of cultural traditions (the main difference is captured under the slo-
gan the visible hand). On both points, this book therefore assigns a
greater role to the functional dimension.
Functionality operates on both the individual and the collective level:
(a) Functional patterning constitutes an extra descriptive dimension

superimposed on the conceptual system. The linguistic as well as the
general conceptual competency in the individual (cf. chs. 4 and 5) are
partly shaped by functional pressures.
(b) Functional patterns resulting from adaptation in the individual can

only be understood in relation to the environment to which they are
adapted. This implies a successor concept to Saussurean langue
understood as language-in-society. In social cognitive linguistics,
langue is constituted by affordances in the sociocultural community
for using linguistic expressions to convey conventional meanings (cf.
chs. 4 and 6).
Affordance is a term borrowed from Gibson (1979) to cover factors that

are available in the environment for individuals to use (or not use). Lan-
guage as an affordance exists whether the individual taps it or not; if other
people in the community speak a particular language this constitutes a
potential for making contact with them, which an individual may or may
not make use of. The split between competency and langue is reflected in
a double dissociation between them: the individual may (accidentally or
on purpose) adopt a phrase for which there is no affordance in the com-
munity; conversely, there can be a conventional expression in the commu-
nity to which an individual has failed to adapt: no individual competency
is likely to tap the entire langue (which includes the whole variational
range of resources available in the community).
3. The progression of the book
Part One (chapters 14) lays the foundations, while Part Two (chapters
58) presents the main argument and the conclusions:
Part One:
Chapter 1 describes what I call classic CL: language as conceptualization.
Chapter 2 describes aspects of the ongoing social turn to which this
book aims to contribute. The main ongoing developments can be summed
up in the words variation and intersubjectivity. Among the elements I
build on are Sinhas theory of epigenesis, Tomasellos account of joint
attention and the evolution of communication, Verhagens inclusion of
the addressee in the grounding scene, Clarks account of joint action,
Geeraerts approach to language variation, Zlatevs exploration of evolu-
The progression of the book 11
tionary stages in sign use and Crofts application of evolutionary mecha-

nisms to language as a panchronic object in social space.
Chapter 3 describes the salient competitors to an extended CL as a
framework for describing the social dimension of language, focusing on
the discourses approach.
Chapter 4 discusses the nature of social facts, concluding with the ver-
sion that forms the basis for integrating the conceptual and the social
dimension. A central element is the trinity of flow, competency and langue
as the new, complex object of description for social cognitive linguistics.
Part Two:
Chapter 5 begins with the nature of meaning in the new perspective,
stressing its dynamic nature as a contribution to interaction (rather than
something residing in an underlying, Platonic landscape). It argues, how-
ever, that it is necessary to take account of both offline and online dimen-
sions of linguistic meaning, also in the new perspective. The offline dimen-
sion (viewed as an aspect of language ability or competency) is
functionally shaped so as to constitute potential-for-action, while the
online dimension takes the form of meaning construction in context.
Chapter 6 is about language structure, and argues for an integrated
account of (a) functional and cognitive dimensions, and (b) variation and
structure:
(a) Structure has two interdependent aspects: the bottom-up unit-ori-
ented conceptual dimension (reflecting a competency to fit an inventory
of units into whole utterances), and the top-down, recipe-for-action func-
tional dimension (reflecting a competency to handle formats for whole
utterances, saliently including clausally structured utterances).
(b) From the langue perspective, linguistic affordances in society reflect
a number of variational dimensions to which individual competencies are
differently adapted but all variants constitute potential sources of selec-
tion pressure for individuals who are exposed to them, and all are there-
fore equally part of a post-Saussurean, social cognitive langue. In contrast
to more radically variationist approaches, the main point is that varia-
tional linguistics presupposes structural identification of units. Variational
description is stage two in terms of descriptive adequacy, one level higher
than structural description, and not to be confused with a level zero
account simply in differences: saying that [t] and [tT] are variants in a
speech community is much more interesting than merely saying that they
are different.
Chapter 7 is about meaning-in-society. A major point is that while
meaning feeds into the construction of social reality, the results of the
construction process also involve other factors than meaning including

aggregate-level causal patterns.
Social constructions are thus part of social reality, not just figments of
imagination, and give rise to adaptive pressures on members of the com-
munity, involving both mental and non-mental aspects: to understand how
the law works gives selective fitness, but the law applies whether you
understand it or not. Sometimes mental aspects predominate (acceptance-
heavy social constructions, such as world knowledge), sometimes hard
facts (efficacy-heavy social constructions, such as the military).
Awareness of the different sides of social constructions is essential in
order to be able to capture not only the collaboration between causal and
conceptual dimensions but also the divergences. Among examples of col-
laboration is the Platonic projection, where concepts are endowed with
causal power in the community; among examples of divergence is bull-
shit (which prompts the formulation of a concept of factual grounding).
Functional relations once again have a partially structuring role, giving
rise to differential replication of social constructions depending on feed-
back from social (and material) reality, which determine whether social
constructions are stabilized or eroded over time.
An integrated account of social and mental facts makes possible a cru-
cial distinction between two senses of the word concept: competency
concept vs. niche concept. Competency concepts are internal to individ-
ual minds and enable individuals to grasp what is around them. Niche
concepts are socially entrenched ways of categorizing things, i. e. of sub-
suming aspects of social reality under particular conceptualizations
which determine how instantiations are treated in the community. The
two sets of concepts do not necessarily correspond: we live in social worlds
that put things in different containers, and each of us also develops an
individual competency to put things in containers but only in a mechan-
ical automaton would there be complete one-to-one correspondence
between niche concepts and competency concepts.2
Chapter 8 discusses the multi-ethnic society, arguably the most impor-
tant challenge for understanding meaning-in-society, and argues that the
2 In terms of the philosophical dilemma of internalism vs. externalism, this posi-

tion reflects a basically externalist position inspired by Burge (cf. Burge 1989:
181) and Putnams pragmatism (cf. Putnam 2001:1920). The main aim with
the distinction (rather than the more philosophical aim of conceptual clarifica-
tion), is descriptive: to make room for concepts both as possessions of indi-
vidual minds and as part of the world they adapt to.
The progression of the book 13
social cognitive framework proposed avoids the potentially damaging

limitations of analyses based on the discourses approach.
Chapter 9 briefly sums up the argument and illustrates the interplay
between classic-cognitive-linguistic and social aspects of the analytic
framework.
Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
1. Introduction
This first chapter is an overview of classic key positions and results in Cog-
nitive Linguistics (= CL). I hope to give a sense of both the unity and the
richness of the CL achievement: CL has been able at the same time to pro-
vide something new and distinctive and to introduce a broad and varied
range of phenomena into linguistics.
To understand the broad impact of CL, it is important to keep in mind
its rise as an alternative to formal generative grammar. Where generative
grammar is based on a rigid distinction between core linguistic properties
and everything else, CL is in its basic orientation a recontextualizing move-
ment, cf. Geeraerts (2003b, 2007). The central purpose that unites cognitive
linguists of different persuasions is to describe language as reflecting
human experience. Although this would not have surprised traditional
grammarians, it was a new start for linguistics as a science: according to
well-entrenched dogma, human understanding was too vague and uncon-
trollable to be admitted into scientific description hence the need for at
rigorously formal descriptive procedure, and for an anchoring in objective,
mind-independent facts.
The most prestigious manifestation in science of this approach was the
role of the formal structures of mathematics as the language of physics.
Formal linguistics hoped to achieve a similar success by distilling the basic
formal core out of the human language ability. Once the basic formal struc-
ture was found, so the reasoning went, actual language events would be
just as trivial from a linguistic point of view as the actual event of an apple
falling downwards would be for physics after Newton had distilled the
basic law out of it.
A centrepiece of the hard-nosed scientific position is that when lan-
guage is used in a controlled manner to talk about the real world, the concep-
tual level can be eliminated as epiphenomenal, i. e. as the unnecessary mid-
dle man. Formal grammar adopted a similar attitude to human understanding:
linguistic structure naturally had to map on to objective content in some
way, otherwise language would be irrelevant but worrying about how
actual speakers made the connection would only be a source of confusion.
The idea of allowing the full richness of human conceptualization in at
the front door is therefore truly a new step. It puts into well-deserved focus
Introduction 15
the domain in which language most immediately belongs, and also intro-
duces a way of thinking about language according to which it is neither
distinct from mental content nor forced to be in lockstep with it. Instead,
language is seen as a way of accessing mental, cognitive processes and
representations a window on the mind. In order to describe language in
that light, it was necessary for the new cognitive paradigm to put on the
map the whole range of cognitive resources that language could draw on.
Finding out about what the mind could do, as a prerequisite to finding
out how language used what the mind could do, was an exciting opening,
but at the same time a suitably constrained task. It also constituted a new
stage in the larger enterprise of cognitive science. Instead of moving in a
cautious and hamstrung manner, controlled more by ideas of what was
scientifically kosher than by insights into the object of description, cogni-
tive linguistics for the first time threw the door really wide open: let us
look at everything the mind can do, and stop looking over our shoulders
worrying about the science police.
When the tables were turned by CL, the whole idea of disembodied
objective understanding was rejected and the conceptual dimension was
reoriented away from reflecting objective reality towards the roots of con-
cepts in human life. Instead of being a weakness, the experiential and bod-
ily basis of understanding became a new foundation. Whatever human
understanding might turn out to be, it had to be based on the stuff that
goes on in a human body. Therefore embodiment or bodily grounding
arose as a key dimension in the landscape of conceptualization as under-
stood in CL.
This constituted an even more radical new departure. If the human
mind used to be a potential source of error, so much the greater was the
fallibility factor associated with the weaknesses of the flesh. This difficulty
illustrates a faultline in the role of the human mind in hard-nosed posi-
tivist thinking. On the one hand, the mind is the home of reason and
knowledge; on the other hand the mind is an object of empirical investiga-
tion. Behaviourists had declared the mind out of bounds to scientific
investigation because they believed nothing scientific could be said about
it. In order for that to make sense, however, they had to presuppose that
one could cordon off a mental sanctum of unpolluted truly scientific
knowledge. Yet if you do not recognize the existence of reliable properties
of the mind, it is hard to understand how the mind can host the inner sanc-
tum of knowledge.
First-generation cognitive science, including formal linguistics, revolted
against behaviourism by showing that strict formal simulation allowed for
investigation of the mind without polluting scientific knowledge with the
16 Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics
kind of mush that behaviourists were afraid of. When Searle (1980) showed
that the strictly formal-computational approach to meaning was untena-
ble, his outraged opponents in the discussion talked about the threat to
the cathedral of science: if the human mind is cut loose of its science-
imposed shackles, who knows where that will lead to? The historical mis-
sion of CL was to look for the language-related answers to that question.
2. Conceptualization and concepts
CL understands meaning as conceptualization, understood broadly as the

stuff that mental processing is made of (cf. Langacker 1987: 5). In the gen-
erous spirit that replaced the hard-and-fast distinctions of formal linguis-
tics, conceptual representations were seen as part of a continuum all the
way down to the most basic mental level, which is generally assumed to be
felt subjective experience.3 From the point of view of language, however,
the kinds of mental processes and structures that have representational
content remain central and in this book the term conceptualization will
be understood as having representational content.4
For linguists, the special interest in representational content has to do
with the constitutive role of symbolic content in language; but representa-
tion is not relevant solely for language. It involves the basic relation
between mental content and experience of the world: taking perceptual
representations as an example, the mental image of a tree has an inten-
tional relation to the tree of which it is an image (cf. Searle 1983).5
3 The point was made by Nagel (1974) in an article entitled What does it feel
like to be a bat?. If we take bats to have a mind, the most fundamental
assumption we make is to assume that a bat has a subjective point of view, i. e.
that there is a felt quality of being a bat.
4 The reason for this is that non-representational mental states such as pain
have no direct relation to linguistically articulated expressions: the word pain
does not evoke actual pain. Conceptual representations of food or water, in
contrast, have a privileged relationship with linguistic expressions such as food
and water because the ability to evoke representational mental content is what
makes these expressions meaningful.
5 But the direction can also go the other way: once we have stored such a per-
ceptual representation, we can turn it around and use it as a basis for evaluat-
ing actual events: the remembered forest may trigger a reaction against envi-
ronmental destruction. The essential property is the element of duplication,
combined with the intentional relation between the representation and what
Conceptualization and concepts 17
As we have seen, in the logical tradition there was no room either for
subjective experience or for conceptualization understood as a mental
process only for concepts understood as a way for the mind to map pre-
cisely onto categories of the objective world. Classical, Aristotelian con-
cepts were therefore understood in terms of checklists of features (cf.
Fillmore 1975) that translated directly into truth conditions. For instance
the concept of bachelor is defined as an (1) unmarried, (2) male, (3) adult
(4) human, and conceptual classification of external objects (such as
potentially eligible males) can proceed by ticking off these four criteria. If
they are fulfilled, we have a bachelor, otherwise we do not: tertium non
datur there is no third option.
An important step towards the human perspective was the discovery
of differences between good and less good instances of categories, as cap-
tured by the term prototype, cf. a series of seminal papers by Rosch (1973,
1975), Rosch and Mervis (1975), Rosch et al. (1976), etc. Among the cases
investigated are colour categories. Rosch asked people to place a range of
colour chips in familiar categories such as (for English) red, yellow and
blue. It turned out that there was greater agreement on how good exam-
ples they were, i. e. whether they were more or less close to focal red
(roughly = the colour of blood), than there was about whether they were
inside or outside the category red.
Two consequences follow from this: first, there is a gradual transition
between red and non-red. Thus the Aristotelian point-blank division into
plus and minus is simplistic human categorization is subtler than that.
But secondly, because judgements of gradience agree better than judg-
ments about the cutoff point, prototypicality does not necessarily mean
lower levels of precision. Unclear boundaries and grey zones may appear
messy, compared with the tradition but the point-blank alternative
actually gives a less precise picture.
The difference is linked up with the true/false bias in the tradition: it
was implicitly taken for granted that the right categories would not only
serve the purposes of the ordinary conceptualizer, but also and more
importantly the purposes of the philosopher or scientist, whose goal was
to strive for the whole truth (and nothing but). For ordinary people, the
priorities are different: the question is mostly how to deal with the con-
crete matter at hand. For that purpose, focal points are more handy than
precise checklists. This element of focality-cum-gradualness was therefore
it represents. In combination they constitute the representational capacity

without which language would not be possible.
a central point in struggling free of the rigidity of the logical view of mean-
ing that had occupied the scene for almost 2500 years.
Roschs findings also undermined the structuralist claim that it is only
the language that defines the content of a concept, while pre-linguistic
meaning is totally vague (cp. Hjelmslev 1943: 69, Lakoff 1987: 267): it
turned out that (after some initial training) the New Guinea Dani, who had
only two basic colour terms, one for dark and one for light, gave responses
to colour tasks that agreed to a surprising extent with Anglophone
informants e. g., about degrees of similarity with focal red. The conclusion
was that the level of human experience in this case colour experience
was more fundamental than the level of linguistic distinctions.
CL generalized this finding into a theory that the central concrete
foundation of experience-based categorization is sensory experience, i. e.
perception (cf. Evans and Green 2006: 7). One of the pioneers of CL,
Leonard Talmy (2000: 139), coined the term ception in order to stress the
continuity between perception and conceptualization. On a philosophical
level, this reflects an empiricist orientation in CL, in opposition to Chom-
skys rationalist orientation; there is a faint echo of John Locke saying
that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.
Colour concepts are also good examples of the bodily basis of concep-
tualization: we see blood as red and grass as green because this is the
experience of blood and grass that our kind of nervous system generates.
How it works is also scientifically well understood, and common knowl-
edge, because some people are genetically wired to see the world differ-
ently; they are, as we say, colour-blind. By the same token, it shows that
conceptualization is not a direct reflection of the objective properties of
the world out there. We only see colours the way we do because we have
a human body with certain properties, not because the world is inherently
red or blue. Moreover, we see things differently depending on the context:
the colour orange is midway between yellow and red, and so an orange is
more red than a lemon, while being more yellow than a (ripe) tomato. The
fact that it can be (truly) described by both linguistic predicates simulta-
neously, while it would still be true to say that it is neither red nor yellow,
shows that application of concepts to referents is not rigidly controlled by
the inherent nature of the object. Nor is this a rhetorical trick: the inde-
pendent existence of concepts as part of the way the world works implies
exactly this, that objects can be grouped in different ways, depending on
which concepts humans find most adequate for grasping the situation at
hand.
One way of capturing this perspectival element in conceptualization is
to say that human categorization reflects what is salient to people, cf.
Geeraerts (1989). As pointed out by Geeraerts, prototypes are not all

alike, and they are certainly not as simple as this account may suggest.
While colour concepts are difficult to bring under an account in terms of
features, other prototype concepts can be captured by a list that shows not
all-and-only, but mark out the types of instantiations that are central.
The category bird is the classic example. Typical birds have feathers, wings
and tails, can fly and sing, build nests and feed their young, and sit around
in trees. This is why robins and sparrows come out as prototypical, while
chickens, ostriches and penguins are more marginal members of the cat-
egory.6
As argued in Lakoff (1987), however, prototypicality turned out not to
be in itself an adequate theory of mental structure of conceptual represen-
tations. There are many reasons why the concept of prototype is not
enough to characterize what a mental category is like. The simplest idea,
that a prototype was something that had all relevant properties, does not
explain why peas and carrots come out as the prototype vegetable, cf.
Aitchison (1994: 68; Evans & Green 2006: 26869). Following Lakoff, the
term prototype effects has been used about the two central new and flex-
ible features, graded membership and core instantiations. Both are due
to the way the mind works rather than to fixed mental representations; we
may speak of (proto-)typification as a general feature of conceptualiza-
tion, which reflects its role as part of everyday coping, like the notion of
rule of thumb.
The precise nature of the actual conceptual constructs that we use is
thus something that requires further investigation. One such form of
investigation was already part of Roschs pioneering studies. Setting up a
scale of specificity, she established a hierarchy of three levels, with a cen-
tral level dubbed basic level categories, flanked by more general super-
ordinate categories and more specific subcategories. Basic level categories
encompass objects which play a significant role in the lives of people who
have them, like chair, table, car, in the modern world. Above these in terms
6 As pointed out by Geeraerts (1992; 1997), some of the features of the proto-
type-based approach reflect familiar and traditional assumptions of pre-struc-
tural lexical semantics. Dictionary makers have always known that words have
more central and more marginal senses, and that no single set of criteria would
suffice for each word. As he also stresses, however, the tradition had not pro-
vided a concept that would do the work of the concept of prototype, with its
new conception of conceptual grouping as based on a focal area of meaning
rather than on a bounded category.
of generality are abstract superordinate categories like furniture or vehi-

cle, and below them subcategories like armchair and sports car.
Basic level concepts were empirically found to be associated with
rich and experientially well grounded conceptual representations. In con-
trast, superordinate categories elicited only a few properties (there is not
much to say about what a vehicle is); and subcategories only a few addi-
tional features beyond those already characterizing the basic level (a
sports car is a car with a few extra properties). Similarly, informants
were found to have motor routines corresponding to basic level objects
like car and chair, but no routines specific to vehicle or sports car. Gener-
alization over shapes, created by using a computer to average out visual
representations, also produced recognizable results at the basic level (for
example in the case of cars), but not at the level of superordinate catego-
ries (if you average out the shapes of a bus, a plane and a bicycle, the
compromise result is not the shape of a vehicle). Basic level categories
thus come out as rich and robust mental constructs, with more or less
built-in prototypicality.
This robustness is due to experiential grounding: people have experi-
ence with handling and recognizing chairs and cars from their everyday
lives otherwise specific motor routines could not arise. Precisely because
of the experiential and empirical basis of such concepts, however, one
mans basic level concept is sometimes another mans superordinate term.
If your form of life requires that you have detailed knowledge of many
different types of tree, then ash and willow may be your basic level con-
cepts (with assorted prototypes), while tree is a superordinate concept like
vehicle; if you are a city dweller, tree may be as far down in the taxonomy
as your everyday experience goes.
The basic level is thus a fairly solid new point of departure for under-
standing the kind of mental representations that real people construct:
down-to-earth, no more precise than required for everyday life, capable of
accommodating a broad spectrum of different cases, associated with prac-
tical as well as conceptual skills. In short, they reflect both properties of
conceptualization as a human skill and properties of its basis in experi-
ence. Basic level concepts are shaped by an economy factor: they end up
at a level of generalization and specificity that balance out costs and ben-
efits of cognitive efforts. In relation to human experience, they also reflect
the patterns of co-occurrence in the phenomena that constitute the input
to conceptualization. In the case of a car, there is co-occurrence of wheels,
seats, headlights, accelerator, brakes, hooting, etc. In the case of birds, the
same applies to wings, beaks, feathers, and chirping. Combinations across
the divide, in contrast, do not abound in everyday life; cars are not gener-
ally found together with feathers, for instance (cf. Rosch et al. 1976 on
cue validity).
In general a concept, as a countable, individuated construct, represents
the outcome of segmenting the uncountable process of conceptualization
in a particular way. This general feature of dividing up the basically con-
tinuous world of conceptualization applies whether a concept is basic,
subordinate or superordinate, and whether it is understood in the classic
checklist fashion or as involving various forms of gradience. Boundaries
between conceptual categories may take different forms, but their exist-
ence is not in question; Croft and Cruse (2004: 89) rightly suggest that a
boundary is arguably the most basic of all properties of a category. If
concepts are containers, as suggested by Lakoff (1987: 283), we need to be
able to tell the inside from the outside.
The revolution in understanding concepts was also important in rela-
tion to historical change. As pointed out by Sweetser (1990), it had been
traditionally assumed that one could find ancestor concepts by abstracting
over extant present-day concepts. This assumption led linguists to postu-
late very general proto-concepts, like sharp object, as a source for
present-day diverse meanings. However, if the most solidly entrenched
concepts are those that reflect concrete everyday routines, this theory
loses its rationale.
Although concepts thus reflect recurrent features of experience, there
is no determinism involved: grounding involves motivation, not dogmatic
foundationalism. The element of choice is encoded in the term construal,
which is associated with the notion of alternative construals (cf. Lan-
gacker 1987:13841): the mental construct changes while the object of
conceptualization remains the same (as when the human subject shifts her
focus of attention). The relation between a conceptualizing mind and the
object of conceptualization is therefore called the construal relationship
(Langacker 1987: 128).
All linguistic distinctions can be understood as reflecting such alterna-
tive construals. Croft and Cruse (2004, ch. 3) discuss a range of grammati-
cal distinctions as reflecting pervasive differences of construal: leaves vs.
foliage (plural vs. non-count); something moved in the grass vs. there was
movement in the grass (agency vs occurrence); Joe killed Bill vs. Bill was
killed by Joe (from what perspective is the event conceived), etc. The same
applies to distinctions between lexical concepts. The classic examples of
lexical construal include the distinction between coast and shore: both
designate the border between land and sea, but coast views it from the
inland perspective, while shore views it from the sea. From coast to coast
is therefore a trajectory on dry land, while from shore to shore moves from
one side of the sea to the other (cf. Fillmore 1985). In all cases, alternative
construals are simultaneously available as options and can be encoded in
two different lexical choices, allowing the speaker to impose his own per-
spective on a scene.7
Construal, in short, subsumes all modifications, online or convention-
ally encoded, that are superimposed upon a given input to conceptualiza-
tion, and pinpoints the ability of human minds to tinker in myriad ways
with the stuff they mentally represent to themselves. Construal therefore
reflects the seminal change described in the introduction: the realization
that the human mind has a role of its own, instead of being a source of
error.
3. Frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models
When classic checklists were phased out, CL changed the direction in

which concepts are approached, beginning with larger contexts rather
than minimal features. The Aristotelian and logical tradition was to under-
stand meaning as constituted by component features, as in the analysis of
girl as analysable into the properties [human], [female] and [not adult].
CL instead starts by looking at where a concept belongs in the bigger pic-
ture. This change of perspective is reflected in different ways in the con-
cepts of frame, domain and idealized cognitive model. Frames were intro-
duced and developed in a series of papers by Charles Fillmore (1975, 1982,
1985); domains were introduced by Ronald Langacker (1987); and ideal-
ized cognitive models by George Lakoff (1987).
Frames were first on the scene and have remained central because the
concept of frame semantics is central in demonstrating the basic flaw in
truth-conditional and formal approaches to the study of meaning: mean-
ings depend on presupposed cultural and conceptual foundations in a way
that cannot be captured by analysing a concept into features. In this, the
7 Construal also includes the operations of conceptual coercion and conver-

sion as in there was cat all over the driveway, where the individuated cat is
conceptualized as a mass noun (coercion, because it is done without overt
signalling), or in a loaf of bread, where the unit loaf is explicitly imposed on
the non-count substance noun bread (conversion); it also covers modula-
tion (Croft & Cruse 2004: 128), whereby senses of words are enriched so as to
fit into online understanding without any semantic modification (as when
friend is interpreted as a male friend in the context A friend of Joe married
his sister).
Frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models 23
term reflects the same property that enters into the basic framing prob-
lem in artificial intelligence, i. e. the problem that because computers can-
not by themselves link up with the problems they are used to solve, the
user always has to provide the connection. If you analyse computer opera-
tions without taking into consideration what human beings use them for,
you end up with a string of zeros and ones.8 Two examples will illustrate
how the frame type of context-dependence works in understanding lin-
guistic meaning, cp. Fillmore (1985).
The word Sunday denotes a non-mysterious everyday entity that would
appear to offer no inordinate challenge to semantic description. However,
attempts to specify a list of features that would allow you to recognize a
given day as an instance of the category Sunday fairly obviously miss the
point. In order to explain what Sunday means, you have to take your point
of departure in a wider cultural and conceptual frame within which the
word belongs: the traditional Christian calendar, including the seven-day
week. Without that frame, the word itself could not have the meaning it
has.
A slightly more complex example is the interpretation of what it means
to be a first-class hotel. You might try to understand it by seeing it in the
context of a whole set of other linguistic labels including second, third, and
possibly economy class, but that would not solve the problem. In order to
really understand what first-class means, you have to find out how the
categorization system works in relation to the available range of hotel
experiences, including everything from noise levels to language compe-
tencies of the staff. Once that background is in place, the linguistic context
would also be significant, including the question of how many classes are
higher on the list (luxury class, world class .). Here, too, there is no way
of understanding what first class means without understanding the frame
first.9
8 Framing can of course be helped along by specifying links and adding them to
the program. For each step of such a framing operation, you can add an extra
computational operation. But the ultimate framing operation will always
evade the program, receding one step each time: no matter how many specifi-
cations and framing instructions are included, the human operator has to pro-
vide the actual link with the world on her own.
9 The same problem would recur regardless of terminology and definitions.
Teachers will be familiar with marking systems and their descriptions of what
is required for students to obtain each mark and they (we!) know that how-
ever carefully you work out these descriptions, knowing the institutional con-
Framing is not primarily concerned with the nature of the universe and
other related matters, but with how to fit a given, to-be-interpreted, unit of
meaning into the context. This can be illustrated with reference to a lin-
guistic application that depends on structural slots. Fillmore has used the
concept specifically in relation to one grammatically central form of con-
text-dependence: the ongoing FrameNet project (cp. Ruppenhofer et al.
2006) explores the whole inventory of contextual and grammatical slots
that are relevant to English verbs. In Fillmores theoretical development
this was a crucial step beyond the purely linguistic case frames for which
he became famous, cf. Fillmore (1968): the difficulty in constructing a
coherent and exhaustive theory based purely on syntactic case roles led
Fillmore to expand the foundation to the larger experiential and concep-
tual frames that were evoked by the relevant verbs.10
In Ruppenhofer et al. (2006: 6) the term frame is understood in a wide
sense according to which core nouns also evoke frames. However, it is also
clear that these are less central and can be ignored for the purposes of
annotation; hat or tower does not impose frames on surrounding elements
in the same way as verb meanings do (cf. chapter 6, p. 257). That is because
verbs (unlike nouns) have a core function in defining argument slots. A
verb like sentence, as in they could have been sentenced to five years in
prison, puts the patient in a criminal_process frame (cf. Ruppenhofer et
al. 2006: 126): because it designates a process that takes place as part of the
activities of a criminal court, the argument slot frames the filler as taking
part in a criminal process. The noun prison belongs in the same domain,
but does not in itself trigger a framing operation in the way that verbs such
as accuse, charge, convict and sentence do for the arguments they apply to.
In contrast, when it comes to the more general processes of contextualiza-
tion, there is no difference between nouns and verbs.
Although more specific than contextual understanding, the term
frame can nevertheless be individuated in different ways, depending on
what you are interested in. In the FrameNet project, the purpose is defined
in terms of the characterization of lexical entries: the frames they establish
are chosen so as to allow generalizations about the properties of the verbs.
text (frame) in which they are actually used will still be crucial for evaluating
what a given mark really means.
10 The key problem with case grammar was that the problem of identifying a
language-internal watertight system of deep cases was intractable and this
turned out to be connected with the more general insight on which CL is
based: all structural categories have to be understood in a larger context,
which needs to be included as the foundation of the analysis.
Ruppenhofer et al (2006: 15) give an example of what counts as the same

frame for that purpose: verbs such as crawl, flit, slither and walk belong in
the same self-motion frame. But, if you wanted to focus on where a type
of motion belongs in the animal kingdom, these words would not neces-
sarily be seen as involving the same frame (slither may suggest a snake
frame, for instance). It all depends on what the relevant slots are for the
unit to fit into. For that reason, frames involve a possibility of misunder-
standing: if you do not infer the right slot, you may frame the phenomenon
in the wrong way; thus Joes girl may denote different persons depending
on whether you invoke the parent or the lover frame.
The concept of domain also involves going behind a concept to its
background. Langackers definition, however (1987: 147f), concentrates
on a somewhat different type of background-dependence than framing as
discussed above. His key example is that of the human body. In order to
understand what a finger is, you cannot define it by looking purely at its
component elements (knuckles, nails). Rather, you need to go to the whole
domain of which a finger constitutes an integral part. Langacker illus-
trates the idea by moving from finger to hand, from hand to arm, and
further on to the whole of the human body. The general idea is that con-
cepts are not atoms: each concept naturally belongs in a larger conceptual
whole. The body example might also be understood as involving simply a
meronymic (part-whole) relationship, but part-whole relationships in
general are occasion-specific (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004: 160): a lake may be
part of a park, but it is not built into the concept of lake that it should
have a park around it. Langackers point, in contrast, is precisely that
there is an inherent relation between specific concepts and the conceptual
areas from which they are carved.11
As you move through the operation of going behind a concept to the
domain out of which it is carved, you gradually get to larger and larger
domains. Some of these can be viewed as basic (cf. Langacker 1987: 148),
in that they link up with directly embodied experience. Because moving
around in space is one such type of embodied experience, space is regarded
11 Part of the same idea is the pair profile and base as understood by Lang-
acker (1987:183f). The notion of arc can only be understood against the back-
ground constituted by the concept circle, and you can describe what an arc is
by drawing first a full circle, and the draw a subpart of it in bold. The circle is
therefore, cf. the definition above, part of the domain within which it belongs,
but because it is the necessary immediate surroundings of the particular con-
cept arc, it is also the base. Other geometrical figures are part of the same
domain, but they do not constitute the base for the concept arc.
as a basic domain. Langacker discusses, without attempting to settle the

matter, a number of basic domains, some related to specific senses (like
auditory pitch). The human body as the domain for body parts is regarded
as a more abstract domain (p. 150) because it is not grounded directly in
elementary experience but the distinction, like most other distinctions in
CL, is regarded as a matter of degree. One subtype of domain is the loca-
tional type (e. g. temperature and colour), which is constituted so that
each conceptual property can be described by its precise location within
the domain.12
Some concepts belong in more than one domain at the same time, like
book, which is a physical object and also a unit of mental content and
these of course must be described in terms of both domains. One domain
involves things like printing costs, while the other involves topics and
opinions. A set of domains associated with a single concept is called a
domain matrix in the case of book the domain of mental content and
the domain of physical objects are thus linked up in a matrix. Matrixes can
in turn be linked up in even larger structures, in a movement that ends up
facing the issue of the overall organization of human knowledge (Croft &
Cruse 2004: 24). Langackers target in pursuing the concept of domain, as
suggested by Evans and Green (2006: 231), is thus ultimately a conceptual
ontology that includes everything.13
A conceptual ontology is an overall system of resources for under-
standing and categorizing the world, not a precise theory. Part of what a
conceptual ontology contains is a folk ontology, an inventory of catego-
ries that people rely on in their culturally embedded everyday lives. In our
conceptual ontologies, such categories as the soul (cp. Croft and Cruse
2004: 27) are alive and well: you can search your soul, or you can suspect
that some people have no soul, etc. Everyday ontologies are not scientific
12 A mathematical modelling can be set up whereby concepts can be described

geometrically as points in multidimensional space, cf. Grdenfors (2000: 134).
13 When you place each concept where it belongs in the larger conceptual land-
scape, and gradually link up the different landscapes, ultimately you end up
with the totality of the human conceptual world. At the level of the whole
ontology, it may be asked what the difference is between conceptual and
objectivist semantics since an objectivist semantics would also aim at link-
ing up all concepts in a system that constituted an ontology, a theory of what
there is in the world. The difference is basically the same as the one that was
given above in the case of individual concepts. The point is that concepts exist
in their own right rather than passively reflecting the nature of the real world
(whatever that is).
theories, but they function meaningfully and usefully in categorizing the

business of everyday life, and the philosophical questions of dualism ver-
sus monism, or materialism vs. idealism do not really arise for those pur-
poses.
Yet it would also be a mistake to set up an iron curtain between every-
day and scientific ontology. Scientific ontologies are a subcategory of con-
ceptual ontologies in general they are just rather special cases. If you are
trying to make human knowledge cohere at a very general level, the ques-
tion of whether human beings have souls as distinct from their bodies
raises itself for just the same kinds of reason that make you wonder how
to make everyday phenomena meaningful. There is a clear difference,
however, between operating with conceptual domains as used relative to
human experience, and the science-policed use of ontology in positivist
philosophy and first-generation cognitive science.
Frames and domains are essentially contexts for conceptual represen-
tations; they do not focus on the internal anatomy of conceptual represen-
tations. The difference between them is that frames focus on the operation
of linking an element with the contextual slot in which it belongs from
the syntactico-semantic frames of the FrameNet project to situation-spe-
cific interactive frames (cf. Lakoffs use of framing, p. 397). In contrast,
domains focus on the place of a concept in a generic matrix of relation-
ships that is independent of the situational context. This is central to
understanding what makes the term domain useful as a separate term.
Croft & Cruse (2004: 15) regard frame and domain as synonyms, which
makes sense if you do not want to emphasize the distinction between
generic and context-specific meaning. However, it is part of the project of
this book to enable CL to highlight this contextual vs. generic distinction
when it makes a difference, as it does when the social context and mental
categories interact. If you are unfamiliar with the domain, there is some-
thing about the meaning of a term that you simply do not understand, and
your conceptual ontology needs to be expanded. This is why the term
domain does not occur as a verb: domains are conceived as stable entities
with timeless properties, while frames may shift from one moment to the
next in online communication, involving re-framing operations that
speakers need to move along with in order to stay tuned.
After prototypes turned out not to be a generally applicable format (cf.
above), Lakoff (1987) introduced the notion of idealized cognitive model
(ICM) as a format for the conceptual content of the mind. ICMs carry over
from prototypes the element of idealization: they represent the result of
averaging out and prioritizing and generally knocking a model into a par-
ticular shape. ICMs, however, differ from prototypes in that they are not
tied exclusively to the specific idea (the prototype prototype, as it were)

of a focal area with a corona of more and more marginal instances around
it.
Closest to the prototype idea is the notion of a radial model, with
mother as the crucial example. The hub of a radial model corresponds
more or less to a classic prototype; in the case of mother it is one who is
a mother genetically, legally and in terms of actual nurturing, of a child
still alive, and who is married to the childs father, with motherly feelings
for the child, etc, etc. However, instead of just a gradual movement towards
a periphery, as pluses are changed into minuses for the feature list, a radial
model includes fully specified combinations such as single mothers, step-
mothers, adoptive mothers, surrogate mothers, etc, which all have their
own place in the picture. A radial model can be metaphorically character-
ized as a configuration in the landscape with a central conceptual summit
surrounded by lesser peaks and a gradual slope down to the non-mother
surroundings.
Two different, but related examples of idealized conceptual models are
social stereotypes and ideals. Illustrating the difference, Lakoff suggests
(1987: 87) that the ideal husband is a good provider, faithful, strong,
respected, attractive, while the stereotypical husband is bumbling, dull,
pot-bellied. Both are examples of the more general phenomenon of pro-
totypification introduced above, allowing for graded similarity judgments
and associated prototype effects, but neither constitutes the hub of a
radially structured conceptual complex of husbands shading off into non-
husbands on all sides.
As we have seen, it is sometime difficult to tell some of the basic
notions apart, and this is one point where the functional dimension that is
highlighted in this book may serve a useful role. Idealized conceptual
models (= ICMs) share with domains and frames the property of being
complex conceptual configurations, and may therefore function as both
domains and frames. Understanding the concept surrogate mother
depends on the domain of motherhood (including genetic, biological and
social dimensions). When viewed as a generic domain, this model provides
a background against which one may profile each separate subtype, such
as a single mother close to, but distinct from a mother who gives away a
child for adoption, for instance. This is different from the framing func-
tion, which also occurs: in actual social contexts, a single mother may well
be seen as framed by the prototype mother, in terms of which single moth-
ers constitute a (possibly shameful) deviation.
In terms of their role in the theory, ICMs are closer to concepts than to
frames, because they pick out a chunk of conceptual substance, and in
Embodiment and image schemas.From conceptual to neural patterns. 29
highlighting it detach it from its background (whereas frames constitute

the background for a concept). As the more general term, concept sub-
sumes the domain of idealized cognitive models: all ICMs can function as
conceptual categories. In the case of, e. g., Lakoffs model of the strict
father family, you may invoke instances of it just as you would invoke
instances of a concept such as car. However, ICMs capture the fact that
it is part of human cognitive practices to extract idealized representations
of parts of the world for purposes of everyday orientation. The canonical
function of conceptual models is therefore to serve as a partial world pic-
ture or Weltanschauung. The notion of a disaster caused by a large
meteor, for example, is a conceptual model that can be invoked to account
for dinosaur extinction or as a scenario for a thriller movie. Similarly, the
billiard-ball model of relations between things (cf. below p. 51) embodies
the knowledge that things can causally interact in ways that influence
their future direction. ICMs with a temporal dimension are known as
scripts: The restaurant script (cf. Shank and Abelson 1977) embodies
cultural knowledge of what happens when you dine out, linking constitu-
ent sub-events in ways that may enable text understanding, as demon-
strated in the AI literature, and thus also constitutes an ICM.
Functionally, ICMs cover an intermediate level of knowledge about
the world, between individual conceptual categories that enable us to put
all individual phenomena into separate containers and the whole concep-
tual ontology. An ICM is a familiar and coherent configuration in the con-
ceptual landscape that provides default knowledge allowing bridging
inferences and other forms of routine enrichment of understanding. Espe-
cially salient, and linked up with the term idealized, is the role of ICMs
as the carrier of generalized expectations of how the world works frag-
ments of the conceptual autopilot system that we depend on for most of
our everyday activities. The basic format, common to all conceptual rela-
tions, is the network: rather than a neatly ordered structure with every-
thing in its well-defined slot, all conceptual entries are connected to each
other via multiple relations of different types, of which Aristotelian fea-
tures and categories are only one subtype.
4. Embodiment and image schemas. From conceptual to neural

patterns.
Just as frames and domains reverse the direction of approach to concepts,

embodiment reverses the priority between abstract reason and concrete
experience in linguistic description. The generative pattern of thinking
based on abstract structures understands itself as reflecting Cartesian

thinking, based on the ghost in the machine, the rational mind within the
mechanical body. CL subjects abstract reason to the same reinterpretation
as conceptualization in general: instead of assuming that reasoning is
something quite distinct from ordinary human understanding, CL argues
that meaningful categories have to emerge out of human experience as
generated by the human body. The concept of bodily grounding expresses
the view that higher-order cognitive processes should be understood by
looking at their underpinning in the human body, not as the result of rising
above bodily limitations.14
A classic example is the concept of force dynamics (cf. Talmy 1985a,
2000). The ability to understand the force of logical argumentation is a
mental achievement, but in order to grasp the concept as it operates in
human understanding, we also have to understand it as an extension of the
felt experience of physical force. The understanding of figurative language,
especially metaphor, in Metaphors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980),
is full of examples of the role of direct embodied experience as a source of
understanding abstract complexities, and the whole directionality of
explanation in cognitive semantics is predicated on this approach.
Perhaps the most central notion in CL for the embodiment dimension
is the notion of image schema. It played a central role in the foundational
account of embodiment in Johnson (1987), and it has also been used in
empirical developmental psychology, cf. Mandler (1992). The concept of
image schema was developed to capture a type of phenomena that was
first brought to the notice of linguists by Talmy (1975). In his broad-rang-
ing overall project of describing the kinds of meaning that characterize
closed classes Talmy outlines a range of meanings which differ from ordi-
nary lexical meanings in being more abstract and schematic. One such type
of meaning he terms topological, including cases like point, partition,
linear extent, adjacency (Talmy [1988b] 2000: 28). Grasping meanings of
this kind could be plausibly linked with experience of the type that is gen-
erally assumed to precede verbally and conceptually articulate thought,
Piagets sensorimotor stage. Before the child is ready to handle complex
14 One can understand the change without having to take sides: to some extent it
is a question of getting hold of the other end of the stick. From the point of
view of secure knowledge the foundation of mental content is what is objec-
tively (out) there regardless of the human observer. From the point of view of
human understanding, the foundation must be mental processes in human
beings.
content, she must be able to handle physical space and get her basic bear-
ings there.
Image schemas were launched in parallel by Johnson (1987) and Lakoff
(1987). Although (cf. Hampe 2005) no consensus has been reached on the
precise status of image schemas in CL, the concept is predicated on link-
ing up the two dimensions specified above: the structuring of (primarily)
space, and the privileged relation with felt experience. The example that
has perhaps received the greatest interest is the container schema (cf.
e. g., Lakoff 1987: 267). This schema illustrates both the structural simplic-
ity and the plausible relation with basic experience. It involves the con-
tainer itself, which has an inside and an outside, an element (which is
either contained or not), and two potential directions, in and out and
that is about it. But the abstract structure is of a kind that can be related
directly to perceptual systems.
As shown by Mandler (1992, 2005), empirical evidence suggests that
this kind of knowledge is indeed part of the very early cognitive develop-
ment. However, Jean Mandler points out that the plausible source of
image schemas in basic perceptual experience should not be confused
with the status of fully acquired image schemas in child cognition. These
are different levels, and may diverge (cf. the general discussion p. 383 f.):
image schemas as cognitive constructs are independent of sensory modal-
ity and can be used for inferencing already at the pre-linguistic stage, and
they are thus instances of abstract conceptualization rather than raw per-
ception. The word schema, in other words, captures an essential part of
their mode of being. The two sides of the idea, structural abstraction and
direct experiential basis, thus do not automatically cohere, as also pointed
out (with some regret) by Johnson (2005). Mandler also provides argu-
ments to show that the experience of spatial impact in the form of force
dynamics appears not to be crucial to image-schematic understanding:
spatial relations are sufficient in themselves. Thus the understanding of
containment is not necessarily bound up with the experience of being con-
tained (in the crib or pram, for instance). We will come back to this issue
below p. 79 f.
Schemas are one bid for integrating experience and conceptual struc-
ture. Another is the emphasis on emotional experience as a foundation for
thinking. This idea received scientific underpinning with the discovery by
Damasio (1994) of the dependence of rational thought on emotional
grounding. In the book (entitled Descartes error) he showed, based on
detailed clinical evidence, that rationality, rather than having to keep clear
of the mush of human emotions, actually became inoperative when the
link with emotions was severed because of brain damage. Without know-
ing what feels right, the human subject can no longer take rational deci-
sions. Relating to the conceived world therefore depends on linking up
the conceptual and the emotional dimension.
The theory of embodiment thus involves very concrete relations in the
brain between concepts, schemas and emotional qualities, down to con-
crete neural implementation. The most radical manifestation of the project
of integrating concrete bodily phenomena with the description of mental
processes is the neural theory of language, which aims to provide a con-
crete specification of how to get from molecule to metaphor, with the
title of the recent book (Feldman 2006). With the experiential grounding
of someone who has made the whole journey from one pattern of thinking
to the other Feldman started out as a computer scientist and only later
began to take an interest in neural processes he explains in biographical
as well as theoretical detail why a purely computational approach based
on information processing is misguided. Using the word epiphany (Feld-
man 2006: 63) about his sudden realization that there was no distinct level
of physical symbols in the mind or brain (which in the formal paradigm
was necessary to provide formal symbols with causal relevance, cf. Newell
and Simon 1976: 116), he describes how the actual neurobiological feat of
deriving information from the environment must be carried out directly
by the neural wiring otherwise it would simply not be possible.
The core ability in Feldmans perspective is to respond appropriately
to information from the environment. Survival depends on being able to
come up with the best match between input from the environment and
the response from the organism. Beginning with the amoeba and its abil-
ity to follow a gradient of increasing concentrations of nutrition and away
from irritants, Feldman goes on to illustrate how the more complex neural
systems of frogs (citing Lettvin et al. 1959) are similar in allowing the
organism to respond to relevant features such as moving bugs and
approaching shadows. On the way to full human complexity we encounter
mirror neurons (more on this below p. 82 f.) which trigger relevant pat-
terns of action when animals perceive conspecifics coping with the envi-
ronment in particular ways (cf. Rizzolatti et al. 1996).
This is particularly interesting in relation to the process of linking up
embodied experience with relations between individuals: if the individual
is capable, by neural wiring, to share the experiences of others, a neural
theory does not entail a purely inward-looking approach to meaning, but
has a plausible link with social experience. By virtue of that, it also links
up with the basis of normativity and morality: human beings can act as
moral agents because they have access to experience about what pro-
motes or hinders the well-being of others.
In using this theory about human minds, a key element is the causal
link between mental connections and active neural connections (Feldman
2006: 91). This brings us to the level of priming effects, as driven by the
mechanism of spreading activation in a network. However, in order to get
to the level where mental connections are linkable with language, it is not
feasible to go all the way with the neurons alone (Feldman 2006: 151). Not
enough is known about the complex patterns of neuron circuitry to be
specific about how we actually understand the cat is on the mat in neural
terms. Feldman, in other words, cannot close the gap that everybody else
has also failed to eliminate, between the physical and the mental level of
description of the mind/brain: the slash remains.
To his credit, Feldman is quite explicit about this. He sees this as an
instance of the fact that sciences often need bridging theories: astrono-
mers need them in order to make facts about stars cohere with basic phys-
ics, and biologists need them to make facts about protein structure cohere
with theories of how sequences of amino acids fold into three-dimensional
shapes as specified by DNA. Rather than giving up the attempt to build a
neurally based theory of conceptualization, Feldman uses the level of
computational modelling to mediate between neuron circuitry and actual
linguistic performance.
This puts him in the company of classical computational modelling,
with the same basic framing problem: only the human operator can pro-
vide the essential link between simulation and simulated reality. The dis-
tinctive feature of the neural theory is the explicit commitment to an
adequacy criterion based on converging evidence, including especially a
criterion of neural plausibility and learnability. Based on these premises,
Regier (1996) constructed a computational model that was able to learn
spatial relation terms. One of the ways to achieve this feat was to provide
the system with a simple model of the visual system. In contrast with com-
putational models built on the blank slate (Feldman 2006: 154), which
could not learn these terms, a model based on what is neurally plausible
could do the trick.15
15 The same strategy was pursued by Bailey (1997) for action words, where the
crucial addition to the system was motor programs. The model was extended
from physical events to metaphorical interpretations by Narayanan (1997). He
showed how news stories about economics including statements such as
Japan continues its long, painful slide into recession could be understood as
transferring event structure (including aspectual phases from ingressive to
perfective) from the basic motor domain to the abstract target domain. This
The final step to language is made through the apparatus of embodied

construction grammar. The basic idea in this approach builds on the
notion of image schemas, construed to include also event or action sche-
mas. Each word evokes a schema, or a network of schemas and these
then have to be combined according to a best match that repeats, at a
vastly more subtle level, the basic coping strategy of the organism in com-
ing up with the best possible response to input from the environment.
This approach is an essential part of the whole enterprise of working
out a theory meaning based on embodied experience. Thus the neural
theory of language lives up to a key commitment of CL in working out an
ever richer and more detailed theory about how explicit logical thinking
can be grounded in processes that reach all the way down into the purely
biological level of neural connections. Anticipating a discussion below (cf.
p. 200), however, let me mention some issues that are not resolved in this
approach. One is the question of precise relations between levels, already
discussed above. In addition to the neural and computational levels pre-
sented above, there are two others, including the topmost level of lan-
guage and thought (cf. Feldman 2006: 139). The project is not complete
before all levels are spelled out in ways that link up everything from bot-
tom to top. Until then, however committed the theory is to the bottom
level, the project is essentially in the same boat as other theories operating
in terms of separate levels with different vocabularies and properties.
To summarize the argument in this section: as part of the commitment
to meaning as a human-style rather than objective-scientific or formal-
logical phenomenon, CL is based on the approach to meaning as arising
out of processes in the human body. In this, it views meaning as uniting
emotional, motor and representational aspects in a bottom-up path from
baby to adult, and from biological to conceptual functions. Image schemas
have a central role in the way meaning is understood at the pre-concep-
tual level because they capture features that are relevant also for the
development of sensorimotor skills: paths, borders, beginnings and ends,
objects and obstacles. Force dynamics illustrates the involvement of all
levels from physical impact via neural and motor response to schematic
relations between agent and antagonist, including metaphorical exten-
sions of force to the force of logical arguments.
carried over to inferences appropriate to the abstract domain, such as eco-

nomic development, based on the elementary structure of motion events.
Figurative meaning 35
5. Figurative meaning16
Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Metaphors we live by, was the first powerful
illustration of how figurative meaning could enhance understanding of
language as part of a general project of understanding the human mind.
Putting figurative meaning at the centre of attention also effectively high-
lighted the narrowness of the science-imbued conception of meaning in
language. From the objectivist perspective, figurative meaning was mar-
ginal in two interconnected ways: ornamental rather than essential to the
message, and basically involving a misrepresentation: the statement you
are the cream in my coffee is not literally addressed to the cream in the
speakers coffee. There is an effect, rhetorical as well as humorous, of
putting it like that, but underneath is a real literal meaning which has to
be figured out. In terms of the standard position usually attributed to
Aristotle, metaphor was a figure of speech, rather than a feature of real
conveyed meaning.
The cognitive linguistic position on metaphor as stated by Lakoff and
Johnson is a continuation of the dimensions discussed above: meaning is
based on experience, on presupposed cognitive domains, and on pre-con-
ceptual embodied schemata. Figurative meaning adds an extra step to the
process of conceptualization, in the form of a mapping from one location
(the source) in the conceptual territory to another location (the target). In
the case of metaphor, the mapping goes from one domain to another, a
salient case being space as a source domain and time as a target domain,
as in you have your whole future in front of you. In the case of metonymy,
the mapping works by direct association, sometimes staying within the
same domain; in reading something with fresh eyes, the eyes are a part of
the whole that also includes other parts of the neurocognitive system;
sometimes it includes cross-domain connections, as in having ones eyes on
someone, with metonymic mappings that go from eye to vision to atten-
tion to desire (cp. Hilpert 2007: 87).
This makes figurative meaning an integrated part of the object of
description: taking an extra step inside a cognitive landscape is radically
16 For a long time, figurative meaning was the only area of CL that many people
had heard about, and it remains the best-known area of the approach. It has
also given rise to a plethora of different developments each of which would
require book-length accounts. For that reason, the various manifestations of
figurative meaning will not be in focus in this book. Only some of the most
pervasive features will be taken up as necessary dimensions of the social
extension of the framework.
different from adding an external adornment to a cognitive essence. The

point, however, only becomes clear when it is understood how the effects
of figurative language can be better understood in terms of the whole
cognitive linguistic picture. The central element is the notion of under-
standing one thing in terms of another, where the detachment of meaning
from the objective nature of the referent again comes to play an essential
role. In objective terms, it would be a category mistake to understand one
thing in terms of a different thing, i. e. understand nature as a whole as an
animated being (as in you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she
always returns). In cognitive-linguistic terms, however, what happens is
something totally different: you use the same conceptual structure in more
places than one, when it is motivated in terms of human experience.
Rather than being a category mistake (as a hard-nosed objectivist would
say), it is the only sensible, and sometimes indeed the only possible thing
to do: you use your conceptual constructs wherever they seem to work.
The difference, again, is understandable in terms of the knowledge
bias in the tradition, as opposed to the desire to understand conceptuali-
zation as a domain in its own right. In the notation of Lakoff and Johnson,
the contrast is starkly profiled. When, for instance, you map the properties
of machines (source) on to human beings (target), as in Joe is due for a
maintenance check, this is expressed in the formula PEOPLE ARE
MACHINES but obviously this does not entail that Lakoff and Johnson
believe that people are machines from a knowledge point of view (oth-
erwise cognitive linguistics would be wrong, and formal semantics right!).
What the formula does suggest, however, is that there is a form of sta-
ble cognitive identification between the two domains, and that it is main-
tained by cognitive mappings from one domain to the other. These map-
pings therefore constitute part of the way the cognitive system works. The
identity is reflected in the regularity whereby you can invoke one domain
by invoking the other. This is the basis for downplaying the distinction
between dead and living metaphors: no matter whether we may have
forgotten that the expression the foot of the mountain recruits the human
body as a source domain, the mapping whereby human beings project
their own body on to the world in understanding it, is alive and well.
This has brought about a distinction between different types of meta-
phorical mappings. Some are intuitively more basic and entrenched than
others. Lakoff and Turner (1989) distinguished between conventional and
novel metaphors, and discussed how metaphors could be creatively
extended (thus avoiding the need to include cases such as Wallace Ste-
vens the emperor of ice cream as reflexes of basic and shared experiential
mappings in the mind). More recently, Grady (1997) has proposed a cat-
Figurative meaning 37
egory of primary metaphors consisting of those that have a basic experi-

ential status in the human form of life. A primary metaphor is motivated
by a primary scene, which is an activity or situation that recurs as part of
recurrent elementary experience.
One example is the kind of correlation that occurs between sensory
experience and subjective feeling, as in IMPORTANCE IS SIZE (cf.
Evans and Green 2006: 305); when you are faced with something that is
physically big, it goes naturally with a subjective feeling that you had bet-
ter treat is as important, as reflected in the collocation overpowering size.
A similar example is the metaphor SEEING IS KNOWING, reflecting
the fact the vision is the primary human source of knowledge as
reflected in countless historical (cf. e. g. Sweetser 1990) and synchronic
links between words for seeing and words for knowing. Co-occurrence in
primary scenes is a fairly clearcut criterion that legitimizes the special sta-
tus of a number of intuitively basic metaphorical mappings, including also
the links between more and up, change and motion, between end points
and results, etc.
What happens according to Grady is then that other metaphorical
mappings can be superimposed on those associated with primary meta-
phors. One of his examples is the theories are buildings metaphor, which
is exemplified by his ideas have shaky foundations or his theory was demol-
ished. There is a primary element in it, in the form of the metaphor that
links standing up with being in good working condition which is a recur-
rent scene for both people (up and about vs bedridden) and artefacts
(the windmill is not up yet). The choice of a building as the specific struc-
ture that can be either up or down, in contrast, is not similarly inherent in
experience, as evinced by the fact that theories do not have windows or
staircases.
Embodiment therefore works in terms of a process whereby meta-
phors can be unpacked: the poetic extensions and the nonbasic aspects
can be traced back into the primary metaphors that they build on. Were
spinning our wheels as used about a crisis in a love relationship does not
mean that the lovers are understood in terms of lovers are cars; you have
to understand it at the primary level where the car is the vehicle in which
the lovers are travelling and the experience of being in a vehicle that is
not moving has the primary character that is necessary to understand the
embodied sense of frustration (cf. Lakoff 2008:256).
Primary metaphors are good candidates for the permanent mappings
that Lakoff and Johnson take as the prototype foundation for metaphor.
It would run counter to the general gradualist tendencies in CL, however,
if it were not assumed that there is a cline from the stable and entrenched
and to the nonce and ephemeral end. In present-day Denmark we can still
use horse terms for processes associated with setting things in motion: in
addition to putting the cart before the horse we may also belong to the
kind of people who do not ride on the day they saddle their horse (i. e.
slow starters). The primary scene of horse-powered locomotion, however,
is not around any more, and we may expect an ongoing process of gradual
de-entrenchment of the mapping as a result.
An essential feature of metaphor theory is the basic asymmetry
between source and target. It reflects the same basic bottom-up direction-
ality that is associated with embodiment: we use what is basic and already
available to get at what is more sophisticated and intangible. Events in
time are less graspable than physical objects in space and therefore we
recruit spatial concepts in getting a grip on time. Physical processes are
more familiar and manageable than emotional processes, and therefore
we resort to physical source domains in trying to grasp what happens in
love relationships, including the physical journey as an experience of mov-
ing into a new location via various intermediate places and events. The
process could be seen as reflecting a strategy of metaphorical bootstrap-
ping, whereby we seize upon a familiar domain and use it to take a leap
into the unknown, retaining the familiar structure as a handle on the world
while we move on.
When we impose source structure on a target domain, however, we
cannot know in advance what conceptualization is most appropriate in
actually grasping the new domain. Lakoff (1993: 216) therefore intro-
duced a target domain override principle, explaining why not all infer-
ences from the source domain were valid. She gave him a kiss imposes a
transfer-of-goods structure on the act of kissing, but the inference that
when Joe gives me a book, I have the book afterwards does not extend
to the kiss, because the nature of the act does not leave a retainable prod-
uct (unlike he gave me a black eye). As has been pointed out, if the target
domain can selectively resist imposition of source structure, the formula X
IS Y is clearly simplistic it only holds for the current purposes of the
metaphor, if we express it with a Gricean twist (cf. below, p. 191 f.).
For the purposes of classical conceptual metaphor theory, metonymy
was something of a poor country cousin. It shares some of the essential
features, especially the asymmetry that in the case of metonymy is usually
expressed as going between vehicle and target, and the experiential basis,
including recurrent scenes cf. all hands on deck, for instance. In the per-
spective of permanent mappings there would have to be a stable link in
order to enable metonymy, while there would be nothing obviously cor-
responding to the bootstrapping process involved in going into a differ-
Linguistic meaning: Polysemy, ambiguity, and abstraction 39
ent domain and achieving new understanding. Therefore metonymies

were generally viewed in terms of motivating relationships that could
explain familiar extensions such as pars pro toto, cause for effect, rather
than as a source of conceptual creativity. This perspective has later
changed, cp. below p. 99.
6. Linguistic meaning: Polysemy, ambiguity, and abstraction
As a result of all this, the discipline of semantics as understood by CL

becomes much richer than previously understood but it also becomes
more difficult to pin down. From the point of view of language, a very
basic question is: what precisely is the meaning of a linguistic expression?
CL has not spent a great deal of time worrying about the question,
probably because that was something truth-conditional semanticists did.
The most generally accepted position is that of Langacker (1987: 161f):
while an expression evokes the whole domain, it only specifically desig-
nates the profiled subpart. The word daughter evokes the family domain,
but only designates the female offspring and therefore the female off-
spring is the point of access to the domain. Thus an individual linguistic
concept may be thought of as a point-of-access to something that is nec-
essarily bigger than the concept itself.
The access metaphor is useful because it stresses the overall point that
was crucial in the frame idea of semantics, namely that neat little sepa-
rate nuggets are not the stuff that human meaning is made of. The process
of understanding words necessarily invokes human experience, and the
idea of access allows that process to be active in a not rigidly bounded way,
while avoiding the undesirable consequence that each word means the
whole network of experience that it evokes (but cf. the discussion of word
meaning in ch. 5).
However, when you look at the linguistic perspective, there is one
question that is not exhaustively answered by this strategy. This concerns
the question of the individuation of conceptual structure vis-a-vis the indi-
viduation of linguistic meaning. This question raises itself whenever one
has to answer the question of how many different conceptual categories
can be designated by the same expression: the ambiguity-vagueness issue.
The truth-conditional, classical approach in its strict form presupposes a
view of meaning whereby each set of criteria constitutes one meaning
and any deviation means that you are into a different meaning. Depend-
ing on the view, bachelor is four different lexical items or one item with
multiple meanings.
There is an element of notational choice involved here, but underneath

the notational choice is the real issue, which the discussion above has not
clarified: when we understand linguistic expressions as symbolic entities,
what are the criteria for individuating whatever we propose as the content
side, or the semantic pole of a linguistic expression?
With the overall emphasis on the dense network of mappings between
different locations in conceptual space, an important part of the early dis-
cussion in CL centred around the concept of polysemy. The idea is that the
nature of conceptual space allowed linguistic expressions to profile a plu-
rality of different but conceptually related regions. This highlighted a key
property of CL as opposed to the strict either-or mentality of classical con-
cepts: either it is one meaning, and no variation is required, or the two
meanings are different, and the item is then homonymous. The classical
example of this situation is (commercial) bank vs. (river) bank, in which
case lexical semanticists split the homonym into two (monosemous) items.
With the richly characterized conceptual universe that emerged from the
cognitive approach, this is clearly a much too primitive option, and the
option of describing a series of related but different meanings constitutes a
more revealing alternative. Wittgensteins concept (1953) of family resem-
blance is the seminal version of the idea, which is put forward in rejecting
an account in terms of all-or-nothing definitions (and in that respect similar
in spirit to CL), with game as the example of a concept where no single
characteristic applies to all instances (such as more than one participant,
a goal state, winning and losing, etc) had to be given up when confronted
with games like patience or throwing a ball back and forth.
The epitome of this approach in CL is the description of prepositional
meaning, where over (Brugman 1981, Lakoff 1987) is the prototype exam-
ple. It has been discussed many times in the literature (cf. e. g. Evans &
Green 2006: 329339), and there is no need to go deeply into it here. There
are more central variants, such as the plane flew over the city, involving
movement across and above. The full network includes a large number
of other senses, some closely related like above (hovering over me) and
control (power over someone), some less close, including covering (a
board over the hole) and excess (overextension). As a natural element in
the emphasis on the conceptual universe as an entity per se (cp the discus-
sion of metaphor above), all variants are claimed to be stored, even if a
mechanism could be constructed for generating them (cp. Pustejovsky
1995), and Lakoffs version is therefore dubbed the full-specification
approach (Evans & Green 2006: 336).
The full specification approach is the most sprawling way of looking at
word meaning, with senses proliferating in all directions. As described by
Linguistic meaning: Polysemy, ambiguity, and abstraction 41
Tyler and Evans (2003), it is possible to set up criteria for distinguishing

between polysemy and vagueness which can reduce the number. One such
criterion is inferrability: a sense is only an instance of polysemy rather
than vagueness if it occurs in a context where it can be taken as intended
without the support of a context that makes the sense inferrable. Thus the
spatial configuration obtaining in the tablecloth is over the table does not
constitute a distinct sense in relation to the above sense, because it can
be inferred from encyclopaedic knowledge about how we position table-
cloths with respect to tables, while John nailed a board over the hole in the
ceiling does constitute a distinct sense because it cannot be inferred from
the basic spatial configuration (Evans & Green 2006: 34344).
This criterion is related to Quines (1960: 129) criterion, according to
which a word with two senses can make a statement true and false at the
same time; thus if he put a board over the hole in the ceiling is true in the
above sense, it may be false in the covering sense, and vice versa. How-
ever, there is no hard and fast way of getting at a unitary maximal reduc-
tion, cf. Geeraerts ([1993] 2006: 101); depending on various factors, what in
one case may seem to be vagueness may in a different context come out
as polysemy. The CL approach is characterized by its general willingness
to allow for several simultaneous potential accounts; to insist that only
one description out of a set of competing options can be true is what Lan-
gacker (1987: 28) calls the exclusionary fallacy. Thus different readings
can be understood both as the product of a general mechanism and simul-
taneously as a list of distinct individual senses without any necessary con-
tradiction.
As a specific reflection of this non-exclusionary view of meaning, it is
also possible to approach the characterization of meanings in several
equally appropriate ways. The radically sprawling approach to meaning
discussed above stands in contrast to the radically restrictive definitions in
the Aristotelian picture but under the name of schema, the abstraction
associated with generalized overall meanings is also an essential part of
cognitive semantics. This plays a role both in the relation between lexical
meanings (male is more schematic than bull, for instance), but it is central
to the understanding of the (gradual) difference between grammatical
and lexical meanings. As described by Langacker (1987: 18990), the cat-
egory of noun may be captured by a semantic description based on the
most abstract sense of the noun thing (as in something) and this dimen-
sion is perfectly compatible with a simultaneous characterization in terms
of the prototype physical object. The schematic characterization, how-
ever, is useful in cases where there is no direct or obvious link between the
prototype and the extension: how does one get from cup to exacerba-
tion?, Langacker asks, and indeed the path of extension would not be
easy to trace if there was never any resort to schematic abstraction. The
general sense of schema subsumes the more specific use in image schema,
cf. above, which is an abstraction from concrete sensory images. As usual,
it is not clear exactly where the distinction should be drawn; Langackers
schemas for capturing grammatical meaning often recur also in lists of
image schemas, including e. g. the distinctions between mass and count.
The existence of schemas does not license a general return to classical
semantics, however. Similarly, the notion of radial models does not justify
a strategy whereby you limit the meaning of an expression to only a pro-
totypical core and leave the fuzziness to vagaries of usage. The extent to
which there is a clear prototype or a clear schematic formula is variable
from one expression to the next.
For the notion of a meaning associated with a linguistic expression, I
suggest it might be practical to think of it terms of the territory, the area of
potential application within which the expression is sanctioned, to use
Langackers term. Territory differs from profile in being more general,
and naturally can be thought of as including a variational dimension, so
that a new usage extends the territory. (Thus when the practice whereby
internet con artists try to get people to mail their passwords is dubbed
phishing, it extends the territory of the spoken word fishing). The term
territory covers the full range of variant meanings for over, in other words
the range of potential use that may occur without infringing linguistic con-
ventions in the community. It is usefully primitive in that it abstracts from
category-internal semantic structure including ambiguity, prototypes, par-
tial family resemblances, metaphoric extensions and schematic charac-
terizations.
The term thus ignores the details but the job it does is central to the
idea of a specifically linguistic as opposed to a general conceptual descrip-
tion. If you ask what a given expression means, the full answer requires a
specification of the whole territory whatever else it might be useful to
say about it.
7. Mental spaces
The last of the traditional centrepieces of CL to be covered in this chapter

is the notion of mental spaces, cf. Fauconnier (1985/1994). The notion has
become part of a larger discussion whose central concept is blending or
conceptual integration (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 2002), which will be
discussed in chapter 2.
Mental spaces 43
The concept of mental space was originally proposed in relation to

cases of referential opacity, as exemplified by classical examples like The
Morning Star is the Evening Star or Nancy wants to marry a Norwegian.
Mythical beasts have also frequently featured (especially unicorns),
because in relation to examples like John was looking for a unicorn the
fact that they may not occur outside the opaque (looking-for) context is
immediately obvious. The salient point is that referents may have an indi-
rect rather than a direct relation with reality: even if it is true that I am
looking for a unicorn, and the term unicorn thus correctly refers to the
object of my search, there is no guarantee that there exists a unicorn for
me to look for. Because it offers an account of logically troublesome cases,
the concept belongs among the foundational achievements of CL, tran-
scending the limitations of a purely referential, objective-realistic
approach to semantics.
The idea of a mental space captures the fact that in linguistic commu-
nication, we do not start out from the world as objectively given. Because
it is the human world that matters, we operate with local mental universes
such as my plans (I plan to be a home owner in 5 years), how I feel (I
long for cool evenings in the shade), or what I believe (I think ecological
accountability is the only way forward). Entities we talk about are charac-
terized by the way they are located in relation to such personal universes,
rather than by their place in an objective description of the world. I want
to find a nice present for Sarah sets up a want universe in which there
exists a present for Sarah, and the interlocutors can discuss this present
avidly because of the interest they take in the speakers wants and in
Sarahs upcoming birthday. The fact that the present for Sarah does not
exist anywhere else than in the mental space constituted by what the
speaker wants to do is entirely beside the point, in spite of the fact that
this issue mesmerized philosophers for 2500 years,
One of the significant properties of mental spaces is that they are only
partially specified. In this, they constitute a more flexible alternative to the
solution devised in referential semantics, the notion of possible worlds
(cf. Lewis 1973). Possible worlds are total specifications of alternative
worlds, in continuation of the assumption in the logical tradition that the
whole referential universe is taken as the basis. On the one hand this
would pose an unrealistic burden on mental processing of input, and on
the other hand it would strain credulity when it comes to a realist ontol-
ogy although some authors wanted to claim referential reality also for
alternative worlds, the idea did not really catch on.
Mental spaces are practical, because they carry less baggage. They are
bubbles devised for purposes of conceptual understanding and communi-
cation and may be closed down as soon as they are no longer needed. They
are not defined by explicit referential specifications: they are underdeter-
mined (Fauconnier 1985: 2), allowing complex configurations of mental
spaces based on relatively simple grammatical input. They are triggered
by expressions serving as space builders, including conditionals (If she
accepts ), modals (They may refuse) and prepositional phrases (In your
situation, ).
The ultimate source of all such space-building is the ability of the
human mind to form representations, cf. the discussion in relation to con-
ceptualization above p. 16. In relation to opacity of reference, the prop-
erty of intentionality cf. Searle (1983) is central. Intentional mental struc-
tures are understood as representing the world, or more generally a
world. When we go to pick up a familiar person at the airport, we check
the remembered, mind-internal features against the faces in the crowd.
And while we are waiting, we operate with a mental space with specifica-
tions that we want to materialize in the base space of physical experience.
When the person actually turns up, we can close down the want space
again.
All mental spaces owe their properties to the primordial mental space,
i. e. the human mind: because the mind can represent things to itself, it can
also create a split between a referent and its mental representation. It is
especially striking, however, in cases when the relation between the world
and our representation of the world is explicitly put on the agenda: condi-
tionals, modals, and thought experiments in general are manifestations of
this ability to imagine worlds, modulated by the relations of desire, belief
and imaginative projections of various kinds.
For reasons that will be discussed below, I suggest the term alternativ-
ity borrowed from modal logic (cf McCawley 1981: 276) for relations
between such spaces. Mental spaces, I suggest, arise when we imagine an
alternative scenario, and that means there is always an implicit compari-
son involved. The space that constitutes the basis of comparison is defined
by the current discourse but the mother of all these is the so-called
base space: the actual situation in which the conversation occurs. There
can be several such alternative spaces in play at the same time; thus in
Joe told me that Jill expected Jack to think of something, the something
is in Jacks mental space, which is situated inside Jills mental space, which
again is inside Joes mental space, which is part of the mental space
evoked by the speakers utterance but it all ends up in the actual dis-
course world.
The status of a mental space as an alternative licenses a very basic rela-
tionship in Fauconniers account, which is also associated with referential
Mental spaces 45
opacity, the counterpart relation.17 When an entity is construed as part of

an alternative to the actual discourse situation, it acquires two different
identities, which may have properties that are mutually contradictory. For
instance, he thinks he is Napoleon establishes a counterpart relation
between the main clause subject he and the delusion-world Napoleon.
And there may be several counterpart relations. With James McCawleys
example, I dreamed I was Brigitte Bardot and that I kissed me endows the
dreamer with two counterparts, linked by different identity projections.
If we take the concept alternative as basic, ontology does not run wild.
The base space of actual discourse is solidly located in time and space,
even when it is populated with the possibly hallucinated imagination of
the participants. Moreover, mental events are real events. Daughter spaces
are proper parts of the base space, even if they may have weird stuff inside
them. If someone believes he is a high-class professional assassin, that
belief is part of the discourse world, with potential causal consequences
for it. If you meet such a person, you would be well advised to get out of
the way and that means in reality, not in the belief space. This ontological
solidity continues no matter how many recursive embeddings there are. In
I think he believes she wants him to prove that he is a real man, a possible
continuation is:..which may explain why he is coming up to us with a leop-
ard on a leash. Beliefs, thoughts and intentions are hard facts about the
real world, while they give rise to mental spaces that contain not equally
hard facts.
These hard properties are also behind the ease with which we move
across space barriers. The alternativity relation means that the whole
point of having mental spaces is that they should share elements with their
parents and daughters. The sharing may be more or less extensive, but a
mental space with entities that are totally unprojectable on base reality
space would not sustain our interest for very long. In mental space under-
standing, entities are central in that you access spaces via counterpart
identity relations between entities, as defined by connector relations.
Such relations are variations on the basic representational theme, but
include (cf. Fauconnier 1985) value-role relations such as the one holding
between the French president and Sarkozy at the moment of writing. In
17 The counterpart relation was also part of the discussion in possible worlds
theory; at one time the preferred example was what Socrates could or could
not have for a counterpart (an alligator was one of the examples!). For obvious
reasons, the discussion becomes less tortuous if you do not have an objectivist
semantics, but instead view it as a matter of alternative construals of the same
situation in actual communication.
this case the representational content (president) is additionally the con-

tent of a status function, so that it is superimposed upon the person who
carries the function. Another relation of the same kind is the actor-char-
acter relation, where the actor takes on the role of the character in ques-
tion for the duration, as it were.
Generally speaking, mental spaces constitute the central concept for
reinterpreting reference in a CL perspective. In the objectivist under-
standing that is built into the tradition, reference requires a solution to the
problem of the constitution of the universe; in the cognitive perspective,
human speakers are free to populate the universe of discourse with refer-
ents based on the human ability to construe the world in different ways.
Again, I suggest that highlighting the functional dimension will make it
clearer to establish a specific contribution for mental spaces, as opposed
to frames and ICMs. All three are little packages of mental content, which
may be connected in different ways. But in the normal case, the connec-
tor relations need not require separate mental spaces: thus, as long as
Sarkozy is president, there is no alternativity involved in the choice
between introducing him as the president and as Sarkozy he is one
and the same entity that can just be labelled in different ways. It is only
when the two identities are dissociated but at the same time kept in play
together that we need to put them in separate spaces (e. g. when compar-
ing Sarkozy with other French presidents). Similarly, the string of actors
who have played James Bond, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig, are
ordinary co-constituents of the base space as long as they are viewed one
at a time as consecutive choices of movie directors for continuing a string
of box-office hits. You only need to put them in separate spaces when they
are evaluated as simultaneous and alternative James Bonds (because
Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig cannot
occupy the James Bond role at the same time).
Mental spaces, on the reading suggested above, are therefore neatly
complementary to ICMs: where ICMs provide partial configurations of
conceptual content, mental spaces provide partial locations where you
may put conceptual content. In this, they are similar to frames but they
have a special niche in their built-in alternativity: mental spaces always
come at least two at a time, only one of which is (viewed as being) real.
The functional role of mental spaces is that we want to have room for
alternatives to the way things are now, whether or not we attempt to
change the world to fit the alternative. In the classic case of Nancy wants
to marry a Norwegian, the Norwegian can be put either in the want space
or the base space. Depending on which space we choose, we may construe
the term differently: in the want space, there is more free scope for a
Cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar 47
stereotypical construal, invoking idealized models of mountain-dwelling,

skiing (and possibly oil-affluent) Norwegians, than there is if there is an
already existing live Norwegian whom she wants to marry (because we
then want to fill out the picture by the real properties of the man she is
marrying (is he a nice person?). In either case, the roles of mental space
and conceptual content are fairly clearly separable.
8. Cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar
Above I have tried to describe a number of ways in which CL has enriched

the general understanding of language and conceptualization. The descrip-
tion reflects the role of CL as a re-contextualizing force in linguistics. A
recurrent configuration in the sections above is that a particular cognitive
factor, which used to be considered as something that belonged outside
the proper domain of language, turns out to be able to throw new light on
the way language works. Essentially, the headlines of the sections above
are made up of terms that correspond to this pattern. The fortress of lan-
guage description was opened up, and language turned out to draw on a
variety of fascinating conceptual structures and mechanisms whose role in
language had been marginalized until then.
This approach, however, does not include what the second cognitive
revolution implied specifically for the specifically linguistic core area.
Although the thrust of the movement is clearly in the opening up and the
new vistas, the core area is essential, since without it CL might be cogni-
tive, but it would not be linguistics.
Since the overall focus was not on structure, but on moving beyond
structure, it would be misleading to try to set up a construct and dub it the
CL view of linguistic structure. Nevertheless, it follows from the overall
aims that a new, CL-oriented view of grammar needs to reinvent linguis-
tics in such a way that what used to be special and immanent features of
language can be viewed as a natural aspect of human cognition as a
whole without losing its ability to capture what is indeed specific to
human language.
The central figure in this endeavour is Ronald Langacker. It is no acci-
dent that while CL is a generic label shared by many and quite diverse
authors, cognitive grammar has remained a brand name for Langackers
theory: it is in his works that the implications of CL in general for the cen-
tral descriptivist agenda of the professional linguist (cf. Langacker 1999)
have been most systematically analysed, especially Foundations of Cogni-
tive Grammar (1987 and 1991); for a recent summary cf. Langacker
(2008a). The first thing to point out about the framework, also in the con-
text of this book, is its commitment to the foundational relationship
between grammar and meaning.
That linguistic structure is symbolic is one of the points on which there
is a direct confrontation with the understanding of structure in generative
grammar. Generative grammar is predicated on the existence of a purely
syntactic structure, such that meaning is outside of that structure but may
correspond more or less to elements in it. Cognitive grammar takes its
point of departure in the symbolic relation between grammar and under-
standing-in-use; and symbolic structures have two poles, a phonological
and a semantic pole. Thus there are only three kinds of linguistic elements:
phonological, semantic or symbolic. Since sounds only count as linguistic
elements when they are used as part of symbolizing structures, all linguis-
tic elements are part of symbolic structures (the content requirement,
Langacker 1987: 53), and structure as such does not occur on its own.
As Langacker frequently emphasizes, this is by no means a free ride, or
a mere declaration of faith. While the distinction between competence and
performance initially set Chomsky free to postulate meaning-independent
structures in a way that was not easily controllable, Langackers commit-
ment to assigning all structure a role in a symbolic relationship means that
he has to provide an explanation for cases that are often assumed to be
obvious examples of non-correspondence. As a case in point, Langacker
(1999) offers an account of so-called formal subjects (like the pronoun it
in it is raining) in terms of the overall generalization that also applies to
contentful subjects. The schematic generalization he suggests is the role
of the subject as initial focus for the understanding of clause meaning. In
the case of prototypical subjects, the initial focus is assigned to an agentive
nominal, but the presentational frame that is associated with so-called
formal subjects can plausibly be regarded as a type of expression where
the initial focus is assigned not to an entity but to an abstract setting
(which may subsequently have an entity or a process assigned to it).
Whether or not one agrees with the description, clearly this symbolic com-
mitment has implications that the analysis must make good.
The symbolic view of grammar naturally leads to a bottom-up approach
to syntactic structure. The generative approach to structure starts out with
a question that is bound up with the innateness agenda: what abstract
relationships are characteristic of sentences in human languages? 18A sym-
18 This pattern of thinking was historically based on theories of formal automata:

structures are assigned a form of being that is independent of and comes
bolically based theory of linguistic structure, however, has to take its point
of departure in meaningful linguistic items in use. The existence of com-
plex utterances can be understood (Langacker 1987: 279) to arise from the
fact that if you want to encode a complex conceptualization, there will not
always be a single word that captures what you want to express which
means you have to combine your way to an expressive option that will do
the job. The point of departure for that process, therefore, is the list of
available items in the language.
At this point we need to distinguish between two separate applications
of the distinction between top-down and bottom-up descriptive strate-
gies.19 The application introduced above reflects the choice between start-
ing with general rules (top-down) and starting with actual instantiations
(bottom-up). It is on this point that there is a clearcut distinction between
generative grammar and CL but you can also apply the distinction to the
direction in which you approach a structure. Either you can begin with the
whole configuration (top-down) or you can begin with the single elements
(bottom-up). On this point neither generative grammar nor CL can be
placed unambiguously on one side of the divide.
Early generative grammar was clearly top-down (beginning with the
symbol S and moving downwards), but the minimalist framework has a
strong bottom-up element based on the operation merge. Cognitive
Grammar in its classic version is predominantly oriented bottom-up, being
understood as a Structured Inventory of Conventional Linguistic Units
(Langacker 1987: 73), which could be combined according to a composi-
tional path that moves from elements towards complex combinations. At
the same time, it is stressed that each conventional combination has prop-
erties of its own; this holistic aspect is one of the points on which Cogni-
tive Grammar differs from the strictly compositional approach of genera-
tive grammar. Hierarchy is always partial and only one possible dimension
of organization. An assemblys coherence has to be assessed holistically,
i. e. it is not inherently or exclusively bottom-up, top-down, or left-to-right.
In accordance with this, it is an open issue how structures constituting the
assembly are accessed in actual processing.
This has implications for the understanding of complex syntactic rela-
tions. To the extent they are compositional, i. e. if they are formed in
accordance with general principles (as assumed by generative syntacti-
before the concrete instantiations.

19 I am indebted to Ronald Langacker for pointing this out in relation to a previ-
ous version.
cians), these general principles are not free-floating or autonomous but

must be understood as based in the semantic properties of the items that
are combined, and there is a cline with more idiosyncratic properties. In
combination with the content requirement, this has further implications
for the descriptions you can offer. Thus the kind of arbitrariness that in
generative descriptions is associated with syntactic (distributional) classes,
for instance with respect to what determines the membership of word
classes, is not compatible with this approach. It must be assumed that ele-
ments in them have a potential for being combined into complex syntactic
constituents.
One illustration of this principle is that membership of the class of
nouns goes with a semantic description (symbolizing a schematic thing).
This semantic property at the same time qualifies the noun (or the nomi-
nal expression of which the noun is head) to combine with a verb, because
a verb designates a process that has an open slot for things that take part
in the process (an elaboration site). Because of this correspondence
between their symbolic contents, nominal and verbal expressions can
combine into complex expressions denoting process-cum-participant(s).
A corollary of this descriptive path is the claim that grammar is in itself
non-constructive it is the speaker who constructs complex utterances,
not the grammar that assigns structure to sentences. Structure is a prop-
erty of the inventory in that some units are part of other, larger units: the
unit [d] is part of dog, which is part of dogs, which is part of dogs are pro-
hibited, etc. and speakers can construct their own complex expressions
because combinability is not arbitrary, but motivated in terms of proper-
ties of the units themselves.
Following this descriptive path, grammar can be seen as (Langacker
1987: 97) the successive combination of symbolic structures to form pro-
gressively larger symbolic expressions. It is not an equally natural option
to begin with a complex structural relation and work downwards from
there. (But there is more to be said about that, cf. ch. 6).
The syntagmatic dimension that is involved in a compositional path on
the paradigmatic side by the third basic relation proposed by Langacker,
which he calls categorization (1987: 74), and whose core feature is schema-
tization (cf. above). Thus if a category subsumes another category, it is
abstract or schematic in relation to it, as fruit is abstract/schematic in
relation to apple. This relation is the successor concept in CL to the link
between Aristotelian categories based on assigning substances to their
superordinate kind, and may thus be used to form hierarchies reminis-
cent of the taxonomies that are traditionally used to illustrate conceptual
hierarchies (animal > mammal, reptile (etc); reptile > lizard, snake ).
However, because the relation is based on human acts of conceptuali-

zation, it does not carry the same ontological and universal implications
(Langacker 1987: 74n). It may depend on the situation how we choose to
set up the categorical relations between the relevant items. Apart from the
role of categorization in establishing relations between meanings, it is also
central to linguistic structure in that the formation of categories in lan-
guage itself depends on the formation of abstractions. Saliently, the kind
of meanings associated with grammatical items would not be feasible
without the formation of very abstract schematic categories: the sense
of thing in which all nouns are things is very abstract indeed, cf. above
p. 41.
The bottom-up approach applies also to this dimension. Abstractions
in the cognitive view do not arise out of thin air but from acts of categori-
zation applied to concrete items just as combinatory relations depend
on the concrete units that we combine. The bottom-up principle is also
associated with the general view of what language is. If you take units to
be basic, and combinations to be a subsequent and later stage, then the
only sensible way to approach syntactic combination is bottom-up.20
Langacker fleshed out this general picture with a systematic reinter-
pretation of the whole area of basic grammar in terms of symbolic struc-
tures. In all cases, he provides interpretations linking up linguistic struc-
tures with meaningful and generalizable cognitive models. What he called
the billiard-ball model may serve as a key example of this.
The billiard-ball model is posited as the cognitive underpinning of the
relation between nominal and verbal elements. It may be said to consti-
tute an idealized cognitive model of the relation between things and the
processes in which they take part. In this, it stands as a cornerstone in our
20 The same core contrast surfaces in relation to language acquisition: the bot-
tom-up approach entails that children learn units first, and then later get the
hang of how to build combinations, thus gradually mastering more complex
structures the structure-first approach entails an acquisitional path where
the underlying structural mechanisms gradually surface in the childs emerg-
ing language. And most general of all, the contrast is associated with a basic
understanding of the role of theory in relation to actual findings: Chomsky
sees the role of linguistic theory as analogous to the role of very general prin-
ciples of physical theory in relation to actual physical events stressing local
and bottom-up regularities is simply equivalent to focusing on the periphery
instead of the centre. Cognitive linguists, in contrast, reject the analogy with
physics and assume only the existence of those abstract categorizations that
actual human speakers and conceptualizers establish, which means that the
local perspective is basic.
basic understanding of the world. In order to understand how it works, it

is necessary to maintain at the same time the basic analogy and the essen-
tial element of schematic abstraction. Nouns denote things in a very
abstract sense, which can only be defined precisely with respect to mental
operations but we understand thinghood also by reference to the cat-
egory prototype, which is a physical object located in space.
At the concrete level of the prototype, nouns are thus analogous to bil-
liard balls, which exist in space and are stable in time: billiard balls exist
also when no one is playing, in which case they just remain where they are.
In contrast, verbs are analogous to energetic interactions, which (1) exist
only in time and (2) depend for their existence on things serving as par-
ticipants in those processes. The event of hitting thus occurs in time and
requires for its occurrence two balls, which go through a process of hitting
that is extended both in space and time.
The abstractness is essential in order to understand why we can have
verbs like sleep, agree or resemble which have no direct analogy to the
energetic interaction of hitting. Some noun-verb relations are understood
not directly by reference to the prototype but rather with the schematic
level of understanding, which involves only the conceptual processes:
nouns are construed atemporally, while verbs are construed as unfolding
in time (Langacker 1987: 247248).
In addition to providing a semantic framework for the relation between
nominal and verbal meaning, the model also establishes a relation of
dependence between the two types of meaning. Verbal meaning is depend-
ent on nominal meaning in the same way that processes depend on things.
You can conceptualize billiard balls without events of hitting, but not vice
versa. Thus things are conceptually autonomous in relation to temporal
processes in which they take part. Temporal processes, in contrast, are
conceptually dependent on things. Like other relations, this dependency
relation has a symbolic basis: the meanings of verbs have reserved spaces
for participants (Langacker calls these reserved spaces elaboration sites,
i. e. sites reserved for being filled out by nominal elements, 1987: 304).
This conceptual account does a number of important things at the
same time: it provides a cognitive description of a very basic grammatical
relationship; it assigns meaning to grammatical categories that used to be
prime candidates for purely syntactic status; and it links up the nucleus of
a clause with basic elements of the way we think about the world, includ-
ing space, time, entity (thing) and process.
Other purportedly purely grammatical relations can be accounted for
by extensions of the same pattern of reasoning. The two nominal elements
in transitive predications do not have equal status in relation to the verb
they combine. Building on Talmy (1978), Langacker adopts the idea of a

basic asymmetry that is associated with the figure-ground asymmetry in
perception21 (which was pioneered by the Danish psychologist Edgar
Rubin, cf. Rubin 1915). A predicate with two participants thus privileges
one as the primary figure, the main character: Joe visited Jack is about
Joe, while Jack received Joe is about Jack. Langacker captures the relation-
ship by means of the distinction between trajector and landmark. The
trajector is the element with the privileged status, the subject candidate.
The landmark also has figure-like properties, because it is a participant
rather than part of the setting, but it is secondary in relation to the trajec-
tor (Langacker has later said that if had thought of it, he would just have
called them one and two, respectively, saving cognitive linguists a great
deal of tongue-twisting).
This dimension links up with the basic account of verbal meaning: tra-
jector-landmark alignment is part of the account of the elaboration sites.
In choosing the predicate, you therefore also choose a way of conceptual-
izing the participants: when you choose the preposition below you choose
a trajector that is vertically lower, while above has the trajector vertically
higher than the landmark. Thus although there is truth-conditional iden-
tity between the painting is above the fish tank and the fish tank is below
the painting, the two sentences do not mean the same thing, since one sen-
tence is about locating the painting, the other is about locating the fish
tank.
In general, when symbolic elements combine, the outcome can take
different forms it is not just a question of one meaning being dumped on
top of the other, with the combined meaning as an unstructured heap. The
concept of profiling acquires an additional function here. At the item
level, it highlights the carving out of the designated semantic area from its
base domain as a finger is profiled against the background of a hand (cf.
above p. 25). When it comes to understanding syntactic combination, it
can provide a symbolically grounded account of the grammatical relations
of complementation and modification.
The basic reason for this is that the profile indicates what the core con-
tent of a linguistic expression is. Profiles of contributing elements must be
involved when they combine, because there needs to be some consistent
overall profiling in the result if profiles stayed the same, meanings would
21 The force of the perceptual analogy in relation to a possible alternative source

in physical manipulation will be discussed in ch. 6. Both are of course instances
of bodily grounding.
just lie around next to each other without collaborating. Modification is

elegantly captured by saying that a modifier-head construction takes over
the profile of the autonomous element, the head rather than the modifier.
Thus while the adjective dangerous on its own profiles a property, the
combined modifier-head construction dangerous road profiles the nomi-
nal thing (road) that has the property.
This may appear to be the natural and fully predictable solution: the
dependent element gives up its profile in favour of the element on which
it depends. However, complementation, which is the other main type of
grammatical combination, works the opposite way: the verb marry denotes
a process, and if we add an object, as in marry a Norwegian, it still denotes
a process. In other words, the autonomous thing does not impose its pro-
file on the combination instead, the dependent element, the verb,
imposes its process profile on the whole construction. Similarly for prep-
ositions: above denotes a spatial relation, and above the fish tank still
denotes a spatial relation, although a relation that has been comple-
mented at one end.
Viewing the issue of syntagmatic combination from a semantic and
bottom-up manner has other implications for the way in which properties
of combinations are related to properties of elements. Instead of purely
distributional laws as expressed in phrase structure rules like VP o V
NP or PP o P NP, we get a combination that also inherits semantic sub-
stance from its elements. Since the substance is brought into a new rela-
tional position, it is logical that new properties will arise as part of the
process: as a result of accommodation between the combined units, the
combination has semantic properties not found in the units themselves.
Thus the semantic substance gets pushed around in conceptual space
depending on what it teams up with, thereby extending the network of
meanings that an element can designate (cf. Langacker 1987: 76).
This also has consequences for the understanding of compositionality,
a cornerstone of formal semantics ever since Frege. Because of the proc-
ess of accommodation, the meaning of a complex expression is typically
not equal to the sum of the parts plus their manner of combination there
is almost always an extra element. Although it may be argued that accom-
modation is fundamentally a situational act rather than a feature of the
conventional meaning, typically the extra element will start to become
conventionalized whenever the combination is re-used. A bad loser is not
someone who is both a bad person and a loser; nor would it even be accu-
rate to describe him as someone who is bad at handling the event of los-
ing it is someone who is bad at it in a specific way (i. e., who cannot stand
losing and makes a nuisance of himself). Thus a feature of cognitive gram-
Final remarks 55
mar is partial compositionality (Langacker 1987: 449), reflecting again

that cognitive content rather than formal immaculate symbolization is at
the heart of language.
If we view language as a window on cognition, it is not always neces-
sary to specify precisely where the dividing-line between general cogni-
tion and specifically linguistic categories is: meaning is encyclopaedic in
the sense that there is no separate compartment for linguistic meaning as
opposed to the rest of the conceptual world. However, in combination
with profiling the three essential relations described above symboliza-
tion, categorization and syntagmatic combination provide the ground-
work for explicating the relation between linguistic units and the sur-
rounding encyclopaedic landscape. The region that can be designated by a
linguistic expression is wholly inside conceptual space, but cannot be
inferred from the non-linguistic conceptual region in itself.
In his concern to keep up the central descriptive agenda of linguistics
(cf. Langacker 1999), Langacker has to some extent ploughed a lone fur-
row in the CL landscape. In addition to showing how general cognitive
mechanisms and principles could be integrated, he has systematically
been rethinking the whole home territory of linguistics, shifting it from a
formal to a semantic foundation and showing how apparently arbitrary
features could be assigned a place in a theory based on meaning and moti-
vation. Precisely because of that, however, he has received growing recog-
nition also among authors who did not have the same commitment to the
descriptivist agenda. He has done a job that was essential to the creden-
tials of CL as a theory of language.
9. Final remarks
In this chapter, I have tried to give a condensed survey of the key ele-
ments in the rejuvenation of linguistics that CL brought about. I have
deliberately tried to create an idealized cognitive model of what may be
termed classic cognitive linguistics, and therefore backgrounded prob-
lems as well as issues which are central to the development that this book
focuses on; both kinds of issues will be taken up later on. While I recognize
the lacunae left by omissions due to condensation and idealization, of
course I hope to have given an impression of a view of language and cog-
nition that is both valid and innovative in a way that is not diminished by
subsequent qualifications.
All available truths are partial, and classic cognitive linguistics is no
exception. However, the tearing down of the wall between the general
domain of human understanding and the understanding of language is a

lasting achievement, and I also regard the concepts discussed above as
lasting contributions to the analysis of the wider conceptual world that
opened up. All the concepts discussed above play an important role in
understanding meaning, the central property of language in CL.
In my discussion above, I have sometimes suggested how construals of
the central concepts that highlight their functional dimension may clarify
the division of labour between them. As we have seen, Croft & Cruse
(2004: 15) equate the terms frame and domain, and Barcelona (2007:
53) defines what he calls functional domains as being equivalent to Fill-
mores frames and Lakoffs idealized cognitive models. This is natural
because in purely conceptual terms they will often overlap: in such cases
domain, frame, ICM, mental space and concept may come down to the
same thing. But the distinction in terms of the functional roles of the con-
cepts should be maintained, so that they can be kept distinct when needed.
Let me end up this introduction by offering an example where they come
down to the same thing, and one where they need to be kept distinct.
In the right context, the dreamy-eyed utterance If I were a billion-
aire may evoke a concept, domain, frame, model, and mental space at
the same time. The concept captures the category of people who own ten-
digit fortunes; the domain is the generic hierarchy of affluence with bil-
lionaires at the top; the frame might be a magazine story about the super-
rich; the ICM invoked is the world of sixty-foot yachts and champagne
parties; the mental space is the alternative reality in which the speaker
imagines himself. Although the functional difference between the five
ways in which boundless wealth is evoked is just discernible, there is so
much duplication across them that simply talking about the millionaire
frame is a useful shorthand.
However, the more or less invisible functional differentiation may in
other cases be crucial to capture what is going on. To take a case in point,
the Nigerian oil emails that large numbers of people have received also
evoke the chance to become a millionaire, but here the overall picture is
rather more complicated. By asking the recipients help in getting an
enormous fortune out of the reach of an oppressive government, the email
raises the possibility of becoming a millionaire, but without evoking the
concept or the domain explicitly. The prospect of coming into possession
of a very large sum of money, however, can hardly fail to invoke the ideal-
ized cognitive model of being a millionaire.
The frame analysis has (at least) two levels: at the syntactico-semantic
level of the FrameNet, it evokes the money transfer frame, since the large
amount is mentioned in connection with the need to find an account to
Final remarks 57
which the money can be transferred so as to get out of the reach of the
oppressive powers-that-be: this is often a subframe of the commercial
transaction frame, but in these letters it tends to occur on its own (with
only three central frame elements, i. e. the money and its source and target
locations).
At the level of the whole utterance, there are two frame analyses pos-
sible: there is an explicitly invoked frame of political abuse of power,
which defines a slot for the message as a request for help (such that com-
pliance would coincidentally put some money in the recipients posses-
sion). The real frame is that of a scam to drain the accounts into which the
Nigerian money was supposed to flow, and in that frame the letter consti-
tutes the bait. Since there is an alternativity relation between the two
frames, we need to distinguish between two mental spaces, one for each of
the two frames which are linked by counterpart relations such that the
sender is a victim of persecution in one space and a crook in the other, and
the recipient is a potential millionaire in one and a sucker in the other.
Although this construal of the basic concepts in CL on some points
contrasts with proposals from other authors (some of which are cited
above), the point is not to criticize these alternatives, which are well-moti-
vated in terms of the purposes they serve in their respective contexts.
These narrowing-down construals are suggested in the hope that they may
serve to bring out the full and differentiated potential of these concepts,
reflecting an overall strategy of differentiation-within-continuity, where
CL in my view has tended towards emphasizing continuity at the risk of
making precise differentiation difficult. I think the need for continuity has
now been emphasized strongly enough to make it safe to move in the
other direction and stress differentiation: if all the theory offered were the
millionaire frame/space/domain/model with no clear differentiation, the
analysis would be somewhat less precise.
In the next chapter, the subject is the ongoing developments in CL that
constitute the social turn, the expansion from the individual mind to soci-
ety; this will affect especially the understanding of grounding, prototypes
and image schemas. I return to some core concepts of classic CL in chap-
ter 5, with a view to suggesting a reprofiling of their role in view of the
extended framework proposed in chapters 14.
Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to
social processes: aspects of the ongoing social turn
1. Introduction
This chapter is about the aspects of CL that go beyond the individual

mind. Some of them have always been there but are expanding, others
are new developments. In combination, they are shifting the focus of CL.
The key change is the recognition of factors outside the individual mind
as explanatory dimensions. These developments can be seen as a process
of living up to Langackers (1988) commitment to a usage based linguis-
tics which has gained momentum since the turn of the millennium (cf.
the title Usage Based Models of Language, Barlow & Kemmer 2000).
Another pervasive motif is the role of fellow subjects in human concep-
tualization. Two keywords that reflect these dimensions are variation and
intersubjectivity.
I begin with conceptualization as a feature of the social and cultural
sphere (section 2). Section 3 introduces variational description (see also
ch. 6). Section 4 is on development and acquisition, with intersubjective
dimensions in focus. In section 5, I discuss the implications of these dimen-
sions for the central notions of embodiment and grounding. Section 6 dis-
cusses the evolutionary framework as an overall model for understanding
cognition in a wider context. Section 7 takes up a new focus that is directly
linked to the usage orientation for the study of meaning: the shift from
conceptual structures in the individual mind to the interactive process of
meaning construction.
2. Cognitivism and conceptualization in the sociocultural sphere
There has always been a social dimension in cognitive linguistics, but

social factors have been at one remove from centre-stage position in CL.
They come into the picture by the same route as physical factors: via cog-
nitive representations in the mind. Focusing on the mind-internal dimen-
sion goes naturally with the conceptualization of linguistics as part of cog-
nitive science, whose job it is to model the powers of the human mind as
part of the general description of how a human being works.
Cognitivism and conceptualization in the sociocultural sphere 59
In this way the social dimension can easily be accommodated within a

mind-internal perspective; it is hard to tell the difference between social
facts and cognitive representations of social facts. Frames (cf. p. 23) illus-
trate the natural conflation: calendrical systems are parts of the social
order and also mind-internal cognitive models. Theories of the individual
mind can naturally be extended to the analysis of cultural phenomena, as
described by Talmy in the article entitled The Cognitive Culture System
(Talmy 2000. vol. II, p. 373):
Cognitivism indicates that cultural patterns exist primarily because of the cog-
nitive organisation in each of the individuals collectively making up a society.
This analysis arrives at particular positions on the issues of what is universal
across cultures and what varies, of what is innate and what is learned, and of
how the individual and the group are related. This cognitivist view of culture
disputes several other theoretical positions, such as the position that culture
has mainly or solely an autonomous existence beyond the cognition of individ-
ual humans.
Adopting a mind-internal source of explanation was a pervasive trend
during what may be called the cognitive era from 1960 onwards.1 Cogni-
tivism does not entail a focus on mind-internal objects of description
only on mind-internal sources of explanation. The interest in cultural and
political issues within CL is manifested most flamboyantly in work by
George Lakoff (1987, 1996, 2004, 2006, 2008) demonstrating how idealized
cognitive models and metaphorical mappings can be used to understand
American politics.
His analyses illustrate some of the basic properties of classical CL, the
grounding of abstract thought in more concrete domains, and the role of
embodied experience in motivating conceptual mappings. In a series of
publications, beginning with Moral Politics (1996), Lakoff has shown how
the ideological divide between the liberal and the conservative positions in
the US can be understood in terms of two different idealized cognitive
models of the family: the strict father family and the nurturant parent
family, and has suggested what implications may follow from this link
between politics and cognitive structures. Lakoff argues that the conserva-
tives have been much better at motivating their supporters because they
have grounded their policies in terms of something everybody could under-
stand and relate to. If the liberals are to be effective in fighting back, they
must reconquer the lost social territory by finding an equally powerful way
of grounding their policies in structures that resonate in individual minds.
1 Cf. also Hutchins (1995) as quoted below p. 84 on cognitive anthropology.

60 Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes
Arguing for the superiority of a nurturant family model, Lakoff points

out how conceptual models based in bodily experience have implications
that generalize into the sociopolitical domain: The nurturing family can
serve as a model for a society based on mutual support rather than on
unquestioning support of the president as chief executive. The family is
where human beings first meet the practice of government, cf. Lakoff
2008, and so the response to government on the larger scene draws on
those formative, embodied experiences (cf. the discussion of primary met-
aphor above p. 37).
Lakoff has analysed other concepts, including the key concept of free-
dom (Lakoff 2006) on the same essential premises. Framing is a key instru-
ment in political campaigning: if you can get people to mobilize a frame
that motivates your positions, the battle is half won. Lakoff has helped to
found a think tank (The Rockridge Foundation) based on the idea of
grounding liberal political argumentation in cognitive models that are
immediately understandable in terms of the everyday embodied experi-
ence of individual voters.
Lakoffs work on cultural and political issues is predicated on essen-
tially the cognitivist position expressed by Talmy. His view of the relation
between the mental and the social sphere comes out in an interview by
Pires de Oliveira (2000). Entitled Language and Ideology, the interview
challenges Lakoff from a point of view that stresses the potential constitu-
tive role of socially entrenched value systems for cognition and for cogni-
tive linguistics. Pires de Oliveira, while sympathetic to Lakoffs views,
probes the question of how facts belonging in the social dimension may
have implications for cognitive facts. Lakoffs position, however, is clearly
that the directionality is from mind-internal conceptual facts to social
facts. In analysing socially relevant cognitive structures, including ideolo-
gies, the place where cognitive linguistics can really make a difference is in
analysing unconscious frames and metaphors lying behind conscious
beliefs (p. 37).
If we temporarily abstract from the issue of the relation between con-
scious and unconscious phenomena (but cf. the discussion in ch. 5), there
is nothing wrong with doing research from the cognitivist perspective, i. e.
to look for the impact of mind-internal cognitive structures on social phe-
nomena. From the point of view of this book, it covers only one half of the
issue but you can only pursue one explanatory direction at a time. The
problem lies in ruling out the direction that begins with social processes
and looks at the mind in that perspective and there is little room for that
in Lakoffs thinking. His view is clearly that language is only indirectly
social: Since language reflects our conceptual systems, it will reflect the
social aspects of our conceptual systems (p. 37). When Pires de Oliveira,
pressing her point, suggests that socially based assumptions might to some
extent shape Lakoffs views on language and ideology, she gets rebuffed in
no uncertain terms2.
This position did not remain unchallenged. The sense of stepping over
a new threshold can be exemplified with reference to two programmatic
articles: Taking Metaphor out of our Heads and Putting it into the Cultural
World (Gibbs 1999) and The Social Dimension of a Cognitive Grammar
(Hawkins 1997).
As a psychologist engaged in CL, Ray Gibbs has devoted much of his
attention to research into the mental reality of the phenomena that are
central to CL, especially metaphor (cf. Gibbs 1994, Gibbs & Colston 1995).
One strand of this research had taken the form of experiments showing
empirically that activating conceptual metaphors has effects for cognitive
processing that cannot be accounted for by purely linguistic similarity or
generalizations based upon them.3 But looking back on the evidence,
Gibbs points out that there is another step that needs to be taken (the
continuing path of recontextualization, cf. p. 3). The classical CL assump-
tion is the following (cf. Gibbs 1999: 146):
Most cognitive scientists supportive of the conceptual view of metaphor tacitly,
and sometimes explicitly, assume that conventional metaphorical mappings
must be internally represented in the individual minds of language users.
Instead, Gibbs suggests that

cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, like myself, should think
about metaphor and its relation to thought as cognitive webs that extend
beyond individual minds and are spread out into the cultural world.
2 Lakoff summed up the discussion as follows (Pires de Oliveira 2000: 34): You
asked, Isnt it based upon our own biases (that of a white, male, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant)? Putting aside the racism and sexism of the question, the answer
is no. It is an empirical issue.
3 Thus the conceptual mapping underlying the metaphor ANGER IS HEATED
FLUID IN A CONTAINER, once activated, will connect up with expressions
such as make ones blood boil, blow ones stack and hit the ceiling, although
there is no literal similarity (or literally based abstractions) linking these
expressions. This work was crucial to the empirical underpinning of the basic
assumption of CL, namely that linguistic meanings are not specific to language
as a self-contained domain but draw on general conceptual mechanisms and
models.
Taking himself to task (1999: 155) for not explicitly acknowledging this
dimension in previous work, Gibbs points out the essential link between
the social evaluation of an (annoying) event such as being kicked in the
leg and the question of whether it gives rise to the embodied experience
of anger as a fluid with yourself as the container. Depending on whether
the kick is perceived (socioculturally) as a deliberate unmotivated attack,
an accident, or a well-deserved revenge, the embodied response may dif-
fer considerably.
As an extra dimension, he points out the role of external symbols for
internal experience (including pictorial representations of people with
steam blowing out of their ears, p. 158), as a significant locus for meta-
phorical mappings. With the therapeutic practice of Erickson as an exam-
ple, Gibbs goes on to show how overt social practices such as sharing a
meal can serve as scaffolding for approaching emotional relations.4 For
the purposes of this book, however, it is significant that there is still a
sense that the object of description remains basically the same: in his con-
clusion, Gibbs suggests that there is much less of a difference between
what is cognitive and what is cultural than perhaps many of us have been
traditionally led to believe (1999: 162).
From a different perspective, Hawkins (1997, 2000) expresses similar
views, pointing out both that there is a field outside the individual mind
that needs to be explored, and that cognitive grammar is well equipped to
handle meaning in the social sphere (1997: 22). Hawkins announces his
agenda in the first lines of his article: The purpose of this paper is to dem-
onstrate that a cognitive grammar can and should attend to the socio-polit-
ical aspects of language use. Hawkins takes up the direction from social to
individual meaning, focusing on the role of ideology (with reference to
Althusser (1971) and Hodge & Kress (1993). In his approach he defines a
field of interest constituted by strongly emotional (positive or negative)
ways of referring to socially salient entities5. Presenting two obituaries of
Richard Nixon, he demonstrates how one tends towards the extreme pos-
itive pole (one of the great statesmen of this century) while the other is
located at the extreme negative pole (the only president forced to resign
the nations highest trust).
4 From his perspective, he is on to the same mechanism that is discussed later in

relation to material anchors (cf. p. 85): if overt practices are adjusted first,
emotional relations may piggyback on them, reducing the burden imposed on
human subjects.
5 Hawkins calls it iconography (in a different sense from the one associated
with Panofsky).
In spite of the possibly alien flavour,6 Hawkins suggestion is fully in

harmony with Langackers (1988) view of cognitive linguistics as part of a
wider project of usage-based linguistics: the processes that create socially
defined positive icons and negative caricatures are cognitively imbued
forms of usage. In England, there has been more contact between critical
linguistics and cognitive linguistics, with Paul Chilton as a key figure; in ch.
3 below, I discuss approaches to meaning that start from the social rather
than the cognitive end, including the French anti-humanists; in ch. 7, I
present my own view of how a social cognitive linguistics can be set up to
handle the legitimate issues that they address, and I postpone the discus-
sion of the cognitive/critical interface until then (p. 394).
The political agenda is fully in harmony with Lakoff-style analyses
based on cognitivist premises, as described above. But forces operating in
the political sphere call for analyses that go beyond cognitivism. The dif-
ference is between seeing the mind as the sole explanatory factor and
essential object of description and opening the door to mind-external
facts as a source of explanation, cf. Geeraertss warning ([1988] 2006: 47)
against a tendency that is a natural characteristic of Cognitive Seman-
tics: the tendency, in fact, to look for purely cognitive or conceptual expla-
nations.
One example of CL-based analysis following this trajectory into the
sociopolitical sphere is the work of Brigitte Nerlich, which has broadened
from traditional linguistic topic areas in ways reflected by the designation
of her present chair as Professor of Science, Language, and Society. The
three topic areas are combined in Nerlich, Elliott and Larson (2009),
which deals with the social understanding and communication of science.
Among the striking results of this interdisciplinarity is the use of CL to
characterize the changing institutional pressures on science and the media
practices that affect the institution in terms of conceptual models, frames
and metaphors that are used in communicating about science. An exam-
ple of how these concerns address the same concerns as this book is their
discussion of increasing role of hype in science communication (cf. Ner-
lich, Elliott and Larson 2009: 3) as a result of sharpened competition for
funding and public support cf. the discussion of bullshit in ch.7.
6 The position he presents is one in which ideologies as socially entrenched

ways of thinking are at the same time part of the CL project and not quite
recognized as such. This view of what CL included was not universally
accepted: in Hawkins (2000:19), Hawkins explicitly reports the dismissive
response that questions of ideology drew from a CL audience when he pre-
sented his 1997 paper.
The volume reaches beyond academia, including also accounts of insti-

tutional practices: the director of an institution (cf. Fox 2009) set up to
improve science communication in the media gives an (optimistic) account
of the bridge-building that has been accomplished, and an experienced
journalist (Strauss 2009) describes his professional efforts to provide the
ways of (metaphorically) conceptualizing science in a way that will enable
optimal understanding across the divide between experts and the public.
A further part of the perspective is the analysis of the potential impact on
science as a social institution (cf. Nerlich 2009) and its impact on and rela-
tions with the public. This illustrates how the object of investigation in CL
is widening to include the role of cognition in a larger social context.
3. Variation, lexical semantics and corpus linguistics
With respect to the usage based commitment, Dirk Geeraerts has occu-
pied a unique position in the development of cognitive linguistics, both
because of his background in historical lexical semantics and his dual
commitment to theory and to practical lexicography. Across his multifari-
ous research topics, the social life of words and meanings, as opposed to
the purely mind-internal dimension, stands out as the focus of interest.
Especially from the lexical point of view, his approach has provided a
broad sociocultural enrichment of cognitive semantics.
The concept of prototype is one example where Geeraerts (e. g. 1989)
reorients the significance of the concept from conceptual structure per se
to what prototypicality reveals about the relation between incoming expe-
rience and the mental organization of information.7 The key feature is
that prototypicality is essentially a result of the cognitive effort of manag-
ing experience in a flexible way.
This reflects the onomasiological perspective on meaning, i. e. the
approach that begins not with a word or concept but with the designated
phenomenon. Starting with the communicative task, onomasiology asks:
how can we name this object by linguistic means? This contrasts with the
traditional semasiological perspective that starts with the word and asks
what kinds of phenomenon it can denote. To illustrate the significance of
this perspective: Dutch offers two alternatives for destroy, cf. Geeraerts
7 This very general point is reflected in a broad range of disciplines (including

for example Kuhns theory of science, with its concept of scientific paradigms,
cf. p. 105 below).
Variation, lexical semantics and corpus linguistics 65
(1988), vernielen and vernietigen, which can be used about virtually the
same range of conceivable cases. Working from the words themselves, it is
hard to establish a clear difference. However, starting out with a usage
survey, looking at the kinds of things the words are used about, Geeraerts
can establish a pattern: vernielen (whose root is to do with tearing down)
is mainly used about concrete physical objects, and the result can typically
be viewed as constituting damage. In contrast, vernietigen (whose root is
to do with negation) is typically used about abstract objects, and results in
absence of the object. This also enables a greater degree of precision in
the area of conceptualization: atypical uses do not eliminate the core
senses, but impose atypical conceptualizations, like demolishing ideas or
negating physical objects.
The historical trajectory of meaning and naming is the subject of a
large-scale empirical investigation reported in Diachronic prototype
semantics (Geeraerts 1997). The introduction of legging as a new type of
clothing is studied in minute empirical detail, with mail order catalogues
and womens magazines as the corpus material. Only sources with picto-
rial representations are used, enabling researchers (1) to provide a feature
representation of instantiations named by the terms (including length,
width, material, etc.), (2) to cover also potential referents that are actually
named by a different term (including superordinate terms like trousers).
The development is followed in the years from 1988 to 1992, during which
the category undergoes a rapid development (cf. Geeraerts 1997: 3640).
In all years there was a core instantiation type (below calf length, maxi-
mally tight-fitting, without crease, smooth and finely woven/knitted,
upper rather than underwear, for female use) but the clothing article
became a success and the linguistic labels associated with it were carried
along by this success. One of the results that illustrate the process of social
expansion is that the increased incidence of core instantiations went hand
in hand with a gradual expansion in the range of variation: from the pro-
totypical centre, the successful new concept spread out into the surround-
ing terrain, establishing a rich new radial model in this lexical area.8
8 The significance of the onomasiological approach can be illustrated with the

measure they develop for degree of entrenchment of the linguistic terms:
because also cases that were nameable but (in concrete cases) not actually
named by the new terms could be captured (by means of the pictorial repre-
sentations), figures could be given for the development whereby the new word
acquired a gradually increasing salience, since it was used to name more and
more of the potential cases.
In the legging case, the social process involved a new physical object.
This makes it easy to see the existence of both directions: from the social
phenomenon to the word, and from the word to the social phenomenon.
Social processes, however, also have their own role to play when the phys-
ical world remains the same, but the sociocultural processes cause them to
be understood differently. This creates a situation where it is more diffi-
cult to tease the cognitive and the social dimensions apart. This can be
exemplified with the case of the humours (etymologically = liquid)
model of emotions (cf. Geeraerts and Grondelaers 1995), which looks at
social processes that involve the history of high culture, including the his-
tory of ideas.
This case presents a direct contrast between a usage based and social
approach and a traditional cognitivist approach. Arguing against Kvec-
ses as a representative of the classical CL position of analysis in terms of
bodily based cognitive mappings (cf. Kvecses 1986), Grondelaers and
Geeraerts argue that the physiological basis (whose existence they do not
deny) is overlaid by a tradition from antiquity of analysing emotions in
terms of the four humours: black bile for melancholy, yellow bile for
anger, phlegm for sluggishness, and blood for light-heartedness The analy-
sis of the anger metaphor, understood in purely physiological terms, does
not explain the salience of the fluid element (as in ANGER IS THE HEAT OF A
FLUID IN THE CONTAINER) over the heat and fire elements. Also, the wealth
of expressions of other terms of fluids and temperatures show that there
is a historical pattern that cannot be predicted from universals of physiol-
ogy (cf. also Gevaert 2005). Among other things, this raises the question,
underplayed by Lakoff, of the significance of the distinction between liv-
ing and dead metaphors: if a way of thinking slowly becomes obsolete,
retrieving it as a source becomes gradually less natural. The understand-
ing of choleric and phlegmatic emotional responses in the 21st century is
likely to evoke bodily humours in a diminishing segment of language
users.
A major priority for Geeraerts is to expand the methodological base of
cognitive linguistics. One of the really hard core consequences of taking
the sociocultural dimension seriously is the need to go beyond introspec-
tion: since usage is not accessible by introspection, a usage-based model
cannot be based solely on it; empirical, quantitative data are needed. This
calls for a number of different enrichments of traditional descriptive prac-
tices. A central factor is the rapidly growing availability of electronic cor-
pora and associated statistical descriptive tools, which make possible a far
greater breadth and depth of empirical coverage than previously availa-
ble. A descriptive aim facilitated by this tool is the possibility of account-
ing for variational patterns, i. e. the type of fact that used to be the prov-
ince of sociolinguistics (including dialect geography), cf. Geeraerts (2005).
Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003) demonstrate that lexicology is incom-
plete without an integration of the sociolinguistic dimension: the key
object of description, lexical choice, simply cannot be described without
an integrated sociolinguistic dimension. Just as the choice of phonetic
variants is determined by the social pressures (including the Labovian
parameters of style and social class), so is lexical choice.
One of the factors in prototypicality that become highlighted in the
usage-oriented perspective is the role of salience itself: what factors are
most important depends on speakers and the situation. This expands a
classic point made by CL against objectivist semantics: rather than being
an unfortunate misrepresentation of the real world, this is a reflection of
the fact that words inherently serve purposes for language users; thus con-
cepts need to be understood in relation to both naming and linguistic con-
ceptualization practices, including pragmatic variability (cf. Geeraerts
1989).
As an example of the interfacing between meaning relations tradition-
ally viewed as intra-linguistic and social factors that are traditionally
viewed as external, Grondelaers and Geeraerts investigate lexical choice
in names of cancerous diseases. The internal dimension they focus on is
lexical specificity, i. e. the choice between superordinate terms like illness
or disease, and more precise diagnoses such as cancer, or breast cancer.
Based on a corpus divided into medical and non-medical texts and
between personalized and generic contexts it is found (as predicted) that
there is a significantly higher frequency of the less threatening and more
general terms illness and disease in personal contexts (as compared with
generic and professional contexts), reflecting an avoidance strategy when
speaking of people close to you. Clearly, it would be arbitrary and unre-
vealing to separate this description into two sub-descriptions, one of which
dealt with level of semantic specificity and the other dealt with the impact
of social contexts.
The kind of issues that are thus brought into CL can be illustrated with
a long-standing research process involving the use or non-use of er, the
Dutch equivalent to existential there, in construction types with initial
locative (cf Grondelaers et al. 2002, Grondelaers, Speelman and Geer-
aerts 2008, 2008b). The illustration case is In the ashtray (there) was a
hailstone. Introspection about conceptual content does not provide
immediately striking ideas about how to account for the choice, if you fol-
low the standard structuralist commutation procedure of looking at the
same example with or without er. It is hard to verify any ideas that may
come into your head, first of all because the difference is not very great
(and does to pertain to truth conditions or other more tangible criteria).
As always in such cases, looking for too long at the examples may con-
found any intuitions you might spontaneously have had.
Corpus investigations therefore have a distinctive explanatory poten-
tial, and they have made it possible to show that er serves as an inacces-
sibility marker, i. e. its occurrence correlates with the extent to which the
object that comes after er is unpredictable. Thus after the concert came a
reception would be without er, while after the concert there was an
earthquake would tend to have er. In addition, there is regional variation.
Belgian speakers are more prone to use er than speakers of Netherlandic
Dutch. By logistical regression, it can be shown that you can account for a
very large part of the variation (85 %) that way.
In one investigation, Grondelaers and Speelman (2008) pursued the
methodological agenda one step further, in an attempt to get at the
remaining 15 % of the variation that eluded logistical regression based on
the features that had previously been found to make difference. Although
questionnaire investigations have obvious limitations as guides to actual
usage, since they tap error-prone introspective judgments, they might be
one way of going beyond what corpus data could yield. The study did
reveal some regularities but on closer examination confirmed the reserva-
tions. Among other things, a retest revealed that there was an instability
factor in the judgements. Then again, it was interesting in that the instabil-
ity primarily affected cases without er, rather than the er examples: intro-
spection-based judgments changed significantly for the er-less examples.
While this does not settle the issue with respect to remaining factors, it
illustrates the difficulty of getting reliable data by asking people to intro-
spect. The research group at the University of Leuven to which Geeraerts
belongs (Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, QLVL) has
since 2000 produced a steady stream of work that combines the social and
conceptual dimensions, thus providing an institutional focus for this kind
of work within cognitive linguistics.
The variationist and the history of ideas perspective are combined in
the analysis of culturally salient alternative approaches to linguistic varia-
tion in different national traditions (Geeraerts 2003c). There are two
influential models: the rationalist and the romantic model. The rationalist
or enlightenment model focuses on the virtues of a standard language as
a crucial means to enable all people to take up the ideal role of citizen
(citoyen, in the terminology of the French Revolution). This role (as
opposed to the stereotype bourgeois) involves emancipation from out-
moded constraints, and shared and equal participation in the political
processes of the Republic. The Romantic model focuses on language as a

means to express your personal, traditional, Herderian Weltanschauung,
and sees standardization as a Procrustean bed that violates local and
authentic identity. Emphasis on the role of dialects goes with a romantic
view of language9 while standardization in language, including a shared
form of spelling, goes with the establishment of a coherent and universal
school system.10
While emphasizing the need for a solid empirical and statistical foun-
dation for lexical research, Geeraerts simultaneously points out that the
type of investigation that follows meaning through historical and cultural
changes inevitably also brings back a hermeneutic dimension into linguis-
tics. Lexical semantics is a Geisteswissenschaft in Diltheys sense (cf. Geer-
aerts 1992; Geeraerts 1997: 175), belonging inside the purview of human
interpretation. There is no contradiction here: empirical solidity is neces-
sary to ensure that interpretive processes are on firm ground (Geeraerts
1997: 185). There is an important distinction between introspection and
intuition: any kind of linguistic description depends on sound intuitive
judgement (cf. Itkonen 2008: 291 and below p. 156 on participant access);
9 In Denmark, for instance, the influence of the religious, educational and cul-
tural reformer Grundtvig gave rise to dialectology as the study of the authen-
tic voice of the people.
10 Geeraerts follows the two models through two series of transformations. In
the age of nationalism in the 19th century, the enlightenment model becomes
associated with the nation state as the basis of a liberal democracy, while the
Romantic model assumes the guise of the medium of national identity; in the
present postmodern age, rationalism underpins the movement towards global
English as a medium of international opportunity and co-operation, while the
Romantic model becomes recruited to defend multilingualism, whether of
ethnic minorities or of nation states under the pressures of increasingly anglo-
phone international collaboration. Quantitative measures of uniformity in
different strata in different time periods of Flemish and Netherlandic Dutch
are subsequently used to discuss the development in the light of the twin pres-
sures of ethnic identity (romantic) and standardization (rationalist). Three
possibilities are raised, with no attempt at prediction but the dual contextu-
alization of lexical choice in the context of regional and diachronic variation
as well as in the cultural pressures of standardization and ethnic factionaliza-
tion means that the question of whether a speaker of Dutch decides to use
(over)hemd vs. shirt (for a shirt) or caleon vs. legging(s) becomes fraught with
somewhat greater significance than a pre-variationist glance in a dictionary
would lead one to believe.
but using introspection as the only source of data is a severe limitation on

what your intuitions have to work with.
It would be inaccurate to say that this is a new turn, since it has been
around from the beginnings of CL. But it has gathered momentum in
recent years, and its concerns are becoming generally shared, as exempli-
fied by the recent volume on Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Kristiansen and
Dirven 2008) which gathers the cultural, lectal, social and political aspect
under one theoretical aegis.
4. The developmental perspective: epigenesis, joint attention

and cultural learning
For an approach to language based on experiential grounding, it is neces-

sary to have an account of what happens on the path from the womb to
full membership of the speech community. The process of establishing the
ontogenetic basis for CL can be described in relation to two main figures,
Sinha and Tomasello. They both emphasize the intersubjective and cul-
tural dimensions as foundational aspects of the process.
As a developmental psychologist, Sinha has a different perspective on
cognition and language from that of cognitive psychologists. Cognitive
psychology in its modern version started with the computer metaphor,
because that was what made mental content scientifically respectable.
Developmental psychology had a broader base: for clinical reasons alone,
no one questioned the need to understand typical paths of mental devel-
opment.
It is from this broader perspective that Sinha approached the develop-
mental issues that are central to the agenda of CL. Language and Repre-
sentation (Sinha 1988) is an attempt to provide a new grounding for the
developmental study of human representational capacity with linguistic
representation in a focal position. Taking his point of departure in a criti-
cal stance towards the computational modern synthesis which domi-
nates contemporary cognitive psychology (1988: xiii), Sinha sets out to
establish what he calls a socio-naturalistic approach, i. e. one that inte-
grates natural and social sciences both in the conception of the object of
description and in methodology. A centrepiece of this foundation is the
notion of the materiality of representation, i. e. one in which the repre-
sentative powers of the mind basically unfold themselves not in an imma-
terial inner space but in a universe constituted by interaction between the
subject and the environment. This does not entail a reductionist scepti-
cism towards the mind as such, but an orientation towards describing the
The developmental perspective 71
mind as an integrated part of the overall practical and material world in

which human beings live.
At the time of the publication of the book, it was necessary to do a
great deal of clearing before such descriptive foundations could be marked
off effectively from its vociferous contemporary competitors, including
not only logical positivism and Chomskyan formalism but also Marxism,
Freudianism, and critical theory. The key difficulty is perhaps in carving
out a position from which you can keep at bay both the abstract and inna-
tist, computational approach to cognition and the sociologically oriented
belief in relativism, going back to Marxs belief that human essence is
nothing other than the ensemble of social relations, cf. Sinha (1988: 169).
This is why a central concept for the position that avoids both pitfalls is
the notion of epigenesis (borrowed from Waddington 1975, 1977 (cf. Sinha
2006; Sinha 2007: 1277). It designates a type of development that is super-
imposed upon rather than triggered by genetic determination but
depends on interaction between organism and environment rather than
simply being imposed by environmental factors.
This position is in harmony with classical assumptions about child
development. Although Piaget is frequently misunderstood as describing
an innate, maturational developmental trajectory, his approach to learn-
ing in terms of adaptation goes beyond innateness: adapting old schemas
to new operations, as in accommodation, is clearly an instance of superim-
posing experience-based learning on innate skills. The Piagetian trajec-
tory that begins with pre-representational modes of understanding also
avoids the extreme of Chomskyan nativism, in which learning really does
not exist. An even more significant figure in the picture outlined by Sinha
is Vygotsky, who represents the directionality that is underplayed in Piaget
(cf. Sinha 1988: 92f): the internalization of sociocultural practices, and its
importance for addressing the issue of integrating the study of social and
biological factors. The existence of patterns outside the individual, in cul-
tural and interactive practices, can thereby enter into the picture without
rendering the cognitive processes of the subject irrelevant. Another
important foundational figure (cf. Sinha 2007) is Karl Bhler, whose most
familiar contribution to the psychology of language is the organon model.
This model views the utterance as constitutively embedded in a field of
three interlocking functions: one reflecting its human source, the sender of
the message (the expressive function), the other reflecting its orientation
towards the addressee (the appeal function), and the third its role as rep-
resenting the external world, cf. Bhler (1934).
The central object of description for Sinha is therefore the human sub-
ject in its interaction with fellow subjects and the world, rather than the
human cognitive system per se. The development of cognitive capacities

must be understood as part of the overall development of abilities to cope
with the environment. A central part of Sinhas position is that children
are born to be fellow subjects: intersubjective embedding is not something
that is subsequent to the development of the subject as such. Rather,
human infancy has evolved so as to prepare the emerging new subject for
intersubjectivity as its medium of existence (Sinha 1988: 107). On this
point, Sinha therefore moves beyond Vygotsky whose materialist
approach to some extent presupposes the divide between subject and
object that his approach subsequently seeks to bridge from the social side,
cf. Sinha (1988: 103).
These foundational views also have implications for language learning.
In Sinha et al. (1994), this approach is applied to an empirical study of the
acquisition of spatial semantics. Findings from Danish, English and Japa-
nese confirm the central assumption of this approach, that the rise of spa-
tial categories must be understood as a process of gradually extending an
ability that is based on (but not predictable from) universal cognitive cat-
egories in the spatial domain. Although containment is a well-supported
pre-linguistic cognitive category (Sinha et al 1994: 28283), actual facts
about the acquisition of markers of containment can only be explained by
taking into account features of the language that is being learnt: there is
more to it than simple labelling.
The fact that learning is conservative is also in harmony with a pattern
of gradually extended coping: each successfully mastered point in the tar-
get area is used as a vantage point for further progress. Among early
acquired expressions are those which are basic both from a cognitive
point of view and from the linguistic point of view: simple expressions for
simple spatial relations. This gives rise to a feature that reflects a core CL
concept, that of radial structure: Both in acquiring the whole field and in
acquiring the individual item, learners start out with central elements
(central spatial concepts and central senses of individual spatial concepts,
such as the canonical containment relation for in). Subsequently they ven-
ture into more marginal positions, gradually establishing a richer network
while preserving central points of orientation (cf. also the pattern found
for diachronic development of lexical meaning by Geeraerts above p. 65).
More radically, the potential of the epigenetic approach for causing a
revision of classic assumptions of CL is evidenced by a joint article (Sinha
et al. in press). It gives an account of Amondawa, an Amazonian language,
in which there are (almost) none of the familiar linguistic and cultural
resources for organizing temporal reference: no calendars, no verbal
tense, no word for time, and reference to temporal points and periods is
possible only via events occurring at those times (beyond simple deictic
temporal reference based on time of utterance). There is an extended
grammatical system of nominal aspect, so the language is by no means
generally impoverished, but it has no cultural or linguistic evidence of
either segmentation of time, metaphorical division of time via spatial con-
cepts, or any other obvious way of documenting an awareness of time as
an independent and separable dimension of the human world. (The argu-
ment is rather more powerful than Whorfs famous one for Hopi, cf.
Whorf 1956).
Among their provisional conclusions is that Time as Such is not a
Cognitive Universal, but a historical construction based in social practice,
semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts and
entrenched in lexico-grammar. The classical CL trajectory whereby
human beings gradually develop concepts based on universals of primary
bodily experience, mapping previous and more concrete domains such as
space onto later and more intangible domains such as time, thus needs to
be supplemented with a trajectory that starts from the sociocultural
dimension. We return to this discussion in chapter 7 (cf. niche concepts,
p. 318).
Michael Tomasellos research interests cover several issues central to
the social agenda in CL: language acquisition, the pragmatic dimension of
cognitive development, and the evolutionary path of language and cogni-
tion. In relation to language acquisition, he took up a unique position in
addressing the central interest of generative linguistics, the acquisition of
syntax, from a CL-oriented perspective. Because of the polarization in
relation to Chomsky, syntax has to some extent been a contaminated area
within CL, and as a result there was little attempt to offer alternative solu-
tions for the kind of problems that occupied the attention in Chomsky-
inspired psycholinguistics. For a long time, psychologists and psycholin-
guists interested in language acquisition, cf. Tomasello (1998), therefore
tended to take the generative theory of language to be the only bid for a
linguistic starting point for their research.11
11 Of course this is not the whole story: research by a number of functionalists

including e. g., Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (with the competition
model as possibly the most well-known element, cf. Bates & MacWhinney
1987), Schlesinger and others established a counterposition to the generative
mainstream. Many of the elements of a usage based approach had been pro-
posed in the functionalist literature, including the role of item-based patterns
and frequency effects, but they tended to be seen not as constituting a strong
Understanding language acquisition as usage based was nothing new,

since all opponents of Chomskyan innatism had to base their theory of
acquisition on actual usage. But much of the discussion could be framed
as a question of whether everything could be explained in behaviourist
terms leaving the generative position in possession of the cognitive high
ground: the connectionist approach based on pattern-recognition proc-
esses was vulnerable on the question of whether there is anything else
going on in the world than probabilistic assessment of feature complexes,
cf. Pinker and Prince (1988).12 Tomasello was able to reset this agenda by
alternative position but as a question of being for or against Chomsky there

was a strong hegemony effect in the pragmatics of the acquisition debate.
12 Generative linguists believed they had the only bid for higher-level cognitive
factors, while the opposition was relegated to blank slate reduction of human
beings to rat-like forms of learning. The discussion was to some extent predi-
cated on the argument based on the dichotomy between two forms of compu-
tational simulation, the classical algorithmic form associated with generative
grammar, and the connectionist or neural net approach, cf. Rumelhart &
McClelland (1986). Although this discussion brought out a number of signifi-
cant issues, it also took the discussion away from the core concern of CL, in
that the neural net approach was even further away from the semantic side of
language, earning it the epithet of neo-behaviourism. What appealed to CL in
the neural net approach was the absence of any reliance on pre-given struc-
ture, and the fact that machines could be trained to impose distinctions based
on any empirical input whatever, thus getting round the poverty of the stimu-
lus argument. In a neural net, everything is featurized, and categorization is
probabilistic rather than based on all-or-nothing Aristotelian categorization.
Neural nets can therefore be used to mechanically reject defective specimens
in a sorting process, simply by starting out randomly and then gradually being
adjusted, without any explicit description of what a defective specimen must
be like.The classical algorithmic approach based on higher-level structure
was also known as the symbolic approach because it presupposed the exist-
ence of symbols in the sense defined by the physical symbols hypothesis of
Newell and Simon (1976). However, there was a pervasive confusion in the
discussion between physical symbols as a hypothesis about the workings of the
brain and the discussion of lexical symbols as part of a human language. Con-
nectionists therefore sometimes felt they had to deny that there was such a
thing as a word constituting a unitary lexical category: the argument for reject-
ing symbols in the classical Artificial Intelligence sense (formal meaningless
syntactic elements) also carried over to rejecting meaningful symbols which
is against the basic CL position. Therefore most CL practitioners did not go
too deeply into the connectionist issue an exception being Lakoff, whose
position reflects this dilemma (cf. the discussion on embodiment p. 80). Out-
combining three interlocking dimensions in his impressive research pro-

gramme: phylogenetic (evolutionary) development from hominid ances-
tors to humans, human ontogenetic development, and detailed corpus
documentation of the path into language (that generativists claimed
would be impossible without innate knowledge). These three elements
will now be described in that order.
Based on extensive experimental evidence, Tomasello has argued that
the key difference between humans and other primates can be captured in
terms of the concept of shared intentionality, as manifested most tangibly
in joint attention (cf. Tomasello 2008: 4). Human beings are unique in that
they can relate to each other by (1) attending to the same thing and (2)
attending to it not because of its inherent interest, but because they are
doing it together (for instance because they are playing with it). Alarm
calls in animal groups are used to create attention to the same thing, such
as a prowling leopard but the interest in attending to it is not that this is
the game we are playing together at the moment: each group member has
a purely individual interest in calling out (Tomasello 2008: 18). Human
beings, in contrast, will look at things merely because fellow subjects look
at it, and thus assign an importance to the attended object that is due
solely to the fact that they are (co-)engaged in an act of paying joint atten-
tion, and pursue joint activities that have no apparent goal (Tomasello
2008: 177178). The engagement in being in this together also goes with
a species-specific form of altruistic orientation, cf. Warneken and Toma-
sello (2006), where available affordances are to a certain extent under-
stood as belonging inherently to all those present, rather than being up for
grabs.
Joint attention and action is subtler than (but presupposes) intentional
action which again is subtler than (but presupposes) general coping
skills. If we look specifically at communication, Tomasello argues that
non-human vocal communication is non-intentional, and intentional com-
munication is very rare (but is found in the gestural communication of
apes, Tomasello 2008: 14).13 The crucial extra step into human communica-
tion is the ability to read the other persons intention in order to share that
side the specific CL context, in relation to learning and cognitive architecture,

it was a huge issue, however, cf. e. g. Elman et al. (1996).
13 Unlike vocalizations, which are directly associated with emotional states and
are emitted without regard to addressees, gestures are directed at addressees
and are sensitive to monitoring their attentional states. Awareness of the dis-
tinction between intentional and non-intentional action is demonstrated by
the fact that apes get annoyed when they perceive that the human caregiver is
intention. As Tomasello points out (2003: 23; 2008: 91), this is what is
required for Gricean non-natural meaning the kind that goes beyond
depending on information available in the environment. While smoke
means fire by a mechanism that does not depend on human intentions, hi
is a greeting only because I attribute to the sender the intention of greet-
ing me and this requires fellow subjects who attribute intentions to each
other as part of their form of life.
In addition to communication, this ability also has implication for
learning and for the kind of social environment that human beings inhabit.
What Tomasello calls cultural learning is special and different from basic
trial-and-error learning, because the target goes beyond an individual
goal. The aim is to do what the other person is doing, and because of the
role of intentions this also depends on what the other person has in mind.
In adopting cultural patterns you cannot expect an immediately tangible
reward for successful acquisition to be part of what the others are doing
must be felt as a reward in itself, otherwise the process will not work. Play-
ing football may be fun, but it is not really fun until you know how what
makes the initial humiliations worth while is that there is a point in being
part of the action. Therefore the only game in town is always worth play-
ing, whatever it is. This enables human children to learn things of no osten-
sible value, simply because it makes them part of the community. Lan-
guage change over time thus trades on what Tomasello calls the the
ratchet effect of cultural learning: speakers do not have to start from
scratch, but can stand on the shoulders of previous generations, starting at
the point to which the community around them has arrived (because they
enjoy standing on peoples shoulders).14
withholding food intentionally as opposed to bungling the job (Tomasello

2008: 45).
14 In contrast, the evidence suggests that other animals can only learn new prac-
tices if they visibly contribute to their own individual purposes, such as using
tools to get at the food. This ability is consistent with cultural differences in
that different groups of animals may have figured out different solutions
(which they pass on) to recurrent problems in the life of a primate. A cele-
brated example is the Japanese snow macaques where some groups have
learnt to wash their food. However, it does not include the kind of accumula-
tion that goes with the ratchet effect. The food-getting strategies may be
transmitted from generation to generation, but only if they have a concrete
anchoring in the form of a tangible purpose (such as getting at the nut by
cracking the shell with a rock, or avoiding getting pebbles in your mouth by
rinsing the food), which remains the point of departure for all successive gen-
erations. Humans, by detaching themselves from the necessity of knowing
The specifically human experience of attending jointly to objects in the

world goes naturally with another difference in relation to chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees do not share food or show other spontaneous altruistic ten-
dencies in relation to conspecifics15. That is not to say that they are loners
without social relations but grooming and other such activities are
strictly on a quid pro quo basis: you scratch my back, and Ill scratch yours.
The activities are shared, but not joint, or (more abstractly) dyadic: there
is no common object of attention that takes priority over separate and
individual purposes.
The phylogenetic difference has an ontogenetic correlate. A human
child is not born fully equipped to enter into joint attention and purposes.
A key event in the development is when, somewhere between nine and
twelve months (cf. Tomasello 2003:2126), human children develop the
capacity for joint attention. Instead of having a merely two-way relation-
ship with the external world (acting on the world, including other people,
and getting reactions in return), children begin to tune in on what others
are attending to.
This is what makes language learning possible the real missing link
between mechanical input and language in the mind, in contrast to the
innate grammar postulated by Chomsky. In a series of experiments, Toma-
sello (2001) has shown that children can learn names for absent objects
(as opposed to visually present objects) when they have good reason to
think that the absent object is what other people have in mind. Tomasello
argues that this attunement can solve the gavagai problem: children
learn what words mean because they become skilled at figuring out what
others intend to name. Even if there may be occasions where the gavagai
problem is not tractable, intention reading points to where the problem
lies in such cases: the lack of a jointly understood situation. Expressions
only get meaning through joint practices. Language learning takes place
in contexts where people know how to do the same things and therefore
also know what each other are doing. Language acquisition is driven by
what precisely there is in it for me as an individual, can take over cultural

practices merely for the purpose of doing what we are doing. Obviously, there
are risks as well as advantages in this, cf. also below p. 106.
15 Zlatev (personal communication) reports findings in current work suggesting
that chimpanzees and bonobos (the Pan species) allow for a greater degree of
passive sharing (mothers allowing offspring to feed off their food) than in
other primates.
the inherent motivation that is associated with being on the same page as
others.16
As a last dimension, this process also opens a pathway into a normative
universe thus establishing an foothold within empirical psychology for
an aspect of the human world that is more familiar from philosophy and
sociology (cf p. 277 on Itkonen, p. 141 on Durkheim; p. 364 on Habermas).
Joint attention and joint activity have causal underpinnings just like eve-
rything else in the universe, but the fact that it can only come off if speak-
ers are actually on the same page means that one can be looking at the
wrong object. The attentional stance of the other person is the criterion
for whether I am getting it right. In this primal scene, there is no norm
beyond the here-and-now but once cultural learning gets under way,
learning the norms inherent in cultural practices is part of it. You cannot
learn to play soccer without learning that scoring a goal is good and that it
is bad if the other team scores a goal, cf. Rakoczy, Warneken and Toma-
sello (2008) on the acquisition of norms in relation to games. Language
works the same way: water is called water, and if you ask for it by using the
word zunk, you are doing it wrong simply because you are not hitting
the target in joint social space.
Once this mechanism is there, acquisition does not have to depend on
an innate crib. You can take the steps one at a time, as part of figuring out
what the other speakers are on about. The joint attention hypothesis thus
feeds into Tomasellos long-standing research into language acquisition,
including the precise path into complex syntax. The first major step was
the discovery of the asymmetry between nouns and verbs in early acquisi-
tion, known as the verb island hypothesis (Tomasello 1992). While chil-
dren learned to insert nouns in slots in a productive manner fairly early,
generalizing overall noun properties across instances, they tended to use
verbs only in ways that they had heard, i. e. with complementation pat-
terns that were actually attested in usage. Thus the idea that there was a
general category verb at the outset of the acquisitional path a core
16 The absorbing interest which children invest in those acts of pointing, gaze-
following, mutually co-ordinated movement etc, where shared attention and
understanding are at stake, can be understood as an instinctual basis for lan-
guage learning but obviously this is a different kind of instinct from Pinkers
Language Instinct (1994). In relation to language learning, a key difference
between humans and animals is therefore that human children can learn the
language without being rewarded with nuts at intervals. Being able to do what
others can do and being with the others and knowing what they know are
experienced as inherently valuable.
Extended grounding 79
assumption for innatist theories did not appear to be plausible in the

light of the data. Rather, a very cautious path of generalization based on
actual usage seemed to be not only possible but also more realistic.
This idea was followed by a more general strategy of tracing actual
language acquisition by means of dense corpora of young children in the
process acquiring language. Because of the density of the corpora Toma-
sello was able to follow the emergence of new syntactic forms in greater
detail than previous research and show that rather than innate patterns
suddenly being evoked in full-fledged form by confrontation with data,
children generally followed a very cautious and conservative trajectory
through the space of possibilities. The overall pattern was that children
took only one step at a time away from known forms. The celebrated crea-
tivity that was the key argument for innatism, where wholly new sentences
were produced on the basis of very general rules, was very hard to find
examples of, while tentative forays into new territory at the margins of
known usage patterns were everywhere.
Just like the variational dimension, the developmental dimension car-
ries a methodological requirement. In addition to the corpus methods
described above, rigorous experimental investigation is necessary in order
to get at the relevant differences between age groups, as well as between
humans and apes. Here again, the kind of issues you want to include has
implications for the methods you need to employ.
5. Extended grounding: situational, intersubjective

and cultural aspects
The previous section brought out one central social factor, which is equally
essential to the development of language, culture and personality: human
subjects are inherently disposed towards establishing a community of
understanding with other human subjects. This has profound conse-
quences for some of the basic assumptions in CL.
These consequences affect the understanding of grounding. Ground-
ing is the key foundational difference between first-generation cognitive
science and CL (cf. the discussion p. 3 above). CLs platform was and is
that language and meaning are not autonomous and self-contained enti-
ties but grounded in human cognition as a whole, which in turn is grounded
in the human body as a whole. The title From molecule to metaphor sums
up this path of understanding.
In order to accommodate the social dimension in the picture, this
notion of grounding is no longer sufficient. Rohrer (2005) has pointed out
the dangers of the lack of clarity in the concept of embodiment, suggesting

that it would mean a form of reductionism that is actually not too distant
from behaviourist attempts to keep mind and consciousness out of the
scientific world picture altogether. As also argued by Zlatev (2007),
attempts to ground meaning directly in a neural level ultimately end up
with no way to distinguish mental from non-mental phenomena. Lakoff
and Johnsons position (1999: 17) is illustrative here: according to them,
the amoeba categorizes objects by moving either towards them or away
from them and there is no such thing as inner representation (Johnson
and Lakoff 2002: 24950). If grounding is understood in terms of this pic-
ture, it means more or less the same as reduction. 17
Rather than trying to split up the concept in different subcomponents,
Zlatev relocates the whole grounding process into the social sphere. The
title Situated embodiment (Zlatev 1997) sums up the dual focus on social
and biological aspects of grounding. His position takes over from Witt-
genstein (1953) the idea that meaning emerges from language games, i. e.
from interactive practice, but stresses the contribution of the human sub-
ject to this interaction. This proposed synthesis is illustrated with the
emergence of spatial meaning; based on a child language corpus he argues
that neither an approach in terms of direct embodied experience alone,
nor an approach in terms of learning downloaded from the social process
alone can explain the data.
The task is then to show how the duality works in practice. Zlatev
(2003) has proposed a theory that accounts for the broad concept of
meaning in terms of four stages that constitutes a scale of nature, with
relevance to both the evolutionary and the epigenetic time scale. The rock
bottom point of departure for understanding meaning is the emergence of
living creatures: meaning can only exist in relation to life. In harmony with
the epigenetic perspective, meaning is seen as essentially a property of the
relation between organism and environment. What distinguishes meaning
from other such relations is the concept of value, which (following v.
Uexkll and Cisek) Zlatev anchors in the basic contrast between desira-
ble and undesirable (or favourable vs. unfavourable) input from the envi-
ronment.
The idea of value therefore ties in with Gibsons (1979) idea of
affordances and also with the central role of emotions (cf. Damasio 1994)
17 The issue of embodiment in a cultural perspective is discussed in a recent

interview with Tim Rohrer and Mark Johnson, cf. Pires de Oliveira and Bit-
tencourt (2008).
for cognition: before anything else, there must be a criterion for what is
good or bad.
On that basis Zlatev suggests four types of meaning systems: cue-
based, associational, mimetic and symbolic creatures. Cue-based beings,
the simplest type, work solely through responses to a fixed and innate set
of environmental cues, i. e. event types. The standard minimal example is
the coli bacillus which propels itself towards food and away from toxic
substances. Habituation is the only form of learning, entailing adaptations
of the response system to ignore stimuli below a certain intensity. Above
these, we find associational creatures (comprising most higher animals),
which are capable of modifying their response system by (re)forming
associations between environmental input and actions. Evaluation in
terms of intrinsic desirability remains basic: responses are modified based
on whether they give good or bad results. For higher animals, the limbic
system, as described by Damasio 1994, has a crucial role in generating
primary, hard-wired emotions which constitute the criterion for evaluat-
ing success or failure.
Since the third stage is in important respects transitional, it is easier to
take the fourth stage, symbolic creatures, first. The crucial properties
include abstraction and conventionalization, i. e. symbolic meanings that
are detached from direct relations with the stream of experience, and soci-
oculturally shared. This also means that they are intentionally controlled,
i. e. they constitute non-natural meaning: you understand an expression by
making assumptions about what is meant by it, rather than by simply asso-
ciating it with other features of the environment. This stage is strongly
associated with a radically increased role for the cortex in the brain.
The third stage is transitional in that its key feature, taken over from
Merlin Donald, is that it is mimetic, i. e. capable of understanding and
using bodily responses for the ulterior purposes of representation, includ-
ing gestural communication. This entails a form of detachment from the
strictly associational link with the environment that is characteristic of
stage two, but falls short of the achievement of shared and abstract sys-
tems of meaning at stage four. Only the apes are candidates for belonging
at this stage. This placement is motivated by their ability to form culturally
distinct groups, which may plausibly arise by mimetic transmission of
behaviours, and by their ability to take over and iconically represent
human forms of communication. At the same time, they fail to make the
transition into the symbolic stage, and therefore they cannot undergo cul-
tural development because their cultural differences are still concretely
anchored in the shared context, rather than based on shared representa-
tions alone.
Zlatev (2008) adds a differentiation of the mimetic stage into dyadic

and triadic mimesis, where apes are somewhat capable of the first (imi-
tation, imperative pointing, ritualized gestures), but without human encul-
turation, not really of the second (where declarative pointing and produc-
tive iconic gestures belong).
The discovery of mirror neurons, cf. above p. 32, has played a role in
this discussion. Their defining feature is that they fire equally when others
perform an action and when the subject does it herself. (Parents will be
familiar with a salient manifestation of this mirror phenomenon from the
experience of opening their own mouths when spoon-feeding toddlers!).
Mirror neurons are automatic and unconscious, and appear before the
mimetic stage but they are important in demonstrating that other peo-
ple matter to the individual also at a purely mechanical level, not only in
the subtler forms based on joint attention.
This scale is then used to outline a scale of ontogenetic development.
No evidence is suggested for a purely cue-based stage, but Zlatev traces
a development from an early associational stage, dominated by the acqui-
sition of sensorimotor schemas (before 9 months) via a mimetic stage,
with pointing as an example (before language acquisition) to the final
symbolic stage (or post-mimetic, cf. Zlatev 2008: 219), which involves a
socially shared symbolic system.
Regardless of the precise epigenetic path of intersubjectivity, the broad
picture outlined above suggests that there is a sense in which intersubjec-
tivity is present from birth, and also that its foundation includes a hard-
wired ability to respond directly to the feelings and actions of others
(Zlatev 2008: 223). Further, that the representational dimension is mini-
mal at the initial stage and develops through a dyadic stage (where the
point is to influence the actions of others) to full, triadic communication,
where the intersubjective relation includes a shared world. This can be
understood as building up to the full Bhler triangle of self-expression,
appeal and reference as the presupposed foundation of all linguistic com-
munication.
As also argued by Sinha (cf. p. 72 above), intersubjectivity is basic in
this picture, not something that is added at an advanced stage. Rather than
being essentially imprisoned in their individual minds, human beings are
inherently grounded in a world that includes aspects of the internal states
of other people; crucially, we have a natural quasi-perceptual access to
other peoples elementary qualia, cf. Zahavi (2007). Increasing cognitive
sophistication is part of a process that mediates in increasingly sophisti-
cated ways between organism and environment, including a social envi-
ronment that is constitutive from the beginning. The special cognitive
sophistication of human beings depends on their embedding in a cultural

context of shared meanings that are not directly embedded in the stream
of experience, but in membership of a community. Meaning in the fully
human sense thus arises in a space that is both cognitive and sociocultural,
and therefore marks out a new ontological territory.
A crucial concept in the epigenetic approach is a further development
in the general notion of a schema (cf. Sinha 2007, Zlatev 2005), beyond
the classic image schema. At the most general level it subsumes all types
of skills that depend on extracting something generalizable from previ-
ous experience. The concept is therefore general enough to be used across
the board from neurobiology via cognitive representations and all the
way to the level of conventional sociocultural schemas, cf. Sinhas discus-
sion of the history of the concept (2007: 1275). Thus, when the child learns
to grasp a ball, increasing success can be viewed as the result of a success-
fully entrenched grasping schema just as the successful learning of a
linguistic pattern is an instance of schematic learning. Authors as diverse
as Bartlett, Piaget and Bourdieu have found the word useful in that
capacity.
However, further development of this basic insight depends on differ-
entiation. Zlatev has proposed (Zlatev 2005) the concept of mimetic
schema as an alternative, or at least a complement to the not entirely
clear role of image schemas (cf. above p. 31), which hovered between
abstraction and concrete perception. Zlatevs concept offers a way of
relating the two types of schema without conflating them. While neural or
sensorimotor schemas are embodied in a very concrete sense, they are
strictly the property of an individual organism and thus cannot underpin
a system of public meanings. On the other hand, if schemas are under-
stood as abstractions over sets of more concrete meanings, they lose the
foundational status that they have been assumed to carry in the view of
embodiment that is central to cognitive linguistics. The developmental
perspective suggested by Zlatev locates mimetic schemas at the transition
point, where bodily experience acquires a dual identity as shared abstrac-
tion. Mimetic schemata as a form of internalized imitation are at the same
time features of bodily action and public representations of the relevant
bodily experience. They can thus have a feel associated with them (Zlatev
2005: 322), which is naturally understood as part of communal experience
at a pre-linguistic level but which may be recruited in understanding
linguistic utterances.
Zlatevs theory is primarily a way of extending bodily grounding to the
situated body; and mimesis is an embodied skill. His theory is based on the
Wittgensteinian perspective of grounding in shared practice (cf also. Sinha
(1999) and Harder (1999) on discursive grounding). In fleshing out this

approach, an anthropological dimension is necessary.
Anthropology was affected by the same narrowing of the perspective
that went with the cognitive revolution. One of the anthropologists who
have served as an inspiration for CL expresses this in the following way:
As part of the cognitive revolution, cognitive anthropology made two crucial
steps. First, it tuned away from society by looking inward to the knowledge an
individual had to have to function as a member of the culture. The question
became What does a person have to know? The locus of knowledge was
assumed to be inside the individual. The methods of research then available
encouraged the analysis of language. But knowledge expressed or expressible
in language tends to be declarative knowledge. It is what people can say about
what they know. Skill went out the window of the white room. The second
turn was away from practice. In the quest to learn what people know, anthro-
pologists lost track both of how people go about knowing what they know and
of the contribution of the environments in which the knowing is accomplished.
(Hutchins 1995: xii)
The project in which the limitations of a cognitivist approach became evi-

dent to Hutchins was a study of navigation as a cognitive process. From
the first moment, one thing was obvious: in navigating a large navy ship,
success depends on more than one mind. To the extent the successful out-
come of any navigational task can be considered the outcome of a cogni-
tive process, that cognitive process is distributed across a collective group.
The knowledge required is therefore a truly social fact in the sense pro-
claimed by Durkheim (more on this in ch. 3), cf. Hutchins (1995: 176).
The fact that different people have to know different things about how
to carry out a cultural practice such as navigation raises several issues.
From the managerial point of view, the answer to the problem is simply a
question of division of labour. But from the point of view of human under-
standing, it raises the question of the link between what I know and what
other people know as we collaborate on reaching a common goal. The
kind of cognition that goes on is inherently cultural in the sense that it
goes with the status of being a member of a community of understanding,
rather than working through the individual mind alone. Moreover, there
is always going to be a social organization that mediates between individ-
ual-internal structures and individual-external structures and that social
organization is an entity of a kind that cannot be viewed as mind-internal
(Hutchins 1995: 262). Organizational knowledge is present in any complex
organization as distributed knowledge, for example about how to produce
buses or how to govern a city. And organizational knowledge is a special
case of cultural knowledge, i. e. the kind of knowledge that allows a human
society to go about its collective business. In both cases, the larger group
constantly faces tasks that are beyond the capabilities of any individual
member (ibid.).
One of the things that make this possible is another type of extension
beyond the body of cognition-imbued activity: the use of material
anchors. The case he discusses in detail is that of the astrolabe (Hutchins
1995: 9699); a simpler example is the compass. If we look at the collective
task of navigating on the one hand and the individual cognitive systems on
the other, it is obvious that the success of the enterprise depends on a reli-
able way of mediating between on the one hand the demands of the task
and the cognitive systems, and on the other hand between the different
cognitive systems between which there is a division of labour. The role of
material anchors in that context can be illustrated with the apparent plau-
sibility of behaviourist reasoning: there is something mysterious about the
idea that invisible processes in the mind can control the material world,
and it feels more scientific to attribute effects to overt material causes. The
type of operations that are necessary to keep a ship on its course may well
appear mysterious to rookie navigators for the same reason and if the
necessary cognitive operations are mediated by an object where its ele-
ments are represented in material form, it will literally make the task
more tangible. Learning to handle the compass and the astrolabe is an
intermediary step to learning how to handle the whole navigation of the
ship. Similarly, the abacus makes calculation visible, and thus more man-
ageable in the initial stages.
In order to understand the significance of this operation, however, it is
necessary to understand it as involving a kind of back-formation, a top-
down modification of a relationship whose basic mode is bottom-up. As
pointed out by Sinha & Rodriguez (2008), the primal scene of intersubjec-
tivity is not going from individual knowledge to common knowledge as a
special and refined form of knowledge. Instead, intersubjectivity is based
in the experience of participation in shared material practices. Physical
objects such as chairs enter into this process: they acquire shared signifi-
cance by entering into shared practices. An object, socially speaking,
counts as a chair if it enters into those practices by serving the function
of chair. As an example, bean bags at one point in the sixties began to
count as chairs, without acquiring new physical properties simply
because they entered into shared practices as things you would sit on.
Material anchors are therefore a special case of the relation between
material practices and cognitive representation. The basic way in which
objects acquire significance is that their symbolic significance emerges
from their place in (non-representational) shared practices material
anchors, in contrast, are designed to represent something that would oth-

erwise be more abstract and intangible. An abacus helps a child to get into
calculation, because it provides a concretely accessible path towards the
abstract learning target
Nevertheless, material anchors may have a constitutive role in ena-
bling forms of cognition that would not otherwise be possible. Conceptu-
alization is easier if it is supported by immediately available input from
the environment, cf. Brown (1994); thus remarks on how to carry out a
practical task are easier to understand if they are made in the context of
actually carrying out that task. A material anchor such as an abacus may
not only provide a short cut, but be a condition on making abstract numer-
osity culturally sustainable. (More on this issue p. 323).
Yet material anchoring is not an account of the way cognition is inher-
ently and basically grounded. In order to approach that issue properly, we
need to follow the bottom-up path and see how sophisticated phenomena
emerge from the simpler ones on which they depend, and recognize both
the dependence on and the difference from the simpler phenomena (cf.
p. 145 below).
In relation specifically to language, Verhagen has developed a theory
of intersubjective grounding that involves an additional dimension of the
expanding CL world view described above. He takes his point of depar-
ture in Langackers theory of subjective grounding. In the standard dia-
gram reflecting Langackers canonical viewing arrangement, encoded
meanings are put on stage. For example, the prototype billiard ball
model, as in the red ball hits the white ball, puts on stage a scene where the
red ball is the figure, the white ball is the landmark, and the hitting consti-
tutes the profiled event. In Langackers classic version (but cf. Langacker
2008a), the onstage event is grounded in the mind of the conceptualizer or
speaker. When subjective grounding plays a special role (as in processes
of grammaticalization, cf. Langacker 1990), what happens according to
Langacker is an evocation of the conceptualizer, rather than the objective
scene of conceptualization. However, grounding predications, including
tense, are not part of the onstage event they evoke the position of the
conceptualizer as part of the speech event. The here-and-now is not on
stage but part of the off-stage ground.
What Verhagen (2005) argues persuasively is that instead of the lone
conceptualizer, we have to posit a speaker-addressee relationship as the
grounding scene. Rather than relating to the mind of the speaker alone,
the event is being located in relation to a speaker-hearer axis. Referring to
Bhler and Tomasello, Verhagen (2005: 2 and 6) sees the basic ground for
meaning as being a matter of cognitive co-ordination rather than intra-
mental grounding: other minds are presupposed from the beginning.

Aligning himself with the argumentative semantics of Ducrot, he suggests
that regulating and assessing others (Verhagen 2005: 9) is as central as
understanding the informational content on stage. In the book, he goes
through a number of cases showing how this regulatory intention can
change the perspective. One example is negation: negation evokes two
conceptualizations at the same time and performs an act of regulating,
more specifically correcting, an informational state.
The kind of context in which cognitive linguistics locates elementary
meaning, and in which embodiment takes place, in other words, has clearly
been moved from the inner recesses of the individual mind-cum-neural
system to embodied interaction with a world including other minds. Sinha
and Jensen de Lopez (2000) give a striking illustration of what they call
extended embodiment. They compare the canonical image schema of
containment as encoded in the relevant preposition in two communities,
the European (represented by English and Danish) and the Zapotec.
Rather than containment being directly grounded in universal bodily
experience, it turns out to reflect differences both in linguistic encoding
and sociocultural practices. Specifically the canonicality effect associated
with the basic image of a container described by Lakoff and found in
European investigations, was not found in the Zapotec community
which could be easily correlated with the ways in which woven baskets
were habitually used for containment by the Zapotecs.
Such an extended view of embodiment entails a rejection of the more
radical version of Lakoffs neural approach to embodiment: although the
neural element is important, it is not constitutive of meaning in the emerg-
ing intersubjective recontextualization of cognition and embodiment.
This also has consequences for the basic understanding of the con-
strual operation that is the heart of cognitive semantics, cf. Verhagen
(2007). In the diagram that sums up the basic scene for the construal oper-
ation, cf. Langacker (1987: 487488) with a subject and an object of con-
ceptualization, Verhagen shows that it is necessary to replace the solitary
conceptualizer with a dyad of speaker and hearer. Instead of a subjective
ground, an intersubjective ground is necessary which in turn means a
common ground (Verhagen 2007: 60).
All the dimensions discussed above have an obvious affinity, which
constitutes the motivation for bringing them together in this chapter. Per-
haps the best way to summarize it is in terms of the significance of the
shared material world. Epigenesis, intersubjectivity, material anchoring,
and cultural development occur in that shared world. Cognitive represen-
tations, processes and mappings depend on objects, people and practices
with properties that do not only impinge upon cognition but constitute
the presupposed context for it and therefore have to be included in a full
account of grounding. From Bhler via Sinha and Tomasello to Verhagen,
the triadic relationship between the first, second and third person roles
recurs in different variants as the basic scene for understanding language,
replacing individual cognitive representations as the object of description.
6. Language as a population of utterances: an evolutionary synthesis
Embodiment implies a commitment to a form of biological realism. First-

generation cognitive science has been accused of physics envy in its com-
mitment to mathematically precise models, which from a CL perspective
is clearly a source of distortion. CL, however, is moving closer to the terri-
tory of the second-most successful scientific theory, evolutionary biology.
The most obvious place to explore neighbourly relations with evolution-
ary theory over the fence is of course historical linguistics. When Bybee,
Perkins and Pagliuca (1994) published a synthesizing volume on gram-
maticalization, they called it The Evolution of Grammar but it was
essentially an analogy only, rather than a case of theoretical inspiration.18
A step towards a more theoretically ambitious integration of theoreti-
cal thinking from evolutionary biology was taken by Croft with his two
volumes on historical and synchronic linguistics, Explaining Language
Change (2000) and Radical Construction Grammar (2001). In the follow-
ing, I will discuss the historical part first, as the one with the most direct
analogy with biology, and the synchronic part afterwards.
In order to arrive at a theoretical synthesis with evolutionary biology,
it was necessary to go a roundabout way. Languages are not biological
organisms and do not physically interact with the environment the way
organisms do. Too direct analogies are therefore likely to unravel on close
inspection. It is necessary to extract the structure of the causal mechanism
18 At that point the analogy was centred on the general attitude to the subject
and the priority of diachronic patterns and pathways over synchronic rules.
The focus was on showing that the source of understanding why languages
look the way they do was in the types of development that could be found,
rather than in the relations between different parts of languages with other
parts of languages which is analogous to the contrast between morphological
theories of organisms as opposed to theories based on trajectories of evolu-
tionary development.
Language as a population of utterances: an evolutionary synthesis 89
that makes a system undergo evolution-type developments. Hulls (1988)

evolutionary theory of the development of scientific ideas had both the
necessary distance and the necessary precision to make explicit what
needs to be present in order for the dynamics to work.
The basic architecture of the model can be described as follows. There
is a basic distinction between two levels at which changes happen, the
individual organism and the whole population. Change happens first at
the level of a single change in an individual, and may then go on to the
level of overall, aggregate change in the population. In biology the indi-
vidual change is a mutation, a random change in the genetic constitution
of a single individual; the aggregate change is the change in a species that
results from the new gene becoming propagated across the whole popula-
tion. This distinction in turn depends on the existence of reproduction, or
in Hulls terminology (Hull 1988: 408), replication. Replication is the
central mechanism that makes evolutionary change possible at all: an
individual must be able to pass on its own structure (more or less intact)
to a new individual in the next generation otherwise there is no pathway
from individual to aggregate change. That is why only reproductive sys-
tems allow evolution. Entities that persist as individuals, such as atoms
and oceans, cannot evolve, although they can undergo individual change.
The four basic elements that Hull (1988: 40809, cf. Croft 2000: 22)
outlines as basic to his theory of evolution are replicators, interactors,
selection and lineages. Replicators are the elements that get copied from
one generation to the next, in biology the genes. Interactors have the role
of either being selected or not; in biology the prototype interactors are the
organisms. Organisms play an independent role because it is their survival
and reproductive success that determine whether the genes are passed on
or not. There is a link, of course: part of reproductive success is due to the
genes, whose proliferation depends on how well they serve their bearers,
the organisms, in interacting successfully with the environment, including
members of the opposite sex (this is taken up in relation with the defini-
tion of function, p. 160 below).
The difference in the reproductive success of organisms is what gives
rise to selection, causing some genes to spread in the next generation and
others to become rarer. Comparison across generations is possible because
the replication mechanism gives rise to lines of descent, or lineages: when
an entity is copied from one generation to the next, the result is a space-
time worm (Hull 1988: 410) that wriggles on as long as reproduction takes
place. Lineages can arise at several levels: genes, organisms and species all
form lineages across generations. We can follow (1) what happens to a
gene from one end of a lineage to another, (2) what happens to the organ-
isms from one end of a lineage to another, and (3) what happens to the
whole population. The changes are linked, but not identical.
When all these elements are present, they allow the mechanisms
whereby evolution becomes possible. The essential two-step nature of the
process of change is ensured because of the distinction between replica-
tors (genes) and interactors (organisms): the small thing that may change
in a way that is passed on to the next generation (by replication) depends
for its success on how it contributes to the success of a bigger thing, namely
the interactor. Although the standard way of thinking is anchored in the
gene as the replicator and the organism as the interactor, the point of
Hulls application of this idea to scientific development is that it is the
causal structure that is important, not its particular application in par-
ticular the co-existence and mutual dependence between reproduction (at
the individual level) and selection/proliferation (at the population level).
Science may evolve in an evolutionary manner because the same causal
structure is involved, regardless of how (dis)similar the history of science
is in other respects from biological evolution: ideas are produced and
reproduced through the work of individuals but they are selected and
proliferated as a result of selection mechanisms that work over the indi-
viduals head (through the reception history in periodicals, at conferences,
etc). This applies to language change, too (more on this p. 157 below). Evo-
lutionary theory is therefore something totally distinct from embodiment.
What matters there is the causal structure of evolutionary dynamics.19
There is a direct link in Crofts theory with the doctrine of usage based
linguistics. Evolutionary dynamics involves causal processes that affect
the relevant entities through actual usage events such as matings, births
and deaths. A necessary property of all elements belonging in such a sys-
tem is therefore that they constitute spatiotemporal particulars, i. e. physi-
cal entities bounded in space and time. This is a condition on having the
relevant causal properties. Thus species of animals, in order to enter into
evolutionary processes, must be understood as populations rather than
essences (cf. Croft 2000: 13, 2006: 95). Even if we assume for the sake of
the argument that the definition homo sapiens encapsulates the essential
property of the human species, thinking animals might in principle exist
19 The word evolution carries so many overtones that it is essential to distin-

guish between biological evolution proper and systems that have the same
type of causal dynamics. In places where there is a danger that the use of the
word would lead to unwanted inferences, I try to use terns like evolutionary
dynamics or selection-adaptation mechanisms about the abstract similarity
in causal structure.
elsewhere that do not belong to the human species as a historical entity.

They would therefore not be affected by the same causal factors that
shape the human species across generations.
This has other interesting consequences. The changes that are the
whole point of having a theory of evolution in the first place can in princi-
ple affect all an organisms properties, and so would-be essences may be
lost in time20. A species is defined in terms of interbreeding, since this is
what causes replication and enables selection among its members to cause
the proliferation of changes. Certain properties of individuals may be
essential in order for that to be possible but the essence depends on its
role in interbreeding, rather than the other way round.
Crofts version of the theory takes the form of a theory of utterance
selection. The most basic item is the replicator. In Crofts theory
The replicators themselves parallel to genes are embodied linguistic struc-
tures, anything from a phoneme to a morpheme to a word to a syntactic con-
struction, and also their conventional semantic /discourse-functional (informa-
tion-structural) values. The replicator is the particular linguistic structure as
embodied in a specific utterance. (Croft 2000: 28)
A crucial question to which we shall return later (p. 292), turns on the way
we understood the relation between the two elements in the definition of
the replicator, their status as being embodied and their status as struc-
ture.
Since utterances are the elements in which structural units (linguemes)
are replicated, it is the population of utterances that constitutes a language.
Although perhaps not intuitively obvious, the analogy is sustained by the
parallel with the causal structure that is necessary for evolution: a popula-
tion that constitutes a species is made up of the units (organisms) that in
them have the replicators (the genes) and pass them on. The population
that constitutes a language is the population of units (the utterances) that
contain the replicators (and pass them on).
The view of language as a population of utterances is the basis of the
theory of synchronic structure that constitutes the natural complement of
20 This does not, of course, mean that it is forbidden to investigate and enumer-
ate the properties that characterize members of a population that constitutes
a species. What is forbidden is if these properties are taken out of their his-
torical context and reified as constituting the general object of description.
Even a perfectly adequate descriptive generalization (e. g. that human beings
have a language ability) is only a partial truth about the species because it
belongs in a wider context of causal pressures and changes.
an evolutionary approach to language change. Radical Construction

Grammar (Croft 2001) is radical in the sense that it is the syntactic the-
ory to end all syntactic theories (2001: 4) because it eliminates the idea
that there are any scientifically justifiable basic syntactic categories. Good-
bye to nouns and verbs, clauses and phrases as shared basic concepts in
linguistics!
All other theories of syntactic structure, formalist or functionalist, have
set up a descriptive apparatus and argued that this apparatus is the one
that captures best what really goes on in structural combinations of lin-
guistic elements. Such theories are therefore somewhat like eternal
essences in biology, attempts to define units in Platonic or Aristotelian
terms. From a really radical construction grammar perspective, they are
more or less plausible and attractive mirages whose fundamental mistake
is to try to extract something basic and eternal from the only basic reality
there is, the sprawling and fluctuating multiplicity of actual utterances.
Construction grammar will be discussed in ch. 6. The crucially social
idea that is pursued so consistently in Crofts radical version is that it all
comes down to a population of utterances. One of the consequences is
that variation, diachronic as well as typological, is the basic fact that lin-
guists have to cope with. Not only are all grammatical structures essen-
tially language-specific; even within the individual language, linguistic
generalizations are merely inductive generalizations based on actual spec-
imens found in usage (as the population-genetic biologists generaliza-
tions are based on specimens collected in different sub-populations).
The question arises, therefore, of how the linguist can get a terminol-
ogy at all? Where can we get a frame of reference that can deliver con-
cepts in terms of which the variation can be described, if we cannot with-
out distortion use terms such as noun and verb? The answer, in harmony
with the basic assumptions in CL, is that language depends on pre-existing
conceptual resources. These resources can be understood as constituting a
conceptual space also known as mental map, cognitive map, semantic
map, or semantic space, cf. Croft (2001: 92). In that space we find things
like reference, modification and predication along one axis and objects,
properties and actions along the other. Linguistic categories in different
languages can therefore be described in terms of the conceptual territory
they cover.21
21 This idea is of course widely used across linguistic traditions; it is in harmony

with structural diagrams of dividing-lines between colour categories in differ-
ent languages, cf. Hjelmslev (1943: 49), and also the modern tradition of
semantic maps from Anderson (1982).
This idea is a new twist of a familiar idea: to base the understanding of

language on a presupposed underlying order. From the point of view of
European structuralism, it would correspond to the idea that content sub-
stance or purport is universal (cf. Hjelmslev 1943: 46): it consists of con-
ceptual categories which, in contrast to linguistic categories, are assumed
to be cross-linguistic: all languages are used for reference and predication
and encode objects, properties and actions. Croft emphasizes (2001: 93)
that conceptual space also represents conventional pragmatic or dis-
course-functional or information-structural or even stylistic or social
dimensions of the use of a grammatical form or construction. Although
these presumably belong at the less universal end of the section, this claim
is in harmony with the CL tradition of assuming that there is a total uni-
verse of conceptualization that can subsume all relevant properties (rep-
resentational or social) for the purpose of understanding language22.
Croft (2009) discusses the crucial changes that must take place in the
classical apparatus of CL in order for it to take the full step towards inte-
grating the social dimension. He sums up these in terms of expansions of
four basic principles of CL.
First, the interpretation of processes in language as instances of gen-
eral cognitive abilities must be extended to social cognitive abilities of
which the most important are joint action, coordination and convention.
Joint action is action of the kind that reflects the human capacity for joint
attention and joint action, cf. above; co-ordination enters into the practical
execution of joint action in ways described by Clark (1996); and conven-
tion is one way of achieving co-ordination.
Secondly, to the symbolic commitment (which in Langackers classical
form pairs off the phonological and the semantic pole) Croft adds a third
22 The evolutionary analogy is also found in other versions, cf. Frank (2008), who
focuses on the way metaphors arise, spread and disappear as part of the socio-
cultural process. In her approach, the memetic dimension plays a more sig-
nificant role. A meme, following Dawkins (1989:192), is a unit of cultural
information, such as a tunes, catchphrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, which
are like linguistic expressions in that they may proliferate across populations.
Frank points out the problems with this notion, recognizing the need to flesh
it out in order to set up a fully fledged theory. The point of the article, however,
is to trace a way of thinking about language, with the complex adaptive sys-
tem as the most fully developed version, as the wider frame in which the life
history of discourse metaphors must be understood. The idea of extending
the evolutionary analogy to sociocultural formations will be pursued in chap-
ter 7 below.
corner anchored in the community. The point is in harmony with the

revised theory of intersubjective grounding proposed by Verhagen, but
emphasizes the population level rather than the I/you relation, emphasiz-
ing that meaning is variable according to what members of the community
you are talking to (cf. Clark 1998).23
Closely related to this move is the third extension, from encyclopaedic
to shared meaning: it is not enough to say that meaning is recruited from
the general store of knowledge about the world, we also need to say that
meaning is recruited from the common ground between speaker and
addressee). In defining what this means, Croft stresses the role of com-
munities of practice (following Wenger 1998) over and above shared
expertise (Clark 1996). For Wenger, a shared history of learning is essen-
tial, thus making more stringent requirements than would apply to all
members of a speech community (beyond a face-to-face, hunter-gatherer-
type community). Croft argues that there can be a mediation such that
immediate and direct communities of Wengers type can form the basis
for indirect communities (via the rise of historical lineages, cf. above), so
that the foundational role of shared activity can be preserved also if com-
mon ground can extend beyond direct experience (this discussion is taken
up in relation to social construction below p. 331). The requirement of
shared practices brings the sense of common ground close to the directly
experienced form of common ground that is the focus of attention for
both Sinha and Verhagen.
The fourth and last extension involves construal and takes the step
towards construal for communication, reflecting a move towards some-
thing like the argumentative semantics proposed by Verhagen. The cen-
tral idea is, as for Verhagen, that construal is not individual but construal
for a communicative purpose. This socially amended view of construal
goes with the basic role of variability (illustrated with Chafes pear sto-
ries): rather than assuming that each alternative formulation reflects a
precise conceptualization chosen by the speaker, we must understand the
encodings as the result of the inherent variability of encoding practices:
Alternative construals provided by alternative verbalizations cannot be
precise. We thus end up in the fundamental fact of usage: Language is
a fundamentally heterogeneous, indeterminate, variable, dynamically
23 Croft uses the term subject in its grammatical and psychological senses as an
example: part of knowing the language is to shift your understanding depend-
ing on the actual discourse situation so that you avoid linking grammatical
agreement with psychological subjects (and vice versa).
Meaning construction 95
unfolding phenomenon, just like the human society it constitutes a part

of. (We return to this issue in ch. 6).
The introduction of evolutionary dynamics opens up a larger theatre
of operations than other socially oriented developments. The central ele-
ment is the dynamic relations between the individual and the community
that unfold in a panchronic four-dimensional space. No individual intui-
tion and equally, no linguistic corpus can contain the whole of that
scene.
7. Meaning construction
With the emphasis on variability and indeterminacy, another social, online

process becomes elevated to a more significant role. Meaning construc-
tion is attracting increasing attention (cf. e. g. Radden et al. 2007) as the
process whereby complex meaning is created as part of communicative
interaction. Like other new developments, this has in principle been part
of the framework from the beginning, in the sense that language is only
part of the story of understanding (cp. Reddys (1979) seminal criticism of
the conduit metaphor). It just did not attract so much attention, because
the focus was on the cognitive models and mappings in the mind, rather
than on their role in situated meaning construction.
This changed with the rise of blending (or conceptual integration)
theory, cf. Fauconnier and Turner 2002. Blending is an outgrowth of the
theory of mental spaces, cf. Fauconnier 1985 (and above p. 42), and
describes what happens, simply put, when two distinct mental spaces are
brought together to create a third mental space with elements from both.
Among the staple examples is the philosopher who portrays himself as
having a debate with Immanuel Kant ending up by putting Kant in a
position where he has no answer. One input space contains Kants philo-
sophical writings and views as well as the contemporary philosopher and
his work with philosophical problems in the tradition that is heavily influ-
enced by Kant; another input space contains the academic symposium
scenario. When these spaces are blended, we can cast the philosophical
disagreements in terms of a debate with turns-at-talk, replies and refuta-
tions.24
24 Kant the philosopher is still with us in his works as a result of cultural learning
(in one of its more demanding forms!), and in terms of the restrictive defini-
tion of mental spaces adopted on p. 46 above, philosophical discussion can
therefore be carried on by people inhabiting one undivided mental space that
Blending has some similarities with metaphor, and sometimes incorpo-

rates metaphors as subcomponents. Like blending, metaphor depends on
mapping from one conceptual sphere to another, and the result has ele-
ments from both: when love is understood as a journey, it has both love-
properties and journey-properties. But where metaphor lends itself to an
understanding in terms of stable underlying mappings, blending is more
obviously an online dynamic event. It is plausible that our understanding
of space is in certain ways permanently mapped onto our understanding
of time, for instance when it comes to understanding distances in time.
However, we cannot assume a debate with Kant that is stored in the per-
manently available cognitive unconscious, and the blend therefore brings
about something new.
This is also reflected in what is the key difference between metaphor
and blending, namely the role of emergent effects. Metaphorical map-
pings in the classic Lakoff and Johnson sense are not emergent they are
permanent parts of the mental universe, as reflected in the (provocatively
ontological) format of metaphor description X IS Y, as in LOVE IS A
JOURNEY. The mappings can be activated by linguistically articulated
metaphorical descriptions, but the real metaphors are already there, in the
form of cognitive mappings. In contrast, when you blend two spaces online,
there is a whiff of mixing powder and embers: you may have something
explosive on your hands. However, here is no absolute dichotomy between
dynamic and static conceptual mappings.25 Once it has emerged, a blend
may stick around. The Grim Reaper, for instance, is a blend that has
become culturally entrenched.
The distinction between blending and metaphor brings out two impor-
tant differences. First, blending is broader than metaphor because it does
includes the results of the process of cultural tradition. But online debate
requires the integration of distinct mental spaces also in the restrictive sense,
because Kant the debater is no longer with us and cannot enter the space in
which the living philosopher puts forward his arguments.
25 A step towards more dynamic conceptualization of metaphor was taken by
Lakoff and Turner (1989), describing literary metaphors as extensions of exist-
ing conceptual mappings, with novel literary effects, which might equally
deserve the epithet of emergent effects. Conversely, blends may involve stable
mappings. In Turner (2001: 19f), cockfighting in Balinese culture as analyzed
by Geertz (1973) is described as involving a blend between man and cock that
endows the fighting with a significance which depends on the co-presence of
man elements and bird elements in the fight to the death. The blends status as
staple element is revealed in the fact that outsiders are likely to miss the point
if they drop accidentally past an actual cock fight.
not have to involve two different domains like space and time or philo-
sophical tradition and campus debating arrangements any two concep-
tual spaces can be blended. Another standard example can be invoked
here: the riddle of the monk (adapted from Koestler, cf. Fauconnier and
Turner 2002: 39). Imagine a monk who walks from the foot of a mountain
to a sanctuary at the top, taking from eight in the morning to eight in the
evening to reach his goal. After staying the night at the shrine, he follows
the path in the opposite direction, again taking from eight in the morning
to eight in the evening to complete his journey. The riddle asks: is there
a place where the monk is at exactly the same time on the two consecu-
tive days? The answer can be arrived at by blending the two journeys,
imagining the monk setting out at eight oclock simultaneously from the
top and the foot of the mountain. The place that the riddle asks for is the
point where the monk meets himself. This blend is clearly distinct from a
metaphor, since there is no recruiting of structure from one domain to
another.
The second distinct property of blending in its most interesting form is
that it is double-scope, i. e. it does not have the clear directionality that
metaphors have. The whole point of a metaphor is to recruit structure that
you know in order to impose it upon something that you are trying to
understand. If theories are buildings, you know that they take an effort to
construct, for instance. If argument is war, you know you have to counter
your opponents moves. Blends lack this directionality because the rela-
tionship is not from source to target; it goes from two source spaces to one
output space that did not exist before, and where anything can there-
fore happen.
This is where the distinctive creative potential of the blending opera-
tion comes in. It is no accident that blending theory gave rise to a book
called The Literary Mind (Turner 1996). Blending offers the unique
opportunity of mixing conceptual elements in ways that transcend the
familiar cultural environment. The figure of Satan in Miltons Paradise
Lost achieves his literary effect because his status as personification of
Evil is blended with certain properties of heroic figures in narratives
(including being the arch-rebel).26 Successful writers at some point dis-
cover that their creations are no longer willing to do their creators bid-
ding but start to act in ways that need to be discovered rather than deter-
mined and this testifies to the strength of emergent effects. If a blend is
26 There are also a great deal of other blending activities going on in the Satan
figure, cf. Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 16062).
successful and has a life of its own, a new entity has arisen and the concep-
tual world is no longer the same.
This potential is obviously a source of meaning construction rather
than evocation or invocation of existing meanings. Deviant but fascinating
figures abound in great works. When many of us read a great many more
run-of-the mill crime novels than great works of contemporary fiction, it
is partly because blending may be a conceptual challenge, and sometimes
you may not feel comfortable with some of the newly emergent creatures
that start prowling around in your mind27.
One type of conceptual integration operation illustrates the reversal of
the perspective that is central to this chapter. The directionality that begins
with the human body has its counterpart in the goal that unites the princi-
ples of blending: achieve human scale! (Fauconnier and Turner 2002:
312). This principle is a constraint on the processes of meaning construc-
tion and thus affects the output end rather than the origins of the process.
The process of compression works so as to convert a multiplicity of inputs
in both spaces to a compact version in the blend, such as when the evolu-
tionary story of the population of pronghorns across millions of years
evolve to run away from predators is compressed into one pronghorn that
escapes which is open to human identification because it is a kind of
event that fits into ordinary experience. The human element is active at
both ends: in the body that provides the neural wetware and in the online
interactive process that shapes the outcome.
In Coulson (2006), the potential of blending for online construction of
meaning outside literary contexts is analysed in relation to thought, rheto-
ric and ideology. Stressing the temporary and online nature of the opera-
tion of blending, she traces the new interpretations imposed by blends
such as snowflake kid used by a Christian pro-life group about surplus
fertilized eggs resulting from in vitro fertilization. Speaking of these eggs
in their liquid nitrogen tanks as tiny humans located in frozen orphan-
ages triggers a process of meaning construction whereby it would be
unethical to use them for stem cell research (which is what the debate was
about). Note that the operation works by the active re-construction from
eggs to children, encoded with the endearing term kids, and by conferring
the affective value that is associated with baby humans on the eggs. If you
think of them in those terms, it would indeed be unethical to experiment
27 Sharing this low-brow propensity, I found it comforting to learn from Ray

Monks biography of Wittgenstein (whose uncompromising existential stand-
ards were daunting in other respects) that he was particularly fond of the
Black Mask stories and assiduously avoided any variations on the pattern!
with them. (There is of course a step from running the blend in your
mind to adopting this as the way you think about them; more on that
below p. 307.)
When this powerful mechanism of generating new meanings has
become part of the landscape, it becomes logical to think also of less
pyrotechnic (the term is Turners) forms of conceptual processing in
terms of meaning construction rather than in terms of meaning evocation.
One unresolved issue is the division of labour between the creative build-
up of surprising new forms of meaning and the evocation of familiar types
of meaning in standard combinations. As pointed out in Bundgaard,
stergaard and Stjernfelt (2007), although blending analysis may be uni-
versally feasible, it will often be overkill because standard schemas are
more plausible and economical. Their illustration case is compounds (one
of the issues listed as examples of what blending analysis applies to in
Turner 2007). They are essentially asymmetrical because they are modifier
constructions with a head that defines the point of departure for under-
standing, and therefore you can understand modification in the simple
case as based on schemas associated with the head. Thus fingernail can
be understood without requiring blending, because nails have a schematic
relation with fingers. Similarly house rat can be understood without
blending while mall rat (a term for delinquent teenagers who hang out
in shopping malls) do indeed require blending: no schema associated with
rat will provide the right interpretive link with mall28.
One of the processes that have acquired new significance as a result of
the increased focus on meaning construction is metonymy (cf. Panther
and Thornburg 2007, Panther 2006, Radden et al. 2007). Basic so-called
metaphors like more is up, cf. Panther (2006), might with greater justifica-
tion be understood as metonymies because it is the experiential, indexi-
28 Embodied construction grammar (cf. Bergen and Chang 2005; Feldman 2006)
views the process of meaning construction in a way that is relevant to this dis-
cussion. In accordance with the central assumption in construction grammar,
it is assumed that constructions are entrenched as wholes rather than com-
posed online. The comprehension process therefore has a necessary first step
in the form of evoking the constructions which are involved in a given utter-
ance. For the classic example of she sneezed the napkin off the table you there-
fore need to evoke caused motion, sneezing, napkin, etc. However, once the
constructions are activated, down to sensorimotor level, the second phase con-
sists in running what is termed a simulation of the entirety of the construc-
tional subcomponents. The analogy is with the way a computer runs a pro-
gramme, and the way Fauconnier and Turner speak about running a blend.
cal connection that motivates them. Generally, Panther argues based on

examples that metonymic links must be understood as the primary source
of contextual enrichment. With the example a Pearl Harbour must never
happen again, Panther (2006: 169f) shows that the metonymic interpreta-
tion place for event is no more than a prompt for further interpretation:
whatever the reader knows becomes available as a source of added mean-
ing (negative effects, surprise attack, loss of military capability ). The
function of metonymy as meaning enrichment in context is based on
indexical relations and means that you build up larger meanings instead
of merely substituting one (contiguous) element for another.
Barcelona (2007) explicitly links up metonymy with Gricean pragmat-
ics, using metonymic links as input to Gricean implicature. Thus a cause-
effect relation at the textual level, where introducing a salient new refer-
ent causes the expectation of more information, drives the textual
inferencing process that creates coherence between the elements. Faced
with the textual beginning If you have ever driven west on Interstate 70
from Denver to the Continental Divide, you have seen Mount Bethel, read-
ers infer that a description of Mount Bethel is now coming up. The aware-
ness of how things hang together is not just a passive conceptual construct
but an active force driving cognitive processes in understanding towards
richer and more coherent meanings29.
In general, the process of metonymically driven meaning construction
reflects the fact that there is an online process of grabbing chunks of
meaning going on, and Langackers idea of point of access works also in
the pragmatic dimension: once you have gained access to a semantic point,
you may accidentally or by design take in more or less of the surrounding
terrain.
Croft and Cruse (2004) use the term dynamic construal rather than
meaning construction, but their orientation shares with blending and
29 Stressing the methodological dimension, in harmony with Geeraerts, Gibbs

(2007) discusses the question of what evidence there is for the actual causal
role of figurative language. The metonymy place for event (in addition to
Pearl Harbor, cf. above, one may cite Gibbss example he was shocked by Viet-
nam), for instance, was found in one study to be active only in 1 % of all coun-
try names (Markert and Nissim 2003, as quoted by Gibbs 2007:22), and it is
necessary to make ones claims precise in relation to such empirical figures.
One finding that supports the role of metonymy in actual text construction
rather than as an abstract principle is the fact that familiar relations have
stronger effects: you recruit understanding based on actual available links-in-
context (Gibbs 2007: 23).
Final Remarks 101
online metonymy the emphasis on situated processes rather than static

general constructs. They quote, with approval, Smith and Samuelson
(1997: 167), saying that These foundational ideas of stable categories and
stable concepts, have led to little progress (Croft & Cruse 2004: 92).
Instead of taking the classical approach of locating stable structure in the
lexicon and accounting for variability by means of pragmatic rules and
principles (cp. the process from meaning via metonymy to Gricean impli-
cature explored above), Croft and Cruse (2004: 97) take a different
approach whereby neither meanings nor structural relations are speci-
fied in the lexicon, but are construed on-line, in actual situations of use
(referring to Moore and Carling 1982 as previous proponents of this view).
This discussion will be taken up in ch. 5.
The rise of meaning construction as a major issue is thus another man-
ifestation of the general trend explored in this chapter: from the anchor-
ing points of language and meaning in the general properties of cognition
grounded by the human body to the online and fluctuating processes of
making language work in a social context.
8. Final Remarks
There is obviously more to say about the socially oriented work that is at
present developing within CL than described in this chapter. This chapter
has attempted only to single out the main directions of this work. Some
additional aspects, including the specifically political dimension, will be
taken up as part of the presentation of the overall social cognitive frame-
work in Part Two of the book, especially in chapter 7.
In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned variation and intersub-
jectivity as the two keywords. To sum up at sound bite level what the
essence of this chapter has been, the most striking manifestation of the
usage-based trend is variational description, while the most radical change
from the individual mind to minds in an interactive relationship is the shift
to intersubjectivity. One phenomenon is especially central to the whole
project of the book: joint attention and action. Because joint attention and
action create a third element in addition to what is in each individuals
mind, collective mental phenomena have more emergent properties than
traffic jams (cf. the introduction, p. 6). All the issues taken up in this chap-
ter must be understood in the light of the constructive powers of joint-
attention events: conceptualizations viewed as part of culture, the role of
the population level in variational and evolutionary patterns, the dynam-
ics of meaning construction in context.
In the next chapter, we are now going to have a look at the competi-
tion. The social arena is not virgin territory that advancing cognitive lin-
guists can claim as their own merely by planting the flag, and in order to
discuss the potential role of a social CL, it is necessary to assess the find-
ings of approaches who regard it as their home base.
Introduction 103
Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
1. Introduction
The social sciences do not traditionally take a primary interest in mind and
language. However, there is one type of approach, associated with the two
keywords in the title of the chapter, which has gained ground in the past
generation, and which has assigned a significant role to language and mean-
ing. Social constructionism1 is the belief that social processes have the
power to create a range of entities that used to be understood as facts (dis-
eases, scientific theories, genders, etc). Discourses (in the plural) are key
agents in that process: what precise entities are generated depends on what
discourse is at work. The social semiosis is one name for the whole overall
process in which we find discourses and the entities they give rise to.
Although this approach is radically opposed to that of CL and cogni-
tive science generally, there is another sense in which they start from the
same point of departure: the demise of objectivism. In order to under-
stand what the two approaches share and where they differ, it is necessary
to understand this historical point of departure.
From antiquity onwards it had been assumed that words had meaning
because solid reality lurked right behind them. The precise nature of that
seemingly obvious link, however, stubbornly resisted all attempts to nail it
down; and in the 20th century it was abandoned.2 The transition is gener-
1 Although the two terms social constructionism and social constructivism

are sometimes used synonymously, often a distinction is made in terms of
which the latter is used about learning, especially as associated with Vygot-
skys position, cf. this passage from Wikipedias entry on constructivism: ().
social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social
interactions of a group, while social constructivism focuses on an individual's
learning that takes place because of their interactions in a group. Throughout
this book I use the term social constructionism as a cover term for both; in
terms of the framework I propose, the difference is captured by the distinction
between the niche and the competency dimension of social facts, cf. the conclu-
sion of ch. 4. (I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this issue
out to me).
2 Putnam approached the problem of linking language and world with the
sophisticated intellectual technology of logical empiricism and showed that
it was logically insoluble. In Putnam (1980) he showed (by an argument that is
104 Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses
ally associated with the change from early to late Wittgenstein. In Philo-
sophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953), meaning is described as some-
thing that emerges from language games, rather than being based in
mind-internal structures or as labels of objects. Placing the naming game
as merely one type of activity that you can use language for, Wittgenstein
in one fell swoop gets rid of both objective and mental categories as priv-
ileged sources of meaning. An alternative example of a language game is
one enacted by two builders, one of whom has the task of passing on build-
ing materials to the other, who does the actual building. An utterance like
slab gets its meaning from being part of that language game, and the other
builder understands it because he is part of the game. Looking for the
source of meaning in the mind would thus be mistaken: if we abstract
away the building activity (and imagine the two people lying on the beach
instead), the utterance slab would no longer make sense.
This was a truly monumental change. Suddenly it became clear that the
entire 2400-year-old approach to meaning had got it backwards. When the
objective facts of unified science went away, both mental and social facts
came out to play but they played in separate ball parks. Cognitive science,
including CL, pursued the mental side of the issue. The social side did not
join forces in a parallel umbrella discipline of social science, but across
disciplinary boundaries social constructionism had equally spectacular
consequences. If social processes are the key causal agent behind every-
thing from the scientific world picture to Tolstoys War and Peace, it under-
mines the foundations of the whole tradition of knowledge not just the
tradition in the humanities (which had been slowly undermined by the
progress of science anyway), but also in the hard sciences. In various forms
it has continued to exert corrosive influence on the authority of apparently
solid knowledge. We are still in the process of digesting this change.
This chapter begins by outlining the rationale of social construction-
ism, with a view to identifying the main true insight and the main fallacy
in the development. The next section describes the most influential mani-
festation, the French poststructuralists or anti-humanists, and then goes
on to sketch out the type of discourse analysis that is associated with the
plural form discourses. I then describe first a form of psychology and then
a form of linguistics in which the social semiosis is the basic point of depar-
ture.
related to Gdels famous proof of the incompleteness of mathematical sys-

tems) that any language, formal or everyday, can only be linked to reality by
virtue of an existing social consensus about the meanings of words and state-
ments.
The social construction of reality 105
2. The social construction of reality
In order to understand what this approach implies for language and mind,
it is necessary to begin by considering what it means for knowledge in
general. In relation to language, the causal power of social forces is most
familiar from Austins and Searles theories of speech acts. Acts such as
marrying and promising bring about things that were not there before
(marriages and promises). Social constructionism views the creation of
scientific knowledge from the same point of view: what are the processes
whereby a piece of information is assigned the status of fact?
From that perspective, facts are constructed through social processes.
The same goes for another centrepiece of the tradition, the concept of
knowledge itself: only if we assign the status of fact to a given piece of
information can we say that we know it. In addition to the iconoclastic
thrill, it created a new exciting project: investigating the processes that
contribute to the construction of facts. The first major work that thema-
tizes the role of social factors in determining what counts as scientific fact
was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962), which put the
notion of a scientific paradigm on the map as a name for the collective
belief system of a school of scientists. This concept is set up expressly as
something distinct from scientific theories viewed as the best available
approximation to true knowledge. Paradigms are familiar facts of life for
linguists, since the field is a very obvious example of how scientific disci-
plines may contain competing sets of basic assumptions. When a linguist
has to present his investigation of a given linguistic body of observations,
the issue of how to adapt his conclusions to the paradigm is clearly a sepa-
rate and laborious issue that comes on top of the process of adapting his
conclusions to his object of description (previously understood as real-
ity). Scientific paradigms are cognitive constructs, and thus illustrate that
this development is part of the same historical process that gave rise to
cognitive linguistics. But like other authors discussed in this chapter, Kuhn
is less interested in cognition than in the workings of social power, in this
case the power of scientific communities.3
A second major work, which came to define the post-positivist take on
scientific knowledge also in a broader community perspective was The
social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966). They dis-
cussed science as a key example of how social processes determine what
3 Like this book, Kuhn understood such socially constructed paradigms as

developing in analogy with Darwinian evolution (Kuhn [1962] 1970: 172).
is to count as reality. In their perspective, scientific knowledge does not

begin with the real world, then enter our minds and finally move into
social processes of discussion and teaching. Instead, knowledge arises
from social processes of collection, sorting and gaining acceptance, with
the link to the real world as a tenuous and recalcitrant issue that is never
finally settled.
There has been a considerable degree of confusion about exactly what
follows from the development outlined above. There is one insight that I
regard as both important and uncontroversial: the processes whereby
something acquires factual status in human minds are to some extent
social and knowledge can only exist in human minds. Therefore no one
can deny that facts as we know them are social constructs. Universities are
social institutions, and since they have a role in sorting and proliferating
facts, facts undergo social processing.
Adherents of objective knowledge may, however, be forgiven for feel-
ing that this is beside the point that social constructionists want to make.
But from this point it becomes difficult to get any further. It is hard to get
a grip on facts in their pristine, non-social mode of being. Only the type of
knowledge that consists in direct perceptual observation, as the case of
seeing the tree in front of the house, can be kept apart from social proc-
esses. Positivists therefore generally took that as the prototypical case of
knowledge creation. But not all knowledge is grounded solely in direct
perception, and new scientific knowledge never is. New findings have to
be systematized, discussed, replicated and evaluated before it is clear how
they should affect our knowledge state. These processes take place in the
scientific community. The processes whereby something gets the status of
new knowledge in the scientific community are indisputably social, and
they involve the same processes of spreading and evaluation as the proc-
ess whereby something comes to be accepted as knowledge in the social
community as a whole. Any lingering feeling that an individual direct
observation would be a better prototype of scientific certainty cannot, on
reflection, be maintained. A sole individual may be deluded or halluci-
nated. Even if somebody had seen the Loch Ness monster clear as day-
light, we would look for confirmation from other sources. If you try to
bypass social validation procedures, you are not in the inner sanctum of
science you are merely on your own.
This argument, which is persuasively represented by Rorty (1980), still
leaves something that causes scientists to go but ! The only source of
resistance, however, is the fundamental conviction that whether or not
something is actually true, and thus deserves the status of knowledge, does
not depend on social processes. Let me confess at once that I share that
The social construction of reality 107
conviction. Who would want to deny that I can be innocent of a crime

even if all available evidence points to me and everybody is firmly con-
vinced that I did it?
Rorty suggests that we give up the idea because we cannot do anything
with it, and argues that we should see knowledge as founded in tried and
tested social procedures alone because they are what make the differ-
ence. But this argument depends on assuming that only operational crite-
ria are definitive for adopting a belief: if nothing follows logically from a
belief, we might just as well throw it away. However, this is not the way
actual human beings work we stubbornly insist that there is a fact of the
matter although we cannot be sure when we have found it. This may be
described as an act of faith, but I suggest it is better described as a form of
adaptation (more on this ch. 5): we cannot help taking the existence of a
material world for granted, because that is the way we are wired up. This
is my personal favourite for an unconscious cognitive routine with an
innate foundation: if something happens to you, you assume that there is
something in the world that brought it about.
And that is why it makes sense to insist that there exists a fact of the
matter, also on the level of explicit beliefs: if this is the way we cant help
thinking anyway, we might as well bring our conscious beliefs in line. Only
hardened intellectuals feel free to ignore this commonsense perspective, at
their peril: with a quip usually ascribed to Wittgenstein, surely the people
who deny the reality of the material world would not wish to deny that
under my trousers I wear underpants. Hard-nosed science (cf. Dawkins
2009) and common sense thus join hands at this point: what should count
as knowledge about an object of investigation does not depend on socially
constructed representations of that object, but only on what the object is
really like.
As powerfully illustrated by the Sokal Hoax4, unconstrained social
constructionism thus raises two related issues. The first is the question of
validity: if fact status is something we can just assign to propositions, how
4 The difficulty in pinning down exactly how much was determined by social
processes, combined with the common sense acceptance of the distinction
between solid fact and illusion has created considerable leeway for disagree-
ment and extreme positions. One of the most celebrated clashes was the so-
called Sokal Hoax, where a physicist wrote an article which was a travesty of a
social-constructionist critique of belief in hard physical facts. The article in fact
succeeded in getting published in Social Text, a leading social-constructionist
periodical (cf. Sokal 1996).
can we know whether they are trustworthy or not? The second is the ques-
tion of rationality: If the individual is causally bound to believe whatever
he downloads from the social group he hangs out with, what happens to
the process of sorting and evaluating incoming information? The latter is
associated with what Pinker (1994, 2002) calls the standard social science
model, in which human minds are blank slates, overwritten by whatever
social processes may inscribe on them. While the anything goes position
is not credible in science, we still need to know the precise nature of the
influence of social processes in determining what counts as good science.5
What such a precise account is going to look like is controversial. What
is uncontroversial is that the process by which we assign the status as sci-
ence to something is social, and reliable procedures for evaluating scien-
tific results thus depend on a good social framework for science. Ironically,
social constructionism about scientific knowledge therefore revolves
round one pivotal, objective, inescapable scientific fact: all the stuff that is
recognized as knowledge has undergone a process of social construction.
This means that whatever other factors enter into the picture, such as mol-
ecules, neurons and metaphors, an account of the role of social factors is
mandatory in order to understand the way we think.
3. Power, habitus, marginalization and discourse:

the French poststructuralists
The social constructivist revolution affected not only the theory of hard
science but had an even more pervasive impact on fields dealing with the
softer forms of knowledge in the areas of culture and society. In this
context, it allied itself with a broad agenda of anti-authoritarianism that
affected also the more general political and cultural agenda of the 1970s.
Revolts against established forms of knowledge went hand in hand with a
revolt against the set of assumptions that constituted the legitimization of
established political practices in the western world.
In the early phase of that development, Karl Marx was an important
influence, especially with respect to one key point: mental categories are
shaped by social processes ultimately driven by power relations. The state-
ment that the ruling thoughts are the thoughts of the rulers (Marx/Engels
1932: 35) can be regarded as the foundational statement in the left-wing
5 Cf. p. 89 above on the Darwinian theory of Hull (1988).

Power, habitus, marginalization and discourse 109
agenda of social constructionism and is echoed in countless different con-

texts, e. g., the Bourdieus critique of reproduction in education (Bourdieu
and Passeron 1990: xv;1011). On another point, however, Marxist think-
ing was at odds with social constructionism: Marx believed rather too fer-
vently in solid material reality6. What was generally accepted in the intel-
lectual climate of the time was the element of social determination,
combined with the suspicion against accepted patterns of thinking. The
status of the thoughts of the ruling classes in the community came to be
understood in terms of the concept of hegemony rather than ideology
in the classic sense of illusion. In the version that was widely adopted,
hegemony as defined by Gramsci (Gramsci 1971, 1991), cf. Wright (2004:
16768), was a form of domination that did not depend on raw power, but
on acceptance of beliefs and positions by non-dominant groups. In a state
of hegemony, people outside the dominant group pursue their own inter-
est in ways that reinforce the hegemony (following the maxim if you cant
beat them, join them).7
Among the most influential figures in the kind of social construction-
ism that set the agenda in the 1970s are a number of French intellectuals
known variously as post-structuralists and anti-humanists, with Bourdieu,
Foucault and Derrida as key figures. There are radical differences between
them, not least in the role they assign to language (more on this below).
The justification for lumping them together in this section is only that they
all take the force of social processes as their point of departure, and so
6 One way of summarizing the main thrust of his ideas is to say that what is real
is in fact not decided by social consensus. That was why all the socially
entrenched ideas that young and old Hegelians were haggling about were all
equally misguided. Instead, the bedrock reality of peoples lives is created by
their own interaction with the material world. This is where the term ideology
gets its sense of illusion from: there is an actual social reality which can be
factored out from all the talk. While the freshness of the indignation behind
Marxs attack on German idealist philosophy has survived, the project of fil-
tering out the realm of non-reality from material reality turned out to be dif-
ficult to bring to a successful conclusion without an element of reductionism
(vulgar Marxism). Reducing superstructure to being determined by the
base constituted by material production gradually lost ground; the remains
were swept away by social constructionism and with it the intellectual inter-
est in the strictly economic part of the agenda.
7 As emphasized by Wright (2004), this is a more specific situation than simply
one in which there is simply a superior position that dominates over less pow-
erful beliefs and practices.
they see the understanding of the individual as subject to limitations due

to the processes of social determination. Further, instead of looking for
purely economic forms of determination in the Marxist tradition, they
look for the causal source of what counts as facts in broader types of social
processes and practices. Bourdieu expresses the last point as follows:
The only way to escape from the ethnocentric naiveties of economism () is
to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and to extend eco-
nomic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction,
that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particu-
lar social formation which may be fair words or smiles, handshakes or
shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, powers or pleasures,
gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc. (Bourdieu
1977: 178)
What Bourdieu describes as the driving force, equally in the traditional
Kabylian culture where he did his early field work and in the modern
world, are the social processes, including everyday as well as ritual prac-
tices, that assign symbolic value and meaning to actions and material
goods alike. For the scientist, the task as he sees it is to construct a theory
of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of prac-
tices (Bourdieu 1977: 72). The symbolic values are of course mentally rep-
resentable, but that is not their central property:
We see yet again how erroneous it would be to consider only the cognitive or,
as Durkheim put it, speculative functions of mythico-ritual representations
(Bourdieu 1977: 165)
One of the reasons why mental representations are assumed to be insuf-

ficient is that the generation of practice is seen as involving crucially not
just the collective practices, but also (as a reflex of those practices) a set of
pre-conceptual dispositions inscribed directly in the body, as subsumed
under Bourdieus most famous concept, habitus.
The concept of habitus illustrates at the same time an affinity and a
difference between the cognitive-linguistic and Bourdieus social-interac-
tive approach to cultural meanings: on the one hand, it affirms the impor-
tance of bodily grounding of cultural meanings, and also places elements
of culture backstage (cf. p. 198 below), as inaccessible to conscious
inspection. On the other hand, it locates the explanatory factors else-
where, outside the embodied mind. Bourdieus interest is in pointing to
the existence of social processes that drive certain cultural patterns so
deep into the human subject that they are out of sight. Educational proc-
esses are among those patterns that, according to Bourdieu, have the cre-
ation of a habitus as its goal: the society reproduces itself by imprinting
itself directly into the bodily dispositions of the students (cf. Bourdieu &
Passeron 1990: 31), dispensing with the detour that goes via cognitive rep-
resentations8.
The key type of social practice, and the central explanatory factor in
critically oriented social constructionism, is what is called discourse in a
wide sense that includes all language-mediated social processes from edu-
cation, religion, and government to everyday communication. The con-
cept of discourse as understood by Foucault and especially his followers,
has gradually assumed centre-stage position as the term for what analysts
need to get their hands on in order to understand what shapes post-objec-
tivist forms of reality. The most striking renewal of the standard way of
talking about discourse is the introduction of a countable sense, a dis-
course, understood broadly speaking as a particular way of talking about
things (more on this in the following section).
Initially, Foucaults interest was in large-scale quasi-objective forms of
determination, with historical epochs in focus and shifts in discourse as
parts of a new form of history of ideas. Foucaults (1969) study of the
change in scientific discourses at various points in history points to a
mechanism related to the one made famous by Kuhn (1962) in the theory
of science9. At any given point in history there is a particular way of talk-
ing and also disagreeing about a field of study that is taken for granted.
When the participants in such historical circles of practice make their con-
tributions, they act according to unwritten rules to which there are no
alternatives available. By the same token, these practices also determine
what is beyond the pale, i. e. what cannot be articulated within a context
dominated by a given discourse. It is not that it is physically impossible it
is just that it does not arise, or if by a freak accident it does, it becomes
invisible because it does not qualify as a relevant way of talking about
things.
8 Cultural and material practices are interwoven in this view of human practice,
since symbolic and financial capital are interchangeable. An illustration is that
in certain societies it is rational to spend all your money on a wedding since
that wedding will give more status in the sociocultural order than hoarded sav-
ings. Although Bourdieu explicitly does not see either language or cognition
as the central factors, the processes that he as well as the other French anti-
humanists are interested in are those that are accompanied by language and
other forms of symbolic mediation; Bourdieu speaks of lconomie des
changes linguistiques in the original title of the book that in English became
Language and symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991).
9 As pointed out by Piaget 1972, p. 112 (in the Danish translation).
Later, Foucault turned to the interplay between social power and

human subjectivity, with the history of prisons and social control as a
major motif (cf. Foucault 1975) One focus is on the dividing practices
whereby external forces impose a split between the normal and the mar-
ginal: the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and
the good boys (Foucault 1982: 208). This brings him into the territory
of what cognitive linguists would call idealized or stereotyped conceptual
models, although at this point Foucault views them as constituents in proc-
esses of determination in a macro-social perspective. In his third phase, he
continued the trajectory from historical formations into the human sub-
ject itself and the impact of the self-definitions on experienced identity,
especially in terms of sexuality. At this stage his focus moves beyond
socially distributed patterns of thinking to the issue of embodied under-
standing, albeit still from the point of view of social determination.
Following up on the studies of deviation and normality, a privileged focus
for Foucault and his followers has been the study of texts reflecting the
polarity in social categorization between us and them, or between self
and other; more on this in ch 8.10
It is part of this extremely influential way of thinking that discourses
always appear to represent reality, even as they subtly reorganize the way
we think. The approach thus opens a chink in the armour of ruling repre-
sentations, allowing criticism to expose the latent discrepancy between
what is presented as reality and what is behind it. Yet since social reality
only manifests itself in discourses, and as discourse never stands still, we
can never get at the ultimate reality that lies behind them if, indeed,
there is any reality behind them. The concept of floating signifier goes
back to Lvy-Strauss, but became central when structuralism turned into
poststructuralism, because of the constant re-articulation of meanings.
Taking its point of departure in the traditional assumption that there is a
fixed Platonic meaning underlying all signs, the notion of floating signifier
came to embody the role of signs as part of the semiotic flux: meanings are
generated as we go along and are carried along with the flow, with no ulti-
mate foundation.
In the theory of literature, the concept of intertextuality reflects the
same type of mechanism: rather than representing diverging forms of
10 This contrast has been adopted and used in vast numbers of different guises,
including gender studies (where heterosexual patterns are mainstream), class
structure (where the ruling classes are mainstream) and post-colonialism
(where established western doctrines are mainstream).
reality, texts take their cues from each other and reproduce as well as
reorganize particular organizations of meanings. In the most radical ver-
sion of this position, there is nothing but interpretations as far as the eye
can reach: Every decoding is another encoding, as succinctly expressed
by David Lodges fictitious professor Zapp. A key point of reference is a
passage from Derrida which is often rendered as there is nothing outside
the text (but which in the French original is il ny a pas de hors-texte, Der-
rida (1967: 227), which is a pun on hors doeuvre and means something
like there is no privileged domain that is totally extra-textual).
In Derridas own context, this much-discussed quote is not part of a
discussion of what really exists Derrida is playing a different language
game and is not really into ontology talk. This becomes clear in the dis-
cussion with Searle in Glyph, Derrida (1977a&b), where rather than
entering into the discussion, Derrida is being naughty according to the
standard rules of the game.11 Although the plausible intended message is
not to express the thoroughgoing ontological scepticism which detractors
use it to illustrate, but rather the text-like interpretation-driven features
of human existence as such (cf. Derrida 1981: xiv), there is a certain irony
in having to resort to the authors intended message in trying to defend
Derridas general position. However, this should not obscure the rele-
vance of the theme that Derrida is pursuing: that readers are in the grip of
forces they cannot hope to get behind, and we should therefore be scepti-
cal of the claims of those who pretend to have found a secure foothold
beyond the semiosis itself. The risk is only that this particular agenda is
taken to be the whole truth, cf. pp. 336 and 450.
With the alliance between discourse and the exertion of social power
of marginalization and oppression, there is a critical edge shared with
Marxism, even if there is no material base for it. The factors that shape
discourse in ways that speakers cannot defend themselves against still cry
out for being pointed out and examined. This gives rise to a pattern of
interpretation which, following Ricoeur (1970), has been called the
hermeneutics of suspicion: the task of meaning construction in under-
standing discourse is associated with an orientation towards dismantling
illusions and unmasking hidden power play in the text.
11 As pointed out in Siegumfeldts 2005 (counter-)obituary, the fact that his posi-
tion emphasized the unfinished nature of all interpretations and openness
towards the future did not mean that questions of sources and origins were
foreign or irrelevant to him.
4. The analytic practice: discourse(s) analysis
Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for a large variety of analytic

practices whose only shared feature is that they analyse actual instances
of language use. The following should perhaps be printed as a government
warning on all textbooks in discourse analysis:
What gets addressed under the rubric discourse is so varied that the default
expectation should be the non-generalizability of what is said about some type
of discursive object of attention to others. (Schegloff 1999: 167)
The Foucault-inspired type of discourse analysis introduced in the section
above, however, is possibly the most influential variety. As a framework
for analysing ways of thinking in literary and political contexts, it is also
the approach that constitutes the most conspicuous alternative to CL
when it comes to understanding meaning in society and meaning con-
struction in texts. Bluntly speaking, if CL in its new socio-cognitive mani-
festation wants to stand as an attractive method of analysing conceptual
models in relation to social forces, it must be seen to have advantages that
post-Foucauldian discourse analysis lacks. I think it does have such advan-
tages, and also that post-Foucauldian analysis is potentially dangerous if it
is not handled with extreme care (which is far from always the case, cf.
Antaki et al. 2002).
For those reasons I will take some trouble in giving an account of core
features of this analytic practice (or collection of practices12), henceforth
called the discourses approach, or discourses analysis. In this chapter
I first try to place it in relation to other forms of discourse analysis. Sec-
ondly, I take up concrete examples of how it is understood and used in
analysis and try to show both what it typically covers and what it typically
leaves out. When I have presented my own approach to meaning in soci-
ety in ch. 7, I compare it with examples of the discourses analysis, and in
ch. 8 I illustrate why the differences in approach are not just important
academically, but also from a civic point of view.
This form of discourse analysis involves two key elements: (1) uncover-
ing a pattern of conceptual organization as reflected in a body of texts
(statements) and (2) showing what particular position this discourse
12 It follows from the heterogeneous nature of the enterprise that what I present
as core features will not fit all instances equally well, cf. also chapter 7, section
4. What I claim is merely that there is a position in the landscape that my
account fits well enough and that has enough impact to make it worth chal-
lenging.
The analytic practice: discourse(s) analysis 115
takes up in social space, especially as a manifestation of power relations.

The conceptual dimension is thus understood in relation to its social posi-
tioning. Some key concepts are taken over from the Marxist tradition,
including ideology and hegemony. After the strict division between
truth and illusion faded out of the picture, ideology is typically understood
as a coherent set of culturally salient assumptions and values adopted by
a (sub-)community, with the capitalist ideology still in its position as a
historically central example. The concept of hegemony, as introduced
above, is used about the dominant position of an ideology in the relevant
body of texts, understood as reflecting and maintaining power relations in
the community by the collusion of people outside the dominant coalition.
The focus is on uncovering the economic and ideological interests associ-
ated with the position manifested in the discursive practices that are ana-
lysed (cf. Laclau & Mouffe 1985).
In this approach, discourses are the central objects of description in
accounting for the social role of mental representations, rather than eco-
nomic interests or pervasive practices. This emphasizes the force attrib-
uted to patterns of linguistic interaction and the beliefs that are expressed
in such interaction. It suggests that what our so-called knowledge derives
from is essentially the flow of language with changing patterns of mean-
ing, referring back to previous patterns while continuously reorganizing
them.
In the linguistic tradition, there is a different form of discourse analysis
which arose as the result of crossing the sentence barrier, cf. Harris (1951).
From that perspective, discourse is the domain of relations between sen-
tences (understood as the maximal unit of grammatical analysis), and con-
stitutes a new linguistic domain, where patterns associated with grammar
gives way to other patterns. The Rubicon-like crossing of the sentence
boundary has remained defining of the field, cf. Schiffrins (2006) charac-
terization of discourse as structure operating above and beyond the sen-
tence.
This linguistic definition represents an adaptation to the fact that the
intra-sentential turf was already occupied by Chomskyan linguistics. One
notes the element of unconscious collusion that is characteristic of victims
of hegemony: in taking over the remainder, linguistic discourse analysts
give up the sentence-internal territory without a murmur as lying outside
discourse(!). Although defined by phenomena that go beyond the sen-
tence, discourse is actually more or less equal to language use: processes
like repair, topic nomination occur inside as well as outside sentences,
but are among the characteristic features of discourse organization. The
focus is on the online creation of meaningful relations between utterances
and participants, with the emphasis strongly on local discursive events. In

Conversation Analysis (cf. Sacks, Jefferson & Schegloff 1974), this empha-
sis on the local, empirically given course of events has been at the most
marked, yielding substantial insights in the microstructure of oral com-
munication.
The linguistic tradition of analysing discourse is understood as part of
the umbrella construction of usage-based linguistics, cf. the discussion
above p. 58. The strength of this conception of linguistics can be described
as a joining of forces between CL, which was heavy on mental content and
light on interactive patterns, and the linguistic tradition of discourse anal-
ysis, which was heavy on interactive patterns and light on mental content.
Textbooks in discourse analysis, ignoring Schegloffs warning, tend to
treat the two traditions as varieties of the same overall enterprise. There
is, however, a valid point in seeing the two enterprises as belonging to the
same field of inquiry especially from the point of view that I am adopt-
ing in this book. Both usage-based linguistics and poststructural dis-
course analysis subscribe to the claim that discourse, i. e. linguistic interac-
tion, is the central channel through which individual mental representations
engage with the social world. The affinity extends to descriptive sociolin-
guistics, where the importance of socially constructed, power-laden proc-
esses has become a major issue.
Although sociolinguists focus on the factors that determine choice of
linguistic variants, this topic also involves power and social construction,
because the choice of particular variant forms does not just reflect, but
also in itself constitutes or constructs membership of social groups (more
on this in ch. 7). Thus by speaking in a particular way, choosing special
linguistic variants, you define your own position and identity (or let other
people define it!) in relation to the social world. The sociolinguistic vari-
ants you choose have a position in social space and contrast with variants
selected by rival communities, just as the core conceptual models you acti-
vate in discourse contrast with models favoured by rival groups.
The pattern is observable at both micro- and macro-social levels. On
the macro-political level, the issue of opting for a national standard lan-
guage in the tradition of the French enlightenment is directly tied to the
social construction of the nation (cf. Geeraerts 2003c as discussed p. 68).
On the individual level, sociolinguistic choices such as speaking immigrant
multi-ethnolects (cp. Quist 2005) or other down-market linguistic forms
also reflect conceptual models of who you are and who you belong with.
The distinction between jocks and preppies on the one hand, and burn-
outs on the other (cp. Eckert 2000) establishes a choice between socially
entrenched group identities in youth culture based on a contrast between
mainstream and marginal with affinity to social class, which is indexed

by linguistic variants. Issues of the kind that reflect conceptualizations of
ethnic group identity involving issues of marginalization pervade sociolin-
guistics. Tannen (1994) similarly links up discursive choices and patterns
with cultural assumptions that may differ between genders and subcul-
tures, including media culture. There is no point in trying to enforce apart-
heid between the traditions. But when the post-Foucauldian style of anal-
ysis on a broad scale blends in with the linguistic tradition, this only makes
it more urgent to be explicit about its limitations.
As discussed above, the theoretical centrepiece is the (countable) con-
cept of a discourse, understood roughly as a group or type of statements
or texts sharing a common orientation. Originally (cf. Foucault 1969) this
was understood in relation to texts produced by particular intellectual
groupings such as the physiocrats, or of texts constituting a particular
academic discipline such as economics or biology in a specific period.
Foucault at one point defined a discourse as constituted by a particular set
of historically determined rules (Foucault [1969] 1989: 131). However,
these rules did not produce a clear-cut set of shared properties. Foucault
rejected the traditional assumption that the key common denominator
was to be sought in the subject matter, or in the shared body of thought.
In looking for the unity of such bodies of texts he looked instead (cf.
above, p. 111) for unity in the pattern of dispersion, i. e. in the structure of
their different positions in common space (Foucault 1989: 4041). The
key idea was that a body of statements could be understood as reflecting
a set of rules for positioning yourself within a pre-given field, such that the
players were unaware of the processes of determination that kept them
within the rules.
This idea caught on for many reasons. The basic reason was that it
pointed to a type of phenomena that had until then been overlooked:
when we learn to talk in a particular way about particular subjects, we are
more or less aware of the field within which we can choose to move and
the options we have within it, but we are not conscious of the borderline
between what is possible for us and what lies beyond our ken.13 An insidi-
13 This is true in more than one way. First of all, it applies to the borderline
between the field that constitutes our world and the untrodden domains
beyond and secondly it applies to the distinction between the types of things
we say and the types of things we habitually do not say within the everyday
cosmos we live in. The latter we only meet in the shape of embarrassing fail-
ures and transgressions, without being aware that what is a failure by one
standard may be an achievement by another.
ous added attraction of the model, however, is that it situates the analyst
at a level of consciousness above the language user: the analyst is looking
for something the speaker herself cannot see. This privileged position for
the observer follows directly from the limitations of the position of the
subject: if the analyst was equally incapable of seeing what eludes the sub-
ject herself, there would be no analysis possible. There is no dialogic, col-
laborative relation between the sender and the analyst, who is not an
addressee but an observer.14
Foucault pioneered the approach of looking for the backgrounded,
hidden and invisible elements in the picture rather than the foregrounded
and explicitly highlighted. The distinction between the focal and the mar-
ginalized is related to the distinction between normality and the other.
His general approach is well suited for a description of the way in which
dominant patterns of talk are instruments of upholding a particular bal-
ance of power that keeps some people in and others out, while masquer-
ading as simply representing the way the world is.
I would therefore like to draw a distinction between on the one hand
the specific contribution of Foucault to understanding the historical
changes he describes, and on the other hand what Blommaert and Ver-
schueren (cf. chapter 8) call the Foucauldian lore. For instance, Foucaults
analysis of the development of the correctional dimension of institutions,
cf. Foucault 1975, brings together an impressive amount of knowledge,
linking up language, architecture, institutional history and many other
diverse fields. In doing so, Foucault shows how the detailed and compre-
hensive historical knowledge of a range of social processes allows you to
14 Foucault and his followers are essentially only interested in statements, ways
of representing the world, and thus deal mostly with texts that might to others
naively appear to represent reality. But in continuation of Foucaults investi-
gation of social processes of marginalization and exclusion, the interest in the
role of practices of discussion and communication in setting up the borderline
between what is inside vs. outside the field of accepted practice has played a
tremendous and well-deserved role because it brought something under the
microscope that had eluded the attention of investigators. If it is assumed that
language gets its meaning from reality itself, the role of talk in making parts of
reality invisible does not arise as an issue for the analyst and thus escapes
attention, just as the deft movements of the magician keep certain acts out of
sight of the audience. The processes of social determination that lead people
to talk about some things but not others, and talk about those things in certain
ways but not in other ways, would therefore be potentially successful also in
misleading the critical investigator.
bring out the rise of interwoven patterns of thought and social control that
would be inaccessible if you stayed within traditional assumptions and
discipline boundaries. I thus follow Putnam (2001) when he expresses his
admiration of Foucaults analysis of specific institutional practices, while
remaining more sceptical about the more general features of his work
(those that are taken over by the Foucauldian lore in Blommaert and
Verschuerens terms).
One common mildly diluted variant is discourses analysis used with
texts as the object of description, i. e. without an independent analysis of
institutional practices. The following description of it is somewhat boring
and not very dense in information, but this unfortunate feature is moti-
vated by the sprawling nature of the phenomenon, its dispersion in social
space (as it were), combined with my wish to provide a reasonable amount
of documentation, since I would otherwise suspect myself of tending
towards unfairness in my description.
As described above, discourses analysis begins with a distinction
between different discourses, thereby allowing the analyst to assign a
piece of discourse (non-count) to a given discourse (countable), such as
the neoliberal discourse or the discourse of tolerance. The use of this
form of analysis is characteristic of approaches that use the adjective crit-
ical about themselves, such as critical theory, critical linguistics, and
especially critical discourse analysis (= CDA). Among the most influen-
tial representatives of Foucault-inspired CDA is Norman Fairclough (e. g.
1995, 2000, 2003), which makes it natural to use his work as a point of
departure.
To illustrate the vagueness as well as the central point in the concept of
discourse in this approach I begin with a selection of quotations:
Fairclough (2003: 123f) introduces the concept with reference to a discus-

sion in Foucault:
I believe I have in fact added to its [the word discourse, PH] meanings: treat-
ing it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an indi-
vidualized group of statements, and sometimes as the regulated practice that
accounts for a number of statements. (from Foucault 1984)
The analysis of discourse for Foucault is the analysis of the domain of state-
ments that is, of texts, and of utterances as constituent elements of texts. But
that does not mean a concern with detailed analysis of texts the concern is
more a matter of discerning the rules which govern bodies of texts and utter-
ances.
Then, from Fairclough (2003: 124125), on his own behalf:
As in the case of genres, it makes sense to distinguish different levels of abstrac-

tion or generality in talking about discourses. For instance, there is a way of
representing people as primarily rational, separate and unitary individuals,
whose identity as social beings is secondary in that social relations are seen as
entered into by pre-existing individuals. There are various names we might give
to this discourse for instance, the individualist discourse of the self, or the
Cartesian discourse of the subject. It has a long history, it has at times been
common sense for most people, it is the basis of theories and philosophies and
can be traced through text and talk in many domains of social life, and its scale
is considerable it generates a vast range of representations. On a rather less
general, but still very general, level, we might identify in the domain of politics
a discourse of liberalism, and within the economic domain a Taylorist dis-
course of management. By contrast, in Fairclough (2000b) I discussed the polit-
ical discourse of the third way, i. e. the discourse of New Labour, which is a
discourse attached to a particular position within the political field at a particu-
lar point in time (the discourse is certainly less than a decade old).
In the same tradition, Riggins (1997: 2) intensifies the sceptical dimension:

In everyday language, a discourse traditionally has been understood as a state-
ment or an utterance longer than a sentence (Fiske 1987, p.14). But in the
humanities and social sciences in recent years, the term has come to have a
more elusive meaning that usually takes the work of Foucault (1972, 1984) as
its starting point. Foucault seems to have emphasized the structural nature of
statements, including those that are spontaneous, and the way in which all
statements are intertextual because they are interpreted against the backdrop
of other statements. The anthropologist William OBarr, following Foucaults
lead, provides a useful general definition of discourse as a flow of ideas that
are connected to one another (OBarr 1994, p.3). A more technical definition
might be to say that a discourse is a systematic, internally consistent body of
representations, the language used in representing a given social practice
from a particular point of view (Fairclough 1995b, p. 56). The practice of social
work, for example, could be conceptualized in terms of at least two discourses.
Social work can be seen as the provision of benevolent, professional care or as
a negative and repressive form of population control (Stenson, 1993). Dis-
courses do not faithfully reflect reality like mirrors (as journalists would have
us believe). Instead, they are artifacts of language through which the very real-
ity they purport to reflect is constructed.
The quotations illustrate both how elusive the concept is (cf. especially
Riggins), and also how sharply profiled its central function is: to pinpoint,
and typically challenge, a specific point of view that underlies a particular
representation of the world.
As suggested in the Fairclough quote above, there are generous crite-
ria for how discourses can be individuated; you can in fact define a par-
ticular discourse pretty much as you like. But since the point of the analy-
sis is to pin down a particular point of view, a given discourse has to stay
within the defining point of view. This becomes clear when Fairclough
(2000: 24) analyses a Blair speech containing the following passage:
In the increasingly global economy of today, we cannot compete in the old way.
Capital is mobile, technology can migrate quickly and goods can be made in
low cost countries and shipped to developed markets ()
()The fourth (point, i. e., that technology can migrate quickly, PH) is perhaps
the most interesting: it is represented as an action, but technology is repre-
sented as itself an agent in a process, rather than something that is acted
upon (i. e. moved) by the multinationals. Notice the metaphor here technol-
ogy migrates, like birds in winter. The sentence might be differently worded,
for instance as : The multinational corporations can quickly move capital and
technology from place to place, and they can make goods in low countries and
ship them to developed markets. But this is not just a change in the wording; it
is a change of discourse: in the discourse of New Labour, the multinational cor-
porations are not agents responsible for what happens in the global economy.
What prevents the hypothetical reformulation from joining the existing
Blair discourse is its status as an ideological odd-man-out. Purely abstractly
there is no necessary contradiction between seeing multinationals as
agents and other elements in Blairs universe; but the ideology of agency
is different from the one Fairclough is after. It is not a matter of either
logical contradiction or strictly linguistic choices, but of ideological stance.
If Fairclough had chosen to define other ideological features as criterial or
if Blair had chosen as his overall strategy to profile the beneficial effects
of agentive corporations, this would have been part of the New Labour
discourse.15
The discourses analysis therefore and that is crucial in comparing it
with a cognitive-functional approach inherits one half of the classical
objectivist understanding of language: it assumes a truth-based semantics
The difference is, of course, that what is to count as reality is part of the
battle. Similarly, as pointed out by OHalloran (2003), it also takes over a
truth-conditionally based view of language processing, corresponding to
first-generation cognitive science: meanings provide a precise world
view although the reality claim and the world view are approached with
scepticism. There is no awareness that language could be linked to reality
in other ways, such as by its functions within a way of life.
15 One may observe that Foucaults own analysis of the way economic power
works would appear to coincide with Blairs rather than with an analysis in
terms of explicit agency.
Most authors, Fairclough included, recognize the existence of a real

world behind the representations; but they simultaneously point to the
difficulties in getting at it. The following quotation can illustrate the orien-
tation towards characterizing the discourse itself rather than what it rep-
resents:
Do we perhaps, beyond its fables and follies, pretend to know what terrorism
is? No, indeed, we question the very possibility of defining, and thereby giving a
satisfactory account of, the facts categorized as terrorism. Our goal is not to
elaborate yet another typology, but rather to redirect the study of terrorism
into an examination of the very discourse in which it is couched. As is the case
with other discourses of the postmodern world we inhabit, the terrorist signifi-
ers are free-floating and their meanings derive from language itself. (Zuleika &
Douglass 1995)
Sometimes the causal role of discourses is upgraded to the point where
discourses themselves are seen as agents, leaving the speakers themselves
as puppets. This is in keeping with one of the points stressed by Foucault,
namely that the rules are hidden: speakers do not know the discursive
rules that they are following. Jrgensen & Phillips (1998: 24) cite Kvale
(1992: 36) for the claim that the self no longer uses language to express
itself, it is rather the language (or discourse) that speaks through the per-
son.16
The central analytic mechanism in poststructural discourse analysis
reflects the social constructionist pattern of thinking: extra-discursive
reality is out of sight; the human mind is a passive medium formed by the
social process; language-mediated social processes with their baggage of
16 How the discourse can be personified and abstracted out of the speakers can
also be illustrated by Hansen (2006), using discourse analysis in the political
science field of International Relations:
The construction of the Balkans as incapable of change and with the capac-
ity of entrapping the West functioned to legitimize a Western policy of inac-
tion. But as accounts of the warfare surfaced in Western Media, the Balkan
discourse had to engage in a debate on whether ethnic cleansing and geno-
cide warranted Western intervention. Here the Balkan discourse made a
double move. First, it homogenized the inside of the Balkans by constitut-
ing the subjectivity of anyone involved in the war in Bosnia as one of being
Balkan, more specifically as parties or warring factions.
We see how the social agent, the Balkan discourse finds a counter-ploy to a
move by an opposed agent by regrouping parts of the underlying Weltan-
schauung (more on the role of meaning and language in the theory of Inter-
national Relations in chapter 7 below).
Discursive psychology 123
representational content are the sole actors on the scene, and the analyst
(standing above the fray) can essentially choose or even construct the
object he wants to focus on.
Foucault (1969) argued that this view constituted a new phase in intel-
lectual history and provocatively claimed that the age of man was end-
ing that human being as a concept was becoming obsolete, replaced by
the impersonal forces of discourse(s). But instead of viewing this as a
world view in which human beings are mere pawns, it makes more sense
to see it as a type of analytic practice that chooses a different vantage
point compared to the individual-based perspective with the human agent
as the hero. Foucault-inspired discourse analyses such as Edward Saids
([1978] 2003) Orientalism have succeeded in bringing out patterns that are
indeed invisible to the individual speaker, precisely because they adopt a
perspective that is beyond the scope of single individuals: there is a cluster
of related but variable ways of speaking about the Orient which has
developed over centuries and which, for the individual speaker at any
given historical time, are already there before she even opens her mouth.
We can only get at that kind of pattern if we abstract from the individual
and therefore this type of analysis brings out elements that were over-
looked before Foucault, and in so doing puts a much-needed critical spot-
light on the power of social forces to determine (partly) what we think
and what we take to be real without being aware of it.
5. Discursive psychology
The discourse-based pattern of thinking gave rise to a new form of social

psychology that is presented in the following quotes from key members of
the group:
We argue that the researcher should bracket off the whole issue of the quality
of accounts as accurate or inaccurate descriptions of mental states. The problem
is being construed entirely at the wrong level. Our focus is entirely on discourse
itself: how it is constructed, its functions, and the consequences which arise
from different discursive organization. In this sense, discourse analysis is a radi-
cally non-cognitive form of social psychology. (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 178).
the self I portray in my experiment has no voluntary agency. Ones sense of

self, in this context, is determined by social feedback; I am simply the reposi-
tory of others attitudes toward me. (Gergen 1996)
Discursive psychology understands mental processes as driven by online

discursive activity. Instead of the encyclopaedic view of conceptual rep-
resentations in CL, we may think of it as a print-on-demand model:

representations are produced when events require them. The ancestry
outlined in Potter and Wetherell (1987) is mostly non-psychological:
anti-mentalist philosophers including Wittgenstein and Ryle, the concept
of speech acts (especially in Austins version), ethnomethodological soci-
ology and Saussure-inspired thinking about language. The role of lan-
guage is central as the carrier of the discursively mediated content that is
the chosen focus of psychological investigation. Discursive psychology is
thus a good candidate for the purely blank slate approach to the human
mind reviled by Pinker (2002), and for the deconstructionist extreme in
Johnsons (1992) account of where CL is situated in the academic land-
scape. As if speaking directly to cognitive linguists, Gergen describes his
stance as follows:
Let us first deconstruct the traditional emotional terms concepts such as
anger, love, fear, joy, and the like. That is, let us view such terms as social con-
structions, and not as indexing differentiated properties of the mind or the cor-
tex. (Gergen 1996)
Discursive psychology also aligns itself with the conversation analysis that
grew out of ethnomethodology, including its commitment to close-knit
analysis of the situated unfolding of conversational practices. What the
discursive psychologists add to these foundations is the attention to the
psychological maneuvering involved in the process of online construction.
They use the work of Atkinson and Drew (1979) on courtroom interroga-
tion to illustrate how the discursive process of attribution of blame is the
key motor in the process, shaping questions and especially answers. They
note (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 89) that allocating blame takes a number
of turns, usually eight or nine, and point out that witness testimonies are
organized so as to best deflect the process. Understanding of what goes on
as well as the causal mechanisms driving the process needs to be based in
the process of blame attribution and the construction of events that goes
into that process, rather than in facts about the inner mentality of partici-
pants.
One of the analogies used is that of dancing: like people engaged in a
square dance, participants engaged in discursive interaction know what
expectations and role attributions are at work in the unfolding situation
and navigate as best they can so as to acquit themselves (sometimes liter-
ally so!) as best they can. Referring to Garfinkel (1972), discursive psy-
chologists invoke the existence of a dense network of everyday normative
mechanisms working to keep things within existing patterns, but also
shaping events when developments stray from those patterns.
Discursive psychology 125
Instead of the causality associated with agency or with determination

from outside the discursive process, discursive psychology concentrates
on the factors at work in the interaction itself. Specifically, the use of cat-
egories is seen as explained neither by the existence of mental, conceptual
models, nor as deriving from classification of things in the real world, but
for their causal power in discourse. In the court case, categories such as
girl, race, black sister and white man are invoked because they count
towards relevant inferences, and are variable (indeed inconsistent), in
terms of content within the same stretch of discourse: categories are
selected and formulated in such a way that their specific features help
accomplish certain goals (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 137).
Potter (2003), defending his approach, stresses the advantages of this
view as opposed to traditional methods which treat society and its actors
[] as structured sets of causal entities. (Potter 2003: 791). Arguing
against a critique that accuses the theory of having a thin view of the
human actor, he claims that It is a rather weak idea of what is thick or thin
that treats these intimate, consequential studies of psychology in practice
as somehow lacking in comparison with traditional models of agents with
inner motors. He also points out that discursive psychology does not
straightforwardly contradict the traditional (including cognitive)
approaches to psychology, only in that it develops an alternative under-
standing of language and its role in the machineries of psychological
research and assessment.
This defence is well suited as a point of departure for understanding the
role of causality in the picture. Causality is crucial also in the foundations I
suggest for a social cognitive linguistics (cf. ch 7). When Potter distances
himself from discourse-external causes, I believe it must be understood pri-
marily in contrast to a positivist, single-step form of determination by
objective forces (cf. the discussion of Wver, p. 370 below). In psychology
such a view would imply that human beings always acted out a certain set of
objectively fixed personal drives, regardless of the particular circumstances,
including unfolding discursive practice. Clearly it would be a simplistic and
reductionist enterprise to set up predictions about individual responses in
interaction solely based on inner, pre-defined properties (biological or
mental) without bothering to study how purposes and responses are modu-
lated by the force of unfolding reality, including discursive pressures.
However, the view espoused by Potter in the quotation above is also
fairly obviously only a thin slice of the full story. Behind the online causal-
ity of blame attribution, working from turn to turn in court interrogation,
there is a deeper pattern in which the institutions of law enforcement are
active (more on this in chapter 7 below), and there is also a set of concep-
tual models and status functions in terms of which blame is attributed on

a principled basis. Thus when suspects know that certain sorts of motiva-
tions may be seen as more culpable than others (Potter & Wetherell 1987:
130), it is presumably due partly to causal forces associated with practices
of societal discipline and punishment (cf. Foucault 1975), and correlated,
pre-existing conceptual models of culpability. The process of witnesses
who try to minimize blame assignment thus cannot be understood without
reference to those discourse-external factors.
If taken literally, the position of discursive psychology reflects the turt-
les-all-the-way-down ontology of social constructionism. Since it is clear
that something has gone before the online discursive causation, it is part
of the pattern of thinking that what goes before is also the result of discur-
sive processes (rather than pre-given essences). Behind the social con-
structions there are other things, which are also socially constructed.
In relation to the interpretation of that particular type of linguistic
process that involves the understanding of texts, the pattern of argument
is reminiscent of the hermeneutic circle: understanding the whole presup-
poses the understanding of parts, and vice versa. In both cases there is a
valid point made by those statements. In order to capture that point with-
out ending up in a vicious circle, we have to see it as part of a bigger pic-
ture, as argued above: since we are not dealing with a static relation of
causal determination, but dynamic processes of meaning construction,
there is nothing mysterious in the claim that each act of interpretation has
consequences: if we understand a part of a text in a particular way, it has
subsequent implications for our understanding of the whole and when
we have then constructed a reading of the whole text, it has subsequent
implications for the way we understand its parts. Similarly, when we
impose a particular construction on the event we are testifying about in
court, it has implications for what further constructions we can make in
later answers (otherwise the construction might collapse on us). But this
in no way rules out causal impact from factors outside the discursive pro-
cess. A full account thus has to consider how the full story can be put
together, while welcoming the contribution from detailed investigation of
the strictly online part of the psychological process.
6. Systemic-Functional Linguistics
Also within linguistics, there is a long-standing group which is essentially

social in its orientation, viewing semantics as based in social semiotics,
namely Systemic-Functional Linguistics (= SFL) with Michael Halliday
Systemic-Functional Linguistics 127
as the central figure.17 SFL shares a number of basic beliefs with cognitive
linguistics, and Halliday has had most of those beliefs since before Chom-
sky took centre-stage position on the linguistic scene. For almost sixty
years, he has been pointing in essentially the direction that is associated
with this book, and in so doing been right from an early date about an
impressive number of important things. It is worth outlining some of
them:
First of all, following the lead of his mentor, Firth, he points to the
foundational status of actual linguistic usage in linguistics: language must
be understood as ongoing practice. Secondly, meaning rather than form is
the name of the game: the social process that is the primary manifestation
of language is a process of creating, handling and exchanging meanings.
Thirdly, as opposed to the American tradition, the issue of structuring is
not primarily associated with the formal side, but also and essentially with
the side of meaning. Meaning, as in CL, is understood as encoded in a
continuum rather than a split between lexicon and grammar, as expressed
in the term lexicogrammar Fourthly, the experiential dimension is
embedded in a larger, functional conception of what semantics is that also
includes an explicitly recognized interactive, or interpersonal, dimension,
as well as a textual dimension.
Some of Hallidays theories about links between sentence structure
and interpersonal and textual features have gained very wide recognition
both inside and outside linguistics. For example, the reanalysis of standard
notions of subjecthood (Halliday 19671968), in which are into actor, sub-
ject and theme, with roles defined in terms of the different major subcom-
ponents of the semantic system, has remained a classic.18 Halliday has also
stressed the role of construal, including what he calls grammatical meta-
phor, such as the reification associated with nominalizations (the shooting
rather that they shot him). Combined with agent deletion, it can be used to
transform the police shot a demonstrator into the shooting, a kind of
transformation with obvious political implications.
17 It should be pointed out that there are different groups within the larger com-
munity of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, and the discussion below does not
apply equally to all of them. In particular, the Cardiff community with Robin
Fawcett as a central figure would not in general agree with the positions I
criticize below.
18 Cf. Butler (2003) on the changing relations between the subcomponents dur-
ing the development of SFL.
These are among those SFL-based linguistic concepts that have had
considerable impact in discourses analysis as described above.
As a final point, Halliday (cf. Halliday 1975) has analysed the roots of
language in early embodied practice, including as a particularly important
point the role of intersubjectivity as the basis of language development,
not as something that arises when two cognitive individuals happens to
meet; his contribution there has been stressed by e. g. Trevarthen, cp.
Trevarthen and Reddy (2006).
All in all it is therefore interesting, also in the context of the history of
linguistics, to ask why (I believe) not only Cognitive Linguistics in general
but specifically this book has not been rendered superfluous by progress
in systemic-functional linguistics?
In answer to this I would like to suggest that the systemic-functional
endeavour as a whole has taken a different course, and as a consequence
Hallidays impact has perhaps been greater outside than inside linguistics.
The basic feature, which is a strength in some respects but which has lim-
ited its power to bring about the kind of overall clarification that is the
aim of this book, is its inherent user-orientation.
In a lecture in Copenhagen (2006), Halliday talked about appliable
linguistics (rather than applicable, or applied). By the term appliable he
understood linguistic concepts developed for or by the potential users
themselves, devised so as to be usable in the particular context in which
users were interested. In the preface to his collected works (Halliday 2002:
2), he talks about how
when it came to asking questions about language, I always found myself lin-
ing up with the outsiders I was interested in what other people wanted to
know about language.
This personal bent combined with his theoretical orientation towards

ongoing practice as the basic level has created a certain centrifugal
momentum in his overall approach. One result of that is the laudable but
also intimidating level of detail with which individual language events,
including texts, are in principle supposed to be analysed. In Dimensions
of Discourse Analysis: Grammar (Halliday 1985), he analyses a short
spoken dialogue in ten different ways, giving rise to charts in which the
dialogue is characterized in terms of each of the ten different sets of
descriptive categories, with minute attention to ongoing language activity
at all relevant points. From the point of view of the reader, the balance of
interest in the account is strongly oriented towards the full richness of the
actual specific event, while it takes a certain effort to extract the generaliz-
able features of the overall analysis.
This would be nothing but a wholesome counterweight to the masses

of over-abstract and convoluted products of the fertile brains of linguists
who never went near an actual utterance if they could help it if it were
not for a more principled issue that arises in continuation of this. The crux
is the status of the criteria by which the concrete analyses have been con-
ducted. What is the relation between criteria used in an actual concrete
analysis and the theory?
This is a very difficult issue but also essential, not only for SFL, but for
any approach that aims to capture the variable and context-specific nature
of social events. I am therefore going to discuss it in some detail and
approach it from several directions. Those who feel that they have got the
point may skip to the next section!
The basic problem is (as pointed out by Butler 2003) that although
there is in one sense a large and complex set of categories permanently
available in SFL, these categories are not always defined explicitly enough
to make instantiations of these categories generally recognizable, and dif-
ferent users may therefore interpret them in ways that reflect their differ-
ent purposes. The price of flexibility, therefore, is that the analyses do not
add up to a theory that constrains subsequent analyses.
This is not a question solely of the possibility of disputing why in con-
crete instances a certain description has been proposed this charge
could be made of all linguistic analyses. The problem has deeper roots in
SFL and goes with a cornerstone of the whole theoretical edifice, namely
that there is assumed to be a full semantic system at the bottom of all lan-
guage events, including texts. This semantic system is not to be confused
with the lexicogrammatical system it constitutes a large complex of
purely semantic choices that comes before the interface with actual lin-
guistic forms. Halliday envisages a future in which this whole set of
semantic choices can be enriched to such an extent that it can handle all
the meaning-assigning operations that are now accounted for in terms of
the
inference, knowledge of the universe, and the like What we have to do is
extend and enrich our semantics to the point where we can handle these things
as part of the system and process of language (2002: 11).
Every new insight that you get when analysing a text, every addition to
your knowledge of the universe, must be understood as reflecting a part
of your semantic system. This system would have to be pretty big; but the
complexity is perhaps not the main worry the world is after all a compli-
cated affair. The problem is that it is not clear that there is a well-defined,
existent object of investigation which warrants all this complexity in the
semantics (viewed as part of the language system) as envisaged by

Halliday.19
By taking this stance, Halliday becomes at the same time the most
devotedly data-oriented linguist around, and the one who insists most
strongly on the fundamental role of the language system. Speaking again
of the semantico-pragmatic rather than the lexicogrammatic part of the
enterprise, he says If you dont know the system, you dont understand
the text (Halliday 2002: 10). The entire meaning potential of the language
user, as it unfolds itself in any given text, therefore has to be prefigured in
the system. The project is reminiscent of producing a universal map to the
scale of 1:1 of language in action or perhaps that is even an underestima-
tion: as pointed out in Bache (2008), the systemic grammar includes a
number of forms which are entirely unattested, so the system prefigures
not only everything that is out there but a great deal more besides.20
The need to have everything inside the system is linked to another part
of Hallidays orientation, the priority of the top-down view (2002: 12). This
need therefore does not arise if you combine a usage-based view with a
bottom-up approach, as in CL because the categories that we choose on
the hoof may exist nowhere else than in a particular text at a particular
time. In other words, output categories do not have to be prefigured in the
19 There is a fundamental difference between complexity as a property of the

description of an actual empirical object and complexity as a property of the
descriptive system. Any empirical object can be described in infinitely many
ways, and with an arbitrary level of complexity it depends on the person
doing the description what categories to apply, what perspectives to view it
from, and how to carve up the object. How far such descriptive complexity
should be carried depends on the concrete purpose of the description and the
funds available, as in a police investigation of a crime scene. It is a different
matter when you are considering what semantic categories are inherent in the
system itself. Anyone who wants to operate with a language system (as this
book does, cf. chapter 6), instead of taking actual language in use as the only
real object of description, is faced with the risk of hypostatization. When you
postulate a virtual category of the system in order to account for the actual
empirical occurrence of an instance of the category, you have to find a way to
avoid circularity and it is hard to see how this circularity can be avoided if
you assume by fiat that every empirical choice must reflect pre-defined fea-
tures of the general system as Halliday does.
20 The need to prefigure the entire potential for meaning creation in the linguis-
tic system (rather than allow a role for non-linguistic practice) marks a clear
contrast to Bourdieu, cf. Halliday (2002: 11): Bourdieu is an expert in exploit-
ing the power of language to proclaim that language has no power.
semantic system in order for the text to be understandable (pace the quo-
tation above). This is where the understanding of natural language differs
from the understanding of a formal system.21 For that reason, there can be
no valid criteria for setting up the whole set of semantic choices relevant
for text understanding in advance setting up such a system is either
something you can do any way you like, or a circular process whereby you
smuggle the output categories into the premises of textual understanding.
In practice, the semantic categories therefore have an uncertain status,
which is perhaps best understood in terms of the concept of appliability,
cf. above: they are there because it seems a good way to analyse the text
you happen to be dealing with.22
In practice, it thus appears to be up to the individual systemic linguist
to posit any categories that he finds revealing. An illustrative early instance
of this is when Halliday (1973: 72), envisaging a sociological semantics,
sets up a network of semantic choices in the area of parental control over
children. Inspired by Bernstein, he sets up a socio-semantic network
that includes a choice between person-oriented and position-oriented
forms of control, as the first tier of semantic choices that mediates between
21 In natural language understanding, the input is not determined solely by the

way the system works; in addition, it is shaped by the mental content that
arises in response to other forms of input than language. In contrast, if you
want to understand a number such as 111753, everything there is to under-
stand is given by the number system, which is indeed presupposed without it,
you will be unable to grasp any individual number that manifests the system.
Input from outside the number system cannot interfere in the process, the way
experiential input can shape the understanding of linguistic utterances.
22 The same uncertainty adheres to general categories of the analysis. As an
example, we may take the concept of field (together with tenor and mode
constituting the context of situation which is the last of the ten sub-analyses
in Halliday 1985). Field is defined as what is going on: the nature of the
social-semiotic activity. In the actual example, the interlocutors discuss
whether you can use the word it of a baby and the field of this text is said
to be (Halliday 1985: 283): Field: a general, imaginary problem of verbal behav-
iour: how to refer to a baby whose sex is unknown, without offending against the
parents, the baby (later in life), or the language.There is no obvious way of
delimiting the number and kinds of fields that you might want to assign the
text to. The term field is very appliable, in that it points to the fundamental
pragmatic issue: if you do not understand what is going on, you will have little
chance of doing the rest of the analysis. But precisely for that reason, it cannot
very well be a feature of the pre-existing system: ongoing activity by its nature
does not exist except while it is actually going on.
purely behavioural options (outside language) and the choices that are
closer to the lexicogrammar. It is fascinating to follow the path that Halli-
day outlines from the situation of confrontation between the childs and
the parents agenda to the actual, if unfortunate, choice of If you do that
again Ill smack you. It is also clear that the socio-semantic network is set
up based on both a particular sociological condition and a particular soci-
ological theory. Had the sociologist conceived of the situational options in
different ways, the semantic network would have looked different. It
would appear also to be in the spirit of this practice to import for instance
the grid of choices offered on company phones (press one for complaints,
two for bookings .) as a systemic network into the socio-semantic
domain of customer inquiries.23
This broad scope for the theorists free choice may arise also in connec-
tion with categories close to the lexico-grammar. Thus Halliday (1994:
6869) operates with four basic speech act types (seen as (discourse)-
semantic options), divided two by two: offer vs. request, and goods &
services vs. information. These can be matched to lexicogrammatic cate-
gories, in that declaratives and interrogatives are respectively offers and
requests of information, and imperatives are requests for goods and serv-
ices but what about offer of goods and services? Well, for that semantic
choice there is no congruent lexicogrammatical category. This is perfectly
true but again, it is not clear how the semantic category offer of goods
and services is validated, or whether or not the descriptive principles of
Systemic-Functional Linguistics actually entail that it needs any validation.
This is the essential issue in the critique I have presented. There can be
no argument against positing new relevant descriptive categories; there
can be no objection to users applying existing categories in a way that
suits their purposes best; there can be no objection to describing an empir-
ical object in arbitrarily fine detail. But at the end of the day there has to
be a process of evaluating and validating all descriptive categorizations, if
they are to have any claim to a status as part of the descriptive apparatus,
rather than disposable tools that have served their purpose.
23 There is of course nothing wrong in using descriptions of social reality devel-

oped within another discipline as background for understanding linguistic
choices. The problem lies in the duplication or circularity that is the result if
the sociological description is imported wholesale into the semantic descrip-
tion of the linguistic choices themselves. Duplication arises if we describe the
choices first as sociological and then as semantic options; circularity arises if
we then go on to explain the semantic choices as reflecting the (identical) soci-
ological choices.
I believe the grand project for a socially based semantics that Halliday
outlines is unrealizable for reasons of principle, both because of the open-
endedness of the universe of potentially relevant semantic choices and
because of the hypostatization that would be involved in attributing them
all not only to ongoing process but also to the system from which choices
are supposed to have been made. I think this explains why a number of
linguists who have at one point rightly been fascinated with the many
attractive features of the approach, do not in the end align themselves
with the overall endeavour of systemic-functional linguistics: it is not
designed to bring about clarification of issues about which one might be in
doubt it is designed for users, not scientists.
This is also reflected in the practices of the community. Logically
enough, since the issue is not really whether this is the best possible
description, systemic linguists do not concentrate on that point:
Perhaps the most common criticism of systemic practice is that argumenta-
tion is severely lacking, to the point of being non-existent. (McGregor 1997:
ix)
The result is that although much work is done, and much of it is not only
useful but also potentially valuable, there is not much sorting and selec-
tion going on:
since, as we have seen, systemicists place a very high value on applications
and their feedback into the theory, this tendency acts to reinforce the accept-
ance of hypothesis as received wisdom. (Butler 2003: 204)
Bache (2008: 1) points out the consequences of this intellectual conserv-

atism also for core areas of the grammar, in his case tense and aspect.
Systemic-functional linguistics is best understood essentially as a tool-
box for the process of dealing with segments of linguistic reality, with out-
comes whose value is determined by what use they can be put to in con-
crete cases rather than a systematic attempt to validate a particular version
of the theory. As pointed out by Butler (2003: 202), SFL on Hallidays own
admission tends to work by accretion rather than by critical reassessment
of earlier positions. There can be no objection to the emphasis on useful-
ness: give me a useful descriptive tool rather than a useless theory any day
of the week. But if positions are not reworked but just abandoned and
new ones invented based on usefulness for the purpose at hand, this must
be part of the directions for use: do not take systemic-functional linguis-
tics as a linguistic theory. You may use it for your own descriptive pur-
poses, just as you may use it for any other purpose you may have, but you
do so at your own responsibility. You cannot have it both ways
This feature of the system acquires an additional dimension when the

linguistic categories are brought into use in Critical Discourse Analysis.
Widdowson (2004) subjects this alliance to a thoroughgoing critique,
whose central feature is the too great reliance on features of the language
itself and the linguistic concepts, with too little attempt to demonstrate the
validity of the descriptions offered in relation to actual discourse.24
Hallidays analysis must be understood in the light of the general SFL
approach to the relation between cognition and language. Where CL
views language as emerging from general cognitive processes, SFL is
predicated on the opposite directionality, cf. the title of Halliday and Mat-
thiessen (1999), Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-
based Approach to Cognition. If it is assumed that language is the original
site of meaning, it is less odd than it appears from a CL perspective to
assume that the linguistic formulation can be taken as the point of depar-
ture for the analysis of cognitive effects. As in discursive psychology, cf.
above p. 125, this assumption involves a thin view of inner mental con-
tent.25
24 The appeal of Hallidayan grammar that comes from the goal of basing gram-
mar in actual text thus turns out to have the drawback that once the gram-
matical description has been made, it freezes the understanding of text into a
grammatical mold. If there is no distinction between the two, there can be no
dynamic interplay between the grammar and the process of textual under-
standing in context, understood as an online process that mediates between
the general categories and the concrete act of understanding. In a number of
cases, Widdowson shows that grammatical metaphor and agent deletion does
not really hold up as an argument for manipulatory language use. One exam-
ple is newspaper headlines, where there are good reasons why full sentences
instead of nominalizations are not to be expected. Another is the critical anal-
ysis of literature, cf. Widdowson (2000), which he shows to be un-cooperative,
because literature invites readers to carry out a genre-specific language activ-
ity which the critical analyst refuses to perform.In a similar vein, OHalloran
(2003:79) points out how Hallidays assumption that grammar as a description
of the linguistic system can at the same time be a grammar of the text has the
consequence that critical analysts can use Hallidays system to analyse texts
under the assumption that clauses are mentally facsimilated in cognition. If
something is coded as a thing (as a result of nominalization), this reification
is directly copied into cognition. A sentence that does not explicitly encode
agency is copied into a cognitive representation where agency is missing (see
also the discussion in ch.7).
25 Another fairly striking failing analysed by OHalloran (2003) is the absence of
a consideration of the role of the reader: whether the text spreads a political
bias or not depends on the activities of the reader as much as on the text. As
Robert de Beaugrandes riposte to Widdowsons critique (On use-

fulness and validity in the theory and practice of linguistics, de Beau-
grande 1998) while arguing against a number of distinct claims by Wid-
dowson, does not really address the validity issue, except at the end where
he says that a successful application can very well be one reliable indica-
tor of the validity of a theory. One can agree that there is a connection
between appli(c)ability and validity, in the sense that a theory that one
cannot meaningfully apply to an object is also disqualified from giving a
valid description but being a necessary condition is different from being
a sufficient condition. By leaving the argument at this stage, de Beau-
grande effectively concedes the point.
Each separate piece of systemic-functional analysis therefore stands or
falls by its own merits. The most inspiring work done within systemic-func-
tional linguistics, it seems to me, is found in analyses of areas that are
inherently bounded by the nature of the particular topic selected. In such
cases, the looseness of the framework matters relatively little, and the
openness and the nuanced attention to the whole field of social and psy-
chological factors involved can come into its own. Thus, for instance, the
territory of the classic work on cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976) is
defined by a fairly specific range of phenomena and a clearcut substance
area: it is placed at one of the crucial interfaces between the structured
area of the sentence and the less structured area of textual properties, and
has given rise to a rich subsequent development of the area. Similarly,
Halliday (1967) broke new ground by exploring the interface between
grammar and intonation, cf. Bache & Kvistgaard Jakobsen (1980); Mat-
thiesen, collaborating with American functionalists, contributed to a the-
ory of intra-sentential rhetorical acts, etc. In relation to the user perspec-
OHalloran points out, if you read for gist rather than immerse yourself in the
text, you are not likely to be mentally molded by the text. Rather than stamp
a precise reading into the minds of unsuspecting readers, news texts are sub-
ject to experiential meaning construction which means that text-based ideol-
ogy does not translate directly into ideological mystification to the extent
presupposed by the alliance between SFL and CDA.To some extent, the prob-
lem is the same one that has been approached from a number of perspectives
above: the assumption that the text world reflects categories of a large seman-
tic system, which makes it superfluous to reserve a role for interaction with the
extralinguistic world. Since the actual reader is part of the world-text interac-
tion, it is taken for granted that he can be subsumed under the description that
characterizes the text as meaning potential. The world, in a sense, is treated as
a feature of the text.
tive, it can be mentioned that at the University of Southern Denmark

there is an education in organizational communication based on Halliday-
inspired principles: in this relatively bounded domain of options, the open-
ended, practice-inspired analytic practice has proved very successful.
In conclusion, although Systemic-Functional Linguistics has champi-
oned a social approach to meaning, it has not provided an overall theory
of social semantics as such, or a distinctive central conception of the field.
What it has done is to put social semantics on the agenda in its user-
friendly way, and given rise to examination of a number of interesting
disparate pieces of the overall puzzle.
7. Socially based theories of meaning: overview and issues
The historical shift associated with the late Wittgenstein combined the fall
of positivism and the rise of interaction as the home ground of meaning.
In spite of the lack of a unified umbrella (soc-sci) for the social sciences,
the idea that social processes, some more powerful than others, are the
driving forces of meaning construction is widely shared within fields
including literature, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and political
science. The approaches discussed in this chapter are just a small selection
of those that directly bear on meaning.
The unity-in-diversity is reflected in criss-crossing links between these
approaches. The role of social determination and power, and the critical
attitude to it are common ground. Hallliday is explicitly committed to lin-
guistics being used as an ideologically committed form of social action (cf.
Halliday 1985: 2, as quoted in Butler 2003: 158), and the most influential
work in SFL-inspired social semantics is probably Faircloughs school of
Critical Discourse Analysis which also uses Foucault-inspired concepts.
Discursive psychology looks for the same kind of power-driven mecha-
nisms as Foucault and also reflects the hermeneutics of suspicion. Both
discursive psychology and Halliday adopt a minimalist approach to cogni-
tive content: Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) links up language in the
social domain directly with neuroscience, thus cutting out mental cogni-
tion as an unnecessary middle man, cf. Butler (2003: 158). All in all, the
foundational importance of social processes, viewed in a critical perspec-
tive, and the focus on understanding conceptual content as more or less
derivative of the social processes, makes this broad position a clear alter-
native to an emerging social cognitive position.
In the chapter I have tried to make clear both where I think there is
something in each of these approaches that a social cognitive linguistics
needs to address, and also why I think their account of it is not definitive.
The points of interest have to do with the social life of meaning above
individual level the traffic, as well as the traffic jams of meaning, to
broaden the metaphor I used in the introduction (p. 6). Of these, I take up
later two elements from Bourdieu: the idea that cognitive constructs enter
into the economic sphere as symbolic capital, and the notion of habitus
as embodiment imposed from outside. From Foucault I take up the con-
cept of a discourse understood as a collection of utterances that exerts
pressure on subsequent contributions, defining what it is (im)possible to
say. From Derrida I take up the idea that there is a powerful internal
dynamics to processes of meaning construction in society, which cannot be
grasped from the outside. From discursive psychology I take up the power
of specific language games such as the blaming game to get people to
adopt conceptual constructions on the fly, as dictated by the internal logic
of the game, rather than their own mental content, and finally Systemic-
Functional Linguistics offers an approach to language as a vast tool-box
for user-friendly meaning construction.
The reason why these approaches are not definitive have to do with
two things. The first is the part of the picture that they ignore (or actively
suppress), which in most cases includes the human mind. The second is the
vagueness in the understanding of the nature of the all-important social
process. The two are related in that the absence of a clear role for the mind
also makes it unclear how to understand the role of mental constructs in
the social process.
For the project of an integrated social cognitive account, this raises a
pervasive question of clarification in cases where what appears to be the
same issue can be addressed both as a social and cognitive phenomenon.
Thus where Fairclough (p. 120 above) speaks of the Cartesian discourse,
Lakoff and Johnson speak of the Cartesian metaphoric model (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999: 409). From a Foucauldian perspective, Lakoffs strict father
model would be an instance of the discourse of governmentality, cf.
Foucault (1975), etc. There is also an affinity between the variationist
dimension of the emerging socio-cognitive position and the Foucauldian
concept of dispersion: the fact that it is not one well-defined conceptual
framework that constitutes a discourse but a fluid and moving constella-
tion of related positions in mutual interaction reflects the same insight.
We are left with a question with a chicken-and-egg whiff about it: what is
the relation between conceptual models and discursive processes? In
order to address this issue, it is necessary to provide an account of how
mental and social facts interact. This is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive
synthesis: social reality as the context of cognition
1. Introduction
The approaches discussed in the previous chapter left us with an unre-

solved problem: how can we get a picture of social facts that can form the
basis of an integrated account of social and mental facts?
The revolt against objectivity left the field open to relativity instead,
offering no account of how causal factors in the social domain interact
with the rest of the world. But we have to take social facts seriously for the
same reason that we have to take physical facts seriously: we could get
hurt if we ignore them. Instead of the ubiquitous but intangible miasma of
social determination, we need to get at the hard facts.
One key difficulty is that the classic distinction between subjective
and objective is insufficient to get at hard facts in the social domain. It is
necessary to disentangle the question of what the intrinsic features of
social reality are (cf. Searle 1995) from a reductive understanding of
objectivity. This is the topic of section 2. I begin with the Platonic and
positivist positions and argue that we can avoid both objectivist and rela-
tivist reductionism if we understand social reality as having a specific kind
of complexity. The rest of the chapter tries to describe what that intrinsic
complexity consists in, ending up with an answer to the question raised in
the beginning: how does social reality tie in with the mind?
In section 3, I invoke the process of niche construction as a mecha-
nism for anchoring social facts in the rest of the world. Niche construction
is a special twist of the evolutionary scenario described in ch. 2. It does two
essential things: it shows how nature and nurture become conflated in a
way that can be precisely described; and it shows how the community can
become a causal factor in its own right.
From the biological time scale, section 4 moves on to the sociocultural
time scale. Here, evolutionary dynamics takes the form of the invisible
hand that operates over the heads of individual members of the commu-
nity. A separate section is devoted to the key area of evolutionary causal-
ity that establishes functional relations between individual action and the
community (section 5). In section 6, I present a theory of the interplay
between social and cognitive dimensions of language based on the
Social facts 139
premises established in previous sections. In section 7, I conclude by dem-

onstrating what this entails for language as an object of description in an
integrated theory of the social and cognitive properties of language.
This chapter focuses on social facts rather than the social process. I
return to the flow dimension in ch 5.
2. Social facts: objective and subjective, intrinsic

and observer-relative properties
What kinds of things are social facts?

The social constructionism debate has raised this question forcefully in
the last generation, but the problematic status of social facts is not new.
From the days of Plato, the social domain has generally been viewed as
antithetical to the whole idea of looking for facts, because of the associa-
tion between surface appearances and social phenomena on the one hand
and deep underlying ideas and the mental domain on the other.
A distinction is necessary here between Plato and the Platonic tradi-
tion. Plato himself was deeply concerned with the social domain; the title
of his main work was The Republic, a projected social construction in the
sense proposed in ch. 7.1 True reality had to be located at an underlying
level only because the distinction between appearance and reality was too
easily blurred in the social process. The problem was the sophists, not
social reality as such. That problem is alive and well, and on that point the
present work is entirely on Platos side. However, in the tradition of the
humanities, the Platonic pattern of thinking came to be associated with a
principle that located reality in eternal factors that were in principle invis-
ible. Actual events were thereby demoted to derived and secondary status.
It is this pattern of thinking that is designated with the phrase the Platonic
tradition in this book.
Until recently, the Platonic tradition has dominated western thought.
As a consequence, there is something oxymoronic about the phrase social
reality because the social sphere has been understood as the domain of
opinion and prejudice. And the reversal that created social construction-
ism, while proclaiming a new winner of the argument, essentially pre-
served the dilemma: you might say that radical social constructionism
confirms the worst suspicions about the social domain in the Platonic tra-
1 I am indebted to Hans Fink for pointing this out to me.

140 Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis
dition. The search for hard facts clearly needs to look elsewhere; and there
are a number of useful points of departure in the tradition.
Like mental facts, social facts crept out of the shadow of supposedly
objective facts in a very gradual process, whose effective starting point
was somewhere in the Enlightenment. Until that point the official assump-
tion had been that the social order had no existence of its own, but was a
reflection of the divine order (and disaffection with it was therefore a
Satanic revolt). Instead, it was gradually realized that human beings were
to some extent responsible for making their own history. The processes
that culminated in the French Revolution put social processes on the map
as something that required attention in its own right.
This development took place in many arenas simultaneously. From
being viewed as divine, the social order came to be viewed in terms of a
contract (cf. Rousseau and Burke) still binding, but now an agreement
among human beings in a social relationship. Hume put on the agenda the
more radical issue of whether our patterns of thinking were merely the
result of what was socially accepted. But perhaps most significantly, the
privilege of being the invisible hand operating behind the scenes while
engendering events beneficial to everybody, was transferred from Divine
Providence to economic, market-based mechanisms (more on this in sec-
tion 4 below).
The idea of a general science of social reality was proposed by Auguste
Comte, the founder of positivism, in a version that explicitly aimed to
throw out the old idealistic tradition and begin with solid scientific facts.
This pattern of thinking continued with Durkheim, who was the founding
father of sociology, in the sense of being the first to give substance to the
new discipline. He investigated a number of social issues based on the
conviction that social facts are just as objective as physical facts. In this, he
was right in one sense: if anything is a fact, in the intrinsic sense (cf. p. 142),
it is objective in the sense that it does not matter what an observer may
think about it. We return to this issue in ch. 7, p. 310.2
2 Durkheims insistence on objectivity is also due to two strategic factors, which

are recognizable from linguistics and from cognitive science: first of all, in
order to acquire respectability, a new discipline needs to look as much like
established and prestigious disciplines as possible (for the same reason that
the first cars looked like horse-drawn carriages). Physics, dealing with solid
material fact, is the most prestigious contender. Secondly, a new discipline
needs to carve out a domain of its own, with facts that belong specifically to its
own turf otherwise it will not be able to get to the stage of becoming a going
concern.
Social facts 141
Durkheim makes two points that are central also from a linguistic per-
spective. One is about the link between covert mind-internal and overt
mind-external facts; the other concerns the nature of autonomy. First, one
should use overt facts to get at covert facts about social reality. Durkhe-
ims position is positivist in resting on a belief in objective fact, but is in no
way reductionist or physicalist. He views moral, normative ties as the basic
fabric of society; but since norms as such are not directly accessible, for
methodological reasons the scientist has to look for external manifesta-
tions (such as the law, cf. Durkheim 1893: 28). In studying whether life is
felt to be (normatively) good, getting at quality-of-life directly may be
impossible, but we can study it indirectly via the prevalence of suicide
(1893: 226f) and use it to get at the less accessible issue, the felt experience
of the quality of life. Social facts thus include a subjective as well as an
objective dimension. Secondly, the kind of autonomy proposed by Durk-
heim(1898) for social facts is not absolute but partial.3 Partial autonomy
applies also to mental facts: Durkheim argues that although mental life is
grounded in cellular mechanisms, mental representations are not reduci-
ble to facts about cells.
Some of the issues that Durkheim took up have remained striking
examples of the causal power of social facts. The study of suicide (Durk-
heim 1897) is illustrative also from the point of view of the social turn of
cognitive linguistics. Suicide clearly involves subjective experience: unless
you conceive of your life as not worth living, suicide is not a relevant
option. Durkheims point was that this apparently most private and sub-
jective of all issues could be systematically related to features of the large-
scale social order. Coining the concept of anomie for a societal condition
in which established norms and patterns of behaviour are breaking down,
he suggested that this kind of social condition had direct causal impact on
the suicide rate. What manifests itself as a subjective sense of having
reached the end of the road is therefore linked up with causal factors in
3 Although socially entrenched representations (such as religious beliefs) are

anchored in facts about the way in which societies are built up, they are not
reducible to statistical facts about social structure. I think Durkheims point is
as valid today as it was then (cf. Harder 1999 for an analysis of partial auton-
omy in relation to language). The reason it has become submerged in the dis-
cussion is that the hedge partial tends to be forgotten when the identity of a
given field of inquiry has to be asserted. The need to put a scientifically respect-
able sociology on the map made Durkheims position appear more hard-line
objectivist than it was. Other disciplines, of course, have pursued similar strate-
gies, with or without hedges.
the social domain. In modern times, the issue of suicide in indigenous

communities that are losing their cultural identity has made this relation-
ship topical again, cf. Chandler et al. (2003).
Durkheims views on the relation between subjective and objective
facts are determined by his basic assumptions about the nature of science,
which included an insistence on quasi-physical status for social laws. This
strategic choice represents one extreme in the social science landscape
that CL is moving into, where the other extreme is radical social construc-
tionism. These two otherwise antithetical views of social science agree on
one thing: you cannot trust subjective mental representations. Although
social and subjective facts are linked, the nature of the link therefore
remains unresolved.
The distinction between subjective and objective is often confused
with another important distinction, which also concerns the issue of solid
vs. intangible facts: the distinction between intrinsic properties and
observer-relative properties (cf. Searle 1995). In the case of physical
objects, the two distinctions coincide: the moon has certain (objective)
properties which do not depend on me and other (subjective) properties
which it only gets because I observe it (for instance, triggering a romantic
state of mind in me). But in the case of facts about human beings, they do
not coincide: being miserable is a subjective property, but it is an intrinsic
property of the person who is in that state you can be miserable without
requiring the presence of an observer.
One mistake is easy to make in applying the distinction: it may appear
that by saying a property is intrinsic I am claiming that it is necessarily
inviolate to observer interference and that is not the case. Although
being miserable is intrinsic to me at a given point, the feeling may very
well be strongly influenced by the presence of observers and their stance
to me (whether they alleviate the feeling or make it worse!). The point is
that both a mental fact such as being miserable and a social fact such as
the state of welfare institutions in Denmark are real constituents of the
world, and therefore they have real, intrinsic properties, which are distinct
from the properties that depend on what observers think or do.
Observer-relative properties include those expressed by human cate-
gorization. For physical objects, once again, it is easy to tell categorizations
from intrinsic properties: they can be categorized in many ways (in princi-
ple, infinitely many), without implications for their intrinsic nature (thus
Plutos intrinsic properties are unaffected by the fact that it has been
demoted from its status as a planet).
Mental and social facts can also be categorized in different ways but
in the case of social and mental facts, any actual act of categorization is
Social facts 143
likely to impinge on the object categorized. If a religious person catego-

rizes his mental state as sinful, or if a politicians conduct is categorized as
reprehensible, it may have consequences for the mental state and for the
politicians social status and career. Because mental and social facts are
liable to be influenced by the way we categorize them, we need to be extra
careful in making the distinction. The alternative would be to give up the
distinction between the object and the categorization. But if we do that,
we can no longer claim that categorization influences the object or
rather, the claim would become circular. Only if I can maintain an analytic
distinction between social object X (e. g., the social importance of reli-
gion) and my own categorization of social object X (what I think of the
importance of religion) does it make sense to claim that one influences
the other.
This is a crucial point for understanding the relation between solidity
and variability in social facts, and thus for the whole point of the book. At
any given time, there is a social reality out there with certain intrinsic
properties. As part of that social reality there is a multiplicity of observer
positions, all with their idiosyncratic features. These are just as real as
other aspects of reality but they may (1) change in ways that are difficult
to predict and (2) cause changes in the rest of social reality in similarly
unpredictable ways.
These two points are important for understanding exactly where radi-
cal social constructionism goes wrong. First, the fact that the observers
stance to social reality is part of and causally relevant to social reality does
not mean that it is the same thing as the whole of social reality. Secondly,
changeability is different from unreality: in these parts, the weather may
change very quickly but the fact that it may start pouring down in a
minute does not mean that the sunny spell is an illusion.
The radical social constructionist mistake is to say that because there
are several legitimate perspectives on an object, you can say anything you
like about the object. This is wrong on two counts: first of all, you may
categorize the object wrongly even from your own perspective; secondly,
there may be properties that are relevant for you which you cannot see
from the perspective you have adopted.
In the context of this book, the distinction between intrinsic and
observer-relative properties can be applied to the different approaches to
language and mind. Linguists can freely choose to adopt a particular
observer position, a vantage point from which to view linguistic facts. That
vantage point will determine what they see when they observe language,
just as your vantage point will determine whether you see the tail or the
trunk of an elephant. An essential part of the synthesis I propose is to take
on board the moderate social constructionist insight that part of the total
reality of a social condition depends on the way people view it; that posi-
tion will be elaborated in the rest of the chapter and more fully in ch. 7.
What more radical social constructionists overlook is that since you can-
not see everything from a single perspective, it follows that there exist
things which happen to be out of sight. As long as you stay down in the
undergrowth, everything is observer relative and partial, but there is one
thing which is not subject to observer relativity, namely everything (cf.
Fink 1988: 152); the fact that no one can see it from her own perspective
does not prove that it does not exist.
On the basis of this understanding, we can now be more precise about
the relation between the three central positions in the discussion about
language and meaning: objectivism, cognitivism and social construction-
ism. They are best understood in terms of different observer positions.
Inevitably, however, each of them is imbued with some spillover from the
observer position that colours its views on intrinsic properties. They have
two shared and one distinguishing attitude to cognition, objective reality
and social process. Each regards one domain as basic and the two others
as either intangible or derivative. Objectivism takes observer-independ-
ent physical reality as its focal object and regards social practice and men-
tal representations as flaky and unreliable as sources of distortion. Cog-
nitivism focuses on individual mental representations and regards
objectivity as a mirage and social processes as generated by cognition.
Social constructionism regards social activity as basic and takes it to be
determinative of both cognitive representations and (what is mistakenly
taken to be) objective facts.
Each thus shares a minus with one of the others. Thus cognitivism
agrees with social constructionism in rejecting objectivity.4 Objectivism
agrees with social constructionism in seeing mental representations as
epiphenomenal. Objectivism and cognitivism, finally, both see social proc-
esses as derivative in relation to the nature of language and meaning.
To the extent these views reflect the stance that is adopted, they are
neither right nor wrong, just a matter of choice. But it follows from the
priority of intrinsic properties as asserted above that the matter does not
end there. There are inherent relations between physical, cognitive and
social facts that an adequate description has to capture, whatever the pre-
4 Cf. Janicki (2008), who makes a point of the rejection of essentialism in CL

and (rightly!) gets a raised editorial eyebrow in the introduction of the volume
for leaving meanings undefined (=floating), cf. Kristiansen and Dirven (2008:
12).
Social facts 145
ferred vantage point is. Therefore a chosen observer position may be more
or less adequate, and may miss out on more or less of the intrinsic nature
of the object. In order to address that issue, one must have a picture of
what the whole rounded object of description is like. This is why it is nec-
essary to try to establish an overall view in order to correct warring half-
truths without inevitably making complementary mistakes, and that is my
excuse for offering what may appear to be a somewhat overextended
framework. The baseline position for that framework is the following:
I assume (cf. also Harder 1996), along with most of contemporary sci-
ence, that there is a hierarchical relation between different types of facts,
such that some types of fact presuppose others, and not vice versa.
Physical facts are ontologically basic. If there were no physical particles in
fields of force, there would not be anything else either (cf. also Searle
1995). But particles in fields of force enter into more complex levels of
organization. When higher levels are superimposed upon simpler levels,
new properties emerge which cannot be described in terms of objects at
the simpler levels. That is why reductionism is wrong (cf. Kppe 1990).
Attempts to describe language with reference to only physical objects
would miss almost everything of what there is to say about language,
because language only arises at higher levels of organization. Physics is
generally taken to be the most successful scientific discipline, and quan-
tum mechanics the most successful theory. Part of the reason is that it
deals with the most basic constituents of the universe and leaves the hair-
ier facts to others.
A major step upwards in the hierarchy is when physical objects enter
into the complex set of relationships that characterize the biological
world. Being a biological entity confers properties that cannot be pre-
dicted from physical components alone. These have to do with the ongo-
ing process of life. Biological properties are part of the physical world and
biological entities are also physical entities, but the difference is that bio-
logical properties exist only as long as they are alive when an organism
dies, physical mechanisms are again alone in the arena.
Within the biological world there are simpler and more complex life
forms. For social animals including ants and human beings, the group is
the most crucial part of the environment and thus adaptation to the group
is crucial for survival. The two examples illustrate that there is no one-to-
one link between sophisticated social organization and sophisticated cog-
nitive powers; adaptation to group life does not necessarily require men-
tal mediation.
Evolutionary biology is usually viewed as the second-most successful
science. Its domain is defined in terms of the mechanisms that shape the
progression of the flow of life from first beginning to present-day human

life.
At still higher levels of hierarchical organization we find the sociocog-
nitive universe in which human language operates. This is where it is less
easy to nominate universally acclaimed success stories and where this
book belongs. In accordance with the general logic of this levels-based
ontology, biological facts presuppose physical facts, and social facts pre-
suppose biological facts. But when we get to the level of human societies
things get less easy to disentangle. The next section shows why this is.
In suggesting what hard facts need to be integrated into the theory, I
begin with the level of evolutionary biology. The causal pattern I am get-
ting at here works in a time scale that antedates and is inaccessible to
individual human cognition, and forms the presupposed background for
phenomena that work in a more humanly accessible time scale.
3. Niche construction
The significance of niche construction for understanding the causal power

of social facts can perhaps best be appreciated in relation to the basic old
chestnut: the nature-nurture discussion. Is the source of explanation in the
nature of the individual, or in impact from the environment? Social con-
structionism and Chomskyan innatism are sophisticated modern develop-
ments of the nurture and nature-oriented positions (respectively). The
issue goes back much further than Darwin, but evolutionary biology is the
generally recognized context of the scientific approach to the question.
Genetic factors, including mutations, are causal agents inside the organ-
ism, while adaptive change is a mechanism anchored in the environment.
Some of the intricacies of the argument in concrete biological cases have
been made accessible to the public by Stephen J. Gould (e. g., The Pandas
Thumb, Gould 1980).
Niche construction comes in as the most radical example of why the
question nature or nurture? sometimes has no meaningful answer.
Strictly speaking, it never has a fully adequate answer, because the influ-
ence of the environment is always to some extent mediated by the genetic
properties of the organism. When niche construction is at work, however,
any attempt to answer the question will be wrong.
The concept of niche is a familiar metaphor in biology. It denotes an
environment that offers a specific set of affordances (cf. Gibson 1979)
that certain organisms are adapted to. For example, cacti have developed
the ability to conserve water in a dry environment, which gives them a fit-
Niche construction 147
ness edge in deserts and the desert therefore constitutes their niche. In
the standard case, a niche is thus a condition provided by the environ-
ment, into which species may find their way. The two are matched if the
niches have the right affordances for the species. Part of the dynamics of
evolution consists in mutations that create beings with coping skills that
fit into hitherto unoccupied niches as when life conquered dry land by
means of hard egg shells.
The simplest, classic relationship is one in which it is just a question of
competitive survival of organisms in a given environment (including the
social environment). This the scenario presupposed by the brute survival
of the fittest social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. However, evolution-
ary thinking about individual and social processes has passed through suc-
cessive stages of sophistication since then. Sociobiology (cf. Wilson 1975)
has shown how altruism could drive evolution by enabling co-operative
behaviour that increases overall fitness. Also, relations between niches
and organisms may change. Cultural traits have been shown to impact the
gene pool (Laland et al. 1999, citing Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza 1989), as
when domestication of cattle led to the spread of lactose tolerance in the
population (since among cattle-keepers those who could digest milk had
better chances of survival).
Niche construction is a recent extra level in this increasingly subtle
understanding of evolutionary mechanisms (cf. Odling-Smee, Laland and
Feldman 2003).The central idea is that there are processes of linked feed-
back going both ways: the species changes its environment in certain ways;
the environmental changes influence the selection processes in the spe-
cies. As a result of that altered selection, in the next round the population
has a different impact on its environment than before, thus shaping the
environment to which it is concurrently adapting. Deacon (1997) illus-
trated this mechanism with the case of the beaver. Over the years, beavers
have adapted to living in an environment with ponds (cf. their flat tails, for
instance). Simultaneously, however, they have developed a behavioural
repertoire that includes building dams thus creating ponds. Beavers are
thus adapted to environments with dams built by beavers. This is where
the nature-nurture dichotomy becomes entirely inapplicable. If you ask
whether the explanation for the beavers lifestyle is in the beavers nature
or in influence from the environment, there is no sensible answer.
Niche construction has been suggested by Deacon (1997, 2003a, 2003b)
as a scenario for the process that gave rise to language, and the discussion
in the following is based on his views. The key idea is that human beings
have been selected so as to do well in a niche that includes language pro-
duced by human beings.
The niche that is thus constructed is the speech community. Introduc-

ing the speech community as a factor in evolution changes the founda-
tions of the discussion between innatist and usage-based linguistics.5 In
the evolutionary scenario suggested by Deacon, the process that created
language started out with a change in mutual understanding in the com-
munity. Among pre-linguistic factors, Tomasello (2008) suggests that
intentional gesturing as found in non-human apes was probably a crucial
factor in the evolutionary process: while ape vocalisations are directly tied
to emotional states, gestures depend on monitoring the attentional states
of the addressee and thus create a relation between individuals that goes
beyond direct causal impact. For the development of human communica-
tion, the decisive extra step is when enhanced communicative ability starts
to provide a selective advantage for a hominid community. Once there
was enough of a selective advantage to give enhanced communicative
powers a critical edge, all changes which contributed to this critical edge
were positively selected for and they in turn changed the nature of the
community to which subsequent adaptation would take place6 a case of
100 % nature and 100 % nurture, as expressed by Deacon.
In addition to the general logic of niche construction, Deacon (cf. Dea-
con 2003a) makes a suggestion that turns the question of genetic change
5 One of the innateness issues is the question of continuity or discontinuity

between human and animal communication. The Chomskyan innateness
assumption goes naturally with an assumption of total discontinuity. In Chom-
skys classic view language arose by a genetic mutation serving as the magic
bullet that provided the African Eve with the language faculty, in the same
way that the first proto-reptile one day laid a hard-shelled egg. Any assump-
tion that there was a gradual evolution towards language, in contrast, would
suggest that language had functional properties built into it, thus providing a
rationale for explaining structure by means of function. Chomskys dislike of
evolutionary biology fits naturally into this picture.
6 This kind of dynamics is unique in being able to account for why a series of
physically unrelated changes could be part of the developmental pattern that
ensued: greater cortical control over the organs of speech, lowered larynx,
bipedalism etc. These changes are not credible as disparate constituents of a
genetic magic bullet, but they could all plausibly arise as standard mutational
accidents along the way. They would thus spread across the population because
they enabled better communication, driving an evolution towards ever greater
linguistic powers. If this is correct, we see again how the niche hypothesis
supersedes discussions about nature vs. nurture. It no longer makes sense to
ask how much is due to the genes inside the communicative hominid, and how
much is due to the external environment including the fellow communicators.
for language on its head. Genetic predispositions come and go in animal

populations, and loss may be as significant as gain. A crucial part of the
dynamics is the role of selection pressure in promoting the maintenance
of certain properties. When that selection pressure decreases for one rea-
son or another, tolerance of deviation increases. As a result, the genes may
take a random walk, as the phrase is, and may ultimately get lost alto-
gether. One type of process where decreasing selection pressure is central
is domestication.
Domestication means that an animal, for instance the dog, no longer
has to struggle with an environment that is uncompromisingly given;
instead it lives in an environment that has been modified so as to offer
better affordances. There may be food sources available that do not come
naturally, and there may be protection against predation. This means that
specimens that would previously have been incapable of fending for
themselves may now live to produce offspring. The ensuing proliferation
of genetic diversity, partly due to random walk and partly to subsequent
controlled breeding, is exemplified by comparing the morphological
diversity of domestic dogs with that of wolves, their genetic ancestors.
Pekinese or Chihuahua dogs would not stand much of a chance out there
in the wolf niche, but it does not matter in a human environment where
survival and reproductive success is determined by other factors.
The process whereby the speech community became a more and more
salient environmental factor for emerging humans has some of the fea-
tures of this process, even though there was no master species involved.
Rather than surviving by direct interaction with the physical environment,
hominid individuals (we may suppose) increasingly survived and pros-
pered by the success of the social group in creating conditions for group
survival. Good communicators, we may suppose, contributing to the suc-
cess of the group, were valued members of the community. Domestication
would then take place to the extent that the niche itself (= the speech
community) grew in importance as a factor for reproductive success. The
brute environment would then gradually lessen in causal relevance, while
the causal weight of the human environment would gradually increase in
weight. With Deacons phrase, humans may have become a self-domesti-
cated species. We created domestic humans along with domestic dogs.
Deacon suggests that as chances of reproduction became increasingly
attuned to success within the speech community, the previous system of
vocal responses that were attuned directly to input from the physical envi-
ronment began to diminish in importance. This caused a gradual loss of
calls reflexively triggered by environmental stimuli. Compared to the
inventory of e. g. monkey species, humans have very few environmentally
triggered calls because they became less important as the information

state of the group became more and more important.
When the selection pressure to stay attuned to direct impulses from
the environment decreases, the scope increases for behaviour that is not
genetically determined. Deacons (2003a) illustration example is the
white-backed munia which has been bred in captivity for 300 years, losing
its genetically determined song in the process. While the genetic song is
necessary to attract mates in the wild, in the cage it was the breeder who
selected the mate, so the song genes took a random walk and instead of
having a genetically determined song, the captive munias have become
capable of mimicking sounds that they hear. When the fixed program dis-
appeared from the genes, environmental factors could get an enhanced
role.
There are several morals of this story. One is that rather than a specific
innate genetic addition, one key development may have been that vocali-
zation as a behavioural field became increasingly free from genetic deter-
mination.7 A niche in the form of a community emerged to which indi-
viduals gradually adapted and that involved a gradually smaller degree
of direct dependence on bodily attunement to specific environmental
stimuli.
The rise of symbolic meaning which is the centrepiece of Deacons
theory, cf. The Symbolic Species (Deacon 1997), inherently involves a
redefinition of meaning from a direct relationship with the environment
to a relationship mediated by meaning in the mind. Symbolic meaning is
cognitively different from iconic and indexical meaning in that it requires
a higher-order organization in the brain. One way of describing the transi-
tion to symbolic meaning is that the cognitive higher-order level takes
over and marginalizes the more direct links between signs and sources of
meaning in the environment. Symbolic meanings can persist and be
evoked in the absence of direct links with the environment; adapting to a
world of symbolic meanings therefore goes naturally with loss of adapta-
tion to direct situational-pragmatic stimuli.
This element of detachment is essential in understanding the special
nature of human language. At the beginning of The Symbolic Species,
Deacon points to the absence of primitive languages as a significant fact
about the story of human languages. No other species have anything like
a language in the human sense. Symbolic meaning, and its neurocognitive
7 Other factors would obviously also be required, or munias would have

invented human speech as well.
underpinning in cortical development, is an evolutionarily distinctive

development in human beings.8
This general evolutionary logic is compatible with the key evolution-
ary step proposed by Tomasello. In theory, the capacity for joint attention
could be a genetic achievement based purely on random mutation and
thus an alternative to the Chomskyan language gene as a kind of magic
bullet. However, if we look at the pointing ability, there is experimental
evidence suggesting that the dynamics of domestication may have a role
to play. Pointing requires a degree of attunedness to other minds: in order
to read the extended finger as a message for you, you have to respond to
it as a message from someone with an intention to inform you. The exper-
imental setup involves the task of figuring out where a cache of food is
hidden. The subjects are brought into a room with hiding places, and the
experimenter then points to the one where the food is. In the simple setup,
chimpanzees fail to learn to respond to the pointing, while dogs can do it,
cf. Hare et al. (2002), Byrne (2003). In contrast, wolves (the ancestor spe-
cies) cannot. By analogy, the critical factor appears to be in the domestic
niche rather than in any specific evolutionary addition to the hominid
branch of primates.9
8 One can postulate a fairly direct link between this feature and the rise of syn-
tactic organization, cf. Deacon (2003b), Harder (1996:26869): while calls are
indexically linked to a feature in the situation, symbolic meaning does not
have a direct link with the situation and therefore it needs to be attached to
the situation in order to get a situational function. That job can be done by
indexical (= grounding) expressions which thus form a syntactic link with
purely symbolic (= conceptual) meanings. More generally, the existence of
ungrounded meanings is a prerequisite for the possibility of evoking and com-
bining meanings freely: call-type meaning by definition depends on a situa-
tional stimulus, and any combination would therefore signal a combination of
situational stimuli not a complex combination where the meaning is more
than the sum of its parts. The step from holophrastic languages, as found in
animal communication, to syntactically complex languages, is part of the same
development that enabled the speaker to operate with meanings that are not
directly tied to immediate stimuli.
9 Responding to pointing only makes evolutionary sense if there are individuals
out there who altruistically point out food and other items of interest which
by and large does not occur in the wild (cf. Tomasello 2008: 41). Learning to do
that thus appears to require losing some of the genetically fixed response
mechanisms that may be a matter of life and death in the wild, but are less
critical than the ability to respond to socially provided information in a domes-
tic environment rather than wait for a mutational fluke. However, the point-
The central point for the purposes of this chapter is that niche con-
struction provides a scenario for how a social unit (the speech community)
can be a causal factor in its own right.
Its causal powers become apparent not by isolating it from the indi-
vidual, but by showing the causal interplay between the two factors. Point-
ing at the properties of an individual organism as the source of explana-
tion is insufficient: we can only understand the properties of the individual
by seeing her as a member of a particular kind of social community. Point-
ing at the community as the sole source of explanation is equally insuffi-
cient: there would be no community without individuals with the proper-
ties necessary for becoming members. The evolutionary spiral of niche
construction uniquely demonstrates how the mutual dependence can
arise in a panchronic perspective, avoiding the usual gratuitous assump-
tion of influence-in-both-directions.
This further reinforces the pivotal role of joint attention as described
by Tomasello. Joint attention is the crucial evolutionary novelty because it
brings a special intersubjective relation into being: a joint mental state by
definition cannot be reduced to the sum of mental states in individual
minds. When mum and dad pay joint attention to their child, this complex
mental state is not reducible to the sum of two simple mental states, mum
paying attention and dad paying attention. It follows that we is not reduc-
ible to the sum of two separate individuals, so a new and more powerful
distinction has come into being between individual and collective. Toma-
sello (2008: 6) shows how this provides an underpinning for Searles con-
cept collective intentionality, the building block of social reality. Joint
attention is thus on the one hand a constituent of the individual mind, an
ability that uniquely distinguishes human beings and at the same time it
is a building block of a new kind of community.
In both Tomasellos and Searles perspective this new and irreducible
we is viewed basically as a constituent of the individual mind: Tomasel-
los introductory chapter is entitled focus on infrastructure, and the dia-
gram in Searle (1995: 26) shows two individuals, each with a we inside the
head. Tomasello uses the term ratchet effect (cf. Tomasello, Kruger and
Ratner 1993) that is the result of joint attention allowing individuals to
learn what others know (instead of each having to learn from personal
experience). In understanding the nature of social reality, however, the
complementary external perspective must be emphasized equally. Niche
ing skill of domesticated animals still falls short of the triadic pointing, where
it is the pointers state of mind that is in focus rather than the food.
construction involves an external ratchet effect, since reality is rebuilt

based on the output of previous generations, not by each generation start-
ing from the same baseline. (We know the external ratchet effect under
the name of history).
Thanks to joint attention and the ratchet effect, a human baby is born
into an environment that already contains a human we, which exerts
selection pressure on the individual mind to take its place in the joint
world. Possessing a mind-internal we is an entry condition otherwise
you cannot join the we that is already out there. The ability to become a
well-adapted participant in the existing community, a member of the niche
we, depends on the ability to take part in the emerging speech communi-
ty.10 We may assume that there has been considerable selection pressure
to be good at language acquisition.
In the context of CL, this scenario has consequences for how the role
of bodily grounding must be understood in a human as opposed to a pre-
linguistic community. The speech community presupposes a weakening or
loss of the simplest and most direct form of bodily grounding, the form in
which a vocal response is fully pre-wired and tied to specific environmen-
tal situations. Accounts of embodiment, as we move along the evolution-
ary trajectory of niche construction, will therefore have to be increasingly
mediated by those factors that intervene between situational stimuli and
bodily responses, i. e. the features of the community to which human
beings have become attuned. The causal role of culture as a population-
level phenomenon, and the integration of the biological and the cultural
level of description that cultural evolution gives rise to has been empha-
sized by Richerson and Boyd (2005), who also point out the resistance
against this pattern of thinking that is due to the entrenched division of
10 For the hominid individuals who are born into an emerging speech commu-
nity, the properties of the speech community are a factor outside themselves,
to which they may be more or less well adapted, i. e. their individual bodies
may be more or less adequate in relation to the crucial features of the speech
community. At this initial point, the speech community is not in their minds
but their (embodied) minds are inside the speech community, understood as
the niche in which they will live or die. Language, by implication, is also out-
side the individuals mind at that point the tool of tools (in Deweys terms)
or supreme artefact (cf. A. Clark 1997) that members have to adapt to in
order to thrive, analogous to the ponds and dams that are a feature of the
beavers niche rather than of the individual beaver. The community, saliently
including the language, is part of the human niche, just as dams are part of the
beavers niche.
labour according to which some academic communities believe only in

social determination while others think only in terms of hard facts. The
need to integrate the two sides will have implications for the understand-
ing of grounding, to which we will return in chapters 5 and 7.
4. Individuals, collectives and the invisible hand
With the speech community, we move from the biological to the sociocul-
tural time scale. Only its most basic features can be accounted for in terms
of biological change. Most of the features that play a role in actual speech
communities are due to changes that come on top of biological features
without necessarily demanding further genetic adaptation, i. e. changes in
community practices. Such changes also causally affect individuals in the
community, but they are epigenetic (cf. Sinha as discussed on p. 70) rather
than genetic: they bring about sociocultural adaptation that is superim-
posed on the effects of genetic dispositions. The full consequences of the
biological evolution described in the previous section therefore did not
arise immediately in the primeval speech community. They are the results
of a new round of selection-adaptation dynamics triggered by cultural
learning (cf. the discussion of Tomasello p. 76).11
This brings about a new kind of hard social facts. In the sociocultural
time scale, the mind acquires a special causal role (whereas biological evo-
lution was at work before there were human minds around). At the socio-
cultural level, two types of processes are at work: one where the social
level and the individual mind are mutually attuned, and one type where
they may diverge radically. Both types are ubiquitous and at work all the
time. The main point of this section is to give an account of the causal role
of the second, invisible-hand type of process, where the individual mind
has limited access to what is going on. But it is easier, especially from a CL
point of view, to profile its specific properties if we start with the kind
where there is a mutual relation between the aggregate level and the indi-
vidual mind.
11 Relations between individuals and collectives as we know them from the mod-
ern human scene are the product of both kinds of processes, intertwined in
ways that are hard to disentangle. In this section, however, the attention is on
the kind of causal pattern that involves cultural learning. The only relevance of
genes is to enable the relevant kind of epigenetic adaptation to community
practices.
Individuals, collectives and the invisible hand 155
This kind of collective phenomenon is what Clark (1996) calls joint

action.12 Joint action (1996: 3) is carried out by an ensemble of people
acting in co-ordination with each other, such as waltzing, paddling a
canoe, playing a piano duet or making love. Two properties are central:
such activities cannot be reduced to a combination of individual acts
thus they transcend the flock of birds case that can be decomposed into
the responses of the individual birds: birds do not play flock the way
musicians play a symphony. Secondly, joint actions are composed of two
sets of intentional actions: individual acts of participation (each inten-
tionally playing their separate scores) and the collective act that they par-
ticipate in, i. e. playing a symphony (which is the collective intention of
the orchestra).
This form of complexity is only possible by virtue of the existence of
common ground (Clark 1996: 92110). Joint projects can only succeed if
all participants share an awareness of the whole, without which they could
not know what their own role is in relation to the others. This may appear
to be a tall order, especially if you take the traditional investigative path
that begins with the isolated individual and wonder how to get from there
to collective, joint action. But with the help of the evolutionary account,
we can see why that approach would be inherently wrong. Just as increas-
ingly communicative hominids were born into a community with proper-
ties to which they had gradually become adapted, in the same way it takes
a process of sociocultural adaptation to become a member of an orches-
tra. Speech communities and symphony orchestras are there before the
individual, and have arisen out of a long process of niche construction
which works also in the sociocultural time scale.13 Via this path, the devel-
oping individual grows into different types of subcommunity activities,
from street games to football matches to orchestras to democratic elec-
tions.14
12 Joint action in Clarks sense fits naturally into a theory based on joint atten-
tion, cf. Tomasello (2008: 83).
13 If you start out with an isolated individual, you cannot get him into the
charmed circle of joint activity and that is why normal human development
cannot start with such an isolated individual, cf. the discussion of Sinha p. 72.
Participation in joint activity grows out of the evolutionary gift of attunement
to the community via joint attention, plus the sociocultural gift of cultural
learning.
14 As always, the activity dimension is basic, rather than the product dimension.
The channel of initiation is the experience of taking part, not the completed
artefact (the whole football game or the whole symphony). Participant activ-
Such collective processes are consciously accessible to the individual,

and would not work unless they were: the conceptual representations and
the collective social action go together in participant awareness: if I am a
second violin in a symphony orchestra, in the normal case I represent
myself mentally as playing second violin. In a state of seamless adaptation
there would be complete identity between conceptual models in the indi-
vidual mind and conceptual models as part of the sociocultural niche.
However, we now come to the second type of relation between indi-
vidual and collective facts, where there is no such continuity.15 In the
macro-social domain, this dimension of social reality is captured by the
concept of the invisible hand, so named by Adam Smith in the founda-
tional text of economics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). His canonical
example constitutes the central argument for economic liberalism. At the
individual level we have the entrepreneur who looks out primarily for
himself; he does not see his activity as contributing to a shared aggregate
goal that will either come off or fail. Nevertheless, there is an aggregate
outcome at the level of the economy or market. Just as in the case of
joint activities, the aggregate outcome has properties that go beyond the
sum of its parts; and in this case, the two levels may even have apparently
conflicting properties.
The logic of liberalism illustrates this. In spite of the fact that each
entrepreneur is trying to get his hands on as much of the loot as he can, the
aggregate effect may be that everybody is better off. In the assumed case,
looking out for your own economic interests entails driving down costs
and being as efficient as possible in using resources. If you are better than
your competitors at this, you make more money for yourself. This means
that you become richer than the others but it also means that the others,
ity, which is the individual contribution to joint activity, is learnt through the
experience of being part of the whole. The state of co-ordination is not some-
thing that is guaranteed in advance; it always depends on individual, inten-
tional performance. The basic entity could not very well be a collective inten-
tion, because that would be a rather mysterious entity. But if the pre-existing
social community is understood as a causal factor, individual intentions can be
analysed in a way that makes explicit the inherent link between them and their
presupposed social embedding (Clark 1996: 61).
15 Clark (1996: 22) distinguishes between anticipated and emergent products
of individual activities. Only when the collective outcome is anticipated do we
have joint action; however, individual activities also give rise to aggregate
effects that are not anticipated. This distinction matches the distinction
between the levels of the visible and invisible hand.
if they want to stay in business, have to emulate your efficiency and thus
get better at what they are doing. For your customers, this means that they
get products at lower prices because goods that are produced with fewer
resources can be sold cheaper. Within this foundational fairy tale of eco-
nomic liberalism, what at the individual level is driven by pure self-inter-
est, at the aggregate level works towards the common good16.
The invisible hand does not always bring such beneficial consequences
for everybody. Another foundational story in liberalism is that of the
tragedy of the commons (cf. Hardin 1968). Traditional villages, in addition
to individual plots of land, also had a shared, communal area, where the
poor and landless could graze a cow or two. This was an idyllic feature of
traditional village life which disappeared in the transition from feudal to
capitalist societies, widely bemourned in the literature (cf. Goldsmith, The
Deserted Village). But a discrepancy between causal patterns at the indi-
vidual and the collective level tended to undermine the idyll. The poor
individual peasant would gain something by putting an extra cow on the
commons as long as it survived and gave just a trickle of milk. But above
a certain number of cows, each new cow brings about a decrease in the
aggregate yield because as the cows are nearing starvation level, the
total milk production declines. At the end of the curve, all cows drop dead,
but even if it is in no ones interest to go on till that point, the logic of the
invisible hand tended towards a situation where there were too many
cows for the common good, with overgrazing and low yield as a result.
These examples illustrate that invisible hand effects are hard facts
just as evolutionary causality in general brings about hard facts. In order
to understand the position of the individual in a social context, it is not
sufficient to address what is intuitively accessible (visible) from the indi-
vidual perspective because part of the individuals situation is due to
factors that operate over the individuals head, at the aggregate level.
Invisible hand effects were brought to linguists attention by Keller
1990.17 The individual who chooses to use a certain word rather than
16 Although the invisible hand is older than Darwinian evolutionary theory, in

public consciousness it became more or less subsumed by the social Darwinist
notion of the survival of the fittest (coined by Herbert Spencer). My use of
the term captures the distinction between individual-level facts and popula-
tion-level facts within the social sphere, but does not assume either a social
Darwinist or an economic liberalist ontology.
17 As pointed out by Andersen (2006: 63), the need to distinguish between differ-
ent levels of analysis in understanding change was familiar from Coseriu
another does not intend to change the language. But if enough people
make the same choice such as stop using the German word englisch in
the sense angelic, as happened in the 19th century the word used in that
sense may drop so much in frequency that it is not learnt by the next gen-
eration. At a time when the English became more and more visibly domi-
nant at world level, the possibility of being misunderstood as meaning
English when you really meant angelic was on the increase, and so we
may assume that people increasingly chose the alternative engelhaft, thus
unwittingly driving englisch = angelic out of business, as suggested by
Keller.
Evolutionary causality as manifested by the invisible hand is a key fac-
tor in shaping sociocultural reality. To sum up: a social cognitive linguistics
will have to cover three different objects of description: processes in the
individual mind, collective processes based on individual awareness (the
visible hand, by analogy with the hand of the conductor of the symphony
orchestra), and collective processes operating over the individuals head
(the invisible hand). There are connections between them; but they are
not the same thing.
Although the main point here is the invisible hand as a feature of selec-
tion-adaptation dynamics, its role in relation to cultural phenomena
including language differs crucially from its role in relation to biology and
economics, precisely because of the foundational role of the visible hand
of joint action. Visible-hand phenomena constitute a crucial middle
ground between the individual and the whole population, and the mutual
coordination between the individual and aggregate levels means that soci-
ocultural facts differ from biological facts on precisely this point. In the
area of language change, this is relevant for the disagreement of principle
between Croft (2000; 2006) and Andersen (2006) with respect to the role
of intentions and cultural factors: meaningfulness operates at collective
levels, too, as manifested by the creativity associated with reanalysis and
adoption of new forms. The Danish word for car (bil) arose as a result of
a newspaper competition in 1902. This feat the newspaper has not man-
aged to repeat in spite of several attempts but it shows the potential role
of visible and intentional process at aggregate level.
This means that the analogy between biological and sociocultural evo-
lution is not as a complete as suggested by Croft: in sociocultural contexts
neither the selection criteria nor actual processes are necessarily invisible
([1958] 1974); the new element in Kellers analysis was the clear separation of
the two sets of causal patterns.
and meaningless at the aggregate level. People do not only innovate inten-
tionally but also to some extent propagate innovations intentionally for
instance because they want to do their bit (like returning empty bottles
and batteries), or because they feel they are part of a joint activity (such
as a democratic election) in a Clark-like fashion (Clark 1996). But the
invisible hand is always part of the game at the aggregate level. No one
votes for a hung parliament that cannot govern, and yet it may be the
aggregate result of individual intentional votes. And those who think that
putting forward an attractive conceptualization of the future is enough to
change the world are not likely to have much experience of the process.
Putting a real social construction on its feet is hard work and depends
crucially on finding a path through the Darwinian jungle of macro-social
selection pressures.
The rise of an aggregate level at which the invisible hand can operate
is a historical process. In economics, the process involves the rise of a mar-
ket, where the value of an object can be detached from individual embod-
ied experience. In the field of language, it involves the process whereby
the meanings of linguistic expressions first became detached from con-
crete situated acts. And because of the external ratchet effect, the proc-
ess goes on. With a familiar analogy, the rise of paper money and of writ-
ten communication makes possible a radically increased detachment of
value and meaning from situated joint experience. A paper note and a
text, with the now familiar dual nature, both represent and constitute
social statuses (as value and meaning) and because of their detachment,
they can both survive beyond the moment and also undergo changes due
to the invisible hand. Money may depreciate and words change their
meaning for reasons that have nothing to do with the embodied experi-
ence of local participants.
As a consequence of this form of complexity, we also get types of com-
munication that operate at levels distant from immediate personal experi-
ence (non-basic types of communication in Clarkss term, 1996: 9). Politi-
cal and corporate communication have different ecologies from everyday
conversation. The dimension of detachment from personal experience is
also essential for understanding the social dimension of the sociocognitive
world. It has consequences both for the kind of experience that is availa-
ble in the community and the kinds of talk. Capturing such indirect rela-
tions is the key to understanding the interplay between embodied experi-
ence from below and aggregate social pressures from above; this subject is
taken up in detail in ch. 7.
Socially oriented analysis of language tends to start at the aggregate
end, with written texts for collective audiences, while cognitively oriented
approaches start with meanings that reflect personal embodied experi-

ence. The detachment of aggregate-level communication from basic
human interaction may again raise the spectre of the suspicious ontologi-
cal status that tends to cling to social entities. In conclusion it is worth
stressing, therefore, that invisible-hand processes are extremely respecta-
ble from the point of view of the science police.18 In a free market, prices
are the result of forces of supply and demand that are not intuitively
accessible but their reality is not in doubt. Similar mechanisms are at
work in relation to language, even if they do not manifest themselves in
properties that are as measurable as prices and wages.
5. Functional relations19
The foundation for social cognitive linguistics that I am proposing is at the

same time a functional-cognitive synthesis. Although this reflects my own
take on the subject, I believe that it is an inherently necessary dimension,
rather than an extra issue that is brought in: it is functional relations that
make the cognitive and the social dimension cohere. This relationship is
implicit in the account of the invisible hand given above, but depends on
an understanding of what function is.20
18 Ever since Adam Smith, they have been the centrepiece of economic theory
a discipline that has become increasingly formal and mathematical in the last
generation, to the exclusion of older-style economists that are disparagingly
called verbal. This is not to say that economic theory has a grasp of reality
that is necessarily on a par with its formal precision (a problem also found in
other disciplines). But it means that there is nothing inherently mushy in this
type of intuitively inaccessible facts.
19 I have discussed the issue of functional causation in greater detail elsewhere
(see Harder 1996 and 2003).
20 The point cannot be understood based on the commonsense meaning of the
word function, which can mean a range of different things including utterance
functions such as greeting, discourse functions like repair, grammatical
functions like subject, and social functions like legitimation. Moreover, the
term function is often associated exclusively with intended function (cf. Croft
2000), and functional explanations based on functions as intentions at the
aggregate level would be nave functionalism, rightly criticized by Croft
(1995): like infantile megalomania, nave functionalism assumes that the world
is tailored directly to the speakers needs and intentions. Formalist critiques of
functionalism generally take this version as their adversary, and too often it is
not clear what the alternative is, as pointed out by Tomlin (1997: 165).
Functional relations 161
Function as used in this book is an aggregate-level phenomenon, and

part of the causal structure of evolutionary dynamics (as described in ch.
2, p. 89). As such, it does not depend on individual intentions (cf. Allen,
Bekoff and Lauder 1998, Wright 1973). Functional relations obtain as a
property of the two-stage mechanism of replication and selection, causing
certain elements to persist as part of the whole evolving system. Without
functions, there would be no evolution, only change.
Function is a type of effect (in biology, typically of an organ). It differs
from knee-jerk effects in that it is defined in terms of what this effect
causes in the next round. When you look for the function of a biological
organ (wings, for instance), you look for effects (flying, for instance) that
contribute to the survival and persistence of the animal. Function thus
involves two cause-effect sequences: wings cause powers of flight and
powers of flight cause enhanced reproduction and selection rates. Func-
tion in that sense is part of the way the world works; there is no subjectiv-
ity involved.21
Three features must be present in order for functions to exist.
(1) Functional relations can only exist in entities that survive by repro-
duction (and are thus exposed to selection pressures). These include
organisms as well as human artefacts: a product that goes out of produc-
tion and an animal that becomes extinct do so because the causal chain
does not bring about sufficient (re)production. Inorganic objects, in con-
trast, may persist as individuals, like Mount Everest, but there is no selec-
tion process going on, hence no complex, feedback-driven causal cycle.
Elements of inorganic matter such as molecules therefore cannot have
functions.
(2) Functions also involve a part-whole element: effects have to favour
the survival of a larger whole in order to qualify as functions. Functional
relations are therefore a feature of complex wholes with independently
describable parts. Wings have functions for birds, and artefacts have func-
tions for human beings.
(3) Functional relations are parts of a dynamic panchronic system, not
a synchronic moment in time. They are thus dynamic in two ways: first,
21 In the case of wings, an experimental test would be to release pinioned birds

in the wild, along with birds with intact powers of flight. If the pinioned birds
never managed to breed while their otherwise identical conspecifics did, that
would be evidence that powers of flight are indeed the function of bird wings.
For some species, there might be no difference and that would tell us that
powers of flight had become non-functional for them. Endemic island species
(for instance water rails) occasionally lose powers of flight.
they depend on causal cycles between parts and wholes and across gen-
erations. But they are dynamic also in the sense that the contribution-to-
persistence of an element may change over time. In the case of wings, a
challenge to functional explanation was how an animal ever made it from
no wing to a fully functional wing. On the powers-of-flight hypothesis, half
a wing would make no difference to survival chances (in which case wings
could arise only by evolutionary, mutational chance, rather than func-
tional selection). A suggested answer was that pre-wings might contribute
to heat regulation and only accidentally develop so as to provide powers
of flight in which case their function might subsequently shift.
The same applies to functions in the social domain, such as the buying
power of dollar bills and the meanings of words. The function of dollar
bills is to be exchanged for goods and services, and the function of words
is to convey their meaning. But in the economy, the value of money
changes with shifting market conditions, and in language, the meanings of
words change with shifting conditions of use (as corn came to mean
maize in the US). Functional relations are thus always defined by actual
replication and selection mechanisms, and have variational features (just
as wings may to variable degrees have a heat regulation function on the
side). Functions as hard facts about linguistics expressions depend on the
same panchronic scenario as the function of organs. As pointed out by
Croft (2000: 2324), the selection/replication scenario is at work also when
the language stays the same. A word that remains unchanged does so
because the aggregate invisible hand effect of individual choices repro-
duces it in identical form (just as a money can retain its value only when
invisible-hand effects cause the prices to stay where they are a far from
trivial outcome).
I began this section by saying that functions understood as individual
intended functions are not an adequate foundation for understanding
functions as part of the way the world works. There is a double dissocia-
tion between intended utterance functions and conventional functions of
words: the same situational purpose might be achieved in other ways, and
the same linguistic expressions might also be used to achieve a different
situational purpose. But there is an indirect relationship as well as an
equilibrium condition under which they match up. Individual utterances
are acts of reproduction, which feed into the aggregate process. When the
speaker means something that does not get conveyed, this influences
selection in the next round. A speaker who chooses the word engelhaft
because he intends to avoid the potential misunderstanding of englisch,
contributes his mite to the aggregate processes (like the individual entre-
preneur who brings down her production costs).
Mind in society: causal patterns and the individual 163
When conventional meaning is in a stable equilibrium, the two levels

coincide in a satisficing proportion of cases. The word hello has the actual
as well as conventional effect of conveying a greeting, thus bringing about
an everyday interactive relation of mutual recognition between speaker
and hearer, and that effect is simultaneously the cause that makes people
use it again on other occasions. But functional relations are only part of
the picture; selection implies the existence of other effects than those
which are functional. They are complex, changeable over time and many-
stranded, rather than simple, eternal and unambiguous. 22
Functional explanations have generally been unpopular in the social
sciences in the last generation, for two diametrically opposed reasons. On
the one hand, the spread of social constructionism has discouraged
attempts to constrain the free scope of random social forces; and on the
other side of the spectrum, more direct causation has appeared to be more
scientific, cf. Hull (1988: 354f). But as pointed out by Hull, the fact that
equilibrium-oriented functions and feedback mechanisms are always only
part of what is going on does not prevent them from having a crucial role
to play. If there are functional mechanisms that keep certain practices in
satisficing condition while leaving others to an uncertain fate (such as sci-
ences, systems of government, monetary systems, and linguistic meanings),
we need to know what they are. The fact that function cannot explain eve-
rything is a property it shares with all other interesting theoretical con-
cepts.
6. Mind in society: causal patterns and the individual
We can now return to the question that social constructionist approaches,

as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, could not help us with.
How can mental and social facts be captured in an integrated picture?
22 Functional relations are also emergent in the sense that they emerge from
processes of interaction with the environment and may change with those
processes, as in the case of wings. That does not mean they are emergent in the
sense that they are never really there (cf. Dahl 2004: 2737 on the flip-flop use
of the word emergence to indicate either a generous or a reductionist ontol-
ogy). Once emerged, functional relations are, by the definition above, causally
relevant features of the objects involved. If functional relations break down (if
something happens so that wings no longer enable the animal to fly), the ani-
mal may not be able to persist in its present form.
In previous sections, we have established a skeletal picture of the pre-

cise causal roles that hard (= observer-independent) social facts play for
cognitive processes. The account has two advantages compared with the
ubiquitous social determinism that was found in approaches described in
chapter 3. First of all, the causal impact is not direct knee-jerk determina-
tion that reduces individual cognition to a dependent variable. Secondly,
with more precise mechanisms to refer to, we can hope to mark off the
place of mental, cognitive facts with more precision as well.
Starting from the mental end, it is practical to distinguish between
three aspects of mental facts: internal, representational and (social-)con-
stitutive.
The internal aspect of mental facts is their basic status as a distinctive
part of the real world. Reality includes facts about minds alongside facts
about atoms, bacilli and coal mines. The cognitive revolution unleashed a
flurry of activities whose aim was to chart this scientifically unexplored
domain. Subjectivity and conceptualization are examples of the things
you find when you examine the mind, just as particles and spin are things
you find when you examine atoms. As part of this movement, CL contrib-
uted to the charting of this territory, cf. the overview in ch. 1. The internal
aspect, however, can be pursued quite happily without raising the issue of
relations with the rest of the world23, all the more so since fundamental
aspects of the link continue to defy scientific investigation, cf. the slash
between mind and brain as discussed p. 33. This internal aspect was the
undisputed focus of classic CL.
The representational aspect has been the focus in the philosophical
tradition, casting the mind in the role of a map of the world (at the risk of
forgetting that the mind was also part of the world). From the point of
view of causal relations including selective fitness, maps are useful in nav-
igating the world when you move beyond the territory where the auto-
matic pilot works. Since Popper (1972) it has been taken for granted that
representational powers have survival value because they enable the indi-
vidual to perform mental simulations before putting themselves at risk.
Mental creatures do not have to step in front of a truck to see what hap-
23 This does not entail that the internal aspect of mental phenomena is outside
the world of cause and effect. Brains must have the causal power to generate
what goes on in the mind, and mental phenomena have causal relevance (e. g.)
for learning abilities, cf. p. 204 n. 18. However, I emphasize the role of causality
specifically in relation to social phenomena, because it is necessary to establish
the legitimacy of functional relations as something other than an observer-
relative phenomenon.
pens; they can imagine the result, thus letting their hypotheses die instead
of themselves. For the purposes of CL, the representational aspect has not
been of focal interest, even if only the most dedicated internalists have
denied its existence (cf. Johnson and Lakoff 2002: 24950).
The crucial dimensions in a social cognitive linguistics is the third
aspect of mental properties, their constitutive role in sociocultural facts.
The word constitutive reflects the classic distinction in speech acts theory
(cf. Searle 1969) between regulative rules (which apply to activities that
already exist) and constitutive rules, which apply to forms of activity which
could not exist without them (without rules for contract bridge, you could
not play three no trumps).
Joint attention is the basic linchpin also in this context. It is the signifi-
cance that joint attention gives to other peoples mental states that creates
the fundamental link between the individual mind and the community.
Without the capacity for joint attention, meaning would exist in the indi-
vidual mind only. By bringing the human subject into a triadic relation
with the attended object on the one hand and a fellow subject on the
other, joint attention gives rise to a mental state that at the same time has
a constitutive role for social relationships with fellow subjects. There is a
relationship of increasing complexity from level one to level three: before
there is a mind, there cannot be mental representation; and before you
can mentally represent a national election, you cannot make it part of the
joint world you live in (as pointed out by Searle 1995).
At this third stage, the buildup from the mental end thus makes contact
with the account of social facts as described in terms of joint action in
Clarkes (1996) sense, cf. p. 155 above. Joint action requires that mental
awareness and social activity go together and link up the individual and
the collective level. The link can be described in terms of Searles concept
of status function. Just as an utterance can have the status of being a
promise or a christening, which is not derivable from the purely linguistic
properties, so a man can have the property of being President, which is not
derivable from his personal (embodied) qualities; the same goes for the
function of playing second violin in a symphony orchestra. To give some-
thing a status (function) is to give it a role in the construction of social
reality (the title of Searle 1995).24 This collective assignment gives the
object to which status is assigned some causal properties in the social com-
24 This is related to Clarks account of participant intentions, and Clark (1996:

61) cites Searle as a source for his account; Tomasello 2008, similarly, cites both
Clark and Searle.
munity which have a magical flavour about them, such as the fact that
pieces of paper can buy you a house.
This collectively maintained extra value is crucial for understanding
linguistic meaning in a socio-cognitive picture. There is an important dis-
tinction between saying that meaning would not exist if it did not exist in
the individual mind (which is true) and saying that we can account for all
of the properties of meaning by looking at its properties in an individual
mind (which is false). The classic CL view is that meaning belongs in the
individual mind, and this view is also maintained by some of the pioneers
of the social turn. As discussed above, cf. also ch. 6, pp. 29394 Croft main-
tains that meanings can only be in an individual mind, and words under-
stood as social lineages therefore strictly speaking cannot have mean-
ings. But this reasoning depends on assuming that when we go outside the
individual mind, we have to disregard what is in the individual mind and
that is not the case. The speech community is built out of people with
minds, yet collectives do not have the same properties as the individuals
that make them up. If we see the existence of meaning at collective level
in those terms, the fact that meaning cannot exist without individual minds
is no argument against collective meaning.
I have previously spoken of traffic jams of meaning in cases when a
collection of individual minds formed larger configurations. The consti-
tutive role of mental constructs as part of social structure reflects a
higher level of organization, while the basic idea is the same. A car race
is more structured than a traffic jam, but is similar in that if you take
away all individual cars, nothing remains, while at the same time the
properties of the race do not boil down to properties of individual cars
(or drivers). Similarly, the formation of democratic governments is based
on the ability of citizens to conceive of a government as having execu-
tive power and members of parliament as responsible for legislation, but
uses these mental abilities as input to the formation of a larger structure
that goes beyond what is present in each individual considered on her
own. A democratic government therefore involves a large body of mean-
ing-in-society that is grounded outside as well as inside the individual.
The individual agent is always situated in a field of forces that includes
meaning assigned through social processes and meaning as a constituent
of her own mind.
This applies to language, too. The power of hello to create a greeting is
an observer-independent (and in that sense perfectly objective) fact about
life in the community, just as the fact that red light means stop! or the fact
that the current president of the US is Barack Obama. These just belong
to that subcategory of observer-independent facts that could not exist
without the existence of individuals with powers of mental representa-

tions. If the observer does not agree, he is simply wrong.
One objection to this objective, collective status is the role of variation.
It may be true that there is meaning out there among other people, and
not just in my own mind but all these other people are individuals, too.
And we might bring social constructionist approaches and their floating
signifiers from ch. 3 back in the discussion. Individual minds may assign
different statuses to hello, Obama and red light. Where is this hors-texte,
this collective domain outside individuals engaged in discursive processes,
that I claim contains objective meanings shared by all?
I go into detail with meaning in ch 5 and variation in ch 6. In this chap-
ter the point is to set up the general format for the answer to the question.
In this format, functional relations play a crucial role as links between
individual minds and the social process. The apparent difficulty in getting
out of the individual mind is a question of perspective. If you decide to
look at individuals one at a time, there is nothing left when you have been
through all individuals. If you adopt a panchronic, evolutionary perspec-
tive, however, it is uncontroversial that there are events that occur outside
the individual mind that affect meaning. It is most obvious in a historical
perspective. Changes of meaning due to functional pressures (to take the
englisch case again) do not occur inside the mind of an individual; and it
would make historical linguistics in general very cumbersome if we could
not talk about historical change in the meaning of an expression. But as
discussed above, synchronic states are part of the same panchronic whole:
Obama is President because that is the way he functions in society, and
hello is a greeting for the same reason. The nature of functional relations
as described in the previous section will allow us to do so without ideal-
izing in a Chomskyan way
Examples of status functions such as the US president and the mean-
ing of hello are cases of what I called equilibrium positions (those where
things match up) because there is a widespread consensus that is built
into the way the world works. Mental representations of the form we
take paper money to be a means of payment are an essential part of the
cause for money being what it is, just as taking someone to be president
is essential in order for him to be president. On the other hand, it is also
simply a true description of the way the world actually works: paper
money actually is a means of payment, just as a corkscrew is a means of
opening wine bottles. And presidents are what they are because when
they issue orders, lower executives have to carry them out. This follows
from the causal loop that is characteristic of a functional relationship.
Handing money over the counter has the effect of getting goods in return.
And the effect, in turn, is what causes the persistence of money-making

behaviour as part of our lives (and thus of money). If money loses its
causal powers we will not continue to mentally represent it as money
and that in turn would cause the downfall of the constitutive role as car-
rier of the status assignment. The same goes for meanings of words for
pre-industrial agricultural practices as opposed to words for continuing
practices such as saying hello. This is the rationale for assuming that there
can be equilibrium states, but these have to be maintained by the prac-
tices that sustain them by functional feedback of the kind that can also
keep prices stable (or not).
However, equilibrium cases are not the only kind. Functional relations
have already been described as partial and many-stranded; they operate
over time in a complex causal chain. They are always only a small part of
what is going on. They arise out of the flow of causes and effects only
when stabilizing patterns emerge from the background of random and
criss-crossing events, and that background (unlike the functional rela-
tions) is always there. If the meteor theory is true, dinosaur extinction just
happened and had nothing to do with functional relations and if the
climate becomes warmer, heat conservation equipment such as heavy fur
that used to be functional may turn into an encumbrance and upset the
equilibrium between organism and environment.
Part of the aim of this book, therefore, is to emphasize the need for a
differentiated account of causal factors, focusing on the limited but inter-
esting role of functional relations. Knee-jerk causality, entropy, mutual
see-saw impact, chaos-theoretic trigger effects, etc., are also part of the
way the world works, but the historically variable form of systematicity
that characterizes functional relations is crucial in understanding why nei-
ther Platonic foundationalism nor indeterminacy has the final word.
Since mental status assignment depends on functional relations, there
will be divergences between social causality and mental representations
whenever there is a less than perfect equilibrium. Functional relations
could not be a factor in evolutionary development if they were unchange-
able. I think Searle underestimates this causal element in the foundational
underpinning of status functions; and this is where a jagged edge may
open between mental representations and social reality25. I am first going
to take his example, involving social structure, and then return to word
meanings.
25 This is a development of the discussion in Harder (2003).

Searle (1995) discusses Maos statement that power grows out of the
barrel of a gun, and argues instead that real power comes from status
assignments; those with the guns are usually pretty low down in the social
hierarchy. Searle mentions the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe
as a case in point: people withdrew the status-assignments that supported
communist rule, and so it collapsed. While that account may plausible as a
description of a simple cause-effect chain in 198990, I believe the event
can only be fully understood if we think in terms of the more complex
type of causality that characterizes functional relationships. The role of
physical force, including the use of guns, must be understood in terms of
its function in the social reality of political power.
A textbook feature of being in power is to have monopoly on the use
of force. That is why the presence of warlords and militias in a nation is a
sign of governance problems. In well-functioning states, only the police
and the army use armed force, and only when licensed by the proper
authorities. One of the cases where use of arms is licensed is when indi-
viduals challenge the laws of the land, including the regulations main-
tained by officials of the state which in communist countries included
border patrols, secret police and lots more besides. Once citizens stop
abiding by the regulations imposed by such authorities, power such as that
wielded by communist government behind the iron curtain loses causal
efficacy. In other words, they cease to be power holders: people who have
no influence over what other people do are not in power.
This is where the men with guns may have a crucial functional role and
at the same time be very low in the pecking order. The withdrawal of the
status function of the communist party as the power in the land occurred
partly because the authorities, more specifically Gorbachev, refrained
from activating the men with the guns as opposed to the Chinese author-
ities who at roughly the same time stuck to Maos doctrines in response to
the demonstrations at Tienanmen Square (and who are still in power). A
well-functioning government may in theory persist forever without using
armed force on its citizens, if the collective assignment of status function
is maintained by other causal factors, such as popular support. Maos dic-
tum, therefore, shows the cloven hoof of the dictator. But there has to be
something that keeps the world working causally so as to maintain the
status. Collective function assignments understood as mental content,
which is what in Searles version keeps the system in place, do not operate
on their own, any more than other mental representations. Like other
functional properties, they depend on the way the world works. For the
same reason, green light can only mean go if cars by and large stop on
red. Status assignments depend on actual events; in other words, they are
simultaneously beliefs as well as status assignments. If the belief is under-

lined, so is the status assignment.
Let us now look at situations where the equilibrium is not in place. An
example is the situation that obtained after the 2008 elections in Zimba-
bwe. If we assume with most observers that President Mugabe lost but
refused to abide by the results, what was the social reality immediately
after the election? We may suppose that some citizens represented Mor-
gan Tsvangirai as the new winner and others represented Mugabe (the
hero of the victory over colonial rule) as the only true leader. Which of
them were right? Well, both and neither. At that point, there was no oper-
ational social equilibrium that could be used as a criterion of what the
situation was really like.
When causal structure is uncertain, representations can float around
freely. This also means that there is more scope for simple causal chains
from representation to reality, i. e. direct social determination of the kind
that social constructionists are after. If all the people of Zimbabwe had
represented the situation as a transfer of power, there would have been a
transfer of power. As it turned out, Mugabe continued to wield the actual
power (via his armed men). Some citizens of Zimbabwe might withdraw
the collective status assignment whereby Mugabes government was the
legitimate power in the land, but it would be unwise to forget about the
causal structure of Zimbabwean social reality. Even now that Tsvangirai
has been sworn in as Prime Minister, it remains to be seen how that will
affect the causal structure of government in the country.
That kind of uncertainty has causal consequences both for actual social
processes and for individual participants. The years after the collapse of
communist rule in Russia are an example; we know from Durkheim that
anomie is a stressful and depressing condition, and we may speculate that
the support for Putins exercise of power, also when it involves blatant
violations of civil liberties, which is hard to understand for citizens in well-
entrenched democratic societies, has something to do with this. Lack of
stable status-assignments and lack of a reliable sense of how the world
works go hand in hand in undermining the sense of having a secure foot-
hold in the world.
The situation where representations lack causal anchoring has been
seen as an anomaly. This is fortunately true for national governments. But
if we look at most other domains of social reality, there is less clearcut
causal structure and more freedom for competing representations. Rela-
tions with people you meet in the street have little inherent causal machin-
ery to support them, and accidental mutual (mis)representations may have
free play. Processes of marginalization, which constitute core areas for the
hermeneutics of suspicion, work basically in the same way (although there

is a formal tip of the iceberg when it comes to legal issues such as gay
rights). In general, the kind of well-structured equilibrium cases where
mental representations and causal structure match up neatly, as in the case
of Barack Obama being President of the US, are surrounded on all sides
by vast amounts of much messier relations between mental representa-
tions and social processes. We return to the issue in ch. 8, p. 417 below.
This also goes for word meanings. There are processes going on in dif-
ferent groups all the time that influence understanding of meanings which
generate multifarious variants that never get into a dictionary. My wife
has a few rarely used expressions in her repertoire that are conventionally
understood as carrying a positive load but I know that when she uses
them I have to tread carefully. I doubt that anybody else is party to that
nuance. The point is that variation does not refute the existence of a col-
lective level in fact it occurs on the collective level. The issue of collec-
tive vs. individual meaning is orthogonal to the distinction between con-
sensual and variational dimensions of meaning. Functional relations select
from the variational spectrum and maintain lineages across all relevant
communities and subcommunities; knowing about communal lexicons is
part of participant abilities (cf. Clark 1998).
But if things vary all over the place is it not a more correct description
to focus on the variation between what people mean by words than to set
up a collective level that has to be qualified so heavily that almost nothing
is left of the objective, collective meaning anyway?
The reason why that conclusion would be badly wrong is that linguistic
meanings exist ONLY in collectives (cf. also Wittgensteins argument
against private language). Meanings may form all sorts of complex con-
figurations of variants, but the variants exist as part of a collective-level
pattern. Even in the smallest possible collective group, a word only has a
meaning if it can be used wrongly. If a word meaning does not exist in a
sociocultural niche (however fleeting and emergent), the word does not
exist at all. The individual is simply the wrong unit for understanding lin-
guistic meaning.
This also illustrates another important point. I have emphasized the
importance of causality in order to get behind the mirror cabinet of repre-
sentations and interpretations in radical social constructionism; but this is
not to say that brute causal power overrules all mental factors. The whole
normative, rational, interpretive dimension of mental experience cannot
be reduced either to neuron activation or to social pressures, and remains
a constitutive dimension also after it is realized that mental phenomena
are bound up with causality in various ways.
This account of the constitutive, but non-exhaustive role of mental

representations in social reality has a methodological consequence:
because mental representations have a constitutive role in the wider
socio-functional picture of reality, we can get at part of social reality by
virtue of (and only by virtue of) the fact that we have participant access to
the function-assignments. This means that we can talk about language,
although not all of language, merely based on our experience as partici-
pants. That is convenient, because it means that we can hope to get at
some of the crucial causal powers of status-imbued objects (including lin-
guistic expressions) by means of intuition-based analysis. Intuitions should
be supplemented with other sources of knowledge, but without it the
other sources would be meaningless to us. Even sociology can go part of
the way by intuitive methods based on participant awareness of what is
going on; for instance, Goffmans work is based on participant experience
in a wide variety of communities.
The visible hand in joint action allows participant awareness to extend
upwards beyond the sphere of immediate participation (as in democratic
elections). Emergent effects may also enter into participant awareness and
trigger collective action by the visible hand, so that the joint activity is
adapted to take previously unrealized effects into account (when a win
was upgraded from two to three points in soccer football, it counteracted
the trend towards increasingly effective and boring defensive play that had
been an unwanted emergent effect of the previous system). The borderline
is permeable, but we cannot hope to catch up mentally with all invisible-
hand-type effects: the flow of social activity is a broad and muddy river.
When we talk intuitively, based on participant status in shared practices,
about large-scale processes like education, family relations, restaurant vis-
its and the monetary system, the basis for our observations is only the
mental printout of current experience of participation, and is necessarily
incomplete. Empirical, quantitative, mind-external facts play an essential
role. A full description thus depends on both sides: participant understand-
ing, without which social experience would be meaningless, and aggregate
social dynamics, which is beyond the reach of individual intuition.
7. Summary: the socio-cognitive world
I have now introduced the basic furniture of the socio-cognitive universe

as I see it. The new home ground contrasts in some ways with assumptions
in classic CL, without necessarily contradicting them. In this final section
I will attempt to sum up the essential features, as a background for filling
Summary: the socio-cognitive world 173
out the picture in the rest of the book. The discussion above has implica-
tions for language as an object of social cognitive description which can be
summed up in three main features. In a nutshell, the new universe
(1) works by two interdependent forms of causality, one emerging from the
individual, another operating at the aggregate level of the social community;
(2) involves a complex co-existence between mental, intentional understand-

ing and factors inaccessible to consciousness; and
(3) contains three interdependent objects of description instead of the classic,

unitary object, language as an integrated part of the mind
The co-existing features manifest themselves in three dimensions of the

same complex social object of description: language as a flow of activity, as
a feature of the sociocultural niche, and in individual minds.
The flow is the most basic dimension, without which neither of the
other two could exist. Life is flow (to coin a phrase); when the flow stops,
life stops. And in social animals, such as human beings, social interaction is
a major part of the flow.
The niche arises as a result of evolutionary dynamics. In the case of
human beings, the dynamics operates in two time scales: biological and
sociocultural. The niche consists basically in a specific set of causal regu-
larities that impinge upon the life of those beings whose ecological envi-
ronment it constitutes. In Denmark, niche properties include facts such as
the high prestige of ability to play football and the fact that ja means yes.
Niche properties are not stable, but continue to evolve (in both the evolu-
tionary and the sociocultural time scale). Niche-constructional processes
are at work whenever there is a two-way causal pattern of adaptation and
modification between individual and environment going on. In order to
understand the niche, neither nature nor nurture will serve as sole explan-
atory factors on their own; thus objectivism and social determinism are
equally inadequate.
The properties of participants emerge as part of the same process that
brings about the niche. Participant abilities are shaped by adaptation:
selection works against individuals who are bad at coping with the
demands of the niche and favours those who are well adapted. The dynam-
ics of niche construction means that there is constant interplay between
participant ability and the affordances and constraints of the niche.
Two sets of causal patterns are at work in the interplay between par-
ticipants and niche: the individual can only perform in ways enabled by
her own causal wiring, but at the same time that wiring is shaped by the
way the world (= niche) works. Both the world and the individual have a
role in shaping what is possible, or necessary. In order to understand what
happens, we need both sets of factors.
Finally, the relationship between mind and mechanics has become
rather more complex than in Descartes world. Both internally and in the
community, shades of grey have taken over from black and white. Central
to the position of this book, however, is that the two sides always need to
be considered together: mental processes enter into the dynamics of the
social process only by means of their role as constituents of overt, causally
efficacious behaviour, not by inner mentalization alone; and on the other
hand, social causation is mediated by the mental and normative dimen-
sion of the human niche.
Specifically with respect to language, the three-way ontology comes
out as follows:
First of all, flow corresponds to actual usage, Saussurean parole. The
basic phenomenon is the dynamic activity, as stressed by Clark (1996). The
products you can tape and transcribe and put into corpora are important
as evidence, but they are not in themselves the fundamental object of
description.
Secondly, I adopt the term competency for the properties that enable
human subjects to handle the demands of the niche with linguistic com-
petency as the central example. The term is chosen to indicate that I think
this should be seen as the (sociocognitive and meaning-imbued) successor
concept to a Chomskyan competence.26 My hope is that competency will
sound less exalted and ideal than competence. As an educational achieve-
ment (cp. Smith 1996), competencies are defined in relation to a certain
required standard, which is reminiscent of the evolutionary satisficing
perspective that my account is based on. Competency, therefore, simply
refers to the ability to cope in relation to environmentally defined selec-
tion pressure, such as the ability to take part in the linguistic communica-
tion that goes on in the speech community.
Basic to individual competency, in something like the seat of honour
that Chomsky wanted to reserve for innate formal grammar, we find the
cognitive capacity and emotional motivation for joint attention (Toma-
sello), intersubjectivity (Sinha, Zlatev) and joint action (Clark). The expe-
26 I am inspired by Langacker, who moved the other way and adopted depend-
ence instead of the more usual term dependency, cf. Langacker (1987: 306) for
the special twist he gave to the term.
rience of jointness is the primal scene for a developmental trajectory that

includes altruism, culture, society and underlies the role of communica-
tion as the basis of normative Habermasian features of communicative
life as opposed to the features of social life in Hobbes Leviathan.
It follows from the basic status of the flow of activity that if usage did
not exist, there would be no niche (speech community) and no compe-
tency either. On the other hand, when the whole going concern of linguis-
tic communication is up and running, the kind of flow that occurs is
dependent both on the competencies of the participants and the
affordances of the niche.
Thirdly, language as a property of the niche may be regarded as the
successor concept to Saussurean langue and from now on, by langue I
mean language in the niche. There is a fairly direct continuity with the
Durkheim-inspired views of Saussure, in that langue is a quasi-objective
feature of the way the world works in the speech community (as discussed
in relation to Croft (pp. 294295). [Tak] means thank you in Denmark,
yes in Poland, and branch in Holland and therefore the sound
sequence has different causal powers when spoken in Gdansk, Copenha-
gen and Amsterdam; the world simply works differently in the three com-
munities. The relations between linguistic signs have thus been relocated
from the abstract immanence of structuralism to the causal structure of
the social world. The reason for setting up the three dimensions as sepa-
rate but interdependent objects of description is that we cannot assume
that properties observed in one of them carry over to the other two. There
is variation across the speech community that is not matched by variation
inside the mind of every individual; there are actualized instances of use
that do not reflect what the individuals involved actually want to say; and
there are individual competencies with features that are at odds with
socially recognized status functions for the relevant linguistic items.
Therefore we need to be able to distinguish between the three different
objects of description.
The three objects of description represent different perspectives on
the same complex object, and the fact that you may get different descrip-
tions from the three different perspectives does not prove that one
description is as good as the other, only that all perspectives are needed to
capture the joint object of description adequately.
This proposal may appear very general and vague. I am therefore going
to offer some illustrations of why this expanded picture makes a differ-
ence.
Within the expanded picture, we can place classic CL as the approach
that takes its point of departure in the individual participant and describes
properties of language from that vantage point. Like Newtonian mechan-

ics in physics, this type of description may be both fully adequate and
exhaustive under the appropriate set of boundary conditions. This is the
case when there is full co-ordination and matching competencies between
participants, and if we limit our universe to that type of joint activities
which operate in basic settings, cf. Clark (1996), we can act as if language
is complete in the individual (with a phrase borrowed from Paul Hopper
in discussion 2008).
There is obviously nothing wrong with taking one thing at a time. That
is the way science works. The question is what happens to the relation
between the different parts of the whole story. There is no automatic
mechanism in science for ensuring optimal collaboration between them,
and there is always a risk that different approaches see their own subfield
as the whole story. The issue in practice does not generally take the form
of explicit reductionism, but manifests itself in something that is almost
inevitable in the academic world, i. e. a prioritization of those aspects of
the whole issue that you are working on. As an illustration, I am going to
return to the neural theory of language (cf. above p. 32). We may take the
following as the credo:
Ultimately, the meaning of any utterance is its effect on the (physical and emo-
tional) well-being of the person saying or hearing it. Of course, human societies
have developed a vast array of intermediate structures (i. e. culture) that affect
meaning, but everything that matters is represented in each individuals brain
mechanisms. (Feldman 2006: 283).
The role of culture is recognized, but that part of it which is not inside the
individual does not ultimately matter. What is inside the individual can in
turn be captured at one privileged level of description, by what is explic-
itly called a process of reduction:
The systematic reduction to connectionist, and ultimately neural, realiza-
tion .is the key to grasping ECG [= embodied construction grammar], and,
for me, is central to understanding language and thought. (Feldman 2006: 294)
As already emphasized (p. 34), a research program focusing on the indi-
vidual described in neural terms is an essential dimension of the full story;
but if everybody followed the path outlined in this passage without turn-
ing back, the pursuit of bodily grounding would end up reducing culture
to cognition and cognition to neuronal activity.
The ontology that this chapter has drawn up is designed to provide a
map of the whole project that constitutes a social cognitive linguistics,
enabling us to place such more specific approaches as parts of the whole,
essential but not exhaustive. I would like to emphasize that this is not a
fence-sitting or ecumenical League of Nations position that leaves all

conflicts unresolved. It asserts uncompromisingly that purely mental
accounts are incomplete, and that the causal dimension needs to be
included; and further that all one-way causal explanations, if they are
taken as the whole truth, are simplistic and misleading, whether they take
neuronal activation, cognitive mappings or social pressures as their point
of departure.
Colour categories may serve as an illustration of how a gradual widen-
ing of the perspective (to which this book tries to contribute) can be seen
as one continuous path of progress.
Classic universalism assumed that objects in the world were the same
for all and were directly reflected in the categories of language. For col-
ours this implies that there is a fixed inventory of colours out there in the
world, which correspond to the inventory of names for colours. Structural-
ism discovered (as discussed p. 18 above) that the colour terms differed
between languages, so that it is necessary to distinguish between the col-
our spectrum and the different distinctions imposed by the net of lan-
guage. But structuralists over-interpreted this finding by suggesting that
it was the structural imposition of distinctions that was solely responsible
for creating the categories. Berlin and Kay (1969), followed by Rosch ((=
Heider 1972), then showed that the variation was not random, and there
were features of the different patterns that could be ascribed to the exist-
ence of an underlying universal cognitive map of the territory, which was
shared across languages. And finally Davidoff and associates (cf. Davidoff,
Davies and Roberson 1999) showed that you cannot account for all prop-
erties of colour categorization by referring to the bodily (perceptual)
grounding that underlies all languages. Rather, the underlying cognitive
abilities are subjected to shaping forces that derive from cultural prac-
tices, and linguistically encoded colour categories play an essential role in
that shaping process, because it is the linguistic categories, not the basic
neurocognitive wiring, that mediate the sociocultural practice.
Seeing this path as a continuing unresolved disagreement about the
same issue would miss the point, cf. also Kay and Regier (2009). To put it
bluntly: Aristotle was right that the difference between green (unripe)
cherries and red (ripe) cherries is out there and the same for all languages
and species; Hjelmslev was right that you cannot use such differences to
predict distinctions made in languages, and thus colour terms arise as a
result of the imposition of linguistic structure; Rosch was right that colour
space is not randomly divided by languages, but reflects innate perceptual
biases in the human species; and Davidoff is right that colour space is ulti-
mately defined by language and culture.
In the context of this book, the general moral is that this necessary
complexity is built into the panchronic, tripartite ontology proposed
above. Its purpose is to enable the individual cognitive linguist, who nec-
essarily pursues her own specific project, to consider where that project
belongs in an expanded picture that includes the joint social world. Most
classic issues, like colour, can only be satisfactorily captured if you look in
more than one place: if you ask where the issue of colour ultimately
belongs, the answer is wrong no matter whether you choose mind, lan-
guage or the environment. There is no way to abbreviate the role of men-
tal, environmental, situational and linguistic factors into a single underly-
ing truth.
Functional causation plays a crucial role in linking up processes in the
individual and the community. It is not enough to say that there are causal
factors going in both directions the loose sense in which the word dia-
lectical is sometimes used. This idea of mutual influence reflects the
interdependence that is also captured by functional relations, but lacks
the precision and potential for prediction that is associated with the evo-
lutionary scenario in which functional relations belong, raising the risk of
circularity.27 Complex systems persist by causal mechanisms that tend
towards preserving a functional equilibrium; they create a development
over time which is kept within certain limits by the way the feedback
mechanisms work. There is nothing circular about selection processes in
evolutionary dynamics or in the market mechanism.
Based on the foundations that have been established above, the rest of
the book will now try to fill out parts of the new socio-cognitive picture. In
the next chapter, we look at the understanding of the dynamic dimension,
focusing on the basic dimension of flow. Chapter 6 discusses language as a
specific object of description, arguing that the recontextualization of cog-
nition from the mind to the community also provides the key to under-
standing the partial autonomy of language from individual cognition.
Chapter 7 presents a theory of the sociocognitive universe, focusing on
the relations between mind and society. And chapter 8 takes up a central
and problematic case, the multi-ethnic issue, as a core challenge for a
socio-cognitive theory.
27 Frank (2008: 244), taking the bull by the horns, speaks explicitly of a kind of
circular causality between the local and the global level. Functional systems,
however, could not survive if there was nothing further to be said than causal-
ity moving in two directions at the same time, like the force of gravity that goes
both ways between two bodies in space.
Chapter 5. Meaning and flow: the relation
between usage and competency
1. Introduction
In Part One I have given an outline of CL in the process of moving into

the social domain and tried to show that this requires a full-scale rethink-
ing of the foundations of the enterprise. In ch. 4 I introduced the main
features of the extended framework that I envisage setting the stage for
the social cognitive linguistics that I am going to present in Part Two.
One salient feature is a more prominent role for the functional dimen-
sion. As stressed by Langacker (1999: 13), CL is part of the functionalist
tradition, and I see the functional features that I propose as a spelling-out
of a dimension that has always been implicitly there. The functional
dimension the importance of the role of the item under investigation in
a wider context already permeates the whole CL framework in the form
of the element of recontextualization (cf. p. 3) that also involved a con-
text-oriented reevaluation of the nature of meaning. If the overall con-
text is presupposed in understanding language, meaning can only be
described by starting out with a larger whole that has to be taken for
granted. In CL the larger whole is understood as being cognitive in
nature but the reason why meanings need to be understood in their
larger cognitive context is a special case of the more general principle
whereby meaning needs to be understood in their larger functional con-
text the ultimate source of meaning being, with Wittgensteins term, the
form of life.
The first item on the agenda is the way in which the dynamics of usage
fits into the framework that has been proposed. The increasing focus on
usage is central in the ongoing social turn in CL that was described in Chap-
ter 2. From one point of view, reflecting the terminology where function
and actual usage is more or less the same thing, this may appear to fit
directly into a functional agenda. However, the concept of function pre-
sented above is somewhat more complex, and depends on more than a spe-
cific actual usage event: functions arise through feedback patterns that
operate across several reproductive cycles. Since the core object of descrip-
tion in CL is meaning, a key issue for an emerging social cognitive linguis-
tics is the relation between meaning and usage. This will be the first chal-
180 Chapter 5. Meaning and ow
lenge for the descriptive format presented in ch. 4, and the subject of this
chapter.
The threefold object of description (flow, competency and niche) con-
trasts with the traditional CL approach, which is implicitly based on an
undifferentiated, unitary object of description, roughly describable as
language from a usage-based, cognitive point of view. This contrast gives
rise to the chief claim of this chapter: if the social turn gradually relocates
meaning entirely from the mind to the flow, it will not give an adequate
account. The ongoing development is rightly concerned to redress the tra-
ditional imbalance and give appropriate primacy to the flow of usage as
the lifeblood and raison detre of language but the issue of language in
the mind does not go away. Human language is too complex to be under-
stood solely and exhaustively as online flow.
This chapter addresses the relation between usage and competency
(the langue dimension is postponed till ch. 6). Two points are important: to
capture the pervasive primacy of the flow dimension, and to show what
(distinct and irreducible) role this flow-reorientation reserves for lan-
guage as an offline feature of the mind. Even if the mind is demoted to
secondary position, and the flow takes over the primacy, there is still an
interface that must be an explicit part of the account. Interfaces are two-
way streets: how does the competency reflect the primacy of the flow, and
how does the flow reflect features of competency (which is the condition
of membership/participant status in a speech community)?
It may appear surprising that the discussion of meaning in a usage-
based model raises the issue of competency, in view of the Chomskyan
connotations of the word. But competency as understood here is totally
severed from all Platonic ties and is strictly a property of the individual
participant in linguistic interaction. The general format of the argument
against Platonic essentialism has in fact often invoked a combination of
flow and the competency of individual participants. Conversation Analy-
sis is possibly the most uncompromising approach when it comes to insist-
ing on online actual usage as the object of description, but the essential
role of pre-existing competency is emphasized by Schegloff (1991: 152),
the key figure and Garfinkels term ethno-methodology was meant to
indicate the peoples own method for making sense.1 But what is this
1 Integrative Linguistics, another anti-system approach, cf. Harris (1998), simi-

larly stresses both the importance of the flow of practice rather than pre-exist-
ing structures, and also the essential role of the participants abilities in manag-
ing the flow of linguistic interaction. Edwards (2008, in discussion at the
Brighton conference on Language, Culture and Mind) has emphasized that
Introduction 181
individual competency, when it is detached from its traditional Platonic

moorings?
First of all, the priority relations between static offline competency and
the flow of usage are the opposite of what was traditionally assumed.
Usage is basic and competency has to be adapted to the demands of
usage. This also reflects the individuals trajectory: the newcomer into the
community is confronted with a flow of activity but lacks participant
access and the success criterion is to achieve a competency that grants
that access.
Secondly, this creates a need to clarify exactly how dynamic and static
properties interface. We can no longer say that actual performance is sim-
ply a poor and error-ridden reflection of ideal competence. Without an
ideal Platonic substratum, what speakers possess must be something that
qualifies them to construct utterances, and utterance meanings, on the fly,
with all the variation that this involves.
There is one key consequence of this usage-based competency which
plays a pervasive role in the argument in this chapter: we cannot base the
account on complete utterance meanings alone. Otherwise all possible
utterance meanings would have to be available in advance, and there
would be no possibility of saying anything new (at least if you wanted to
be understood!). Language users must know how to handle individual
semantic contributions, not just whole finished messages.
This is an important point, because the usage orientation in CL is also
an orientation towards emphasizing the foundational role of actual usage
events. If the emphasis on actual usage events is not combined with a clear
recognition that the object of description also has other, less fundamental
aspects (in this case competency aspects), it involves a risk of what I call
usage fundamentalism: the assumption that only actual instances of lan-
guage in use are real and have meaning. This is a form of reductionism,
and as such different from the usage based approach. The usage based
approach (as adopted in this book) assumes that usage is the basis for
everything, but that human language use is so complex that it depends on
minds adapted to usage. Offline properties of minds thus also have to be
part of the story.
The role of units prefigured in the mind means that language use is not
a homogeneous and undifferentiated flow like water coming from a tap.
In addition to pre-existing categories that need to be imposed on the flow
also in discursive psychology, the ability to create social reality online must be
understood as dependent on participant competency.
in order to make it decodable, there are also units that must be constructed
during the flow. This includes the basic unit of pragmatics, the utterance
corresponding (roughly) to what fills a turn-at-talk.
This inherent complexity means that language users have to operate
with a non-continuous dimension that can be captured in terms of three
sub-elements of the overall flow: input, processing and output. From the
production point of view, the speaker starts off with input in the form of
an intended message (of a kind), and generates an output in the form of
an articulated utterance. From the reception point of view (which will be
the preferred perspective below), the hearer gets a linguistic input in the
form of a flow that has to be assigned to recognizable linguistic units, and
then converted to an output in the form of a conveyed meaning or mes-
sage. (This process is what we discussed as meaning construction, in ch. 2).
This chapter explores the implications of this reversed role of compe-
tency and flow. The general direction is that in the beginning the focus is
on showing the importance of the flow features (input, directionality, and
the process aspects of meaning) and later the focus is on describing the
key properties of competency (as a necessary part of the whole picture).
Section 2 discusses the distinction between meaning as input and
meaning as output.
Section 3 explores the consequences of this process-oriented view of
competency for linguistic meaning. The main idea is that conventional
meanings have a directional dimension: just like utterance meanings,
they have a point of interest and a point of departure.
Section 4 discusses the relation between the procedural and the repre-
sentational aspect of participant competencies and argues for a clear dis-
tinction between skill and mental content (while emphasizing that the
two dimensions are in constant interplay).
Section 5 discusses what this distinction implies for meaning construc-
tion on the instructional and procedural premises proposed
Section 6 sums up the implications of the process dimension for under-
standing meaning, including the relation between conceptualization (as
flow) and concepts (as aspects of competency).
Section 7 sums up the argument.
2. Meaning as process input
The traditional understanding of meaning identifies it directly with the

message, the final product of the process of understanding that is at the
same time assumed to be identical with the speakers intention, cf. Reddy
Meaning as process input 183
(1979) on the conduit model. One of the major trends in the past genera-
tion has been a gradual movement away from this position. Instead, the
addressees role has gradually increased. Meaning works as part of a
dynamic event sequence: instead of a complete picture that is carefully
packed and then carefully unpacked, the addressee enters into a process
of (co-)constructing the meaning, based on the linguistic input.
In understanding the relation between dynamic and stable features in
cognition, a major influence in cognitive science generally is the impact of
the computer metaphor, which was at the heart of the first cognitive revo-
lution in the 1960s and 1970s. Computers and computation provided a
direct model for thinking about language in dynamic terms. A computer
program does not represent a situation in the world it consists in a series
of linked operations that specify a path from an initial state to an end-
state. The meaning of a computer program, in other words, is dynamic in
the sense that it changes the state of the system instead of merely repre-
senting it.2
This procedural dimension of computation, however, is inherently
bound up with a declarative dimension, since the procedural changes can
be exhaustively characterized in terms of the input and output states with
which they are associated. In the computational context, the procedural
approach thus does not make much difference.3 But there is no guarantee
that the operations which human addressees carry out in order to get at
the intended output are effective procedures that ensure equivalence. The
procedural dimension may therefore have more significant implications
outside a computational context.
Among the fields that were inspired by the procedural thinking that
came with the computer metaphor is psycholinguistics (cf. Johnson-Laird
1977, 1983). The program analogy (cf. above) gave rise to the phrase pro-
cedural semantics, which corresponds to a development in the psycholin-
2 The possible perspectives of this procedural dimension were taken up in a

number of contexts,also linguistic. Utterances as programs (Davies & Isard
1972) describes how an utterance, understood as a structured complex of lin-
guistic signs, can be viewed procedurally as something that enables the receiver
to reach the canonical informational end-state by carrying out the instructions
associated with the linguistic signs and their manner of combination.
3 Moreover, there is mutual translatability between an account in terms of rep-
resentations and an account in terms of procedures: an effective procedure is
one that leads to an output state that is uniquely specified by the program (cf.
Johnson-Laird 1983: 247). The excitement that the procedural dimension gave
rise to therefore gradually died down.
guistics of memory retrieval and language comprehension, cf. the follow-

ing quote from Zwaan and Radvansky (1998: 162):
Rather than treating language as information to analyze syntactically and
semantically and then store in memory, language is now seen as a set of process-
ing instructions on how to construct a mental representation of the described
situation (see also Gernsbacher, 1990).
This approach captures the representational content of utterances in
terms of an instructional approach, leaving it to the participants to do the
conversion.4
The role of language as encoding processing instructions means that
speaking to people is basically a way of influencing them (impinging upon
them) often but not always with the specific purpose of providing them
with information. The overall role of linguistic meaning as performing an
operation on the world can thus be further analyzed in interactive terms:
the operation is not just one performed by the speaker, but one performed
in virtue of a constitutive co-operative relationship between speaker and
hearer, acting jointly as described by Clark (1996): the speaker ideally
does not programme the hearer, but co-constructs the situation with him.
Viewing meaning as input or instruction has been brought up from
time to time (cf. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia vol. 39; Harder 2009), but
has yet to seriously capture the imagination of linguists. I believe it has a
key role to play in the more dynamic and user-oriented conception of
linguistics that is now emerging in Cognitive Linguistics. Among cogni-
tive linguists who include this angle, Fauconnier (1985: 2) uses the word
4 The development towards focusing on what the linguistic input results in is

also reflected for instance in relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995).
Relevance theory makes a point of the extent to which a code view of under-
standing is misguided, and asserts the role of relevance-driven inferences in
both getting to the relevant proposition and in signalling what the relevance of
the proposition is (cf. also Blakemore 1987). Relevance theory is a develop-
ment of Gricean thinking about meaning, and occupies the same interface
position between a logical-propositional tradition and a pragmatic approach.
Like Grice, it offers a proposal for how to integrate the two sides. Unlike
Grice, however, relevance theorists are focally committed to dissociating lan-
guage in itself from interaction, associating it with information instead. This
orientation is bound up with the approach to meaning and understanding in
terms of informational profit (cf. Harder 1996:142). The product that is gen-
erated as a result of the linguistic input is understood in terms of cognitive,
informational content although of a different kind than the mental models
or structure-building type.
instruction about the underspecified meanings of linguistic items in

calling upon the fully specified cognitive representations. At the time,
however, Fauconnier rightly argued that it was necessary to move towards
the full cognitive perspective rather than limit ones attention to the
purely linguistic input.
Now that the encyclopaedic scope of meaning is well-established, and
meaning construction is coming into focus, I think it is time to pay more
attention to the input dimension of meaning. The role of linguistic mean-
ings as potential input to the flow of interaction becomes much more cru-
cial in a linguistics where actual usage is recognized as basic. This is the
context where we really see meaning at work. In this chapter I am going
to argue that from the linguists point of view, this is where we can most
meaningfully address the question of the interplay between the conven-
tional code and the situational context.
I begin by considering what a linguistic concept is, understood in this
dynamic perspective. There is an affinity between the input perspective
and the functional dimension, in that a very basic functional role for con-
cepts is to serve as a tool for assigning the multifarious stuff of actual
experience to a more limited range of kinds. A point of departure is a
functional interpretation of Lakoffs analogy (1987: 283) between the
container scheme and the way we think about categories. From an input
and a functional perspective the container as such is merely the prerequi-
site, not the function itself. In a dynamic perspective, the crucial thing is
the operation that is triggered when you evoke a concept as part of lin-
guistic communication. In terms of a pervasive metaphor (cf. p. 38),
putting something in a particular container can be described as an act of
grasping incoming experience, cf. the Latin etymon (con)capio: concepts
are handles on reality.
To possess a concept is thus to have a principle for aligning individual
instantiations under the same overall concept, i. e. to put a Porsche, a Ford
T and a Toyota in the same conceptual container labelled car.
One point on which this dynamic perspective makes a difference is
when it comes to the relation between concepts and instances of the con-
cept. If you understand a concept (= a conceptual category) purely as a
conceptual unit, it highlights the issue of how to treat divergences between
instances and concepts (after the neat Aristotelian distinction between
essential and accidental properties has been given up). While the polysemy
cline can handle part of the issue (more on this in section 6), it does not
entirely solve the question of boundaries between concepts, which are
often fuzzy. If conceptual territories overlap, it is not clear what the strictly
conceptual reality may be in such segmentations. How can we maintain
the existence of a mental lexicon with separate bundles of conceptual

properties associated with them, if they merge into one another?
A functional approach, however, may provide the notion of concept
with a clear-cut role that makes fuzziness less problematic. The function of
dividing up a collection of phenomena is external to both the phenomena
themselves and the way we conceptualize them. Faced with the task of
dividing them into groups, a human agent has to decide what her criteria
are going to be this is not given in advance by the inherent properties of
the object. For the purposes of getting through the incoming business of
everyday life, the utility of having ways of grasping is like the utility of
cupboards with different shelves when somebody dumps a load of stuff on
you: it is useful to be able to put things somewhere. How precise the sort-
ing criteria are will depend on the circumstances, not just on inherent
properties. Pointing to experience is not always enough: mothers rightly
worry about providing children with the conceptual equipment that is
necessary to deal adequately with stuff that is currently outside the basic
and familiar sphere, such as vipers and strangers offering candy.
In the input perspective, this means that the evocation of a concept
must be understood as the first step in a process that concludes with an act
of categorization, where the instantiation has been placed in a container
and the concept has done its job. If communication is successful, at the
output stage there is a fusion of instance and concept (cf. also Langacker
2009: 232233 on the target), but at the input stage they are distinct. Cop-
ing by means of concepts depend on handling the input stage, while the
output stage is just a fragment of an actual usage event. Below we will
take up some of the complications of post-Aristotelian approaches to con-
ceptualization, and then in section 6 we return to what this implies for a
functional and input-oriented view of concepts.
Another central CL area where the functional and input-oriented per-
spective makes a difference is that of frames and framing. Framing, cf.
p. 27, involves an act of placing what you are trying to understand in the
appropriate context and a functional and dynamic construal shifts the
focus from the conceptual frame itself to the framing operation. Concep-
tually speaking, frame is a metaphor, based on the relation between a
picture and its frame and the structure that is transferred to the target
domain (word understanding) is the relation between the focused ele-
ment and the surroundings in which it belongs. You understand any given
instance of meaning by viewing it against its background an operation
that is built into the process of interpretation, no matter what the circum-
stances are. (In cases when there is no frame around a picture, the wall
itself must do duty as the perceptual fame; Traugott, personal communica-
tion). In this, it also reflects the basic reorientation of semantics towards

the process of human understanding (Fillmore 1982, cp. Croft and Cruse
2004: 8). The problem of understanding culture-specific terms is often best
accounted for not by trying to explicate the concept in itself, but seeing it
in the context of the whole cultural frame of understanding (cp. Croft &
Cruse 2004: 21, quoting Geertzs account of the Javanese concept of Rasa).
But what difference does it make if we view it in terms of input?
The point can be illustrated in relation to the role of frames and fram-
ing in meaning construction. Frames play a crucial role in the construction
of online interpretation, as demonstrated in great detail by Dancygier and
Sweetser (2005). They show how in understanding conditionals, a very
large part of the conveyed meaning is created by reconstructing frames
based on very sparse coded input. For instance, if I were you invokes a
situation that contains many more assumptions than a neat switch of iden-
tity. We therefore need to consider what the relation is between semantic
instructions and semantic frames. Are frames the same as meaning, for
instance, as the term frame semantics might well suggest?
In chapter 1 I suggested that the division of labour between frames,
domains and idealized cognitive models in a theory of meaning would be
clearer if we used the term frame as part of the dynamics of interpreta-
tion rather than as a static construct (which would be better designated as
an idealized cognitive model). In those terms, the act of selecting the
relevant frame for understanding is part of the situational activity of
meaning construction, but it is prompted by the conventional meaning
rather than being identical with the conventional meaning.5 In other
words, the conventional meaning serves as an instruction that triggers
framing activity. In terms of the basic frame metaphor, the linguistic
meaning of a linguistic item is analogous to the picture itself rather than
the frame around it
This view can be profiled by comparing with Hansen (2008), who uses
both the instructional and the framing approach, but parsimoniously sug-
gests that the instruction simply consists in evoking the frame. Following
Fillmore (1985), Hansen (2008: 23) gives the following example:
5 In the accepted terminology, frames are evoked if they are associated with
the coded meaning, but invoked if they are brought into the picture by infer-
ential rather than conventional mechanisms. Since in ch. 1, p. 27 I suggested
that conventionally obligatory frames were identical to domains, I do not need
to use the term frame about aspects of coded meaning, but can reserve it for
the situated event of inserting the situational background against which a
meaning-in-use is understood.
Severus is economical: hell make an excellent husband

Severus is stingy: hell make a horrible husband
She argues that

the use of economical semantically instructs the addressee to interpret the
utterance as evoking a frame in which the urge to limit spending is conceived of
as a positive quality, and to identify some set of consequences potentially accru-
ing from this quality which may be beneficial to the spouse. The parallel use of
stingy on the other hand, evokes a very different frame, in which generosity is
an absolute virtue, and instructs the hearer to identify a set of undesirable con-
sequences of its absence.
Although I think the analysis in terms of output interpretation is correct,
the paraphrase of meaning in terms of frame evocation is potentially mis-
leading if it is understood as an instruction to evoke the frame per se. The
linguistic key elements encode the predication of a property to Severus:
the word economical means something like disposed to limit spending,
rather than fritter ones money away in an irresponsible manner. Framing
may come in as a background cultural scenario, for example the virtuous
script of making ends meet and saving up which may be invoked as part
of the background against which an economical husband is what you want.
Stingy is in the same structural position, as a property predicated of the
subject NP, Severus. The property is actually not the same as economical,
however. It means, roughly, to be reluctant to fork out the money for no
other reason than wanting to hang on to it. Again, potential cultural
frames come to mind in the form of the icon of the miser, an example
being Scrooge McDuck. Again, framing is part of the process of meaning-
assignment the particular frame is just not part of what the word instructs
you to evoke.6
6 The difference between meaning-as-instruction and meaning-as-framing also

comes out if we look at the complete utterance meanings. I do not think the
formulation literally instructs the addressee to identify some set of conse-
quences potentially accruing from this quality which may be beneficial to the
spouse (and I should add that this is not what Hansen claims in the passage,
which is meant for illustrative rather than precise analytic purposes). Rather,
the addressee is explicitly instructed only to understand Severus as an excel-
lent spouse in virtue of being economical, full stop. As a general feature on
meaning-making, this calls for locating a frame where this makes sense but
how to specify the frame is optional. A very nave addressee might in fact take
these words on trust, and understand the utterance as a piece of information
about married life (the blank wall acting instead of a proper frame, as it were);
In relation to Hansens (2008) own specific topic, however, I think she

argues convincingly for the identification of frames and instructions. Her
subject is phasal adverbs such as still and they are special precisely
because their privileged function is to specify the temporal background
rather than the temporal location. This is why he is still alive has the same
truth conditions as he is alive. What is added by still is the explicitly evoked
temporal background for his being alive. But that is a special case: usually
background aspects are not profiled as the specific contribution of an
expression.7
The advantages of the instructional view may be most striking as an
account of purely procedural meanings with little conceptual content (cf.
Blakemore 1987), as exemplified with conjunctions like although and
focus particles like only. However, it has a number of advantages also for
lexical meanings, cf. Harder & Togeby (1993). In the context of Cognitive
Linguistics, I align myself with Tyler and Evans (2003: 40), who use the
word prompts about the contribution of words to utterance meaning,
and with Evans (2006, 2009) in distinguishing lexical concepts from con-
ceptual models.
A major consequence of this view is that linguistic meaning viewed as
an element of competency is never identical to an actual mental state or
process at best, there is just a satisficing fit. On the face of it, this is a
radical departure from traditional assumptions in CL. But I believe that
rather than a heresy it is a necessary clarification in making the social
turn. You cannot ask what it is to know the meaning and maintain that a
single event is the full answer. The distinction between online and offline
properties pinpoints a key aspect of participant competency: the ability to
store sediments from the flow in a manner that will work next time round,
too. Meaning is constructed in the flow that continuously produces con-
ceptual states including construals, mental models etc but participant
access to all this requires a competency that cannot be reduced to online
flow alone.
and we would not want to deny that she had understood what was actually
said. Generic frames (= domains), of course, are by definition evoked with the
words: the word husband thus obligatorily evokes the marriage frame.
7 Unlike Hansen (2008:32), however, I do not see the presuppositions as parts of
the frame. Instead, presuppositions (in the sense adopted below p. 195) are
rather the result of combining clause meaning with the frame that (in this spe-
cial case) provides the content of the instruction. Thus he is still a fool, by
combining the continuation frame of still with the content John being a fool
gives rise to the presupposition that John was a fool at some earlier time.
This is in accordance with a view of encoded meaning as semantic

potential (cf. Evans 2006) or meaning potential (Allwood 2003), which
is translated to actual meaning in the process of utterance understanding.
From a competency point of view this means that knowing a word means
that you know what range of output interpretations it can be used to trig-
ger, not what it means on any given specific occasion.
The input-based approach is in harmony with a major development in
literary interpretation. According to the classic belief, there was a deter-
minate textual meaning hidden under the surface, and it was the job
of the literary scholar to uncover that meaning. This belief was widely
abandoned and replaced by a focus on the processes whereby meaning
is produced by readers. Many modern literary analysts have flirted with
the anything goes social constructionist position which may sound
rather more plausible in relation to literary interpretation than in the
theory of science (cf. above p. 108). Here, too, however, the issue is more
complex.
Although Stanley Fishs book title (1980) Is there a text in this class?
seems to throw doubt on the existence of any shared source of meaning,
his point is actually different. While reader response is variable, it is not
random, and Fish focuses on that variability of understanding which is due
to different sets of assumptions and practices in interpretive communi-
ties in our terms, a type of niche. The rejection of ultimate underlying
truth in literary understanding, and the focus on processes of meaning-
creation, thus do not rule out certain forms of stability. But it may be hard
to avoid overstating your point when you are up against the full might of
two thousand years of Platonic tradition. Fish himself comments on the
way he has generally been misunderstood, and one case in which he mis-
understood himself, thus getting a share in the responsibility for the mis-
understanding:
This response to a response to Interpreting the Variorum contains the most
unfortunate sentence I ever wrote. Referring to affective criticism as a superior
fiction, I declare that it relieves me of the obligation to be right (a standard
that simply drops out) and demands only that I be interesting. I have long
since repudiated this declaration along with the relativism i[t] implies. The only
thing that drops out in my argument is a standard of right that exists independ-
ently of community goals and assumptions. Within a community, however, a
standard of right (and wrong) can always be invoked against a prior under-
standing as to what counts as a fact, what is hearable as an argument, what will
be recognized as a purpose, and so on. The point, as I shall later write, is that
standards of right and wrong do not exist apart from assumptions, but follow
from them, and, moreover, since we ourselves do not exist apart from assump-
tions, a standard of right and wrong is something we can never be without. (Fish
1980: 174).
The central point is that texts, like linguistic expressions, must be under-
stood as input to an interpretation process and there are norms in oper-
ation for how to carry out such processes. Reading does not yield totally
predictable outcomes, but nor is it the case that anything goes. When read-
ers are competent according to the standards for reading that obtain in a
given community (=niche), the coded text can instruct them to produce
outcomes with a systematic, hence describable, relationship with the lin-
guistic input.8
The habit of thinking that accords output states automatic primacy
also systematically overlooks the possibility that the process itself may be
viewed as a dimension of the successful result of the instigated action as
also pointed out by Stanley Fish. An illustration is given in relation to a
passage from Miltons Paradise Lost (IV, lines 912):
Satan, now first inflamed with rage came down,
The Tempter ere th accuser of man-kind,
To wreck on innocent frail man his loss
Of that first battle, and his flight to Hell
My contention was that in formalist readings meaning is identified with what a

reader understands at the end of a unit of sense (a line, a sentence, a paragraph,
a poem) and that therefore any understandings preliminary to that one are to
be disregarded as an unfortunate consequence of the fact that reading pro-
ceeds in time. The only making of sense that counts in a formalist reading is the
last one, and I wanted to say that everything a reader does, even if he later
undoes it, is a part of the meaning experience and should not be discarded.
One of the things a reader does in the course of negotiating these lines is to
assume that the referent of his in line 11 is innocent frail man. (Fish 1980: 3)
The same principle applies to metaphor understanding. If you look at
what precisely the distinctive outcome of metaphor in actual communica-
tion is, it is typically less than clear. The emphasis has been on the appara-
tus consisting in the mappings from source to target, corresponding to the
8 This applies not only in areas of poetic license; the same discussion has taken
place in relation to interpretations of the law, where the continuing role of the
interpretive community constituted by changing memberships of the US
Supreme Court has been recognized since the Marbury v. Madison case in
1803. Todd Oakley (ongoing research, personal communication 2009) has used
that as an illustration of the role of historical events in redefining the shape of
cultural reality.
formula of understanding one thing in terms of another. But what pre-

cisely, if anything, follows from saying that MORE IS UP?
Because of the target domain override principle (Lakoff 1993: 216),
not everything from the source domain gets transferred to the under-
standing of the target domain (MORE may not always be UP, e. g. if a hori-
zontal puddle is spreading out). But if a target overrides whatever does
not fit in the source conceptualization, it remains open exactly what fol-
lows from applying the metaphor to that target. Davidson (1978) draws a
radical conclusion from this problem. He argues that metaphorical mean-
ing is too indeterminate to qualify as part of the description of language:
one can be precise about non-metaphorical meaning, but one cannot be
precise about a metaphorical meaning until the metaphorical mapping
is complete and the source domain meaning has become part of the target
domain and hence flattened into a determinate, literal-like meaning. To
take a familiar example: Going from London to New York is a journey in
a determinate sense, but we do not know exactly what LOVE IS A JOURNEY
means until we have completed the work of mapping the metaphor onto
the target domain. A primitive result of such a mapping would be some-
thing like love is an experience where, after the relationship has come
into being, you move through a succession of new situations, rather than
remaining in the same initial position which is again determinate and
quasi-literal.
Against this, Collin and Engstrm (2001) point out that the under-
standing of metaphorical meaning as something both non-literal and
determinate can be defended provided one takes an explicitly process-
oriented view of meaning. The whole process of recruiting metaphorical
meaning has a determinable content, even though not all of the potential
of using the metaphor is determinable at a given stage. With Turners and
Fauconniers (1995) analysis of the argument is war metaphor as an
example, Collin and Engstrm argue that beginning with war and impos-
ing it on argument takes you through a blending process with determi-
nate properties. The ending point is indeterminate, but the history of the
application is part of the meaning of the metaphorical expression: the war
path, as it were, is ineradicable from the total signification.
This underlines the foundational status of flow meaning for good and
for bad. Push polls, where members of the public are asked about their
reactions if a politician were to do or say something they did not like,
would not work if some of the dirt did not stick. But this also makes it
obvious why it matters what one takes on board from the flow. Plato was
right to be worried about letting the social process alone have the last
word.
Presupposition and the directional nature of linguistic meaning 193
In all three domains discussed above, the instructional approach makes

it possible to unpack a competency dimension that becomes invisible if
you assume ideal convergence between offline and online meaning. Mem-
bership in a speech community depends on the ability to follow the path
from explicitly coded input, via participant meaning-construction activity,
to full-fledged contextual meaning. Whether in hard-core psycholinguistic
experiments, in interpretation of literature or in metaphor understanding,
the instructional understanding upgrades the significance of competency
as manifested in meaning construction to the constitutive participant
property in the speech community.
3. Presupposition and the directional nature of linguistic meaning
The instructional approach, however, does not exhaust the consequences

of the dynamic view of meaning. To illustrate what is missing, we can
return to the mechanical, computational version of procedural semantics.
The view quoted from Zwaan and Radvansky above would be compatible
with assuming that the meaning instructions are analogous to the instruc-
tions for assembling a kitchen cupboard. If you buy a cupboard under the
condition some assembly required, what you buy is not the instructions
but the cupboard (analogous to the finished mental representation), and
the dynamic stage would be just a tiresome complication.
What you get out of language, however, is not totally analogous to a
cupboard whose stable properties are the main thing. The output of a
process of utterance interpretation is itself a dynamic entity a change in
the interactive situation. The point is made by Verhagen (2005) with argu-
mentation as a key example: the aim is to change the addressees position,
not to fill him with information.
This is generally accepted in the case of utterances, the pragmatic units
of linguistic analysis. A speech act, following Austin and Searle, is designed
to change the situation rather than represent it. This property carries over
to individual elements: functions, also for words, are privileged effects, and
if meaning is functional, it is a kind of effect.9
9 In some cases, this is obvious. Thus when you say hello to someone, you achieve
the function of greeting them, thus bringing about a certain interactive rela-
tionship with them. This makes sense only as an interactive move, and cannot
plausibly be understood as an expression of a mental state in an individual
mind. This is why such greeting expressions can be slotted directly into a net-
This action-based approach has a consequence for conventional mean-

ings which is the main point in this section: linguistic meanings are direc-
tional, i. e. they have a point of departure and a point of interest.10 The
point of interest is the business end, oriented towards the purpose that is
to be achieved. Thus when you say No!, the point of interest is the rejec-
tion. For obvious reasons, this is what gets the attention, just like the act of
cutting when you use a knife.
But there also has to be a point of departure for the utterance, i. e.
something that offers the necessary basis for an act of rejection, just as
there has to be something for you to cut in the knife example. Thus in actu-
ally using the word No! you are necessarily depending on the existence of
something that you can reject, just as you cannot perform an act of cutting
without something to cut, such as a sausage. This has consequences for
meaning construction: if you hear someone emitting a no!, you cannot
understand the utterance unless you know what is being rejected. Just like
(other) acts, utterances have a point of departure and a point of interest.
The significance of the point of departure for an encoded meaning can
be illustrated by a comparison between two similar meanings. The two
words repeatedly and again do not differ a great deal if viewed from the
external, instructional point of view they are both contributions to the
process of meaning construction which indicate iteration. However, they
differ interestingly from the internal, directional point of view: again takes
its point of departure in a previous instance and predicates a new one,
while repeatedly predicates the whole iteration sequence.
To the extent there are features of word meaning that require a spe-
cific point of departure, the word may potentially give rise to presupposi-
tional effects. The point of departure has to be available in order for the
word to be used and these demands are encoded as part of the conven-
tional meaning, spelling out what is taken for granted in using the word,
and may get a role in meaning construction. Whether it actually does so
work of interactive options, cp. Halliday (1973: 83), without intermediate con-
ceptual stages.
10 Viewing meanings as instructions already places them as parts of the dynamics
of interaction, so it might be asked, what is the difference between the instruc-
tional and the directional property of meanings? The difference is that the
instructional view looks only at the meanings as a whole, from an external
point of view. An encoded meaning works in toto at the input stage of under-
standing rather than as features of the output. The directional analysis looks
inside each individual meaning and asks: what does it do, and what needs to be
in place before it can do it?
Presupposition and the directional nature of linguistic meaning 195
depends on whether the use of the words fits into the context in such a
way that the demands are unproblematically satisfied. Not everybody
would accept that this was the case in classics like dont make a fool of
yourself again!
Presuppositional effects take the form of presuppositions of the classi-
cal kind that has been discussed in philosophy and linguistics, when words
in combination impose demands on the situation that can be spelled out
in the form of propositions. The classical example the present King of
France requires the addressee to identify a referent answering to the spec-
ifications, and thus presupposes that there is one and only one relevantly
identifiable King of France available. The dynamic implications of this
directional view are clear: the phrase is designed to change the situation of
the addressee, in that he has to move to the position of having identified
the referent of the expression. Inevitably, you thereby presuppose that it
is available for being identified. Presuppositions are the most overt and
salient manifestation of the directionality of meaning, because they signal
something propositionally explicit about the speakers point of departure.
The reason presuppositional effects are most often invisible is simply that
in the default case, the demands are satisfied: why invoke linguistic tools
in situations where they cannot work? Hence, the information that might
potentially be conveyed, such as the existence of one and only one King of
France, is already available in a default context of use, and so it is not con-
veyed but merely invoked. The phrase the weather has the same presup-
positional potential, but since the weather is always there, the presupposi-
tional potential remains dormant.
However, situations are always only partially specified. There is a con-
siderable grey area which is capable of being evoked as necessary back-
ground for utterances, but which might not be saliently available in the
absence of such invocations. This means that you can insert information
that is not taken for granted (such as making a fool of yourself last time)
with the linguistic status of being actually taken for granted.11 This can
11 This belongs in the area of presupposition failure, the subject of a book I wrote
in 1975 with Christian Kock. (Herb Clark has terrorized me out of referring to
this book as Harder & Kock!). Presupposition failure takes many forms (which
are the subject of that book), including deception (as when you pretend to
have beliefs that you do not (your munificence is overwhelming) and bullying
(stop making a fool of yourself). Generally, adeptness in distributing the status
of being taken for granted vis--vis the status of being explicitly addressed is
central in all strategic language use (not just tact and politeness). This is so
because by taking things for granted you assign them a position as being
also be used non-aggressively: if an old friend turns up unexpectedly, how

you feel about it may not be given in advance, but if you explicitly thank
him for coming you have signalled that you treat his visit as a favour. In a
Truffaut film, the strategy is exemplified as advice for a gentleman who
finds himself in the situation of opening a bathroom door that had inad-
vertently been left unlocked, finding a naked woman behind it. The thing
to say (while hurriedly closing the door) is not pardon, madame, but rather
pardon, monsieur because the necessary point of departure for the term
monsieur is the assumption that you are addressing a man (hence it can be
inferred that no instance of consummated peeping has taken place).12
already in place in social reality, rather than taking it upon yourself to intro-
duce them into unfolding social reality, with the risks and liabilities that such
an action involves.
12 These strategic implications of the directionality-of-meaning are also relevant
in relation to framing. This makes it useful to consider what the difference is
between strategic use of presuppositional effects and strategic use of framing.
George Lakoff, as discussed in more detail on pp. 343 and 398, exhorts his
readers to actively frame the debates they take part in. Is that the same thing
as deviously smuggling your own preferred presuppositions into taken-for-
granted reality?According to the definitions I have advocated this is not (nec-
essarily!) the case. Framing is an inherent and constitutive part of the process
of understanding; for each new introduced meaning, you have to figure out
what background to understand it against. The phrase Joes girl could be
understood as invoking a father or a partner frame. You can frame a debate
quite openly by announcing that you view the issue of energy in the context of
national security or, alternatively, in the context of global warming. Depend-
ence on oil acquires quite different properties depending on whether you
frame the issue one way or the other.The use of presuppositional effects con-
stitutes a possible form of framing, but it is a much narrower category. Its
special flavour is precisely that it comes with the taken-for-granted status of
a point of departure for the utterance in question. Thus the King of France is
bald presupposes, in the accepted reading, that there is a uniquely identifiable
King of France to refer to, and thus introduces the frame of France being a
Kingdom as a presupposition while the frames that are invoked may include
many things, possibly absolute monarchy, with trappings including courtiers
and an irresponsible nobility, with shades of Louis XIV. In the case of again, a
directional analysis would say that its point of interest (=front end or cutting
edge) has the predication of an additional event. This carries with it a point of
departure (= presupposed background) in a previous event of the same kind.
Saying that Lee called the office again thus carries a presupposition (not just a
frame) that he has called the office before. The evocation of an iteration frame
in itself does not distinguish between he did it repeatedly and he did it again
The procedural nature of competencies 197
This ends that part of the chapter which focuses on the ways in which
meanings reflect their basic role as part of the flow. The moral is that lin-
guistic meaning is best understood if it is caught in the act of making a
contribution to the flow it is not an eternal idea, but neither is it part of
the flow itself.
4. The procedural nature of competencies
If meanings are input, what is the nature of the competency to handle

them?
First of all, the competency is responsible for the process that con-
verts input to finished interpretation. Usage meanings, the finished prod-
ucts, are accessible to intuition; input meaning (I have argued) is what
the speaker knows between utterances. This leaves the process that is
needed to bridge the two as the domain of competency. I am now going
to argue that this makes a difference in relation to traditional ways of
thinking about the speakers knowledge of language as the object of
description.
Conscious knowledge has to be applicable at the output end. Unless
we can become consciously aware of the meaning of an utterance, speak-
ing would do us no good. The how, on the other hand, we do not have to
be aware of. This applies not only to language competencies, but to all
other skills. Knowing-how, as familiar from Ryle (1949) onwards, is a dif-
ferent type of phenomenon from knowing-that. The implications of this
familiar fact, however, need to be made explicit in relation to the dynamic
reorientation. I am going to tackle the issue first with reference to the abil-
ity to evoke lexical meaning, instead of discussing it in relation to gram-
mar, since grammar is a much more complex and controversial issue. So
when I speak of skill, ability or competency in this section, I am referring
to the competency to use lexical items, which is clearly part of the speak-
ers know-how. Grammatical competency will be discussed in ch. 6.
This issue of knowledge of language is difficult enough in itself, and the
darkness became almost impenetrable after the introduction of the Chom-
skyan concept of tacit knowledge. This idea was part of the cognitive
revolution against behaviourism, and thus associated with an insistence
and therefore the directionality of meaning, as well as its manifestation in the

form of presuppositional effects, cannot be captured simply by the general
point associated with frame semantics.
on human reason as opposed to mindless causal triggering. Lakoff &

Johnson (1999: 472) generously say that Chomsky deserved enormous
credit for this idea, which in classical CL survives in the form of back-
stage cognition inaccessible to consciousness. There is thus broad agree-
ment that we have a realm of tacit knowledge, although CL and genera-
tive grammar disagree on its nature: generative grammar thinks of tacit
knowledge as computational in nature, while CL thinks of it in terms of
cognitive mappings imbued with content.
I believe this way of thinking about it is fundamentally flawed. In the
context of CL, Zlatev (2007) has argued that Searles (1992: 156159)
argument against tacit knowledge should be taken seriously by CL, even
if it can be ignored by the generative world view (because of overall gen-
erative assumptions about competence-level entities). Basically the argu-
ment is that if tacit knowledge is so tacit that we can never become aware
of it, it cannot in any coherent sense be understood as a mental entity. We
only know mental phenomena from our subjective awareness if we can-
not access them in that arena, we have no way of recognizing them as
mental. Thus a pin prick may be the cause of our conscious feeling of pain,
but the prick in itself is not a mental event it is not the conceptual dimen-
sion that causes the pain or the bleeding. Similarly, a dislike of someone
may be due to mentally stored memories of him, or to physical factors like
his unpleasant smell but we can only know that it is due to a memory if
we can bring that memory to conscious awareness. This has implications
for the practice of inferring backstage cognition on the basis of conscious
mental phenomena how can we know it is really there? Postulating a
language competency that exists at the level of backstage cognition is
therefore problematic for precisely the same reasons that make Chom-
skyan tacit knowledge problematic.
Based on the approach that takes the flow of interactive activity as
basic rather than cognition, a different approach to the description of
competency suggests itself. The success criterion for behaviours is whether
they work in the social and natural environment or not the mental
dimension may be present in some cases and absent in others. The piano-
playing competency is judged by the version of the moonlight sonata
that members of the audience hear how much of the actual execution
is accompanied by explicit intentions is beside the point. This means that
the first question we must ask about a given skill, or competency, is
whether the organism is wired up so as to be able to perform satisfic-
ingly. If we look at a skill such as playing football, the question is whether
a person can produce satisficing behaviour in the kind of situations that
a football match faces her with. Doing the right thing without thinking is
considerably better than having the right explicit intentions without

doing anything.
This means, in the terms discussed above, that basically an up-and-
running competency is a causal setup in the organism just as a function-
ing market is a causal setup in society. Both in the organism and in the
society, mental dimensions may play a variable role in relation to such
causal structures, but the success criterion is causal efficacy, and not the
degree of mental activity. This creates both a descriptive and a methodo-
logical dilemma: how do we tell the mechanical and the intentional
dimensions apart?
Searle (1992: 81) quotes a description of the digestion system, which
systematically uses a mental and intentional metaphor (italics by Searle):
The gastrointestinal tract is a highly intelligent organ that senses not only the
presence of food but also its chemical composition it is often called the gut
brain.
No one would presumably claim that these operations are mental. They
are clearly part of the way the organism is wired up at the causal, physio-
logical level. In Searles critique of first-generation cognitive science, this
was a key point. It was directed at syntactically oriented simulation, and in
the Chinese room experiment Searle (1980) showed that syntactic organi-
zation was not enough for meaning. His point was that the whole simula-
tion paradigm failed to address the real issue of mental representation,
because simulations ignored this distinction. But it affects also the con-
cept of backstage cognition.
The problem applies not only to the neural approach of Feldman, who
explicitly wants to ground explanation at a non-mental level, but to all
continuist accounts that are less than explicit about where the borderline
is between mental and non-mental phenomena. It is clear from the argu-
ment in the beginning of the section that in order for something to qualify
as a competency, its output must be consciously accessible. This is true
not just of the competency to use words, but also for football and sky-
diving; otherwise, it could not serve as a medium for intentional action. We
would not speak of the intestine as providing the individual with digestive
competency, because it is not an intended act, while football, piano playing
and speaking produce results that we can check against intentions and
expectations.13
13 Automatization is standardly understood to involve a process whereby what

used to be laborious and conscious gradually becomes fluent and unconscious.
Searle (1983) talks about the process of learning to ski whereby operations
The two aspects are separable in terms of neural wiring. The purely
procedural setup is associated with implicit memory, while the consciously
accessible knowledge that is associated with language goes with explicit
memory, which works by separate pathways as demonstrated by both
brain imaging data and clinical data (cf. Feldman 2005: 78; Ellis 2007:
2223). Ellis refers to an anecdote about a patient who had lost the ability
to form new explicit memories. She had once been pricked by a pin while
shaking hands with the consultant, and at later meetings, she refused to
shake hands with him while denying that she had ever seen him before.
She had lost the explicit representational skill, but remembered well
enough implicitly, or procedurally i. e. in terms of what forms of action to
take.
Patients with this form of amnesia have not lost the ability to form new
procedural skills (including clearly cognitively imbued skills such a mirror
reading), but cannot acquire new consciously accessible mental represen-
tations. Avoiding behaviours that give rise to unpleasant experience
clearly is one such skill type and this has implications for the role of
adaptation. Blindsight (cf. Weiskrantz 1986) may be a glimpse of the same
type of mechanism, whereby the environment can impinge on your orien-
tation without generating any conscious awareness.
If we follow the principle of caution, there is thus no justification for
assuming that the neurocognitive underpinning of skills, including lin-
guistic skills, have any similarity at all with the kind of mental representa-
tions that are consciously accessible to us. This might appear to support a
generative, purely computational approach to grammatical processing.
But this is due to a variant of the same fallacy as the gut brain example.
Not only are computational operations insufficient for meaning there is
no such thing out there in the world that is inherently computational
(except a computer). It follows from Searles (1980, 1983) argument that
it is empirically empty to describe these processes as computational
what exists is a causal pattern with certain properties that can be simu-
lated. The workings of the gastrointestinal tract, the workings of the brain,
that used to be conscious gradually recede into the background. But on closer
inspection, this turns out to be a conflation of two processes: one consisting in
the fading away of explicit representations, the other in the buildup of reliable
neurocognitive routines. There is never a point at which the actual skill is con-
scious: at all the different stages, the sensorimotor skill as such (like all other
sensorimotor skills) is hermetically sealed. The conscious representations
stand outside and prompt the action, but they are not part of the actual execu-
tion, not even at the fumbling stages.
or the workings of the railway system, can with equal justification be

modelled by computational procedures but this does not mean that
either railways or digestive tracts exist at a computational level in addi-
tion to a digestive or a transport level, respectively. Hence there is no
argument for assuming that linguistic processing intrinsically possesses a
computational level.14
This does not entirely eliminate backstage cognition in the CL sense
but in order to avoid mystification it has to be assigned clearly to one of the
two following kinds: the first category is neurocognitive ability, which we
may choose to call cognitive but is not mental in the full representational
sense of being available to conscious inspection (and that means never, not
a low percentage of the time). This is knowledge only in the knowing-how
or procedural sense. One way of making that point is to say that tacit
knowledge is procedural knowledge; but as also pointed out by Langacker
(2008a: 459) it is better to avoid describing it in terms (such as knowledge)
with associations of explicit and declarative mental content and use the
term ability instead (thus explicitly going against Chomskys position as
quoted in note 14). A procedural interpretation appears to be compatible
also with some strands in the generative tradition, cf. Ullman et al. (1997).
The second category is the kind that is potentially conscious. Although
it is temporarily inaccessible, it might at some point pop up in conscious
form. Although percentage counts are no more than suggestive, it makes
sense to say that at any given time we are only conscious of a very low
proportion of the total potentially available knowledge we possess. This
also applies to the kind of representations that occur at the output and
input ends of linguistic processing. The procedural work of producing
14 Chomskys definition of competence therefore ends up in no mans land:

The term competence entered the technical literature in an effort to avoid
the slew of problems relating to knowledge, but it is misleading in that it
suggests ability an association I would like to sever (Chomsky 1980: 59,
quoted from Brown, Malmkjr and Williams 1996: 3)
Chomsky would like to posit something that is just like knowledge but without
being consciously accessible. At the same time, it must not be identical with
the infrastructure of ability. For the reasons outlined, there can be no such
thing. To the extent there is any reality in tacit knowledge of the Chomskyan
kind, it is the causal wiring of a complex behaviour. Chomskys own metaphor
of the language organ points to the same thing: the formally representable
processes that he is talking about are analogous to the causal mechanics in the
gut or the liver (the liver is Newmeyers 1998 illustration analogy in arguing
for linguistic autonomy).
utterances prompts a great deal of concomitant representations, which we

may be only fleetingly aware of.15
In neuroscientific terms, part of the story is that the two systems inter-
act intensely in normal brains. In terms of language learning, this is
reflected in the fact that explicit learning has turned out to play an impor-
tant role for L2 acquisition. In continuation of the generative theory of
language acquisition, Krashen (1981), put forward a hypothesis that there
was a total separation between real, implicit language acquisition and
consciously accessible language knowledge but this theory has not been
borne out by the evidence (cf. Ellis 2007). The fact that you can wake up
in the morning and realize that you now have the solution to the problem
you thought about last night shows that there is an intimate relation
between dynamic unconscious processes and conscious outputs. This
interaction remains a tantalizing mystery. Another intermediate-type
phenomenon is the form of consciousness that may attend the processing
(which is in itself unconscious) qualia-type sensations like the sense that
something is wrong or that something is eluding you, or the tip-of-the-
tongue phenomenon: a message from the machine room that they are
working on the retrieval problem that you have set and any moment now
the word may be available.
It follows from the above that the ultimate goal of linguistics cannot be
a complete description of language competency in the form of declarative
representations with psychological reality at least if we mean this is
what really and truly is there in the native speakers brain as part of his
language competency. This ambition only makes sense (regardless of
whether it is practically possible) if we aim at describing flow, i. e. a con-
crete actual sequence of language use a stream of consciousness type of
object. This type of phenomenon is clearly distinct from the object of
description that most cognitively interested linguists, including generativ-
ists, have traditionally taken for granted (with a recent formulation, cf.
Langacker 2008a: 20): a fluent native speakers conventional knowledge
of language.
As already pointed out, the central claim is not new, and since it is very
hard to disentangle procedural and declarative elements anyway, it may
be asked what precisely follows from this discussion. I think it points to a
necessary reorientation that would be difficult to get ones head around in
15 I have elsewhere argued (Harder 2007d: 12551256) that much of what Lakoff
and Johnson (1999: 1011) see as completely inaccessible backstage cognition
is actually of the second, potentially conscious kind, an example being antici-
pating where the conversation is going.
the absence of a clear recognition of the difference between skills and

representations. A social cognitive linguistics needs to integrate a tradi-
tion focused on representations into a larger context where adaptation to
social structures plays an important role. Adaptation means coping, and
coping means skill. Familiar concepts like entrenchment and automatiza-
tion must be seen in the dual light of the representational dimension and
the ability dimension.
An example that may illustrate the two perspectives is a proposed
reinterpretation of the figure-ground issue in relation to language. Krifka
(2007) suggests that there is a source which is not based on perception (as
generally assumed in classic CL, cf. p. 18), but rather in bimanual action:
the topic is held constant (with the non-dominant hand), while the com-
ment is the elaboration (by the dominant hand). Both ideas are in har-
mony with embodiment, but they are different in terms of the role of men-
tal representation and the skills element is more strongly profiled than
in the traditional perception-based account. The proper descriptive strat-
egy is to assume that there are two different dimensions and then seek to
integrate them, rather than assume that there is one object that can be
subsumed under the concept of knowledge or psychological reality.16 It
is interesting that at a seminal point, in the introduction to Holland and
Quinn (1987: 6), the distinction between operational and representational
knowledge was explicitly confronted and rejected. Instead, it was
assumed (in our view) that underlying models of the same order
16 This also means that the terminology of hypothesis-testing that persists in the
language acquisition literature should be replaced by skill-testing: only lin-
guists test hypotheses about language, but all learners try out their skills and
learn from the outcomes (some children, of course, may act like linguists!). The
much-discussed issue of negative evidence also falls into two subcategories:
although few children get corrected explicitly, all children experience varying
degrees of success in accomplishing the goals of their utterances, and we must
assume that they adapt according to the pin-prick type of mechanism along-
side their adaptation to conscious feedback. If the goal includes an integrative
component, as we may assume it does in all cases of L1 acquisition, all per-
ceived deviances between own output and other-output will feed into this
process, whenever the speaker senses that she did not get it quite right. Imita-
tion in L1-learning as described by Tomasello might plausibly be understood
as driven chiefly by unconscious adaptive mechanisms. Conscious representa-
tion typically sets in in breakdown situations, where the procedure does not
come off: consciously driven readjustment may then get the process on the
rails again.
are used in operational and representational contexts. For the reasons I

have given, I think it is time to reverse that decision.
In the light of the history whereby tacit knowledge/backstage cogni-
tion provided a step forward from behaviourism, this might appear to be
a step backwards. Causal wiring of language activity, indeed! But that
would be a misunderstanding based on accepting one of the behaviourist
assumptions, namely that there is a chasm between overt behaviour and
complex cognitive performance. Seeing skills as more primitive than
conceptual representations would reflect this obsolete way of thinking.
Rather, for some purposes it makes more sense to see the skill as the fin-
ished product, while for other purposes the explicit declarative represen-
tations are the finished product. Each side would be severely hampered
without the other. For instance, thinking is itself a skill, and we have no
more conscious access to the procedural operations that go into thinking
than to the operations that go into walking. The point is related to the
point made by Verhagen on the importance of the regulatory as opposed
to the purely representational role of language (cf. p. 87), and he reports
similar reactions (personal communication). There is a very ancient pres-
tige structure at work here, in which the attempt to interfere with actual
social processes is vulgar compared to the glory of purely mental activity.
But fairly obviously it would be no less reductive to see mental processes
as working solely in a world of their own than it would be to go back to the
behaviourist idea that they are under direct stimulus control.
This leaves the question of the exact role of truly mental phenomena,
when it comes to understanding the process dimension. I refer to those
representations that form the mental content of the human mind the
inner sanctum of the black box that was declared open at the demise of
behaviourism. One aspect of the answer is that there is a functional rela-
tionship: we use conscious mental representations in orienting our actions
and adapting our action skills.17 A central functional feedback process is
the one that operates when we invoke the unconscious linguistic proce-
dures and evaluate the results for instance in accessing a lexical item.
When recruiting, for instance, the words left or right in giving directions,
many people (including myself) have an astonishingly high error rate.
17 Adherents of first-generation cognitive science occasionally claimed that con-

sciousness was an epiphenomenon with no causal significance a computer
screen that makes no difference to the execution of the programs. But as
argued by Searle (1992:125), there is no compelling argument for it. Also, it is
obviously implausible as applied to skills acquisition: think of learning how to
handle a computer with the screen turned off.
Regardless of the neuroanatomical divide between skills and conscious

awareness, the integration between the two creates a functional system
which can only be described by putting mental representations and causal
wiring together in the same model (as done in e. g. Levelts processing
theories, cf. Levelt 1989, 1999). This is plausible in terms of the evolution-
ary satisficing criterion. If adaptive correction of skills based on con-
scious understanding was not an option, my wife and I would still be driv-
ing around looking for the hotel we had booked in Morocco last March.18
From a functional approach, the output end is criterial: only the actual
response enters into the feedback process that determines what persists,
not the preparatory stages and their variable degrees of conscious acces-
sibility. The output end, however, is also central from the mental point of
view: intentional human action is only possible if the act we end up per-
forming is consciously accessible (while again, preparatory stages do not
have to be accessible). Yet the two properties are still dissociable: even the
output stages are mentally conscious to a variable degree. When I perform
routine actions, such as riding a bicycle, my conscious mind may be occu-
pied for much of the time with matters entirely unconnected to the ride.
18 This is also the basis of the professional linguists use of intuitions: you draw
inferences about the properties of the linguistic input based on conscious eval-
uation of the output. These properties may themselves be consciously acces-
sible, but even if that is not the case, there is frequently no alternative avenue
of exploration. We can only get at these things via participant access. When
used responsibly, it is an experimental procedure, not simply introspection in
the sense of looking inward and describing what you find. In the so-called
commutation test, you exchange one sound segment for another (e. g. sit vs.
set), and then see whether the result makes a semantic difference in terms of
conscious understanding and that does not entail an assumption that the
procedure for articulating vowels is consciously accessible. When you describe
syntactic and semantic variation, you look at a number of different examples
and describe your conscious understanding of them and then relate your
conscious understanding to properties of the linguistic input. For semantic
properties, more may be accessible to participant consciousness than in the
case of vowels but we have to live with the fact that underneath the con-
sciously accessible level there is always an ability level where the object drops
out of sight. The difference between empirical and pure armchair linguistics is
not the use or non-use of this procedure without it, linguistics would simply
be impossible. The difference is in how much empirical input you bring to the
intuition-imbued experiment from large scale empirical data collection to
describing the object literally off the top of your head. Intuition, i. e. the use of
consciously accessible participant representations of the meaning of linguistic
expressions, is indispensable at all points on this cline.
On very preoccupied days, I can get home before conscious attention sets
in, and I may have no recollection of what happened during the trip
because all the decisions were delegated to the procedural system. If lots
of interesting things happen, on the other hand, the whole ride will be
filed away in conscious memory. Only the actual decision to start off the
whole complex procedure needs to be consciously available (in order for
human rather than zombie activity to have taken place).19
Competency in handling conventional meaning therefore has to be
defined in relation to the whole span from the almost totally inaccessible
procedural choices to the fully accessible output meanings. When I say
almost totally inaccessible, it is because the link to consciousness consti-
tutes the borderline between meaningful and zombie activity. Lakoff and
Johnson (1999: 17)s description of the amoebas ability to distinguish
between food and toxic substances as an instance of categorization can
only be correct if the amoeba has conscious access to the result, and this
conscious awareness may drive feedback to later triggering. Most people
would side with Johnson-Laird (1988: 24) in putting this down to purely
hard-wired responses. A meaningful choice potentially triggers feedback
of the kind that defines functions, and the stored feedback from the out-
put to the shaping of future response is therefore linked up with meaning
in a way that makes it part of semantic competency. The motor procedures
in themselves are not semantic but the loop from conscious output back
to the conditions for triggering action subroutines in the future, and eve-
rything that takes part in that dynamic process, are constituents of seman-
tic competency from a functional point of view.
In order for semantic categorization to be involved, there has to be a
degree of interplay between consciousness and purely neural wiring. This
19 In previous sections I have argued that conventional meanings are more

directly related to the input end of the interpretive process than to the output
end that consists in the completed interpretation. But if only the output end is
guaranteed to be fully accessible to consciousness, how can semanticists get at
conventional meaning?The answer is that they are left in the same position as
ordinary speakers: they have to infer (and abduct, cf. Andersen 1973) the
potential-for-use via concrete instances-of-use. Semanticists have a task that is
in one sense harder, since they have to make their description explicit (in spite
of the fact that the meanings they describe are not inherently fully explicit
mental entities). But that is no different from any other discipline: molecules
are not fully explicit mental entities either. Linguistic categories are meta-
level containers, designed to capture features of the described object. They
are not identical to categories inherent in the described object. Not even lin-
guists should confuse the map with the landscape.
is not necessarily always the case even in human beings. If you respond to
a tap on your knee by jerking you leg, it is not an act of categorization; and
this carries over to ways in which you respond to objects around you in
everyday life. From when I was six to when I was about eighteen I disliked
a subset (but not quite a conceptual category) of fruits. The reason was
that at six I had stuffed myself with a kind of not-quite-plums from a tree
on the way to school to such an extent that I was violently sick, and like
rats in Skinners experiments I steered clear of anything remotely remi-
niscent of them. The category (which gradually shrank over the years)
was defined not in terms of conventions in the niche, but due to gut feeling
(quite literally). But of course I had conscious awareness that there was a
type of fruits that I avoided and thus there was a thin conceptual layer
on top of the gut response.
This can be used as a stepping-stone to responses that form part of
Bourdieus area of habitus (cf. p. 110 above), linked by Searle himself to
what Searle (1992: 177) calls background. Searle points out the link back
to Wittgenstein, whose concept of forms of life also gets at the non-rep-
resentational background for meaning. The background contains all
embodied states such as feelings and routines that work by purely proce-
dural skills, and especially all states of being attuned to a world with par-
ticular features such as having a walking skill that depends on the ground
remaining solid under your feet. Bourdieus habitus is designed to capture
especially the kind of attunement that is the result of social pressures.
Such attunement is caused by a mixture of direct impact (acts of physical
oppression and punishment, for instance) and adaptation: if they prick us,
not only do we bleed, we also adapt our reactions so as to avoid future
prickings, thus developing embodied responses caused by social oppres-
sion. The posture of a serf in the presence of his master might be inter-
preted as indicating respect, but on a habitus interpretation it is merely
an entrenched bodily response to a potential danger. It is tempting to call
this secondary embodiment to distinguish it from the kind of embodied
responses that develop spontaneously as a result of normal human matu-
ration but since all human responses are the result of interaction between
the individual and environment, it is difficult to tell the two apart in prin-
ciple.
Is habitus-driven activity zombie behaviour? Well, yes and no. It repre-
sents a response to life in the niche that is attended with conscious aware-
ness at the margins an awareness that may expand in ways that will be
discussed later (p. 316). Well-entrenched routines that are usually dele-
gated to the neurocognitive autopilot system and thus recede into the
background may sometimes erupt into consciousness, for instance in
problematic situations. The social processes that in Bourdieus theory gen-

erate habitus as an unconscious set of bodily dispositions work via proc-
esses that also have consciously accessible aspects (such as education).20
A recent line of investigation which is beginning to throw light on this
issue is the investigation of embodied meaning via body specificity by
Daniel Casasanto (Casasanto 2009). The association whereby the domi-
nant side is conceptualized as the good side is reflected in widespread
associations such as right contrasting simultaneously with left and with
wrong, with the negative association of words for left such as sinister
and gauche, etc. There is no way to tease apart the cultural and the embod-
ied dimensions in explaining why up is good (because the predictions
would be the same, whether you saw it as biologically or culturally
grounded) but the existence of left-handedness offers a chance to see
whether there was a difference in embodied and cultural patterns. And
sure enough, in a series of experiments, Casasanto and associates have
shown that there is a significant bias correlated with the handedness of
subjects when it comes to what is the good side in a series of arbitrary
and balanced choice tasks, items came out as good in ways that reflected
a reverse bias in left-handed persons, such that items were evaluated more
favourably if they were on the good side. (The pattern extended to ges-
tures by US presidential candidates, who uniformly put problems on their
bad side!).
One would assume that such reverse response types in left-handed vs.
right-handed subjects are at the level of what you would call gut feeling:
they defy cultural patterns and show the robustness of responses grounded
in your own individual body. In interactive negotiation of meaning, the
bias in terms of categorisation into good and bad has to interface with
other peoples personal biases and hopefully be overruled by public and
joint deliberation in cases involving choice: Casasanto posed the question
20 This raises a methodological problem for experimental approaches to concep-

tualization: How do you tell conceptual categories from embodied, but non-
mental response patterns? There is a long history of formulations that blur this
distinction, as when Cheney and Seyfart (1992) suggest that vervet monkeys
would be excellent primatologists (with their precise awareness of the features
being studied), Harris (1998) talks about each speaker being his own linguist,
Chomsky uses the term grammar about both what is in the mind/brain and the
grammar book, etc. However tempting it is to sit comfortably down on the
fence, ultimately we need to devise ways of telling whether what we find is an
operational skill or a conceptual representation.
Usage, competency and meaning construction 209
of how much depended on which side of the bosss desk your rsum
ended up on.
Work in progress (Casasanto, personal communication) suggests that
in some experimental conditions you are more likely to respond based on
cultural patterns and in others the embodied responses win out. This is a
neat example of how the investigation of divergence and convergence
goes hand in hand: body-specific experience gives rise to convergence
with personal categorization on the one hand (as it were) and divergence
in relation to cultural categories on the other.
5. Usage, competency and meaning construction
The emphasis on sprawling semantic potentials, on dynamic meaning con-

struction in context, and on non-semantic skills all entail a development
away from neat mental representations and towards a larger and more
varied universe of structures and processes. However, I now turn to the
question of whether and to what extent we can still see the meanings
of linguistic items as separate objects of description. The emphasis I put
on competency meanings as a separate object of description also entails
emphasis on this possibility. I will first discuss the position of Croft and
Cruse (2004), then the position of Taylor (2006).
The following quotation from Croft and Cruse (2004) can serve as a
point of departure for the role I see for the instructional perspective.21
In many approaches to meaning, there is a determinate starting point for the
process of constructing an interpretation, but an indeterminate end point (.)
The present model of comprehension has an indeterminate starting point (a
purport) and a determinate end point. ().
Each lexical item (word form) is associated with a body of conceptual content
that is here given the name purport () purport is continually developing:
every experience of the use of a word modifies the words purport to some
degree (p. 100)
It is by a series of processes of construal that an essentially non-semantic pur-
port is transformed into fully contextualized meanings (p. 103)
The extracts make a valid point, but I am going to argue that a balanced
view of meaning also requires a sense of the term meaning that applies to
the input stage.
21 A more detailed version of the argument is found in Harder (2007b)

Word meaning is indeterminate outside of an actual utterance in the

sense that the potential in its entirety is rarely relevant for any actual
utterance, and we cannot know in advance what area is central in relation
to a particular case. More senses are evoked than are actually used (as in
the case of bug explored by Swinney 1979). But it is not surprising that
you cannot know a precise utterance meaning except in relation to an
actual utterance. In a sense, the indeterminacy of the potential that is
extracted from utterances for future use is the whole point of having a
human language as opposed to a pre-determined set of calls, cf. Deacon
(1997): meanings in human languages are symbolic rather than situation-
bound.
Input meaning emerges from the whole range of use, rather than
being definable as invariant essence. Once it has emerged, however, it
constitutes something else than merely the sum total of actual usage
events. Langackers term centrality (1987: 159), closely related to what
Geeraerts discusses as salience (cf. p. 67), captures what happens on the
path of emergence from raw usage to (input) meaning: certain semantic
properties are highlighted at the expense of others, and knowing a word
entails knowing what features you centrally invoke when you use it. Cen-
trality is thus a good way to allow for gradual and subtle differences. But
there are also absolute differences. The meaning of the word computer is
distinct from that of grow and that of dirty in ways that centrality cap-
tures only awkwardly. Speakers need to know those distinctions, and
describing them as indeterminate and essentially non-semantic does not
give the full story.
A similar point can be made in relation to the position adopted by
Taylor (2006). Taylor lines up the hard problems associated with the mon-
osemy-polysemy spectrum: if you go in for polysemy, how do you indi-
viduate meanings? If you go in for networks, how do you choose between
competing versions? His own proposal is based on a rejection of what he
calls the dictionary + grammar model and the assumptions about compo-
sitionality on which it rests. Echoing familiar CL assumptions about par-
tial compositionality, he suggests that the whole idea of starting with a
word and searching for its properties is mistaken. Instead, meanings essen-
tially belong in the very large inventory of multi-word expressions
which speakers have learned as such, i. e. in concrete usage situations.
Beginning at that end, he suggests, means that the semantic contribution
of component words will become less and less of a concern (2006: 63).
This approach has a whiff of usage fundamentalism about it: only
chunks of actual flow are real. But I would like to begin by emphasizing
an important and under-appreciated point that Taylor makes. A crucial
Usage, competency and meaning construction 211
process in the rise of word meanings is top-down differentiation: you

abstract the contribution of the word out of your understanding of a whole
utterance. In the beginning was not the word, but the utterance (cf. Harder
1996: 265). Atomic elements, including word meanings, are not basic (cf.
also the discussion of Crofts Radical Construction Grammar p. 245).
Some words are more independent than others; but all words are some
extent syncategorematic.
For the more syncategorematic words, whatever you might wish to see
as the contribution of the individual words would need to be studied in
close connection with a study of the constructions they form part of, as
suggested by Stefanowitch and Gries (2003). Cases like all over and
cases like over the table would then come out with different indexes,
and thus with different status as descriptors of the word over as a unit in
itself. It is not an accident that the key discussion of polysemy has been
about a preposition. In terms of the theory proposed above, prepositions
have the job of locating entities, not of assigning them to a conceptual
category. When you say the lamp is over the table, you are not primarily
engaged in subsuming an object under a general category by assigning it
to the concept over. Rather, in combination with its complement, a prep-
osition is used to locate an object in the concrete situation. In the hypo-
thetical extreme case where a word is totally submerged in a web of col-
locations, with no perceivable contribution of its own, a network diagram
of its senses would of course be a pure artefact.
In all other cases, the issue of contribution would remain. Even if
meanings of smaller units are abstracted out of larger units, speakers still
need to know how to deal with those smaller units. The question of
whether it makes sense to look for the semantic contribution of a lin-
guistic expression is orthogonal to the question of what size unit you
choose. I think Taylors examples are persuasive, as far as they go: one
would not want to base a description of the expression all over on its com-
ponent parts, for instance. But the issue of semantic contribution also
applies to the whole multi-word expression all over. And if with Taylor we
take the next step to larger expressions such as all over the paddock (Aus-
tralian/New Zealand usage), the question remains. The only way you can
avoid the semantic contribution issue is by going all the way to whole
utterances with fully contextually specified meanings a list of actual
utterances, in other words. If we follow the argument against the concept
of semantic contribution all the way to that conclusion, it rules out mean-
ing construction (on which point it differs from the position of Croft and
Cruse as discussed above). Expressions learned as such are retrieved, not
constructed. Meaning construction requires semantic contributions.
The instructional and directional approach offers a format which pro-

vides a clear distinction between usage based and usage fundamentalist
assumptions. Meaning as something attached to linguistic expressions
would not be possible without a process of abstraction not even for rote-
learnt holophrases like hurrah or fuck. This is a direct consequence of the
domestication process that deprived hominids of most innate calls but
made it possible to invent expressions with meanings that are not directly
triggered. Without abstraction abilities, it would not work (cf. also Stjern-
felt 2007 for a pursuit of this point).
6. Conceptual categories and the flow. Messy

and precise semantic territories
Above, I have argued that concepts are better understood as ways of trig-
gering an act of categorization than as a static construct but that in order
to understand what a concept can do for the speaker, it is necessary to
understand the input to the act of categorization as a determinate entity,
even if it is not as neat as Aristotle assumed. We have seen that there is an
issue in usage based linguistics with respect to how or whether one can
postulate meanings that exist in abstraction from usage; and in this section
this debate is taken up with respect to what used to be the centrepiece of
discussions about mental content: conceptual categories as such. As
pointed out by Langacker (2001: 11), the equation between meaning and
concept in the countable sense is not an assumption that is generally
taken for granted in CL: the uncountable and process sense of conceptu-
alization is more basic.
The role I see for a concept does not apply to all linguistic meanings. But
for certain meanings, I think it makes sense to understand a word meaning
as being directly linked to a mental concept. For example, I think it makes
sense to say that a central function of the expression dog is to evoke the
concept of dog. In this respect, I see the word class of nouns as having a
privileged position (for reasons which will be discussed in greater detail in
ch. 6, p. 257). The function is especially central when the noun stands as
head noun in a complex NP, which is the grammatical slot for indicating the
category to which a designated entity belongs: a Japanese American is an
American, while an American Japanese is a Japanese. Logically enough, in
discussions about the appropriateness of different concepts, it is tradition-
ally nouns that are considered. Categorization as a sub-act thus has a privi-
leged association with nouns (while verbs predicate and prepositions
locate, etc). Outside the head position, it becomes more complex: a com-
Conceptualcategoriesandthe ow.Messyandprecisesemanticterritories 213
pound such as computer science, for instance, does not directly classify an
object as coming under the category computer, and therefore it evokes a
wider part of the potential, including the activity of computing, than the
point-blank categorizing statement this is a computer.22 The following dis-
cussion presupposes that we are talking about head nouns.
Part of the functional utility of concepts as part of an individuals cop-
ing skill depends on concepts being adaptable to the categorization tasks
that they are called upon to assist with. It follows that concepts are not
immutable over time, even though they preserve their identity as line-
ages in Crofts terms (cf. p. 89). In terms of the framework of this book,
this is understood in terms of the evolution-inspired concept of function:
each act of categorization impinges on the concept which adapts to the
process of use. It is stable in a relative sense, however, in that it persists
between events, and is never reducible to any actual instantiation. The
first time I saw a red-skinned potato in my fathers garden, it expanded my
concept of potato without destroying the concept that was there before.
Concepts are useful precisely because they reduce variation by subsuming
individual instantiations under general categories.
The dynamic coping context can throw some light on the discussion of
classical Aristotelian concepts in relation to prototypes and family resem-
blances. From a functional perspective, Aristotelian concepts constitute a
maximally simple and reliable solution to the abstract question of catego-
ries a neat separation between properties to abstract away from and
properties that make a difference when we move from instantiation to
concept. Simplicity and reliability are important when you are interested
in the properties of the categories for their own sake, as philosophers and
scientists are: for them it is central to get the categories under control,
whereas dealing adequately with a single specimen can be entrusted to
the research assistant.
However, as discussed above on p. 17, the everyday functional mecha-
nism of dividing up the world based on what is relevant to the individual
does not have to work in such a tidy manner. For practical purposes we
22 A full discussion of this issue would take us beyond the scope of this book.
Part of the problem involves the issue of what exactly a concept is including
the question of the relation between concepts as parts of mental competency
(what is discussed in this chapter) and concepts as part of the niche (cf. ch 7,
p. 318 f). The claim made here is only that (in languages like English), nouns
inherently have a semantic element that links them to a category, which makes
the link closer than for other word classes, and that this property is partly
shared with so-called classifying adjectives, as in musical (instrument).
choose categories that we find useful how precise and reliable they need
to be depends on the circumstances. In the crime story that I am reading,
the stereotypical stupid policeman complains about all the different cat-
egories of modern forensic psychology and says that the category nut
was good enough for him. Necessary and sufficient conditions are of no
interest to him. We may disagree for reasons of principle (political and/or
scientific), but this is beside the point if we want to understand the role of
categories in his everyday life.
For the same (functional) reason, the properties of a concept do not
have to match the properties of the instantiations precisely. In fact,
demanding a one-to-one match would ruin the whole point: there have to
be properties that we disregard when we align two different instantiations
under the same category otherwise the concept as such would duplicate
information that was already in the instantiation and be functionally
superfluous (cf. also Langackers use of the categorizing relationship dis-
cussed above on p. 50). When you grasp experience by means of concepts,
your grasp will be no more precise than the actual practices that it arises
from. Neatness and consistency are potential encumbrances, and fuzziness
is just a practical problem.
There is an orientation in the CL discussion towards local forms of
organization those that are as close as possible to the individual event.
On a path that starts out with classical concepts, you can then move via
prototypes to family resemblances and all the way down to a swarm of
individual exemplars, cp. Croft (2007), and this path can be seen as mov-
ing gradually closer to reality, away from abstract idealization. This is a
natural conclusion if you look for cognitive organization in the mind of
the individual, down to neurocognitive traces of individual events. How-
ever, if you view conceptual constructs as part of a social practice, you
have to look at the functional dimension. If we assume that linguistic
practices are responsive to selection pressures, what forms of conceptual
organization can this give rise to? Before we answer the question in any
detail, we have to begin by looking at the different kinds of practices that
are involved.
Roschs original distinction (1975) between basic-level concepts and
superordinate concepts already implied an important adaptive point: only
those categories that enter into everyday life on a regular basis develop
prototype effects. It takes time and processing power to build up a con-
ceptual container organized with reference to a selected cluster of proper-
ties, with a centre and a periphery. Unless you have a sufficient number of
instantiations and these are felt to be worth the effort, you simply do not
bother. For more abstract or schematic categories we therefore develop
less rich representations, defined only in terms of a single or a few features

(cf. also the discussion of Geeraerts on diachronic prototype semantics,
p. 65).
As pointed out by Johnson-Laird (1983), these properties can be linked
to a functional division of labour that accommodates prototypes and clas-
sical concepts in different roles. In everyday life, there are many cases
where it only makes sense to deal with instantiations in a rough-and-ready
manner. Food, traffic, types of people for most purposes there is an obvi-
ous relation between the approximative nature of satificing and the
approximative nature of categories with more or less central members,
just as with the concept of rule of thumb. Basic-level concepts get their
rich but imprecise nature as containers for the same reason that our
kitchen shelves end up with somewhat heterogeneous stuff on them: they
may not fit too well, but you dont know where else to put them and you
cannot stand there forever before dealing with the next thing that draws
your attention.
On the other hand, there are cases which call for an either-or type of
decision. Johnson-Laird mentions legal distinctions as a case in point. If a
particular crime renders the culprit liable to a term of imprisonment of
two years, it is problematic to say that his act falls roughly into that cat-
egory: in order to put him away, we would like to get a clear answer is
this grand larceny or what? Medical diagnoses are another case where
precision may be important. A doctor may respond to symptoms by
assigning the category meningitis, which calls for a somewhat drastic
response, or she might not. The dilemma is there: tertium non datur. If it
turns out later that she did not assign the category and should have, a cri-
tique of the Aristotelian theory of concepts is no help.
This is similar to the special type of practice that consists in scientific
description. Aristotle was oriented towards clear-cut containers because
he wanted to get deeper than everyday rough-and-ready categories. Sci-
ence, like the law, is also a normative practice: you want to put the speci-
mens in exactly their right place. Thus it makes sense to see if you can set
up new categories that are clearer than the everyday ones for just that
purpose.
Both classical categories and prototypes have a property that distin-
guishes them from family resemblances and exemplar clusters: they
involve a significant reduction of complexity. The category bird, which is a
prototype for many people, covers close to 10,000 different species in the
world, with untold numbers of specimens all together. If the generaliza-
tion associated with bird is significant for practical purposes, then all the
other differences may be irrelevant, once you have put something in the
bird category (i. e., it is not a bomb, or a plane, or a childrens kite). Cas-
sowaries in the Karam Papua New Guinea community, on the other hand,
do not belong under the category, because their significance (as a large
ostrich-type species) is totally different from the significance of all other
kinds of bird (cf. Bulmer 1967 as quoted in Aitchison 1994: 65).
Family resemblances are thus less useful as the basis for categorization:
you cannot infer very much significant information from them. They
match the cases where the cohesive link of the term is fairly feeble, and
the centripetal forces are correspondingly strong. The extreme end of the
scale is the view of categories as constituted by a cluster of exemplars. This
approach is interesting, because from the perspective of direct relation to
psychological reality it is so attractive. As discussed by Goldberg (2006), in
non-linguistic literature on categorization evidence has accumulated that
people in fact not only store exemplars, they are also able to extract statis-
tical information from the collection of stored exemplars. This is why the
view that categories are equal to a collection of stored exemplars until
very recently dominated work on categorization in cognitive psychology
(Goldberg 2006: 46). Yet a pure collection view leaves the whole issue of
generalizations unaccounted for. As Goldberg points out (2006: 47), quot-
ing Ross and Makin (1999: 8), it takes away the categoriness of catego-
ries: only instantiations remain.
The functional properties of this cline of variability can be demon-
strated in mathematical terms. Warglien and Grdenfors (2007) have
shown that as long as their domain in conceptual space is convex, concepts
can start out as rather different in the minds of language users, and still
enable a process of homing in on the same meanings. This is because suc-
cessive rounds of attempted matching, in the course of working out an
interpretation, will make them converge on the same fixpoints. In real life,
the process can be understood in terms of Piagetian development with its
twin mechanisms of assimilation and accommodation (cp. p. 71): when-
ever a term is applied to an instantiation, it brings about an adjustment
both of the term and of the perception of the instantiation.
Of course the individuation of conceptual territories depends on vari-
ational and pragmatic circumstances also for nouns. I am not saying is
that there are really eternal invariant concepts after all: the precise nature
of the container depends on the circumstances, as all other forms of mean-
ing do. What I am saying is that noun (input) meanings are for putting
tokens in containers, and the meaning potential of a noun therefore
includes containers. This means that concepts are part of speaker compe-
tencies, even if there is no one-to-one relationship. The (niche) word dog
may designate the species or the male only (dog vs bitch) and that means
that there are two well-defined potential containers in the semantic terri-
tory of the word. The more of those a speakers has, the more competent
she will be also for purposes of language use. If you do not happen to
know the male sense, a conversation about dogs and bitches would be
hard to follow.
Verbs are less categorial than nouns, and less sprawling than preposi-
tions (reflecting their position in the syntactic hierarchy, cf. p. 257). In gen-
eralizing about verb meaning, one should not look for containers, but for
elements that can be predicated about tokens in them.This bears on Tay-
lors argument against Searles (1983: 145f) well-known defence of mon-
osemous literal meaning for a verb like open. Searle claims that we know
perfectly well what a phrase like open the sun would mean we just dont
know what specific action it would refer to. Taylor, in contrast, suggests
that the only meanings we really know are the meanings of entrenched
combinations such as open the window, and the word open it itself has no
independent meaning apart from such usage-entrenched cases. It appears
that Taylor is to some extent presupposing a more rigorous view of seman-
tics than a cognitive linguist would adopt in other contexts. As an objec-
tion to Searles claim that we can know the meaning without knowing the
truth conditions or entailments, he argues (2006: 54):
This raises questions about the usefulness of unitary representations. If they
are not involved in determining truth conditions or entailments, what are they
for, and why should we be bothered by them?
While this argument might be the expected one from Lewis or Davidson,
it is not in the general spirit of CL in its increasingly social and dynamic
phase. Verb senses vary with different types of landmark elements and
this is part of the reason why it is difficult to define a truth-conditionally
unitary conceptual category for the verb open. The relevant form of
abstraction comes easier if you look for what the verb could predicate
about its landmark. One might tentatively propose (borrowing Talmys
concept of barrier) a core aspect of its meaning potential that involves
the removal of a schematic barrier at the boundary of the object nominal,
making its interior accessible. The nature of the barrier would then be free
to vary with the object in question (window, meeting, bank account, etc).
Sometimes it would not be easy to think of how that barrier might look or
what access to the interior would imply but that would be a task for
meaning construction, not an objection to looking for an input meaning
that is as well-defined as the data allow.
Precision, of course, also has a pragmatic dimension. As often pointed
out, you can reduce a prototype to a classical concept by defining the con-
cept in terms of the prototype case alone and then treat instances beyond
the pale as errors in terms of the norm that you describe. A statement is a
lie, cf. Coleman & Kay (1981), if (1) it is false, (2) the speaker knows it is
false, and (3) makes the statement with the intent to deceive and benefit
from the deception. This leaves us with non-core cases like white lies
which do not confer illegitimate benefits on the speaker. For everyday
purposes it does not really matter whether they are viewed as marginal
cases of lies or as non-lies but there may be external social reasons why
the distinction has to be drawn sharply in actual cases. A vow of truthful-
ness, with sanctions in case of violation, is a narrative classic instance. For
the purpose we are discussing, i. e. adding an extra layer on top of every-
day criteria for conceptualization, it functions just like the scientific ambi-
tion to get the description 100 % right by imposing, through social pres-
sure, a higher degree of order on the world than we usually have time for.
This illustrates a dimension of offline competency that is at the same
time fine-tuned in relation to the actual situational flow. The speakers
conceptual apparatus for handling potential instances of lies can be
adjusted to different degrees of strictness: the container function offers
more than a one-size-fits-all construct. This is a very non-Platonic prop-
erty of semantic competency; but it does not inevitably translate into
sophistic irresponsibility. A lawyer who is unable to adjust his legal cate-
gories to the actual circumstances of the case is not going to make it to the
Supreme Court. The situational adjustment capability, whether deviously
pragmatic or ineptly inflexible, is in all cases understandable only as an
offline property of conceptualization. If we had only the flow of actual use
of concepts, there would be no possibility of even raising the issue of flex-
ibility, ineptness or honesty.
The same basic division into online dynamics and offline resources for
coping can be applied to other basic notions of CL. It would be too cum-
bersome to go through the argument in detail, but let me briefly outline
how the account can be generalized.
In addition to the basic, non-count stream of conceptualization we
have two kinds of units of representational content, concepts and ideal-
ized conceptual models, and two kinds of presupposed background-for-
concepts, domains and frames. We also have two kinds of locations for
conceptual content: one is the default location of the current discourse
space, the other arises when there is an alternative to the basic reality
space, and we thus have two mental spaces to allocate meaning to.
In dealing with an instance of conceptualization, all these can contrib-
ute something distinct to the understanding of what goes on. If there is a
family problem, for example, the concept mother singles out someone as
Summary 219
an instance of a salient category, while an evocation of Lakoffs nurturant

parent model brings a particular idealized conceptual model into play.
Understanding may also be abstractly considered in terms of the generic
domain of family relations. Finally, the person may be framed against a
presupposed model of classic (or postmodern) family structure, evoking
possibly an alternative mental space in which things would have been dif-
ferent.
In order for all these operations to be available to the speaker, there
has to be an offline store of evocable mental constructs. But their basic
mode of being is when they are actually used as input to ongoing linguistic
interaction, and this is when they serve their functions which I claim is
their true identity. Functionally speaking, concepts serve to reduce incom-
ing experience to recognizable kinds, while ideal cognitive models provide
partial default models of how the world works, enabling agents to shortcut
the process of figuring out what the world is like solely based on the actual
usage situation a slow and error-prone process. Framing gives scope for
selecting different parts of reality as the background for understanding
what is on the agenda, with implications for what acquires presupposed
status. Mental spaces, finally, enable speakers to escape from the tyranny
of thinking only of what is currently accessible.
In this dynamic perspective, we thus retain the rich inventory of con-
ceptual resources that was discovered by classic CL but we view it as
constituting the offline sediments of dynamic online activity, and with a
complex relationship between purely procedural and habitus dimensions
and consciously available conceptual dimensions.
7. Summary
This chapter discussed the relation between two of the three aspects of
language introduced in chapter 4: flow and competency. It did so with ref-
erence to meaning rather than structure, because it would be unwise to
take on two confrontations at the same time: structure vs. cognitive con-
tent, and mind vs. usage. In the case of meaning, the question of offline
properties of language is less contaminated, since no one seriously doubts
that members of the speech community have something that they carry
around in their minds between utterances, which includes an ability to use
a number of different words.
In a usage-based perspective, flow and competency meanings have the
reverse relationship of the inherited pattern of Platonic tradition. Instead
of a collection of eternal ideas that are soiled by actual use, the flow came
first and then members of the speech community developed the ability
(competency) to take part in it. The meaning of the whole enterprise is in
the flow, too: competency meaning is just the prerequisite for getting at
the meaning in the flow. And competency meanings are shaped so as to fit
into the flexible process of meaning construction that mediates between
the coded input and the output that is always necessarily constructed
online as reflected also in the literary theory of interpretation..
This perspective situates speaker competency rather differently from
the tradition, and therefore it involves different claims about what the
offline properties in speakers minds are. For instance it suggests that
meanings associated with words are in between the indeterminacy of
floating signifiers and the rigidity of Aristotelian categories. They are
untidy in the way things are untidy in a working environment but not so
chaotic that no work can get done.
Another implication is that language competencies have a considera-
ble proportion of non-mental elements. Abilities are never accessible to
conscious awareness, and without the ability dimension there would be no
competency, only unusable representations. The time-honoured concept
of the speakers knowledge of language, and with it psychological real-
ity, have to be abandoned as constituting the unitary object of description
for CL. A large chunk of the reality is not psychological at all, and knowl-
edge has to be unpacked into two entirely different things, unless cogni-
tive linguists want to make the same error as Chomsky: to postulate a
mental object that can never be accessed by the speakers mind. The two
different things are (1) knowing-how routines (such as lexical retrieval
and phonetic articulation) which can be modelled without raising the
spectre of the Chinese room because in themselves they do not need to be
interpreted, only to get done; (2) intentional representations associated
with words. The relationship between them are functional: it is the job of
the procedural ability to produce utterances to evoke representations. But
a description that flattened the whole object out into knowledge of lan-
guage would be like having an exhibition of banks that included both
river banks and commercial banks.
The new concept of competency was also used to argue against the
tendency to focus so strongly on the actual flow that the competency
dimension was too much reduced as in case of proposals suggesting that
words in the mind had no meaning, or that there was no semantic contri-
bution from individual words. The key idea was to see the competency
side of meaning as input to meaning construction: speakers have to know
what words can do for them. Meaning construction then produces output
meanings based on the competency input plus the situational circum-
Summary 221
stances (including acts of framing), which entails that output meanings are
different from one utterance to the next, because words do the jobs that
situations call for. So while it is true that words do not have output mean-
ings, i. e. meanings in the sense of message elements, and these are the
meanings that everybody else but linguists are interested in, precisely for
a linguist it is practical to assume that words have meaning.
The role of offline meanings as potential contributions to dynamic
online meaning construction also entails that meanings are directional
and may give rise to presuppositions. But they also retain their link with
the classic role of evoking concepts for the purpose of putting aspects of
reality into situationally relevant containers.
Because the division of labour between implicit and explicit dimen-
sions of action is variable and hard to track, categorization in the fully
mental sense thus has a variable and hard-to-capture relationship with
autopilot responses to situational input some of which are shaped by
social processes of the kind that generates Bourdieu-style habitus pat-
terns.
In the next chapter we look at structure and variation, and turn our
attention more in the direction of the niche dimension of language.
Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
1. Introduction: the social foundations of structure
Meaning was the first topic to be addressed in terms of the new social
cognitive framework. Now the turn has to come to structure. Because the
account of structure builds on the account of meaning, this chapter contin-
ues some themes from the preceding chapter. The distinction between
offline and online features of language, and the status of offline features
as ancillary to the flow, are also essential for understanding structure. For
the same reasons that ruled out Platonic meaning as the basic object of
description, we also have to rule out underlying Platonic structure.
However, the issue of structure involves additional complications of its
own. The discussion of meaning addressed mainly the flow and the com-
petency dimension, but in order to understand structure a closer consid-
eration of the niche dimension is necessary. It is not individual mental
content that is responsible for the way language is structured: language
structure exists in the community before it is acquired by an individual
newcomer (and we were all newcomers once).
The special attention devoted to structure may appear to be a surpris-
ing development. The social turn was introduced as a continuation of the
process of recontextualization that began when CL moved beyond purely
structural description. Why, then, do we suddenly run into structure in
making a social turn?
The reason is twofold. First of all, there is a link between the social
dimension and structure that has been consistently underemphasized in
the tradition. Secondly, in order to understand those functional and vari-
ational aspects of language that are more usually associated with the
social dimension, a revised understanding of structure is not a step in the
wrong direction, but a precondition for moving forward. The traditional
association between social facts and chaos distorts both the understand-
ing of structure and the understanding of meaning and usage. This means
that if it is used as a frame for understanding the place for structure in
a social CL, the recontextualization narrative involves a risk of distor-
tion. Putting pure structure into the dustbin of history means that struc-
ture as a property of language has to be reconsidered. Otherwise you
would misunderstand not only structure, but also usage. An adequate
usage-based understanding of structure is necessary in order to get an
Introduction: the social foundations of structure 223
adequate understanding of functional and variational properties of lan-

guage.1
Two issues are crucial to this updated understanding: the functional
and the variational dimension of linguistic structure. I address them in
that order, which follows the logic of the overall argument in the book.
The understanding of the functional dimension of structure (cf. section
3) is closely linked to the account in the previous chapter of meaning as
input to interactive flow. The main point is that the structure of complex
expressions must be understood as the structure of a complex act, i. e. a
structured intervention in ongoing interaction. Just as the meaning of an
individual expression is constituted by the job that it does for the speaker
in the usage situation, so does the structure of a complex expression con-
stitute a structured set op operations to be performed on the usage situa-
tion. The structure of language inherits general features of the structure of
1 The Platonic idealized cognitive model of the relationship is manifested in

Carnaps (1942) influential account in which pure formal structure is in the
centre, semantics can be added as the next layer (if you ingiclude what words
stand for), and then finally you can include pragmatics by adding language
users to the picture (thus letting in variation and flux).
This conceptual model has been widely used as the frame for discussion
about relations between these areas, also by non-formalists, who mistakenly
try to change the emphasis instead of rejecting the model. Semanticists have
emphasized descriptive meaning and downplayed the purely formal core.
Pragmaticists have emphasized communication and downplayed the role of
both formal structure and descriptive meanings. But as Lakoff has often
pointed out (e. g., 2004), by invoking a model as the frame of the argument, you
tend to reinforce it, even by arguing against it. From a usage-based point of
view, this model is not just misleading, but dead wrong.
First of all, moving from structure towards use gets it backwards: beginning
with formal structure only makes sense if first formal structure and then
semantic structure can be understood on their own, isolated from use. But on
a usage based account the opposite is true. When it comes to structure, I am
thus echoing the proverbial Irishmans reply to a question asking how to get to
Dublin: If I was going to Dublin, I wouldnt be starting from here.
Secondly, the model places descriptive meaning as the middle man between
structure and usage. This gives the impression that social forces are at the most
remote position from linguistic structure, while descriptive meaning is its clos-
est potential ally. But there is no privileged relation between descriptive
meaning and structure. It is a basic tenet in CL that the conceptualizations that
are evoked by language are not specific to language. Rather, language draws
on everything that is available in the cognitive system, and therefore specifi-
cally linguistic structure cannot emerge from conceptualization alone.
224 Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation
complex tool use, cf. Greenfield (1991), and this procedurally imbued,
functional dimension is not reducible to (but integrated with) the concep-
tual aspect of linguistic structure (cf. also the discussion of Krifka (2007)
on the link between topic-comment organization and manual co-ordina-
tion, p. 203 above). Since this places language structure as part of the abil-
ity to act, of the competency of speakers to cope in a particular niche, an
understanding of this dimension is central to the social turn as I under-
stand it.
Accounting for the variational dimension of structure (cf. section 4)
shifts the main focus from speakers-in-the-niche to language as a constitu-
ent of the overall social niche itself. In this, it is closely linked to the
account in the following chapter of the role of language in constructing
social reality. Here, too, it is necessary to highlight the role of structure in
a new way, in order to illustrate the way in which an account of the social
significance of linguistic choices presupposes an awareness of structure
itself as embedded in social reality. For that reason also, a reassessment of
structure is a necessary part of the social turn.
It is a problem for carrying out this task that although structure is
clearly an integral part of CL, as a theoretical issue it is a contaminated
area: for cognitive linguists, it goes against the grain to focus on the nature
of linguistic structure. Since the account below includes suspicious con-
cepts like partial autonomy and arbitrariness, there is a risk of past mis-
takes creeping into the perception of what is being claimed. Care must be
taken in demonstrating how an expansion into the social domain can at
the same time introduce a more profiled role for structure and also for the
dynamic and variational aspect of language. I am therefore going to give a
brief outline of the argument in order to link up these three aims and pro-
file them in relation to classic CL, hoping to avoid such misunderstand-
ings.
In classic CL, complex structure is understood basically in terms of
complex conceptualization. A syntactic combination of two units basically
inherits the conceptualizations of the individual units, while the combina-
tion itself also has unit status (often with properties not found in the con-
stituent parts); the whole of language can therefore be described as a col-
lection of units. In the approach presented below, this is understood as one
of the two dimensions of linguistic structure, which I will refer to as the
bottom-up or unit-based dimension; it is central to construction grammar,
the dominant approach to syntax in CL.
As discussed in ch.1 (p. 49), the distinction between bottom-up and
top-down can be understood in more than one way. In relation to genera-
tive grammar, CL differs by taking the (bottom-up) path from actual
instances to generalizations, where generative grammar works (top-down)

from general rules to instantiations. In another sense, the distinction can
be understood in relation to units as opposed to larger combinations,
where the bottom-up path goes from units to combinations, while the top-
down path begins with the larger whole and then subdivides it into smaller
constituent types and here, classic CL is mainly but not exclusively bot-
tom up, cf. the discussion on p. 49. The issue is further complicated by the
fact that in addition to the descriptive procedure that I have just discussed,
there is also an issue of bottom-up vs. top-down directionality associated
with acquisition (as discussed in relation to Tomasello p. 265), and with
processing (cf. the discussion in relation to Functional Discourse Gram-
mar, cf. p. 259). There is thus considerable scope for confusion and misun-
derstanding. In order to keep both to a minimum, let me try to summarize
what I see as the point, and why this does not entail that this point is
absent but merely under-appreciated in classic CL.
The sense in which I use the distinction is very elementary, and based
on the case of addressing a complex task: building a cathedral, organizing
Olympic games or, as I am now, writing a book. There is no way of doing
this successfully without approaching it from two opposite and comple-
mentary perspectives: top-down means starting with the overall goal and
considering what it takes to achieve it, dividing it into major components
etc. Bottom-up means starting with the individual elements that are going
to be necessary. The difference is not just in terms of how big units you are
considering: at all levels there is a top-down approach based on what you
want to do: what is the goal or function that needs to be served. At the
very top, the first thing is to decide whether the goal is a cathedral, Olym-
pic games, or a book. At all levels, there is also a bottom-up approach
based on what you have available. From that perspective you start with
raw materials: bricks and marble for the cathedral, sports arenas for the
Olympic games, and a list of points and ideas to be considered for inclu-
sion in the book. The two ends have to meet, not only at the end, but most
of the time, since all (bottom-up) component units have to be evaluated
based on whether they are adequate for their (top-down) purposes.
In relation to linguistic structure, the top-down dimension that I think
needs to be highlighted more is the role of functional relations between
linguistic units. This works top-down because functions are defined in
relation to an overall purpose, and a unit considered in isolation cannot
have a function: for example, the unit Joe cannot be a subject, merely con-
sidered as a unit (cf. below). The (sub)functions served by linguistic units
thus have to be described with reference to the overall whole. As with the
cathedral and the Olympic games, this does not conflict with a considera-
tion that begins with the units you are going to need for your purposes
which (as argued below) can be described as a list of available linguistic
constructions.
The claim that I want to highlight, therefore, is that language structure
is both a hierarchy of functional relations and a network of constructions.
There is no contradiction, only a difference of perspective. In classic CL,
the functional roles (such as trajector and landmark) arise as properties of
units (in this case, as properties of relational predications). Thus in follow-
ing a bottom-up compositional path, structural configurations arise, in
which units enter into relations with other units. Construction grammar
makes a point of this unit-based format. As illustrated in the diagram in
Croft and Cruse (2004: 256), the constructional reinterpretation of struc-
ture backgrounds the structural levels (phonology, syntax, and semantics
fade out of the picture) and instead foregrounds the inventory of units. As
you move upward in the hierarchy, more abstract units occur, which pro-
vide slots for other units to fit into. Whether you start with the units or the
roles/slots, in the end you have to include both sides but the perspective
you choose makes a difference for what you focus on (see section 2 below).
It may not be obvious that functional relations between linguistic units
have anything to do with functional relations between language and social
context. The connection is this: a whole utterance has a function in rela-
tion to the interactive context, as when Joe died functions as an informa-
tive statement, for instance as an answer to the question what happened?
In order for the whole utterance to function as an answer, its constituent
parts have to serve their functions inside the message. A central part of
those roles are that he refers to the subject (of predication), and died pred-
icates the relevant information about the subject. These two roles can only
be understood with reference to the whole utterance meaning, since a sin-
gle unit of meaning can neither be a subject nor a predicate. From this
perspective, slots/roles in relation to the linguistic context are special cases
of the slots/roles in relation to the social-interactive context (this is
explained in greater detail in section 3 below).
The interface between the larger social context and conceptualization
is also involved in the issue of variation. In terms of classic CL, linguistic
structure, like linguistic meaning, reflects conceptualization; and because
the locus for that is inside the individuals head (cf. Grdenfors 1998),
there is no obvious place for variation, which involves relations between
individuals.
Based on these basic assumptions, the chapter will defend three claims.
The first is about function-based structure and is mainly competency-ori-
ented, the third is about variation and structure as a property of the niche,
and the second links up function-based structure with language in the

niche:
(1) On units and functional roles:
The bottom-up, unit-based dimension that is central to construction gram-
mar, must be understood against a more strongly profiled role for the top-
down, functional dimension. This manifests itself in the jobs that must be
done (= slots that must be filled) by linguistic units. From a purely concep-
tual, bottom-up point of view, these are simply abstract, schematic units
but from a top-down point of view they are functional roles.
(2) On structure as interactive options in the sociocultural niche:
Structure is a set of offline recipes for structured communicative action.
Online usage draws on these recipes in producing (co-constructed) situated
utterance meanings. This essential, but dependent role in relation to usage
means that the anti-structural disposition in CL (inherited from the revolt
against generative grammar) is no longer necessary. Structural description
in a usage-based grammar can be clearly distinct from usage description
(just as the recipe is distinct from the cooking) without being in conflict
with it.
(3) On integrating variation and structure:
Since structure in the sense of langue resides in the niche, not in the individ-
uals head, langue (= the whole set of available options including the lexi-
con) can include choices that are differentiated along variational dimen-
sions such as class, ethnic affiliation, gender, age, etc.
In all respects, I am building on developments that are already underway.
With respect to points (1) and (2), I am highlighting a dimension that has
recently been given a significant new boost by Langacker (cf. 2008b). The
link between function and structure, rather than specifically between con-
ceptualization and structure, is laid out in Langackers introduction of the
notion of functional systems. First of all, functional systems go beyond
the purely semiological function of symbolizing conceptualizations; sec-
ondly, they are characterized by members that fulfil specific functions,
including interactive functions two centrepieces of functionalism.
Thirdly, they are organized into mutually exclusive systems, thus giving
rise to closed paradigms a centrepiece of structuralism, especially in its
European version2. This new development illustrates how the achieve-
2 Langacker takes his point of departure in Chomskys (1957) analysis and

shows how the attractive structural features of Chomskys account can be cap-
tured better in an account that includes meaning which can simultaneously
explain some of features that appear ad hoc from a purely formal point of
view.
ments of classic CL are being recontextualized in a way that also involves

structural features of language.
Specifically with respect to point (2), it may appear that in arguing for
a more profiled role for structure, I am arguing against a straw man: after
all, all linguists agree that structure has a role to play. But the point is not
to reiterate this platitude it is to show how the significance of structure
can only be adequately understood when structure is viewed as a socially
shared blueprint for language use. Moreover, the structure-promoting
point goes with an equally important structure-limiting point. The social
blueprint view of structure entails a debunking of the inherited. mono-
lithic view of structure: the language system is an open, partial order main-
tained by social pressures.
Point (3), finally, builds especially on work by the Leuven group (cf. the
discussion in ch. 2) and shows how the ongoing variation-oriented expan-
sion of CL must be understood as building upon a structural description
rather than rejecting it. The ultimate descriptive target is a structured sys-
tem, but one that includes the spectrum of variation that is available in the
community.
The path of exposition starts with the relation between structure and
usage in a social cognitive linguistics, cf. section 2. Section 3 presents the
theory of the functional dimension of structure, as introduced above. Sec-
tion 4 discusses the relation between variationist linguistics and structure.
A major point is the expansion of the descriptive commitments of CL
that is entailed by a variationist understanding of langue. The section con-
cludes with a discussion with Croft, whose evolutionary synthesis (cf.
p. 88) has formed the background for the account in this book of the
relation between structure and variation. Section 5, finally, gathers the
threads.
2. Usage, structure and component units
The main point of the previous chapter was that meaning as a property of
human languages is too complex to be understood solely by reference to
online flow. If you ignore the role of offline competency, the full picture is
reduced to actual online events, which is tantamount to usage fundamen-
talism. Essentially the same argument applies to linguistic structure. A
usage based description is one in which actual usage is basic, but not the
only thing that exists.
In the literature on cognitive and usage based linguistics, it is not always
easy to see what the exact role for structure is. The question of the precise
Usage, structure and component units 229
nature of linguistic structure is not one that has kept cognitive linguists
awake at night: structure was yesterdays buzzword. Owing to the strong
emphasis on providing an alternative to the pervasive role of structure in
generative grammar, agreement has been much more well-defined when it
came to making clear what structure was not (e. g., formal and autono-
mous).
When you look for descriptions of the role of linguistic structure, there-
fore, you find a type of statements that have given rise to repeated misun-
derstandings in discussions with representatives of other linguistic schools,
because they come across as denials of the role of structure in language.
Let me quote a recent example (Glynn & Robinson 2008, p. 222 in the
book of abstracts)
Within cognitive linguistics, no distinction is held between linguistic and prag-
matic semantics or between lexis and syntax3.
In their contexts, statements of this kind generally make valid points such
as linguistic meaning does not constitute an autonomous domain, but is
integrated with encyclopaedic meaning; and syntax does not constitute
an autonomous domain inside language, but is integrated with the lexi-
con. However, because there is no canonical account of what the new,
integrated-but-real role for structure is, such statements are apt to be read
by outsiders as if structure has no other role than being an area that it
3 This is a very difficult discussion indeed, possibly also because cognitive lin-
guists take for granted both this way of talking and the descriptive practices
that (as a matter of course) make reference to structural categories in lan-
guage. I have previously (Harder 1996: 260) pointed to the discrepancy in con-
nection with a somewhat similar statement from Langacker (1987: 3):
There is no meaningful distinction between grammar and lexicon. Lexicon,
morphology and syntax form a continuum of symbolic structures, which dif-
fer along various parameters but can be divided into separate components
only arbitrarily.
I described this statement as implying that Cognitive Grammar denied syntax
the status of a definable area within the larger area of language, and went on
to point out that this description is not an accurate reflection of Langackers
own descriptive practice, Harder (1996:261). Langacker (2008a:6) flatters me
by taking the trouble to correct my interpretation, pointing out that definabil-
ity does not presuppose clear boundaries, and that syntax can be recognized
even if it seen as symbolic. Since that was more or less what I was trying to say,
there is substantial agreement apart from the fact that I still believe the for-
mulation no meaningful distinction is open to unnecessary misunderstand-
ings.
would be wrong to single out for special treatment4. The index in the
Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007, has no
entry for structure and most cognitive linguists would be unlikely to
look it up anyway.
The quotation above rejects two distinctions and thereby raises two
points, both of which are central in the following: linguistics vs. pragmatics,
and lexis vs. syntax. I first discuss the distinction between usage and usage-
based structure; then I discuss the characteristics of bottom-up unit-based
structure as an integrated account of lexical units and syntax. This will
then provide the background for a discussion in the next section of the
functional dimension of structure that is backgrounded in the cognitive
approach.
The tendency to emphasize the flow of usage at the expense of struc-
ture is most marked in West coast functionalism (cf. Butler 2003), the
type of functional linguistics that is most directly based on actual usage, as
represented by Joan Bybee, Sandra Thompson and Paul Hopper among
others. Their work has affinities with conversation analysis in its rigorous
attention to the details of actual empirical data, and they have been pio-
neers in showing how grammatical properties can be understood by refer-
ence to patterns in everyday language use.5 Among the properties they
have documented are that syntactic phenomena evince the kind of grad-
ual, prototype or family resemblance patterns that also play a major role
in CL (cf. ch.1), thus making it a natural partner for CL in the broader
usage-based alliance that was described in chapter 2.
The point I am concerned to make is that just as one can endorse a
neural theory of language without believing it can provide all the answers,
so one can endorse the drive to give actual usage data the status they
deserve in linguistic description without believing that a description of
usage can take the place of the description of structure. The issue has been
discussed in relation to the understanding of complement-taking predi-
4 As pointed out in Nuyts (2007), there is a clear contrast between CL and other
functionalist approaches, especially in Europe, on this point. Function and
structure have co-existed peacefully and productively in European structural-
ism, as opposed to the polarization that took place in the US.
5 Further, they have shown how apparently basic and clearcut grammatical pat-
terns have unexpected frequency properties in actual usage. For instance,
expressions of subjective reactions, with low structural complexity, including
low transitivity, cf. Thompson and Hopper (2001), pervade ordinary conversa-
tion, making transitive clause constructions much less central in usage than
one might have thought.
cates such as think, believe, realize, etc. (cf. Thompson 2002, Boye & Harder
2007). Using conversational data, Thompson (2002) shows the prevalence
of the discourse or usage role of embedding predicates like think as for-
mulaic stance markers, arguing that I think it is a good idea is an epis-
temic modification of It is a good idea rather than a report on a mental
state. Thompson cites Langackers description in terms of which the main
clause imposes its profile on the complement clause (Langacker 1991:
436) as an example of descriptions that come out wrong in such cases. In
these examples, the speaker does not override the assertion profile of it
is a good idea by embedding it in I think. What is expressed by it is a good
idea is conveyed as asserted content, not as embedded in an elaboration
site associated with a main verb think: in spite of the apparent structural
position as matrix clause, it is really I think which is conversationally sub-
ordinate to the message conveyed by the that-clause. Thompson concludes
that this is not just a description of the statistics of actual usage, but also
the only really relevant linguistic description, rejecting the standard
account in terms of the structural relation of subordination.
Verhagen expresses a similar position, both with respect to comple-
ment-taking predicates, cf. Verhagen (2005), and generally with respect to
structure, cf. Verhagen (2002). The latter provides a compelling account of
historical developments whereby processes changed the meanings of indi-
vidual constructions in ways that would make it misleading to look for
overriding generalizations applying to for instance all resultative con-
structions in the language. However, at the end this is seen as supporting
a general conclusion, cast as a reply to linguists who are worried about the
unity of their object of description:
I suggest that the real problem here is the underlying assumption that the unity
of the field should somehow exist in the unity of the system itself. Liberating
ourselves from this structuralist prejudice, we may see that the source of the
unity of linguistic structure may well be external to it, that is, in the processes
giving rise to all these bits of knowledge. (Verhagen 2002: 434)
It is a point of this chapter to show why this reply is incomplete. Just as a
linguistic description must include an account of the potential contribu-
tion of a lexical item (pace Taylor, cf. ch 5, section 5), it must specify the
potential contribution of structural patterns (pace Thompson) but this
requires a rethinking of what the system is.6
6 As argued in Boye and Harder (2007), Thompsons account flattens out the
relationship between usage and structure, thus submerging the role of struc-
ture in the flow of usage. Among the arguments are that the diachronic rise of
The difference between Thompson and Langacker can be elucidated

by reference to a passage in Langacker (2008a), where the basic relation-
ship between structure and usage is explicated. The link is the act of
abstracting schemas out of usage: usage events form the input (Langacker
2008a: 458) to this process, and the output is a linguistic unit. Once linguis-
tic units have been formed, they have to be understood as operating not
just as usage flow, but also as units in the conventionalized linguistic sys-
tem (Langacker 2008a: 222).
The duality between usage token and conventional unit is the centre-
piece in the understanding of structure in classic CL, where language is
regarded as a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units (cf.
Langacker 2008a: 222). This unit format goes with a bottom-up orienta-
tion that is reflected in the notion of a compositional path (Langacker
2008a: 60). In combination, this approach reflects the component-based
dimension of structure (cf. Harder 1996: 154): the structure that arises
when units go together to form complex expressions.
Such bottom-up structures are found equally on all ontological levels,
including physical, biological and social structures. Component-based
structures in language and elsewhere essentially inherit properties from
components, but may include emergent features: a diamond consists
entirely of carbon atoms, but has properties that are due to the specific
way they are put together, i. e. the crystal formation. In order for two
component structures to be integrated, they have to offer a point of
overlap, providing the basis for correspondence in a way that can be
captured by the chemical metaphor of valence (cf. Langacker 1987: 94;
142).
As discussed on p. 245, the system can accommodate holistic proper-
ties by adopting the construction format of description, which combines
the unit format of description with internal syntactic complexity. Con-
struction grammar created a new focus for the understanding of structure
in CL, in which Chomskyan abstract generalizations were removed from
centre stage and replaced by a description focusing on complex units
complementation can only be understood as the result of a process whereby

verbs like think come to be able to take clausal objects (as also pointed out by
Diessel and Tomasello 2001). It is true that the epistemic modification is espe-
cially frequent with first person subjects (I think, I guess, I bet etc), but it is also
true that there is a general pattern which allows speakers to have second and
third person subjects as well as past tense verbs (he believed, they thought,
etc).
between the word and the sentence levels. Such units play a massive and
previously underestimated role in understanding human languages. As
illustrated by the let alone construction (cf. Fillmore, Kay & OConnor
1988) the abstract generalizations of sentence grammar cannot account
for constructional properties such as the peculiar relation type between
the two clauses indicated by the phrase let alone itself.7
As described by Croft & Cruse (2004; 227; 247; 256) the development
from a purely generative view of grammar via a generative view that
includes constructions to a purely constructional model highlights the list
dimension of language even more strongly than classic CL.8 The general
format for language description, also for higher-level units, is an inventory
of units. As a successor concept to the narrow traditional lexicon, it was
called the constructicon (cf. Goldberg 2006, citing Jurafsky 1996): a list of
all units of form and meaning with special properties, such that a learner
needs to acquire them as individual units. Although the constructional
format focuses on larger units than words, it still reflects a bottom-up ori-
entation in the hierarchical sense: it takes the units (of whatever size) as
the basic elements, and looks on combinations as the work of the speaker
rather than the grammar. It is bottom-up also in the usage-based sense:
constructional patterns arise out of usage in a very transparent fashion (cf.
7 The concept of construction has always been used for phenomena like clefting
that cannot be accounted for either by the specific properties of the words or
by the general properties of the sentence. The Chomskyan approach, however,
was strongly oriented towards maximally general properties of sentences
(motivated by the search for innate features) and therefore did not pay much
attention to the less-than fully-regular cases. They were all put on the lexical
side of the strict dichotomy between syntax and the lexicon, which was
regarded as a lunatic asylum (cf. Goldberg 1995) of irreducible irregularities.
Construction grammar turned this priority around and used constructions as
lexical units that could be used as a format for eliminating the entire Chom-
skyan domain of totally general and abstract syntax.
8 The three stages are as follows: the first diagram illustrates the generative
architecture with its basic division into three strata: phonology, syntax and
semantics. The lexicon is the odd man out that cuts across the three strata.
Diagram two is an intermediate model, which adds another bridging sector
alongside the lexicon, consisting of constructions. At the third stage, the three
strata disappear entirely from view and all we have is the bridging type of ele-
ment: a lexicon plus a list of constructions (each with its set of phonological,
syntactic and semantic features).
Bybee & Hopper 2001; Bybee 2002), with frequency as a key factor. In
this, it aligns itself with another major trend, namely the collocational and
idiomatic turn represented e. g. by Sinclairs (1991: 110) idiom principle
as opposed to the open choice principle associated with generative gram-
mar: idioms are constructions too.
If constructions take over the entire territory which used to be popu-
lated by general categories, one may ask whether generalizations have
been lost from sight. This question has been taken up by Goldberg (2006:
45f; 2009), who emphasizes that the focus on constructions should not be
taken to imply a rejection of general laws in favour of idiosyncratic items.
Rather, the advantage of constructions is that they can accommodate any-
thing from the most general to the most local phenomena. As we have
seen, an emphasis on local cases as the basis of all generalizations is dis-
tinct from claiming that local cases is all we have: exemplars are stored,
but so are high-level generalizations (Goldberg 2006: 50).9
Construction grammar, in short, is a major advance for two reasons:
first, it provides a descriptive model that can accommodate intermediate-
level patterns that were homeless in both the traditional word-based and
the modern sentence-based approach to grammar. Secondly, it highlights
the direct pathway from usage to syntax by focusing on pattern extrac-
tion the fundamental mechanism for making structure possible. How-
ever, it does not follow that constructions are the whole story. Before I
turn to the function-based dimension of structure, I will briefly discuss
two points where the contribution of construction grammar is less defini-
tive.
First of all, considered as a general hypothesis about the nature of syn-
tax, construction grammar as such is a rather weak theory; it is hard to
think of a case that would falsify it. There is nothing to prevent generativ-
ists from using a constructional format indeed, Goldberg (2006: 205f)
presents her own approach (Cognitive Construction Grammar) along-
9 As an example of a not particularly general pattern type, Goldberg mentions

serial verb constructions in English. There are three subtypes, including the
GoVPbare, as in go tell it on the mountain. As one of the local restrictions, she
points out that this one cannot take tensed forms of the verb go, cf. *he goes
bring/brings the paper. However, in support of her general point, that gener-
alization is always an option, let me offer her the following example (from
Tony Hillermans Listening women), spoken about a forceful woman in the
story: Some of em go after married men. But a real tiger like that Adams she
goes gets herself a priest.
side four other approaches, including a type of generative construction

grammar. Even a Chomsky-style bipartition between lexicon and syntax
would not be downright incompatible with a construction-grammar for-
malism: a sentence is of course a construction, just as a word is, and no one
denies the existence of cases in between there would just be some patchy
stretches on the cline.10
Secondly, the analysis is basically static. If you analyse a larger whole
simply in terms of collection of components, the process can be compared
with a jig-saw puzzle done in reverse: you remove one piece at a time until
everything is gone, and you can do it in any order your like. When all ele-
ments have been assigned to the relevant item in the list (= the construc-
ticon), thus filtering out all the form-meaning relations that have been
evoked one at a time, the description is over.
To sum up: first of all, I have tried to demonstrate the nature and the
importance of the distinction between usage and usage-based structure.
Secondly, I have argued that although syntactic description in terms of
component symbolic units (constructions) is essential, it is not all there is
to say. I now proceed to the points on which a function-based approach to
syntax can complement the unit-based description.
10 Although that is not the main point here, I would like to mention one example
of where the convenient property of accommodating all types of phenomena
with equal ease has a downside. If we want to carve language at the joints, the
theory should be explicit about where those joints are. Construction grammar
makes an important point against the 100 % separation in Pinkers words-and-
rules dichotomy (cf. Pinker 1999) but the distinction between word-level and
clause-level phenomena is not an artefact. Fuzzy borders, as we have seen, do
not contradict the existence of fundamental distinctions. A case that illustrates
the point is the fact that in Germanic languages, cf. Klinge (2005), there is in
general a very strict division between word-level and clause-level mechanisms.
Compounds, as word-formation, and phrases are kept rigidly distinct in a vari-
ety of different ways, cf. rote Wein and Rotwein, Wortbildung and *Wort Bil-
dung in German. The sole exception to this is English, where the two types (as
in red wine and apple pie) cannot be kept clearly separate; thus word forma-
tion (as pointed out in a series of publications, cf. Klinge 2005:299300) cannot
be unambiguously placed as either compound or phrase. The fact that English
lacks a borderline here is difficult to describe as a significant feature within
construction grammar. Similarly, those cases (cf. Nedergaard Thomsen 1992)
where the syntax of a language like Danish behaves in a polysynthetic way
would be just another construction.
3. Function-based structure
3.1 Structured division of labour and arbitrariness as a functionally

motivated property
So what does a function-based analysis have to add to a unit-based anal-

ysis?
The answer comes in two instalments. This section describes what func-
tion-based structure is, including the relation between function and struc-
ture in complex systems. Section 3.2 will discuss the dynamic side of syn-
tactic operators, following up the discussion in ch. 5 of competency and
the dynamic dimension of meaning.
As we have seen, functional analysis of an object or unit whether a
linguistic expression, a biological organ or a kitchen utensil is about the
role it fills in a larger system. As with the thought experiment of pinion-
ing the wings of the bird, functional theories predict what would happen
if the object was removed or replaced with something different. This
applies at all levels of analysis, non-linguistic as well as linguistic. A pure
description of your qualifications acquires a functional role as a job
application if you send it in an envelope marked job application and
if you do not get the job, you may submit it to functional analysis by
wondering what would have happened if you had changed aspects of
that description before you sent it. The commutation test for phonemes
for instance, replacing [i] with [] in the context [s_t] to see if it makes a
difference is also an example of functional analysis. With the generally
adopted tagmemic term, functional analysis takes its point of departure
in the slot rather than the filler. Slots are more central for understanding
structural properties than fillers, because new structure arises when new
slots come into being but not necessarily when a new unit arises (for
instance, the cyber-term twitter does not in any obvious way change the
structure of English).
It may not be immediately obvious what this has to do with the social
dimension, or what the relation is between the structural flavour of the
slot-based analysis and its functional underpinnings. The similarity with
formal categories is not an accident: the generalizations which have been
put forward as pure formal categories are typically abstracted out of
functional relations. It is not an accident that Langackers (2008b) func-
tional analysis can take over core parts of Chomskys auxiliary theory: the
devices generative grammarians call functional elements often are just
that (to the extent they are real units of language structure and not just
abstract figments of imagination, as in descriptions which suggest up to 17
Function-based structure 237
functional heads in the clause). Complementizers and tense forms, for

instance, are indeed functional elements which have (mistakenly) been
abstracted out of the functional-semantic relationships in which they
belong.
However, to get a more robust feel for the relation between function
and structure in the social world, I offer an analogy with a clearly sociocul-
tural construct: the structure of a business company (for a fuller argument,
cf. Harder 2006). The analogy is meant to illustrate the development from
unstructured holophrases to syntactically structured utterances. The stage
of a fully developed complex business company can simultaneously illus-
trate some of the synchronic properties of complex linguistic structure.
We begin with the narrative of a classic entrepreneur, going from one-
man company to large corporation. The central points include a two-way
developmental process: the aspect I focus on is top-down differentiation,
but the success of this operation depends on the bottom-up process of
integrating elements into larger, structured wholes.
The starting point for the process is the event of one man (lets call him
Jones) setting up a business for himself. As long as Jones works his com-
pany alone, all relations with the world meet in one and the same unit,
namely himself. The functional relations with the world may be multifari-
ous and complex, as they are in the case of communication, but they are
not matched by a corresponding structural complexity in the company.
Jones is the company; the company is Jones. A description of what the
company does externally, in relation to its environment, will be an exhaus-
tive description of Jones Inc.
Now Jones gets paying customers to such an extent that it is no longer
possible for him to do all the work on his own. He therefore decides to get
someone to join him in the company. What used to be one thing now splits
into two: previously the questions what does the company do? and what
does Jones do? boiled down to one and the same question. Now the two
questions are no longer the same thing, because it is necessary to decide
not only what Jones should do but also what the new person should do.
When the decision has been made to split the workload, the company has
been differentiated into two positions. But there are not yet two compo-
nent units; there is only one unit plus a vacant slot (an opening).
The optimal division of labour cannot be derived unambiguously from
the external function of the business company. It is a decision Jones has to
make before he advertises the position. In the initial phase it is a top-down
decision, dividing the whole workload. Once the actual component unit is
there, however, the bottom-up dimension will make itself felt. What divi-
sion of labour is best for the company will then depend both on what
Jones would like the new person (Smith) to do and also what Smith turns
out to be especially good at. In any case, it raises two sub-issues that are
linked but irreducibly different (i. e. one is partially autonomous of the
other): how do Smiths talents fit with what the company does, and how do
they fit with what Jones does? Answering one question is no longer
enough.
Up to a certain point of complexity, the internal organization of a busi-
ness company may be functionally transparent. That is the case if the
internal structure reflects external functions. If a two-man company is
organized so that Jones does production and Smith does sale, internal
structure reflects external function. An analogical situation in the case of
sentence structure would be if a sentence has two structurally signalled
constituents, subject/topic and predicate/comment, and these are always
the topic and comment of what is currently being discussed. In terms of
iconicity, the internal structure is then merely a shadow of the functional
organization of the communicated message. If we know the function of
the component, we also know its structural position; there is no need to
talk about structure as a separate issue.
As the organization becomes more complex, however, the link between
internal division of labour and external function will not continue to be
equally transparent and obvious. Jones and Smith might at one point want
to employ a secretary. Customers will not feel the difference, since secre-
tarial services are only designed for internal use. As business grows, inter-
nal (including managerial) functions will proliferate, because there is
more to do in order to keep the company together. The people who are
doing production in large corporations typically grumble about the prolif-
eration of management, but if (e. g.) co-ordination between sales and pro-
duction fails, it will be bad for the company. There has to be agreement
between various elements in the flow of activity in a business company
between production and sale, between contracts and pay, between what
the managing director decides and the job specifications of the people
who have to carry out the decision. If these things do not agree, the com-
pany will not be able to reproduce its own capital base and it will go out
of business. How much management is functionally motivated is an open
question; there is a very general consensus both that it should be kept to a
minimum, and also that this tends to be a very difficult thing to do. The
differentiation into sub-functions or internal functions (structural con-
stituents) will generate positions that may or may not be strictly neces-
sary from the point of view of external function.
In relation to language, this part of the analogy reflects the second
stage of grammaticalization in the theory proposed by Boye and Harder
(submitted). Grammar does not inevitably have to contain grammatical

items, i. e. purely ancillary elements in principle there might be com-
pletely isolating languages (a frequently cited example is classical Chi-
nese). However, grammaticalization processes tend to bring about con-
structions in which one element is ancillary (auxiliary) and the other is
lexical, and this is part of an overall complexification process (cf. Dahl
2004). Agreement markers are standard examples of superfluous gram-
mar but analogously, certain organizations have uniforms that indicate
rank and affiliation. In language, once the meaning has been put together
in the right way, the elements that serve only a linking function, with no
external contribution, can be discarded. But it may be only in hindsight
that they are superfluous, just as it is easier to see whos in charge if she
wears a uniform to show it. If there were neither agreement signals nor
word order restrictions, it might be hard to put the words together in the
right way, and if police constables did not wear uniforms, it would take an
extra effort to establish their authority in a crisis.
The company analogy extends to the tripartite ontology: the flow of
business transactions is the basic mode of existence, without which noth-
ing else would be possible (with the cash flow as an important aspect);
individual competencies are required to handle those transactions and
niche properties manifest themselves both internally in the company (if
they want to survive, employees have to adapt to the company just as cacti
to the desert) and externally (is the company in a hostile or a friendly
business environment?).
What can we learn from this analogy? There are two key points: first,
there is an inherent link between structure and function in a complex sys-
tem. The division of labour between the managing-director and the pur-
chasing, sales, production managers is at the same time a functional and a
structural fact about the company. Secondly, when there is such a func-
tion-based structure, it entails an interface between the functional roles/
slots on the one hand and the component units that fill those functions.
The existence of an interface means that there is no seamless harmony, no
guarantee that things will match up as there would be if we could reduce
the slot and the filler to one category only. (Predicate nominal is an
example of such a hybrid category).
The lack of a seamless fit between slot and filler is a familiar point in
organization theory. (Human resource management would be ever so
much simpler if it wasnt!). An employee in a company has both his posi-
tion (managing-director, nightwatch) and his personal properties (40-year-
old ambitious university graduate, 60-year-old, tired highschool dropout).
The point is that however intelligently we may fill out a slot in the com-
pany, we can never be sure that there is an ideal match between the slot
and the filler this is why there is always a tension between formal (top-
down) and informal (unit-based, bottom-up) structure in an organization.
And this is a feature of all functional systems. The duality is obvious in
biology, as emphasized by Givn (1995, 2002), and is implicit in the tradi-
tion from Aristotle onwards. The pandas thumb, cf. Gould (1980) is an
adapted maxillary bone, not an anatomical finger, but it functions (more
or less well) as a finger; an apple crate may serve more or less well as a
bookcase, etc, etc.
In linguistic terms, we know this duality as the distinction between
functional role and structural realization. In the continental European
tradition, this is a standard feature of university grammars (examples are
Van Ek & Robat (1984), Bache and Davidsen-Nielsen (1997), and within
CL also Verspoor and Sauter (2000). In the American tradition, apart
from its manifestation as the slot-filler dichotomy in tagmemics, it is gen-
erally backgrounded: neither tree structures nor Langackers pictorial
diagrams explicate it, for instance (Chomsky 1965 explicitly eradicated it
from the heritage that he took over from Jespersen, by defining subject
based on the structural realization category NP).
The top-down orientation inherent in functional systems manifests
itself in two ways: first, because it begins with the role rather than the
filler as such and secondly because it looks first at the larger whole and
only then at the parts. Sub-functions within the company exist only by
virtue of the existence of the larger whole in contrast to unit-based
structures which exist only because of the smaller component units. A
molecule is a unit-based structure because it arises out of combinations of
atoms; in contrast, limbs are part of a function-based structure since they
arise out of the differentiation of a whole organism just as key account
manager positions arise out of a differentiation within the company. If
language was purely a unit-based structure, nouns, verbs and adverbs
could have existed for thousands of years before a bright person got the
idea of combining them into sentences. But just as the company is basic in
business, a whole utterance is basic to linguistic interaction. The utterance,
i. e. the meaningful whole contribution to interaction, has to be there
first before the sub-utterance component fragments.
A holophrase like hello or fuck, just like a one-man company, is in itself
a whole functional unit, because it may serve as a complete utterance.
From a purely external point of view, this is the minimum level: half a
greeting or half an assertion is no more useful than other half measures.
The rise of sub-utterance elements combinable into whole utterances is
evolutionarily significant, in that it is a key part of the developments
whereby human language as a unique phenomenon came into being. Pre-

human languages, as we have seen, are characterized by a correspondence
between signals and acts. Alarm calls have no components: they slot
directly into whatever course of events the signals form part of.
Although the necessary background for the rise of human language
includes the ability to understand symbolic meaning (cf. above p. 150), the
most central fact from a structural point of view is the rise of this new level
of analysis: in addition to seeing each sign in the context of the situation to
which it contributes, we now need to see each sign in the context of the
other signs that are part of the utterance (just as Jones, when getting a
partner, needed to define his own role also in relation to Smith). Words
like the or of cannot be understood directly in relation to the situation in
which they are used they need to be understood as serving a function in
relation to those signs with which they collaborate in coding a whole lin-
guistic act.
The crucial step into syntax must have involved a pincer movement
that simultaneously combined two previously independent units and split
the holophrase. Which way you see it depends on whether you approach
the development top-down (the utterance becomes complex) or bottom-
up (items start to combine). The pathway is the same as the company anal-
ogy: the firm goes from one-man company to two-man company (from
above), while the two people combine to form a team (bottom-up). As
always, the bottom-up perspective is the most concrete way to look at it,
while the top-down presupposes a higher and more abstract level. (An
example of the development viewed in an ontogenetic perspective is given
below p. 267).
Functional innocence is lost when the holophrastic pattern gets frag-
mented: it is simpler when there is one indivisible utterance meaning. But
the functional potential of language obviously becomes vastly greater with
the loss of innocence and simplicity. There is an upside and a downside:
human languages come with the label some assembly required.
The need to include the top-down side of structure applies to all func-
tional entities, including artefacts. A knife has two chief components, the
blade and the handle, and if we want to understand the relationship, we
cannot hope to reach the right result by looking first at the properties of
the blade in isolation and then at the properties of the handle in isolation.
The functional role is the presupposed holistic property, in terms of which
it makes sense with a differentiation into two functional sub-elements.
Similarly, the two oldest structural concepts in linguistic theory, subject
and predicate, cannot be understood as component-based, only as based
on a differentiation of a whole statement into two functional sub-elements.
Functions define slots that need fillers: hence, moving top-down you
move from slot to filler. The process starts with the overall slot that is
filled by the whole utterance. There is something that may appear to go
against the grain in CL here, because it seems as if this implies that there
is something abstract and contentless which comes before the component
unit. But the contradiction is only apparent: at the level of the whole utter-
ance, the basic slot is the turn-at-talk and if we go back to what was said
about the rise of intersubjectivity in chapter 2, p. 77, it will be clear that the
turn as a slot for an utterance actually arises long before the linguistic
utterance, also ontogenetically. At four months, children know that there
are forms of interaction with other people which depend on both parties
taking turns to make their contributions, and the whole felt quality of
being part of what is going on depends on making such contributions
(within the slots that arise). There is thus nothing mysterious in operating
with a slot that may or may not be filled with a linguistically encoded
utterance.11
The internal differentiation of functional systems can throw light on
one of the perennial discussions between functional and formal linguists:
can syntactic categories be understood in functional terms? This discus-
sion is typically conducted with external functions on one side and formal
categories on the other without any reference to the bridging notion of
sub-functions within a complex utterance. This leaves a gulf that gener-
ally makes the discussions unproductive. Also for functionalists, the rise of
internal slots in an utterance necessitates a two-level approach. In terms
of a sub-utterance slot, the immediately relevant function is function in
relation to the whole utterance, not function in discourse. This means
that sub-functions cannot be explained directly with reference to utter-
ance function, except when structure is functionally transparent; the con-
tribution of a sub-unit to utterance function is mediated via combination
with other constituents. Syntactic sub-functions such as subject are there-
fore, in my terminology, partially autonomous. By the same token, they
are partially arbitrary in relation to external, discourse functions. Since I
suspect that arbitrariness, in spite of Croft (1995), may still give off bad
vibrations, I will try to show that arbitrariness is in fact a functionally
motivated property.
11 Sometimes the slot may be very open but sometimes the independent impor-
tance of slot properties can be seen in cases where interactive constraints are
very specific. If you stand poised to answer the $64,000 question, the slot pro-
vides basically only two options (1) right answer (2) wrong answer. Either you
give the right answer and take home the $64,000, or you do not.
The account I have proposed of function-based structure represents an

intermediate position (not a compromise!) that avoids the central mis-
takes of both rigid structuralism and nave functionalism. The argument is
as follows: the Saussurean revolution, whereby structure became the cen-
tral property of language, established a rigid separation between pre-lin-
guistic and linguistic properties. Motivation almost by definition became
associated with the forbidden attempt to derive linguistic properties from
non-linguistic (=a priori) properties. Arbitrariness from this point of
view is an absolute, defining property of human language. The motivation-
oriented approach of cognitive linguistics is a revolt against this position,
and puts the emphasis back on motivation deriving from factors outside
language as a system, on human cognition as a whole. Based on this con-
frontation, the obvious way of understanding the dichotomy is to con-
clude that either language is arbitrary, or it is not or conversely, either
language is motivated or it is not.
In terms of the analogy above, however, both conclusions would be
wrong. In the company, being assigned to serve a function (such as truck
driver) depends on properties of the component, i. e. the person (such as
ability to drive a truck). But the presence of motivation is not the same
thing as being actually selected to serve that function as anyone who
feels he has been passed over for promotion can testify. The important
thing is that the function is served not exactly how it is served. Because
of that, some of the properties represent a choice between various pos-
sible options a kind of decision or judgement (Latin arbitrium). Moti-
vation is necessary, but never sufficient. Every time there is more than one
option, arbitrariness and motivation need to join forces in order to bring
about the relevant functional relationships. Without motivating proper-
ties, the filler would not fit into the slot but only the actual arbitrium,
making the choice between the available possibilities, will actually insert
it into the slot.
As in biology, motivation is a question of satisficing, not optimizing:
as long as organisms have enough of a given property to enable them to
survive and reproduce, selective pressure does not automatically work
towards perfection of the relevant property. Dysfunctional elements are a
fact of life in functional systems, such as teeth that cannot bite, words like
englisch that are increasingly misunderstood, and business leaders who
cannot lead. If the adaptive pressure is low, dysfunctional elements may
persist forever. This is one of the reasons why nave functionalism is doomed
to fail. Exactly what kind and amount of motivation is necessary cannot be
answered in general terms the only thing we can be quite sure of is that
biological properties cannot be fully predicted from motivation. Arbitrary
properties may come across as a remainder, the charred fragments that

are left when scientists have done all they could. But this is a misleading
picture in the sense that it suggests that we ought to provide a total, one
hundred per cent explanation of all the interesting properties. The harder
the environmental selection pressure, the more we can expect functional
pressure to drive adaptation processes. But for the reasons discussed above,
motivating properties, however plentiful, never suffice to set up an actual
functional relationship which inherently depends on an arbitrium.
This shows that arbitrariness cannot be avoided. What is more, it shows
that arbitrariness is in fact a functionally motivated property. As one of
my teachers used to say, thank God the order of the alphabet was fixed
before linguists got their hands on the issue. Linguists, looking for moti-
vations, would probably have quarrelled endlessly about the optimal
order. Such a quarrel about motivation would have stood in the way of the
function itself, i. e. an order of letters in which listable words should appear
when lists are needed. And arbitrariness, moreover, only exists in func-
tional systems. The freedom from knee-jerk deterministic forces is a pre-
condition for the complex functional form of causality that works by
selective pressure: some elements are reproduced in the next generation,
others are not. This is what allows arbitrariness to arise as a more flexible
mechanism than determinism. This occurs in biological systems, and in
social institutions, but not in purely physical or chemical systems. That is
why it does not make sense to try to distinguish between arbitrary and
motivated features of the Atlantic Ocean.
The issue raises itself both at the individual level and invisible hand
level, cf. ch 4. If a speech community has a relevant functional purpose
such as being able to refer to horses, it fundamentally does not matter if
the expression that ends up doing the job is horse, cheval, or Pferd as
long as speakers manage to agree on one of them. What is motivated,
above all things else, is that there should be a functional option any
option that will do the trick. The functional utility of arbitrariness can
also be placed in the evolutionary scenario that was invoked above. The
link between animals calls and the triggering has a deterministic element:
animals cannot choose which calls to use or what the relevant triggers are
going to be. The vast expressive potential of human language arises
because this deterministic link is severed and the change consists in the
emergence of arbitrariness instead of determinism.12
12 Arbitrariness can also be understood as a different dimension from the issue

of determinism or not as the lack of an inherent link between the causal fac-
To sum up: top-down structure, based on division of labour in achiev-

ing an overall function, unites function and structure in one theory, with
function as the basic notion. Partial autonomy and (partial) arbitrariness
represent points of similarity with structuralism, in that structure cannot
be predicted from external function (cf. Newmeyer 1998, 2002); but since
structure depends on functional organization rather than being fully
autonomous, the theory is fundamentally functional, rather than struc-
tural in the formalist sense.
3.2 Slots and constructions: coercion as construction-internal

functional pressure
The issue of how to bring about a meeting between slots and fillers also
arises within the perspective of construction grammar, as a feature of the
unification process. Further, construction grammar also involves a top-
down dimension. In his Radical Construction Grammar, Croft (2001: 32,
46) shows that the primitives of linguistic theory cannot be atomic catego-
ries such as nouns and verbs we have to take our point of departure in
whole constructions. Smaller units arise as (different varieties of) sub-
components of larger constructions. As larger wholes, constructions also
impose top-down properties on elements that enter into constructions. A
famous example is Goldbergs (1995) she sneezed the napkin off the table.
The verb sneeze does not in itself carry a caused-motion meaning but
when it is recruited to serve as verb in the larger caused-motion construc-
tion (S V NP PP), it assumes a reading that fits with the specifications.
Part of the story I presented in the previous section is thus captured by
construction grammar. But the underlying design feature that was dis-
cussed above, i. e. the top-down functional dimension in syntax, is not
overtly recognized because the unit-oriented nature of construction
grammar means that syntactic relations appear to be a matter of fitting
two constructions together. Construction grammars involve a taxonomic
network of constructions (Croft 2001: 58), rather than a hierarchy of
functional relations. This can be illustrated by a recent discussion in CL of
the role of slot properties.
To cover the phenomenon of a slot-determined meaning, the concept
of coercion is increasingly used about this process, also in cognitive lin-
guistics (cf. Ziegeler 2007: 99). Ziegeler is critical of the idea and discusses
tor itself and the outcome. For my purposes, the element of a decision is the
important thing.
examples, e. g. from Michaelis (2003, 2004) with a view to providing an

alternative account. One example is the coercion associated with the
indefinite determination construction, i. e. the use of an indefinite article,
in cases of potentially uncountable nouns, as in she had a beer. One point
which Ziegeler raises, in conformity with the general assumptions in CL,
is that the syntax (i. e. the Indefinite Determination Construction) is
perceived as basic, and prior . From a CL point of view, why should the
syntax override the meaning?
As an alternative, Ziegeler argues that metonymy is fully adequate as
a mechanism of meaning construction. Metonymy as a mechanism that
treats an input word as a vehicle for a contiguous meaning in the same
domain describes essentially what happens in those cases that can also be
described as coercion. From beer as a non-count substance to beer as a
unit there is only a short metonymic step so why should we encumber
the apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics with this superfluous explanatory
tool(2007: 120)?
I think Ziegeler asks precisely the question that should be asked from a
classic CL position. The limitation in the idea of coercion as a feature of
fitting things together, making square pegs go into round holes, can be
described with reference to the origins of the term in formal (Montague-
type) grammar, cf. Partee (1987). An early version of the idea applied to
the understanding of NPs in Montague grammar, where the understanding
in terms of generalized quantifiers implied that there was a problem with
coordinated cases like the temperature is 90 and rising. The reason is that
the referential meaning cannot match both predicated properties at the
same time: if the referent of the temperature in the first compound is 90,
it follows that 90 is rising (from the second compound), which is not the
idea. Type coercion is then a mechanism that adjusts the meaning from the
concrete value to the abstract category (very roughly speaking). In compu-
tational linguistics, the idea has been generalized to procedures that iron
out all discrepancies of this kind. The idea in coercion is thus basically to
restore compatibility in cases of mismatch. As Ziegeler rightly points out,
this general ironing out idea, driven by syntax alone, is not attractive from
a CL point of view that already has a rich apparatus of cognitive mecha-
nisms to account for meaning construction in context and she illustrates
the idea by offering examples of metonymic adjustment that is not driven
by syntactic coercion, such as Table One is movin upstairs (p. 117).
However, in terms of the framework I am arguing for, there is no such
thing as purely syntactic mechanisms. There is instead a constant interplay
between top-down and bottom-up factors, which is ultimately bound up
with the duality of function-based and component-based mechanisms. I
think this account does justice both to the intuition associated with coer-
cion and the preference for a cognitive account in terms of metonymy.
The central idea is that slot properties ultimately derive from context-
driven functional pressures: linguistic expressions have to do a job in the
context in which they are used.
The point of origin for this process is that whatever component content
you put into the overall mother slot, the whole turn-at-talk, has to be
understood in a way that makes sense. This is what is captured in Gricean
pragmatics. In the smaller, utterance-internal slots, precisely the same
mechanism means that the relevant filler will be interpreted in such a way
that it can do the job that fits into the utterance-internal, i. e. syntactic, slot
in which it is used. I have suggested the term syntagmatic implicature as
a cover term for all accommodation- and coercion-type adjustments, in
order to stress the continuity between the utterance-external pragmatic
mechanism and the utterance-internal content-syntactic mechanism. So
what appears to be purely syntactic coercion, is really an utterance-inter-
nal manifestation of interactive, functional pressure to adapt to the con-
text in which the coded meaning belongs.
For instance, the slogan easy does it requires the reader to understand
easy as something that can fill the subject slot. It is complicated to trans-
late the process into a fully explicit syntactic conversion, but there is no
difficulty in understanding what it means. The meaning construction proc-
ess can fruitfully be understood as metonymic, as rightly argued by Ziege-
ler but this component-based side of the matter does not render the
top-down side of the matter superfluous: it is the insertion of the material
in the functional slot constituted by the subject position that drives the
metonymic reinterpretation of the conceptual content of the component
unit. Thus it is not a matter of the priority of syntax over semantic content,
but of the ubiquitous collaboration between bottom-up conceptual build-
up and top-down assignment of function.
The issue of slots and constructions also involves the interface between
language as individual competency and language as a property of the
community niche. Slots are not stored units of language in an individual
mind they are openings for something, like the turn-at-talk. This
comes out clearly in relation to the issue of formulaic language, which is
an inherently unit-oriented phenomenon. It can therefore be used to
illustrate what is missing if you focus strictly on (competency) units in an
individual mind: it goes for both niche properties and flow properties ana-
lysable in terms of slots that they cannot be captured from that point of
view. A discussion with reference to Wray (2002) will illustrate what the
problem is (cf. Harder 2007a for a fuller discussion).
Formulaic sequences are good examples of constructions, both in that

they are units, and also in that they are internally complex. Echoing essen-
tially Sinclairs position as cited above, Wray presupposes a Chomskyan
analytical approach as one half of her theory: it is not only a question of
knowing the words that go together into strings, but also of knowing the
strings of words that go together (Wray 2002: 281). The compositional
and the formulaic approach are different processing modes which the lan-
guage user can alternate between.
The limitations of this purely individual, competency-level account
become apparent at the end of the book where she draws the whole dis-
cussion together. In her overall diagram (2002: 263), she lists three differ-
ent unit sizes: formulaic word strings (strings of words stored and proc-
essed holistically), formulaic words (polymorphemic words stored and
processed holistically), and morphemes (bound or free, including mono-
morphemic words). But as her theory implies that there are individual
differences that cannot be inferred from the general form of these
sequences, she adds (2002: 264):
Unit size is just an explanatory device for the linguist who is trying to make
sense of lexical storage in terms of standard language descriptions () but this
is for representational convenience only: The units are not intrinsically dis-
crete. Any internal structure, including word breaks, is externally and second-
arily imposed ().
If you follow this non-discreteness to its logical conclusion, as Wray does

(2002: 264), the crux of the issue is that all units in the lexicon are effec-
tively monomorphemic. Formulaic sequences thus conform to the stand-
ard constructicon format: a list containing basic unanalysable elements,
not compositionally complex forms.
What is missing in this account touches on both the distinction between
competency and niche and between usage and structure. Let us take an
instance that is a unified whole in the cultural niche as well as in the indi-
vidual competency, such as a quotation one has learnt by heart. Wray
mentions Hamlets soliloquy as an item that may enter as one unit into an
individuals lexicon. This makes sense as a description of an individual
person if it is learned as a chunk with no understanding of sub-units. It
does not, however, cover an understanding of the speech as consisting of
meaning-bearing elements in collaboration, and therefore it also does not
cover the relation between the soliloquy and the English language as part
of the cultural niche. Its status as a unit in the mind of an individual is thus
parasitic on its status as a stretch of meaningfully structured English in the
sociocultural niche hence it is a partial description only. The rise of a
formulaic unit of this kind presupposes the existence of a syntactic sys-

tem, which is not just a representational convenience. Whatever else it
may be, Hamlets soliloquy is not a morpheme.
The quotation from P. G. Wodehouse below can demonstrate another
facet of the issue, i. e. that even where there is no dispute about formulaic
status in the lexicon, we cannot assume a straightforward relationship
with the slots that play a role in the flow of usage:
I noticed that the boys manner was sullen when I introduced him to Mr Bax-
ter, and said he was going to be his tutor. He disappeared into the shrubbery,
and just now, as Mr Baxter was standing on the drive, George shot him from
behind a bush.
Good! cried Lord Emsworth, then prudently added the word gracious.
P. G. Wodehouse, Lord Emsworth and others (Penguin edition), p. 23.
As illustrated, gracious can be an increment, serving a purpose in a very

ad hoc slot that opens up, in the hour of need, in the cognitive production
processes of the speaker while in all other respects it is part of an unan-
alysable whole unit. Because in the public code good is a recognizable unit
even when it occurs inside a formula, the speaker can reconfigure his
utterance in mid-stride by using the language (= langue) exactly as it is.
The moral is that the question of what constitutes an entrenched pattern
does not exhaust the issue of the structural options offered by the niche.
Also in another respect, the concept of construction is at risk of being
made to carry too great a load. In Crofts (2001) list of frequently asked
questions in relation to Radical Construction Grammar, the most fre-
quent question of all is how to individuate constructions if you cannot
characterize them structurally in terms of the atomic primitive units they
consist of. Crofts answer requires the concept of construction to be at
the same time both primitive and complex (Croft 2001: 52). In the
perspective of the individual learner you can argue that constructions are
primitive, by seeing whole utterances as instances of constructions as
Croft claims they are (twice in ten lines, Croft 2001: 52): an utterance is the
basic unit that occurs in natural discourse, that children learn, and that
linguists study (Croft 2001: 52). If an utterance is also a construction, then
construction in that sense does indeed constitute the primitive given that
is the starting point of linguistic description.
But that argument glosses over the difference between utterances as
given unanalysed wholes, such as the child meets them in discourse (anal-
ogous to Wrays formulas) and utterances as instantiations of pre-existing
patterns. There is actually a double dissociation. Not all utterances are
instances of constructions in the sense of entrenched patterns. Picking a
passage from the debate on p. 458, lets for the sake of the argument that
this might occur as an utterance (an uninterrupted turn surrounded by
other turns):
. this idea that jeez I dont know, Jon, definitions in society
As far as I can see, this is only a construction if anything that has actually
been uttered counts as a construction by virtue of having been uttered, in
which case the statement becomes trivially true. On the other hand, more
run-of-the-mill utterances are not identical to constructions, they are
merely tokens of (several) constructional types. An utterance like be a
good girl and go to sleep may be an unanalysable primitive from the point
of view of the child, but from the point of view of the speech community
it is a complex instantiation of several different constructions rather than
simply a construction.13 (Crofts statement is of course true but unsur-
prising in the sense that utterances are instances of constructions just as
they are instances of vowels, intonation patterns and speech acts).
What is primitive about the utterance is its role as minimal communi-
cative act in other words the utterance as a functional unit. The utterance
understood as an instance of complex constructional patterns cannot be
understood as primitive. The criterion for being a construction in the
structural sense is that there is a shared structural pattern that character-
izes all instances and no pattern properties are shared between all utter-
ances.
The point Croft makes, however, is similar to the point I have made
above about structure beginning with the whole utterance, which is then
functionally subdifferentiated downwards, rather than with atomic prim-
itives such as nouns and verbs. The idea of top-down functional differen-
tiation is thus a natural ally of the constructional approach, at least on that
point. Constructions just do not capture the whole story. Because a con-
struction is understood as a form-meaning pairing, it is in reality co-
extensive with the concept linguistic sign. Saying that a language consists
of constructions is like saying that a language consists of signs. This is a
much better description than saying that language consists of syntactic
devices, but there is still more to be said than that.
Some of the limitations of an account in which the distinction between
grammar and lexicon is dissolved into a continuum of units have been
13 The issue involves the same principle as the adoption of a distinction between
constructions (understood as abstract types) and constructs understood as
linguistic expressions occurring as actual usage events (including utterances)
cf. Traugott (2008).
addressed by the so-called Lexical Constructional Model, whose principal

proponents are Ruiz de Mendoza and Ricardo Mairal, cf. Ruiz de Men-
doza & Mairal (2007a, b). Situating themselves (like this book) in the
interface position between the functional and cognitive traditions, they
develop an approach that addresses a number of the issues that have been
discussed above in relation to the role of the top-down approach as a nec-
essary supplement to the bottom-up approach. The name of the model
signals the basic dichotomy between the inventory (lexicon) and the com-
binatory operation that is viewed as having an independent and essential
role in understanding the constructional side of language. This combina-
tory operation thus goes beyond the unification process (understood as
essentially trivial) that makes it possible to conceive of the whole gram-
mar in terms of a constructicon. The model also stresses the similarity
between the extra-clausal Gricean mechanisms and the intra-clausal coer-
cion mechanisms (cf. above p. 247).
The processes of coercion that occur when an item is inserted in a slot
are described in a format that is inspired by Role and Reference Gram-
mar, and at the same time links up with the classic conceptual mapping
operations of CL. Thus the mechanism by which Peter loved Mary back
into life is not just a unification of constructional with lexical meaning, it
also involves a process of metaphorical meaning construction whereby
the metaphor an emotional state is an effectual action is triggered (cf.
Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal, no date). The model also involves a detailed
account of the constraints that this process is under, building on but going
beyond CL principles such as target domain override (cf. above p. 38).
Metaphorical interpretation in this model is thus also understood in
dynamical terms, not as a fixed invariant conceptual mapping but as a
potential for constructing meaning with the linguistic input serving as an
instruction, cf. above p. 192. The model, which is under rapid development,
is thus well positioned to demonstrate the potential of the underempha-
sized top-down and combinatorial part of syntax for CL.
3.3 Functional upgrading: the dynamic dimension of syntax
Grammar (or syntax) is symbolic in nature, consisting in the conventional

symbolization of semantic structure
(Langacker 1987: 2)
A central point about syntax in a functional and cognitive picture is that it

is symbolic, in the sense that it deals with meaning-bearing elements. In
chapter 5, it was argued that content elements are inherently dynamic,

shaped by their canonical role as contributions to the online flow and
that also the language competency of individuals had a non-representa-
tional, purely procedural core. Both conclusions clearly have implications
for the understanding of syntax. The dynamic dimension associated with
the overall syntactic hierarchy is dependent on a feature which I call func-
tional upgrading the type of mechanism whereby one meaning-bearing
item operates on another to bring about a complex whole with enhanced
properties. This mechanism, too, can be understood both top-down and
bottom-up but it is easier to understand if we take it bottom up, so it will
be illustrated from the point of view of composition rather than differen-
tiation.
The dynamic aspect represents a further step beyond the basic idea of
unification in which two items go together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
if their specifications are compatible. The key dynamic operation I am
thinking of is familiar from a number of contexts, including logic and
mathematics, but in a functional context the most well-known instance is
speech act theory. It is generally recognized that utterance meaning has
both a doing (functional) dimension and a representing (symbolic-
conceptual) dimension. The classic manifestation of this duality is Sear-
les (1969: 31) formula for illocutionary acts, F(p), where F assigns the
speech act function (= illocutionary force) to p, which in turn provides
the propositional (representational) content. However, the function-
assigning relationship between higher-order operators and lower-level
operands or arguments is not limited to the speech act (= whole utter-
ance) level; it is also part of the way linguistic expressions are related in
the code itself, inside the clause.
The clause as a structural unit is at the same time a format for a com-
plete utterance meaning. There are other formats for complete utterances,
including holophrases like hurrah or yes. Common to all of them is only
the contrast with fragments such as the or may often which are not suited
to convey a complete utterance meaning. The special status of the clause
in linguistics is due to the fact that it constitutes the most fully differenti-
ated format. This means that most other constructions can be understood
with the clause as the presupposed overall pattern of functional differen-
tiation, cf. the discussion above. The clause format, however, can also be
used for sub-utterance units (subclauses) so the functional role cannot
be derived from the constructional properties alone.
A considerable part of this differentiated structure can be understood
with reference to operator-operand relationships. Operators, as described
above, take arguments as input and create more complex semantic enti-
ties. An example that illustrates the basic principle both in the local and
linguistic domain is the negation operator (NEG), which can be under-
stood as a semantic functor which applies to a proposition (P), creating a
more complex, negated proposition NEG (P). Faced with the proposition
(1) the war is over
you may choose to apply negation to it, yielding

(2) the war is not over
(00) is a more complex syntactic entity both on the semantic content side
and on the expression side. On the expression side, the word not has been
added at a particular point in the linear order (after the verb and before
the adverb). On the side of semantic content, in contrast, the change can-
not be captured as a matter of linear addition. Rather, the word does
something to the rest of the semantic content, changing the whole mean-
ing of the clause.
In a number of ways, negation is an illustrative example of this func-
tional type of syntactic interaction between meanings: a semantic functor
affects the whole, instead of merely adding a small new piece to the puz-
zle; it has an obvious dynamic element: whatever P builds up, NEG (P)
undermines and finally, NEG does not represent anything out there
rather, it performs a semantic task.
The functional, task performance character can also illustrate why it
makes a difference to insist on the terminology of content syntax (cf.
Harder 1996) rather than just semantics or symbolic relations. There is
an important difference between encoded, syntactic relations between
meanings and those semantic relations which may hold between two items
in the clause regardless of their place in the clausal structure. Consider,
e. g. example (3):
(3) The biological world can be divided into the animal and the vegetable
kingdom
In this sentence there are semantic relations between the words biologi-
cal, animal and vegetable. These relations include the superordinate/hypo-
nym relations between biological on the one hand and animal and vegeta-
ble on the other. These have nothing to do with the syntactic structure, and
would exist regardless of how the words had been placed in the clauses
that contain them.
In contrast, the relation between the words biological and world is of a
different kind: it constitutes a structural, encoded relation between the
two words. On the expression side (at the phonological pole in Langack-
ers terminology) this relation includes linear precedence and contiguity.

But the expression-side relations do not exhaust the relation between the
words: there is also a relation that is semantic in the sense that it involves
the meanings of the two words, such that biological specifies what sub-
category of the meaning of world that is encoded by the whole expression
biological world. This relationship, in contrast to the relation between bio-
logical and animal is thus both a syntactic and a semantic relation, more
specifically it is a relationship at the syntactic level of analysis that obtains
between two encoded content units rather than between two phonological
units: hence the term content-syntactic relation.
The obvious but usually ignored sign relation at the syntactic level
instructs the addressee to make a sub-category biological world, once
she has followed the lexical instructions to invoke world and biological.
This is also why the question posed by generative grammar of the inter-
face between syntax and semantics is a misbegotten concept: since seman-
tics includes one half of syntax, there can be no interface between them.
Instead, there is an intersection: the area of content syntax is simultane-
ously a subdomain of semantics and a subdomain of syntax.
Content syntax contains other relations than functor-argument rela-
tions.14 However, they are essential in the hierarchical structure of clause
meaning. We begin by following the bottom-up path towards full sentence
meaning.
Within the structure of the clause, the hierarchy of function-imposing
operations constitutes a layered structure whereby higher, functional
operators have scope over lower content elements. This has been a cen-
trepiece of the functional view of syntax for the past generation, cf. Butler
and Tavernier (2008). It plays an important role in Foley and van Valin
(1984); Dik & Hengeveld (1991); Van Valin and la Polla (1997); Dik (1997),
Hengeveld (2004); Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008). In cognitive gram-
mar, the same principle is found: grounding predications that embed
clauses in their situational content have the widest scope (cf. Langacker
1991: 240). It is also reflected in the formal clause structure of generative
14 Langackers concept of trajector is also a content-syntactic role: it designates

the chief participant in a relation, corresponding at the expression side with
specific word order relations between the phonological poles of predicate and
trajector expressions. There are also different kinds of functor-argument rela-
tions. The relation holding between biological and world has a functor-argu-
ment aspect but also a more special feature that can be called subcategory
attribition, or subcategorization, which is a content-syntactic relation at
phrase level.
grammar (cf. Siewierska 1992). In formal grammars, the operator-argu-

ment relation is not universally understood in semantic-functional terms,
but the overall hierarchical ordering between function and content ele-
ments is generally recognized (for a functional-semantic account, cf.
Harder 1996: 274285).
The emphasis on the doing dimension is warranted by the fact that
when we build complex expressions, we do not just add the content of
each new element to a growing heap of meaning. When we add elements
at the top end of the hierarchy since they are functional operators and
not just concepts they are designed to change what is already there. An
obvious example of that is the complementizing type of operator, which
takes a content element as operand and imposes its profile on it (cf. Lan-
gacker 1987: 309), thus converting it into something that is both conceptu-
ally more complex and has a new functional potential. There is a signifi-
cant part of clause structure that can be viewed in terms of a conveyor
belt metaphor (cf. Dik 1994: 361), with the output of previous operations
becoming the input to following operations. A very skeletal paraphrase of
the way it works if we compile a full clausal utterance bottom-up, such as
Jill killed Leo, can be given with reference to (4)(7):
(4) Jill, Leo: nominal expressions, denoting entities
(5) kill (Jill, Leo): the predicate kill operates upon Jill and Leo, yielding a
predication (or state-of-affairs)
(6) past (kill (Jill, Leo): the past tense operator applied to the state-of-affairs
yields a proposition about a past situation
(7) Declarative (past (kill (Jill, Leo))): the illocutionary operator declarative
applied to the propositional content yields an assertion (cf. Searles F (p)
formula)
The nominal constituents (4) constitute the input end of the scope hier-
archy. This is reflected in the property discussed in relation to the billiard-
ball model (cf. p. 51), the fact that they are conceptually autonomous (cf.
Langacker 1991: 14): they can be conceived of without depending on the
presence of other elements. In contrast, a verb meaning cannot be con-
ceived of without something to fill the argument slots/elaboration sites
there is no way of understanding, e. g., threw without someone throwing
something.
The next major step upwards in building a clause meaning is a predica-
tion (5), which is the result of the verb (kill) operating on (predicating its
content of) the arguments (Jill and Leo). From Searle (1969) onwards,
predication is generally recognized as a propositional act (cf. Croft 2001,
Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008). It is also, from Aristotle onwards, gener-
ally recognized that verbs have a conceptual content that is characteristi-
cally distinct from nouns in having a temporal, dynamic dimension (denot-

ing events or dynamic relations, designating with sequential scanning,
in Langackers terminology (1987: 248). As discussed in ch. 5, the verb
open does something to its landmark entity, namely remove a barrier,
which involves progression in time.
In terms of the instructional format, each operator serves as input to an
interpretive operation that is to be performed by the addressee. In terms
of the cooking analogy, the structure of a clause is like the structure of a
recipe, not the structure of food produced (~ the take-home meaning).
When the addressee follows up in the instructions in the recipe, he con-
verts potential to actual meaning as part of the same process that com-
bines meanings in the syntactically appropriate way. In the process of
executing the operation encoded by an operator, the semantic potential
is imposed on the operand, resulting in a take-home meaning that is pre-
liminary until all instructions have been followed.
In the linguistic discussion, the job (predication in the case of the
verb) and the conceptual content (dynamic relation) generally lead sepa-
rate lives, and the conceptual content tends to be in focus in linguistic
theories (not only in CL). However, it is only by the act of predication that
the things denoted by nominal constituents get converted into partici-
pants of the event denoted by the verb. The verbal meaning operates on
the nominal constituents, rather than just being concatenated with them:
as a result, the content of kill is superimposed on Jill and Leo, so that one
becomes the killer, the other the killee. The fact that this functional
dimension is not just emergent from component units (cf. the discussion of
the Lexical Constructional Model above) can be illustrated by cases when
unusual items are conscripted to serve in the functional slot.
(8) Girl (to herself): Oh no! Ive been Napoleoned! (http://www.urbandiction-
ary.com)
If we put a nominal stem such as Napoleon into the verb slot, then even if
you dont know what it means, you understand that Napoleoning has
been predicated of the girl. The name has thus been coerced into serving
an operator function.15
The predication that is the output of applying a predicate to the argu-
ments can subsequently be operated upon by a past tense form, which
once again converts the input to something more complex, namely a prop-
15 Apparently it means having a short guy come on to you in a way that suggests
he is trying to compensate for his size.
osition (6). Past tense is a grounding operator (cf. Langacker 1991: 195),
the state-of-affairs is now viewed as applying at a particular time before
now, and the question of truth can be raised: does the descriptive content
match the situation to which it is applied?
As the last step illustrated here (7), the temporally anchored proposi-
tional content may be operated upon by an illocutionary operator (the
intra-linguistic variant of the F (p) formula). In the above example it
assigns the status content of a declarative statement to the proposition.
This is the skeleton of the obligatory clausal hierarchy in English.16 The
topmost function-assignment operation, as described above p. 242, is a
situational process of a Gricean kind, triggered by the utterance as a whole
or rather by its insertion into the situational slot, the interactive turn: it is
the interlocutors who determine (in a collaborative manner, cf. Clark
1996) what an utterance is ultimately to count as. So the bottom-up logic
of the process of constructing a (clause-formed) utterance goes from lin-
guistic input at one end via a series of coding operations in which each
step re-functionalizes the output of the previous step, to the final, situa-
tionally interpreted output.
While the dynamic (job) aspect of meaning may be easy to see in the
case of operators from the verb upwards, at the bottom end it is not obvi-
ous what the dynamic role of nouns (noun phrases) might be. That role, I
argue, is to carve out entities (= arguments) for predication to apply to.
Once they are understood, these billiard balls are conceived as static and
autonomous, as pointed out by Langacker, but the linguistic operation, cf.
also Langacker (2008a: 460), interactively instructs the addressee to access
them. Nominal meaning thus operates directly on the world as an object
of reference, cutting out those segments of it that we want to talk about.
This is also why the sub-act of categorization has a privileged relation with
nouns as opposed to all other items: nouns, unlike verbs, prepositions and
adjectives, denote things, and common nouns denote them as instances
of a category. The categorical container is part of the act of identifying a
thing as something that can be talked about. The only way not to see this
as a dynamic operation would be to assume that we talk about the world
as objectively given, with no interference from the human subject.
16 There are also optional operators: it is possible to add adverbial modifiers at

various points to specify additional functional properties. At the top of the
semantic hierarchy, one can add illocutionary or textual adverbials such as
admittedly, furthermore or to cut a long story short, which imposes the roles of
concession or conclusion on the operand message.
Compared to the approach to syntax in terms of a network of construc-

tions, the functional upgrading approach represents a difference of focus.
Two aspects are central:
(1) it highlights the general hierarchical features of clause semantics
(2) it expresses the different stages as dynamic options
The centrepiece is the compositional logic of successive semantic upgrad-

ing operations performed on input elements, until we reach the level of
the full conventional (clausal) utterance meaning The constructional
approach, in contrast, describes each item separately, including both gen-
eral and idiosyncratic properties.
The clausal hierarchy is a highly general feature of clause structure; but
its generality is not the main point. General syntactic principles of clause
formation, whose special status I have defended in one particular version
above, are often associated with formal Chomskian rules, also by those
who are interested in other types of linguistic phenomena (cf. e. g. Wray
2002). But as pointed out by Goldberg (2006, 2009), construction gram-
mar has no problem with generalizations. What is special about it here is
the dynamic, functional nature of the hierarchy as opposed to the static
jig-saw combination mechanism of unification.
The central rule-like operation that constitutes the dynamic aspect of
meaning presupposes an individual competency that enables human
subjects to carry out those operations in ways that are appropriate to the
situation, i. e. to construct the relevant utterance meanings. This reflects a
quite general functional principle that also applies (e. g.) to acts like cook-
ing and cleaning: a functional competency consists in being able to cope
with an input and operate upon it until it suits your purposes. Cooks are
people who can take uncooked ingredients and operate upon them to
produce food (rather than consume them as they are). Cleaners are peo-
ple who can take dirty clothes and operate upon them to produce clean
clothes (or people would have to simply re-use them in their existing con-
dition). Human speakers are people who can (be instructed to) take avail-
able expressions and upgrade them until they meet the standard of the
new communicative step they want to take instead of merely re-using a
fixed inventory of meanings.17
17 Langacker (2009) gives an account of the relation between lexical items and
the constructions they enter into which shares many of the points I have tried
to make above (including what he calls the skewing mechanism that is
involved in the verb to Napoleon, cf. example 8, p. 256). While my strategy
has been to profile the distinctive contribution of the top-down perspective,
3.4 The interdependence of the top-down and bottom-up perspectives
The previous sections have argued for the distinctive contribution of top-
down functional operators to the understanding of syntactic relations
not as an alternative to unit-based constructional networks, but as a neces-
sary addition to it. The aim of this section is to show how the two sides
interact.
The operator-operand distinction and the slot-filler distinction express
two sides of the same fundamental relationship, which is built into all pur-
poseful action: the relation between the means (~ the filler/operand) and
the end (~ the functional slot). In one fell swoop acts such as eating a unit
of food to satisfy your hunger, the relation is direct and simultaneous. In
complex actions, however, it becomes indirect and opaque: although your
intention is to wash your clothes, you start very indirectly by putting them
in the bin. This is how the split between top-down and bottom-up comes
into being, and with it the problem of making ends meet: the bottom-up
means have to be supplied before the topmost goal can be achieved. The
bigger the task, the greater the distance and the co-ordination problem. If
the goal is to hold Olympic games, a very large number of things must
happen in a co-ordinated fashion before you can declare the games open
which requires simultaneous consideration of means and ends at all stages.
This applies to the case of utterances as a species of complex action.
Even in a strictly top-down procedure, such as the one embodied in Func-
tional Discourse Grammar (cf. Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008), the
simultaneous presence of several stages is recognized (cf. Mackenzie 2004)
in that one stage can trigger the next before being completed. Speech
errors demonstrate that ends may in fact not quite meet when processes at
different levels are running simultaneously, as in she come backs tomor-
row; the quake caused extensive valley in the damage (cf. Aitchison 1998:
257), where the words have been recruited and also the syntactic structure,
but the words go into the wrong slots, short-circuiting strict top-down plan-
however, Langackers strategy is to provide an overall format of description

that covers both the bottom-up and the top-down dimension in the same uni-
fied mechanism. That mechanism is a generalization of the categorization
relationship and while Langacker recognizes that it may seem peculiar to
say that the preposition on categorizes the table in the composite expression
on the table, the sense in which he uses the term makes it perfectly accurate.
However, I think his account captures the rather schematic similarity that all
forms of functional upgrading share with categorization, rather than the ele-
ment of function-assignment that I want to focus on.
ning.18 To manage this process, it is necessary to be able to understand

structures in both perspectives at the same time the idea of saying that
one is more important than the other is incoherent. In planning complex
action, you have to move from ends to means in carrying it out, you have
to provide the means before you can achieve your end.
To illustrate the built-in bidirectionality, the structure of the statement
Germany lost the match yesterday can be analysed from both directions.
The rough top-down path is: the overall goal is to make an assertion (illo-
cution), about a past situation (past tense), more specifically yesterday
(temporal adverbial), describable by assigning the predicate lose to the
arguments Germany and the match.
Bottom-up it goes like this: the entities I am going to talk about are
Germany and the match, as participants in an event of losing; this event is
temporally located yesterday. In linking the state-of-affairs with this past
situation I construct a proposition (about the past), which I assert to be
true (declarative illocution).
A striking illustration of the co-presence of the two perspectives is the
issue of what precisely the head of a construction is. What is the most
essential and defining element in a phrase depends on whether you look
at it top-down or bottom-up. True to their general orientation, generative
grammarians and usage-based grammarians tend to differ on this point. In
the case of what Langacker calls nominals, generative grammar has
evolved to view the determiner as the head, renaming the phrase DP (for
determiner phrase). Viewed top-down, determiners take scope over the
entire phrase, including the noun that is the basic operand. With the ter-
minological convergence that was mentioned on p. 236, this gives them
the status of functional head in generative grammar. Representing the
usage-based, bottom-up perspective, Croft (2001) adopts the strategy of
naming phrases after their Primary Information-Bearing Unit (= PIBU),
which for NPs is the noun that denotes the core conceptual content.
A functional view of bidirectionality can accommodate both rationales
at the same time. Occupying the hierarchically higher slot gives one form
of primacy (the power to impose a functional operation on the target
operand). Supplying the content gives another form of primacy (the raw
materials define the possibilities for what kind of operation you can per-
form). Coercion is an example of the top-down upper hand, as exempli-
18 As an example of the same thing, Bakker and Siewierska (2004) also mention
that phonological elements may be recruited at a fairly early point in the over-
all procedure.
fied in the case of determiners by the indefinite determination construc-

tion (cf. p. 246). The coercive power of the indefinite article reflects the
fact that the determiner has the highest scope, imposing a task on the
noun: in the combination a beer, the noun beer is employed to denote a
countable unit, which obligingly it does (cf. Harder 2008 on determiners).
Bidirectionality is also reflected in the existence of dual dependence
relations between higher and lower elements (cf. Harder 1996: 276)19: there
is a functional dependence of lower elements on higher elements, in addi-
tion to the conceptual dependence defined by Langacker (1987: 301). 20
19 Conceptual dependence goes downward in the hierarchy and reflects the fact
that operators cannot work without having some content to operate on. With
reference to the example above, if you want to predicate the concept lose, you
need a loser to predicate it about, one who can fill out the elaboration site in
Langackers terms. Similarly, in order to apply negation, there must be some-
thing to negate. But because of the functional embeddedness of utterances,
there is also a dependence that goes the other way. It applies already at the level
of the billiard-ball model, and can be illustrated with reference to the two par-
ticipants Germany and the match. Just as the verb lose cannot be understood
without reference to participants, the two NPs cannot stand alone and consti-
tute an utterance consisting in Germany. The match. You can conceptualize both
of them without needing to add a predicate to them but only when we link
them up by means of a predicate such as lose do they suddenly have a job to do
in a coherent message content. Higher in the clause, the proposition is a concep-
tually perfectly self-contained unit, which philosophers can discuss happily
without needing to attach them to a speech act operator. Nevertheless, a propo-
sition on its own does not constitute a roadworthy utterance content because
for message purposes we do not know what to do with a proposition, unless the
speaker either asserts it or raises the question of whether it can be asserted.
20 Dependency relations play an important role in understanding the continuity
as well as the discontinuity between meaning in language and meaning in the
situational environment. From a narrowly linguistic point of view dependence
can provide a rationale for two opposite situations: it can mean either than
there has to be an encoded linguistic item (otherwise the dependent item dan-
gles in the air), or that there does not have to be one (because if the depend-
ence relation is obvious, the addressee has to supply the missing item to satisfy
the dependence relation). Both cases are found in real life.
First, there are cases where dependence works so as to require an explicit
coded element. An upwards functional dependence that works in this way in
English is the proposition, as discussed above you cannot encode a proposi-
tion on its own, without an illocutionary value. Downwards, it can be exempli-
fied with a textual adverbial such as further, which needs to be followed by an
explicit textual operand that can constitute the addition that it announces.
Dependence is linked up with the slot-filler dichotomy in the following

way: top-down operators provide slots: a declarative operator opens a slot
for a proposition; a negator creates a slot for a negated item; a verb creates
Secondly, there are cases where dependencies allow items to work without an
encoded item to satisfy them: The potential utterance none as exemplified
below works both ways. It is conceptually dependent on a category specifica-
tion; the addressee therefore has to retrieve it from the previous discourse
context. (Otherwise he would not understand what there is none of). It is also
functionally dependent on the top end of the sentence hierarchy, including the
illocution. In the right discourse context, the addressee will recruit content to
complement both missing ends, cf:
A: How many passengers refused to pay?
B: None
In interpreting Bs elliptic reply none, we have no trouble supplying passen-
gers at the bottom end and assertion from the top end.
Languages differ with respect to the strategies they follow. Mandarin is
famous for allowing many things to be uncoded that have to be explicitly
encoded in clauses in Standard Average European languages like English. This
includes the arguments that are conceptually dependent on the verb (making
it almost impossible to classify Mandarin verbs according to syntactic valency).
This has consequences for the grammatical description, in the sense that the
strategies that you have to follow when understanding verbs in languages that
do not require explicitly encoded arguments are different and more compli-
cated: you have to do more interpretive work on your own when you are listen-
ing to Mandarin than when you are listening to English. Thus the verb gi (give)
can be used alone, leaving the addressee to figure out who gave what, and if
relevant, to whom. Mastery of these strategies is therefore part of knowing how
to use verbs in Mandarin; you simply have to make do with fewer instructions.
A somewhat similar mechanism applies in the case of agreement marking.
As pointed out in Croft (1995), it is often the case that gender classes can agree
either with classes of linguistic items and also with classes of referents. Nouns
have inherent gender in many languages, including French and German and
in the same languages referent entities have either feminine or masculine
(sociocultural) status. But the place where gender is marked is on indirectly
associated items such as adjectives. The word for crazy in French (masculine
fou, feminine folle) therefore links up the adjective with an item either with
linguistic or sociocultural gender, which do not necessarily match: thus majest
(= majesty) is feminine, also when used as the title in front of the King: sa
majest le roi. In terms of experiential content, the two cases of feminine mark-
ing are thus clearly different but functionally and instructionally there is an
equally clear parallel, cf. p. 184, because folle in both cases instructs the
addressee to pair off the property crazy with a referent that has the feature
feminine, thus reducing the scope for attaching meanings in the wrong way.
a slot for participants. Bottom-up content units provide fillers: NPs pro-
vide fillers for participant slots, and a proposition fills out the content slot
of an assertion. This function-based structure is again generalized from the
properties of non-linguistic functional action: the labour market is a meet-
ing place between job openings and people ready to fill them, and as we
know, jobs are created top-down, while people apply for them bottom-up.
Here, too, there are bidirectional dependence relations: applicants depend
on jobs, and jobs depend on applicants; here the discussion about which is
more basic is a political issue, but again, neither side can be eliminated.
In relation to Cognitive Grammar, the dual directionality manifests
itself in the account introduced above of the English auxiliary in terms of
Functional Systems, cf. Langacker (2008b), which is a development of
the classic analysis: the grounding elements (tense and modality) stand at
the top of the scopal hierarchy (cf. above p. 255) and take scope over the
predication, with the lexical (main) verb as the head. 21 The analysis goes
beyond the classic CL account, in introducing a special apparatus for
approaching clause meaning from the functional top end rather than the
conceptual, lexical end.
The analysis also adds an essential dimension to the analysis of subject-
hood in Langacker (1999). In the linguistic literature, the top-down dimen-
sion of subjecthood (cf. Harder 2006) has been under-emphasized because
the subject has been seen chiefly as defined in relation to the verb (at
21 The grounding elements attach themselves to the topmost verb stem, which
Langacker calls the existential verb, because it specifies the reality status of
the clausal content. Subject and existential verb form a unit called the basic
existential core together with the subject, which can be separated by the rest
of the clause by an adverbial, as in (1)(2), (8a-b in the original):
(1) Will she, perhaps, be waiting for us impatiently?
(2) Has she, perhaps, been waiting for us impatiently?
The term core reflects an analysis in terms of layering, where will she and
has she is interpreted as being the centre of the clausal structure. Although it
may be confusing to have two sets of layering relations, one for functional
centrality and one for conceptual centrality, the status of diagrams as heuristic
devices means that this is a practical rather than a theoretical issue. At the
presentation, functional systems were said to have an indirect relationship
with grammatical organization, analogous to the decisive but intangible role
of dark matter (Langacker, personal communication) in the universe. As
with dark matter, this raises the challenge of providing an integrated account.
(The special status assigned to subject + topmost auxiliary corresponds to the
mood super-element in the clause in Systemic-Functional Linguistics, cf. But-
ler 2003: 173, with the rest of the clause called residue).
billiard-ball level, as it were). However, the whole discussion of the role of

subjects in English depends on the relationship with the top-level func-
tional choice of indicative (i. e. either declarative or interrogative illocu-
tion), as opposed to e. g. imperative or exclamative. Only if the speaker
chooses to make an indicative utterance does obligatory subject choice
arise, cp. imperatives like please keep your luggage with you at all times,
exclamatives like what a waste! and exhortations like down with creation-
ism! In indicatives you have to choose a subject, even in the case of zero-
argument verbs like rain functionally speaking because subject-verb
order in English encodes the distinction between interrogative and declar-
ative illocution. Encoding subjects that are referentially null with zero
expression would thus eliminate explicit status assignment at the top end
of the scopal hierarchy. In support of this interpretation, it may be pointed
out that in Spanish, for instance, absence of obligatory subjects goes with
absence of word order coding of declarative/interrogative illocutionary
choice; and I challenge the reader to find examples of obligatory subject
expression in languages where overt subjects do not have a role in coding
functional choices.22
22 Langackers (1999) description of subjects in terms of primary focal partici-

pant as the prototype, analogous to MacWhinney-type starting points, is fully
compatible with this account. In indicative utterances you have to define a
point of departure for the proposition, and in the functional systems analysis
(Langacker 2008b), this point recurs in the form of the role of the subject as
default anchor, whose integration with the illocutionary choice makes essen-
tially the same point as the one I outlined above. A fully explicit integration
between functional systems and the grammatical hierarchy, however, would
have to incorporate a description of the interface between (1) the top-down
choice of a subject that is bound up with the choice of indicative illocution
type and (2) the bottom-up introduction of potential fillers by the choice of
verbs and constructional patterns.
This would also make explicit the element of redundancy in assigning the
status of primary focal participant to the subject. There are many situations
where subject choice does not add any independent semantic content, and
where subjecthood is in that sense a purely formal or syntactic property.
When there is only one argument, as in intransitive clauses, that argument
wins the subject assignment by default primary participant status goes (vac-
uously) to the only argument there is. This contrasts with non-vacuous cases
like Jack resembles Joe versus Joe resembles Jack, where subject choice makes
a clear functional contribution to clause content.
An explicit account of this interface between the two directions would
thereby also throw light on the nature of the arbitrariness that is wrongly
understood in generative grammar as indicating that subject choice is funda-
The co-existence of top-down and bottom-up forces is also essential in

relation to language acquisition. Tomasellos usage-based theory of lan-
guage acquisition (2003) shows in concrete detail how children work their
way upwards from actual chunks, without needing innate higher-level
rules. The emphasis therefore is on the bottom-up path from concrete
instances of unanalysed utterances and step-by-little-step towards more
and more elaborate and abstract patterns. The same basic orientation is
found in other functional approaches to language acquisition, cf. MacWhin-
ney (1975) on item-based patterns. This path matches the component-
based structure discussed in section 6.2 above; progress in acquisition can
be described in terms of constructions that become more and more
abstract, adding more and more complex components to the childs con-
structicon.
There is no contradiction, however, between this pathway into lan-
guage and the simultaneous presence of a top-down element that is under-
stood not in formal, but rather in functional terms. Children come
equipped to move in either direction part to whole or whole to parts
(Tomasello 2003: 39); but on the same page, Tomasello wonders why chil-
dren start with one-word unanalysable expressions. I suggest that is to be
expected if you view the whole-to-part operation in terms of the top-down
functional differentiation. If the functionally relevant unit is the whole
mentally a purely formal mechanism (Pinker 1994: 42). Arbitrariness, as dis-

cussed above, is a functionally motivated property of languages, arising from
the need to make a choice between (motivated) options. In this case the choice
is how to organize indicative utterances, and English represents the choice of
organizing them around a primary focal participant. Once that choice has
been made, it must be imposed on all clause contents, whenever they appear
as the content of an indicative clause. In certain cases this is more motivated
than others but such is the nature of functional systems. As a final suggestion
for the project of integrating the functional systems with the grammatical hier-
archy, I see no reason why the illocutionary force operator (in this case, inter-
rogative or declarative) cannot simultaneously occupy a place at the top of the
scope hierarchy, as in the layered clause structure of functional grammar, and
also enter into the functional choice systems described by Langacker (involv-
ing also polarity and anchoring). The idea of functional choices operating top-
down presupposes that the material on which the choices must be imposed is
provided bottom-up. As pointed out in the introduction above, this also illus-
trates the link between functional and structural organization, adding a set of
paradigmatic choices to the previously chiefly syntagmatic clauses analysis in
cognitive grammar. There is every reason to see them as parts of the same
integrated grammatical system.
utterance, the functional pressure is to go for the top level and fill in the
utterance slot as soon as you can. Since the holophrase saves you from the
some assembly required condition on human language, that is the natu-
ral starting point (as it is also the evolutionary pathway, cf. above p. 240).
This again pinpoints the distinction between the utterance as the function-
ally primitive unit and the utterance as a complex construction. If only the
bottom-up path is considered, the function and the component unit end
up being conflated, as discussed above: we get the whole utterance under-
stood as a construction, cf. in addition to Croft (2001: 52) also Tomasello
(2003: 325).
From the top-down side, structure arises when you move from the sim-
plex utterance to the complex utterance. In acquisition, this works by an
emerging functional division of labour, which may take the form of a
pivot grammar stage, cf. Braine (1963). Pivot grammar does not hold
up if understood as manifesting a generative, formally inviolable subject-
predicate grammar, cf. Tomasello (2003: 9596, 124), and therefore Toma-
sello does not understand pivot schemas as syntactic (Pivot schemas
do not have syntax, Tomasello 2003: 115). According to Tomasello, the
transition into syntax proper has the following crucial elements:
Essentially what they need to learn is that whereas some linguistic symbols are
used for referring and predicating things about the world, others (including
word order) are used for more grammatical functions. (Tomasello 2003:125)
Tomasello thus distinguishes between pivot schemas and item-based con-

structions by the criterion of what he calls syntactic marking, and item-
based syntactic constructions are therefore only present when there is
consistent grammatical marking.
This reflects an understanding of syntax that is essentially taken over
from generative grammar, where syntax is reserved for grammatical
rather than contentful functions. In contrast, if syntax is understood as
reflected in the term content syntax, where the driving force is the
intention to recruit two meanings in order to produce a complex mean-
ing, the emerging formation of item-based pivot schemas qualifies as syn-
tax. In content-syntactic terms the basic relationship between reference
and predication is clearly part of grammar in the sense of content syn-
tax arguably the most basic syntactic relation there is. Moving from a
stage of pure cut-and-paste operations towards this form of combination
is then one of the partial, tentative steps that children take towards
imposing regularities on their utterances. For English children, it is a nat-
ural bid for adapting to the organisation of indicative clauses discussed
above to begin (inductively, item by item) to use utterances starting out
with the primary focal participant and assigning a description to it, as in

Mummy gone.
The development can be understood as stage one in the process of
grammaticalization (cf. Boye and Harder submitted), where the rise of
grammatical items is the next step. If we start out with a repertoire of
holophrases with no relations between them, the rise of a complex unit
with a division of labour between them is the first step towards gram-
matical structure, while the rise of items with ancillary functions is the
next step. In the following diagram, the wugs example (cf. Berko 1958) has
been chosen because it shows that the word is not a holistic unit, but a
productive combination. The path reflects the same scenario as the busi-
ness company example above p. 237, where the first step is the combina-
tion of Smith and Jones, and the second is to employ a secretary):
1. Holo- Mummy! there!

phrases
(no rela-
tion)
2. Gramma- Mummy there

tical relation
between
lexical items
3. Relation Wug- -s
between
lexical and
grammati-
cal item
In an acquisitional context as well, the top-down perspective that is bound

up with the utterance as the functional unit is always present. It has been
found that children show many signs of following not a rigidly bottom-up
path, but a pincer movement whereby they jump ahead to top-down
mechanisms, even as they painstakingly and conservatively build their
inventory of constructions bottom-up. As formulated by Israel (2002),
learners go for both local and global consistency (quoted with approval by
Goldberg 2006: 64). In the case of negation, similarly, children appear to
follow the dual pathway of on the one hand gradually unpicking the jig-
saw puzzle of negation types, and on the other using creative and general
strategies, cf. Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Theakston (2007).
The triple ontology of language, where competencies are understood
as adapted to the niche, may throw light on this issue. Tomasellos trajec-
tory of language learning constitutes a rejection of the continuity assump-
tion that was made in generative grammar: if grammar is innate, it is the
same for all, and so from an innatist perspective the child basically has the
same grammar as the adult. As Tomasello points out (Tomasello 2003:
32324), there is no evidence for this assumption: children build up their
own grammar painstakingly as they go along. But if acquisition is a form
of adaptation to the niche that contains the causal affordances (i. e. pat-
terns) associated with adult grammar, then adult grammar has a role in
the whole process nevertheless as selection pressure exerted by the
environment to which children are adapting. If relocated from an innate
module to the sociocultural environment, there may be a place for conti-
nuity as one element in the sociocognitive, functional-causal process of
language acquisition.
I regard these acquisitional implications as an important argument for
the two first hypotheses defended in this chapter: the need for a more
profiled role for the functional dimension of structure and the contribu-
tion of this reprofiling of linguistic structure to a better understanding
also of the usage based nature of language. Below we shall see how the
functional approach can throw light on variation, the third hypothesis:
adaptation is a hit-or-miss type of process, and therefore it is not surpris-
ing that individuals should respond to selective pressures in different
ways, and actual utterances do not always reflect fully consistent and fully
internalized grammatical patterns.
The general moral is that the syntactic hierarchy must be understood
simultaneously in both perspectives. There is a bottom-up path that goes
from component units to more and more abstract and complex entities
the favoured path of approach in classic CL. There is also a top-down path
from the overall function (which is the raison detre of the whole thing) to
the sub-functions into which it can be differentiated. And this bidirec-
tional approach is necessary in relation to all relevant linguistic objects of
description: whether you are interested in structural, functional, concep-
tual or acquisitional properties.
Norms and variation 269
4. Norms and variation
4.1 Introduction: the interdependence of structure and variation
Some readers may feel that this chapter has taken such pains to demon-
strate the importance of structure that for all my claims to adopting a
social and usage-based perspective, I have actually opted for structure
rather than usage. But as announced in the introduction to the chapter,
the aim is to show that structure is essential for understanding usage prop-
erties. This applies also to the understanding of variation: not only do we
need both structure and variation neither side can be understood except
in relation to the other.
To put it schematically, variationist linguistics belongs at stage two on
a path of increasing complexity, not at stage zero. Stage zero represents
chaos, as found in Genesis on the first day of creation, where the world is
without form. An ontogenetic stage zero is the infants babbling period,
where phonetic variation is (in principle) unconstrained and sounds have
no meaning. Variationist linguistics is not about collective babbling. What
occurs at the stage zero may therefore be called fluctuation rather than
variation.
Linguistic communication requires a state of co-ordination, as reflected
in Bloomfields (1933: 78, 147) fundamental assumption of linguistics,
that in every speech-community some utterances are alike in form and
meaning.23 There must be usage events which are instances of the same
linguistic category before linguistics can get to first base. Stage one of the
scale is therefore one in which there is structure, minimally in the form of
a set of categories of which utterance exemplars are instances.
For that reason, it is logical that structural linguistics historically arose
before variational linguistics. Variational linguistics is stage two because
it builds upon but goes beyond structural description. Labov (1972) could
not have described the variation in realization of postvocalic r in New
York City if he could not take his point of departure in the category
postvocalic r. The necessity of the structural category comes out most
23 The term alike is imprecise, because what is really at stake is that two utter-
ances or signals have to be understandable as instances of the same category
in order to have meaning at all. Speak and speech are alike in form and mean-
ing, but that is not enough to provide them with the relevant form of same-
ness. The question is really whether there is a state of co-ordination such that
two occurrences of one lexeme (two different tokens of speak, for instance)
count as instances of the same signal.
clearly in the fact that one of the manifestations is zero, i. e. there was no r
sound in fourth floor in these instantiations. Unless Labov could presup-
pose a structural description in terms of which word forms are describable
as realizations of an abstract (meta-level) unit called postvocalic r, there
would be nothing to link the two manifestations, i. e. nothing that they
would be variants of. There are very good reasons for being sceptical of
units postulated at the meta-level, prefering to stick to what can be heard
on the tape, but this does not allow you to tell significant absences from
things which informants simply happen not to say.
The path from stage zero to stage two may suggest that structure
could occur without variation, but not vice versa, as assumed in structur-
alism. But in the real world, structure can only exist as a property of a
substratum, i. e. something that is structured and when structure arises,
what used to be fluctuation turns into variation within the structural cat-
egories that arise. In this way, variation comes into the world hand in
hand with structure. As the babbling child gradually adapts to the sound
categories of the community language, a certain range of sounds (which
used to be merely different) begin to acquire the status of variants of the
same sound category. The task of providing a structural description must
reflect this process, by studying how structure is imposed upon a cline of
differences. The structural linguist has to establish structural categories
by showing how categorial (emic) distinctions relate to non-categorial
(etic) differences. Hence, the structuralist conception of a virtual level
at which there is only structure and no variation is simply a daydream
an illusion created by projecting meta-level ideology onto the object of
description.
The interdependence of variational and structural description can also
be illustrated with reference to the results of the sophisticated statistical
methods (cf. Gries 2003, Croft & Poole 2008) which have greatly increased
the descriptive power of corpus linguistics. Although these results are
achieved as a result of studying patterns of variation, what they do in
terms of the interdependence position I am arguing for is really to get bet-
ter at extracting even the most elusive structural categories (which exist
only to the extent they rise above random fluctuation).
Variationist description is thus not an optional extra, but a dimension
inherent in the overall task of describing a linguistic reality that is struc-
tured, but not just structure. The alternative to variationism is not struc-
tural description, but the misguided polarization in terms of which struc-
ture and variation are at loggerheads. Rather than being mutually
contradictory, variation and structure can only be adequately understood
as part of the same overall account.
4.2 Variation and the linguistic system
In chapter 4 (cf. p. 175), a successor concept to Saussurean langue was

introduced: the linguistic system behind the individual utterances (=
parole) was understood as a property of the sociocultural niche. But what
happens to the notion of a system if we give up the idea of structure as
existing in a virtual world of its own?
Structuralism liberated language from having to mirror the ontological
structure of the world.24 Instead it envisioned a parallel but equally all-
encompassing immanent structure as the object of description: the whole
interconnected set of expressions, describable in terms of their valeur in
relation to each other rather than their link with language-external real-
world categories. Set apart from actual usage (parole), the language sys-
tem (langue) was thought to be first an ideal abstract object and secondly
in some way omnipresent in the speech community.25
I suggest that a social cognitive linguistics can take over the idea of
langue as a property of the community, merely by giving up the first
assumption. For structuralists it was a point in itself to aim for the most
abstract and general description, reducing language to a crystalline
essence that was as far as possible from actual usage. But letting abstrac-
tion run on until the vanishing point of human experience only makes
sense if you are allowed to posit a virtual haven, where the system can
reside in splendid isolation. If the language system is a feature of the soci-
ocultural environment, it can be no more abstract than the actual mecha-
nisms that are relevant in that environment.
The system, therefore, is the collection of expressive options that are
available for speakers to tap in producing actual utterances. Structural dif-
ferentiation means that these options are linked and subsumable in cate-
gories, which entails a degree of abstraction; but because linguistic struc-
tures survive by reproduction, linguistic systems tend to have roughly that
degree of abstraction which is functional for speakers. This is why a major
part of linguistic knowledge has list form, as discussed above in relation to
the constructional and lexical dimension of language. Most facts about
language structure are low-level (Verhagen 2002), bound up with items
and their more or less idiosyncratic properties, semantic as well as distri-
24 Cf. the term speculative grammar, from Latin speculum = mirror.

25 This was what gave linguistics the status of model science for the humanities:
other disciplines (literature, anthropology, etc) also envisioned autonomous
structures for their own domains of description
butional. The most abstract and general end of the spectrum is the struc-
tural principles for constructing complex utterances, i. e. the function-
based structure of the clause (cf. p. 251). The chief reason why these
syntactic properties are more tightly structured than others is the process-
ing factor, cf. Hawkins (1994): if you want to produce and understand
utterances at the rate of several words per second, you have to be able to
compile complex meanings according to a very simple and general set of
operations there is little room for superfluous idiosyncratic complexity
on that point.
As pointed out by Croft (2000: 21, citing Hull 1988: 417), it has been
assumed that the structural integrity of an animal was the paradigm exam-
ple but language structure is really more like that of a plant, where dif-
ferent parts can more easily be linked or severed without endangering the
whole organism. English could shed the remainder of the subjunctive
without problems, just as it has shed nominal gender. This looseness also
has implications for the understanding of variation. For the same reason
that the system as a feature of the sociocultural niche does not demand a
maximum of abstraction, it does not demand a minimum of variation. The
functionally regulated boundary condition is that categories have to be
recognizable: variation that goes beyond recognizability would be penal-
ized by not enabling the evocation of intended categories.26 Within that
condition, several different forms of variation can be integrated into a
usage-based reconstruction of language as system.
The most basic kind of variation is the one that is inherited from fluc-
tuation. It includes within-category differences between actualizations in
different cases. Such variation follows from the fact that superimposed
structure takes over the properties of the substratum. But fluctuations
also transgress structurally imposed boundaries, because speakers make
mistakes, leading to accidents de la parole, i. e. cases where there is a mis-
match between instantiation and relevant features of the category (note
that unless both levels exist, there can be no mismatch).
Beyond fluctuation we find the lectal kind of variation that goes with
social differentiation within the speech community. In a structural view of
language, this kind of variation is typically handled simply by transposing
the idea of a whole system to lower lectal levels dialects, sociolects and
idiolects. A lect thus inherits the same kind of structural integrity that is
26 The speech of schizophrenics may occasionally demonstrate how reduced

attunement to feedback mechanisms may cause speakers to end up outside
the boundaries of comprehensibility.
traditionally ascribed to a language, as reflected, for instance, in the criti-

cal maxim that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
In a variation-based approach, however, the issue cannot be handled
by multiplying the number of monolithic systems. The social side consti-
tutes an extra dimension of the same overall picture: for every single
linguistic choice, the speaker situates herself in a social universe, in addi-
tion to making a choice of what conceptualization to invoke. To illustrate
this basic variationist point, let us take one of the most pervasive obser-
vations in sociolinguistics: the co-existence of high-status and low-sta-
tus alternative forms. Labovian sociolinguistics as well as matched guise
experiments (cf. Lambert et al. 1960) show the almost ubiquitous co-
existence of competing sets of criteria for what is the right way to speak.
One type is oriented towards overt prestige, and endows the speaker with
the status as a powerful, well-educated and high-status person. The other
is the community variant, which makes you come across as more loyal,
friendly and nice to be around than the prestige form. This duality is
independent of what precisely the linguistic differences are between the
variants associated with overt as opposed to covert prestige. It can be
found across a range from truly diglossic situations to cases where it is a
matter of subtle nuances in lexical and phonological forms within the
same language.
Before we expand this picture, it is instructive to consider its basic
implications. It involves a split that rules out any attempt to reduce lan-
guage in the niche to a single non-social or society-neutral structure, or
to filter off the social dimension as a separate issue. The existence of dif-
ferent social locations is reflected in the choice between linguistic forms
that situate speakers with respect to those social locations, in this simple
case with respect to a vertical dimension of power and status. In its classic
form, this axis goes with a horizontal dimension of geographical differ-
ences, which are greater the lower you go on the vertical dimension. Geor-
die, Scouse and Glaswegian vernaculars differ more between them than
regional varieties of standard English. Bernard Shaws famous dictum
that it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making
someone else despise him is a polemic way of saying that it is impossible
to speak English without placing yourself somewhere within this sociocul-
tural triangle.
But this is of course only a very basic sample of the expanded universe
that opens up for a cognitive linguistics that aims to include the social
dimension fully. As demonstrated by the work of the QLVL group (cf. the
discussion in ch. 2), including the social dimension involves a radical
expansion of the task of cognitive and usage-based linguistics. In addition
to the triangle presented above, there is the ethnic dimension, the age
dimension, the subcultural dimension, the gender dimension, etc., etc. It
follows from what has been said above that a division into separate lects
would be simplistic here, too: there is no such thing as a separate closed
system for old people, for immigrants, for hipsters and for women (etc.).
The opposite extreme would be a continuous cline on all dimensions, so
that you could place yourself anywhere you wanted on a gradient from
young to old, from autochtonous to immigrant, from male to female, etc.
That would be just as unrealistic as a complete lectal discontinuity.
What exactly the reality is like can only answered by empirical investi-
gation. For all dimensions, in all communities, a large number of questions
raise themselves about what options are available for speakers when it
comes to situating themselves by their choice of linguistic forms. Actual
occurrence, however, is not enough; in order to capture the social causality
of choosing particular varieties, it is necessary to include the matched
guise type of investigation otherwise we cannot know what the force
of these choices are. This is particularly relevant in case of the type of
variation that is experimental and explorative, including the kind that is
driven by processes of identity construction (cf. Eckert 2000 and the dis-
cussion in ch. 3). The study of this type of variation, which has to some
extent replaced the attempt to explain variation by reference to fixed
static parameters (e. g., class, sex and age), is a particularly clear example
of why variational dimensions need to be seen as co-existing in one socio-
cultural niche. If each variety was assigned to a separate lect, the use of
linguistic choices for purposes of identity construction would be beyond
the horizon. In order to study such processes it is necessary to map out
both the distribution and the force of all relevant choices in the relevant
communities.
Much of the variation takes the form of differences in salience and bias
within categories, cf. the description in Geeraerts (2000: 75) of salience as
the place where structure and use meet. Salience manifests itself in fre-
quency, for example of a given meaning within the overall potential. An
example is that containment is found to be more central than inclusion
in the semantic potential of in (cf. Vandeloise 1994, as quoted in Geer-
aerts 2000: 80). This kind of salience can be seen as a structural reflection
of pragmatic phenomena because instead of placing options simply as
alternatives, as is traditionally done, salience adds a weight factor, giving
rise to probabilities rather than possibilities (Geeraerts 2000: 76). This
simultaneously introduces an essential interface between semantic intui-
tion and empirical quantification, cf. Grondelaers, Speelman and Geer-
aerts (2007: 998999): quantitative features of the object of investigation
require a quantitative methodology, but the measurement presupposes

the qualitative distinctions within which variation occurs.
Labovian sociophonetics, like the investigation of presentative er, cf.
Grondelaers et al (2002), illustrates how the interest in variational descrip-
tion is in the combination between the quantitative dimension and those
qualitative features that are relevant for variation. The qualitative dimen-
sions may include features of the coded meaning itself (e. g. the accessibil-
ity factor in the case of er). Further, however, it may involve the connota-
tive dimension of meaning i. e. the variational values viewed as meaning
rather than as contextual parameters, cf. Grondelaers, Speelman and
Geeraerts (2007: 99495). Under the traditional landscape of structural
criteria, therefore, a rich landscape of factors emerges that have different
weights in different circumstances but are part of the same overall system
of options.
The connotative dimension of linguistic communication and coding is
part of what I called the directional nature of meaning (cf. above p. 193).
In standard cases, connotations point to aspects of the situation that con-
stitute the point of departure, not the point of interest: you do not nor-
mally use, e. g., a French informal word (e. g. merde!) purely in order to
convey that this is an informal francophone situation. Connotative effects
can be almost totally dormant, especially in the case of speakers who stay
within geographical and social pockets that approximate homogeneous
sub-communities; they increase in importance the more socially complex
the speech community and the speaking practices are. As illustrated by
the case of honorifics, they may even enter into grammatical structure.
It may appear that including variation in langue is tantamount to giv-
ing up the idea of a system entirely. But the only thing that is really given
up is the idea of maximum structural abstraction and integration. Among
the remaining important aspects of the langue concept is the fact that in
the system, the choices are specified in advance and outside of the indi-
viduals control and that one choice has implications for others. If there
are no words for naming different kinds of butterfly (as in Mlabri, cf.
Rischel 1995) or no prospective future form available in the community
(as in Danish), you cannot choose these options, whatever your individual
communicative intentions might be. And if you have decided to use a
polite form of address, this has consequences for other linguistic choices
that you make, just as the choice of a plural subject may have implications
for the choice of verb form. Even in a social cognitive linguistics, the indi-
vidual cannot with impunity buck the system.
But, it may be objected, is not the only thing that remains the restric-
tions on individual elements? Since each individual linguistic item has its
own idiosyncratic distributional pattern, this appears to rule out any inde-
pendent role for higher levels of the system (because they can be no more
pervasive than the elements they apply to). Similarly, if individuals can
pick and choose among available forms, there can be no more coherence
than allowed by individuals choices. It may also be suggested that since
synchronic variation is closely associated with its diachronic counterpart,
instability, it entails a state of chronic fluctuation in the system. Does it not
follow from this expansion of the system that any apparent coherence in
the system viewed as a property of the sociocultural niche is really just
epiphenomal, i. e. an artefact of the linguists urge to impose an overarch-
ing order upon his world?
However, as pointed out by Dahl (2004: 3739) in his discussion of
structural complexity, more complex levels of systems have a life of their
own. Social patterns of behaviour typically persist regardless of the erratic
behaviour of individual members; and the speech community typically has
both more stability and more variation than the speech of an individual.
Analogously, regularities at more abstract levels may persist where prop-
erties of individual elements vary: across Germanic languages, the class of
strong verbs has been more stable than individual members that belong to
it. The concept of confirmation bias is familiar in psychology, denoting
the tendency to maintain existing interpretations even in situations which
would appear to undermine them; and Hutchins (1995: 239) describes the
circumstances in which a collective body will reinforce such a confirma-
tion bias. Using the properties of a constraint-satisfaction neural network
described in McClelland 1986, Hutchins show that if there are two (sub)
sets of units, each of which satisfies the constraints of the other units in the
subset, once a network has settled into a state that fits one of these subsets,
it will be very difficult to change the interpretation state of the network.
The simple reason is that if the network changes as a result of adverse
input, the immediate result is likely to be less overall consistency/harmony
inside the (individual) network. Each unit is kept in place by the others.
If you build a network of networks, integrating all units in a society of
networks, the interconnectivity may reinforce the tendency towards find-
ing and maintaining a shared interpretation: not only internal consistency
but also external consistency may drive such a process. A speech commu-
nity is one instance of such a network of networks. This is of course par-
ticularly clear in areas subject to functional feedback mechanism, which
work by allowing individual members to mutate, while biasing selection
against dysfunctional deviations.
4.3. The role of norms
The kind of existence that language can have in the niche, i. e. outside indi-
vidual minds, was described in ch. 4. The key idea is that although mental
content can only exist in individual minds, minds can interact in ways that
create larger, collective mental constructs which depend on individual
minds but create a causal pattern that works independently of the indi-
vidual mind. Like beaver dams, collective mental constructs become part
of the niche out there, even if their existence is due to properties inher-
ent in the individuals themselves. The basic channel for the rise of such
mental constructs in social space is the intersubjective permeability of
minds, which operates via the joint-attention capacity. Functional feed-
back mechanisms channel the trajectory of arising collective mental con-
structs, so that some mind-dependent collective constructs are confirmed
and replicated while others die out again because they enter into joint
attention events too rarely.
The offline existence of such collective constructs is generally under-
stood in terms of the concept of norm. This goes back to Saussure, who
took over Durkheims view of norms as the basic glue that keeps society
together (cf. the discussion p. 141); in the context of cognitive linguistics,
the foundational significance of norms has been emphasized by Itkonen
(1978; 2008). What exactly are norms, when they are viewed as part of the
landscape?
First of all, the quasi-objective status that Durkheim stipulated for
norms as part of social reality is replaced by the status as emergent prod-
ucts of interactive events. Norms exist to the extent they are confirmed in
action. As such, they work not by direct causal single-step triggering, but
by the functional mechanism that is associated with differential reproduc-
tive success. The causal power of invisible-hand level norms is that it is the
source of selection pressures. Norms (for speech, clothing, career choice
etc) therefore bias actions towards the normative standard. The mecha-
nisms are analogous to the aggregate market pressures that determine the
success rates of business companies in ways that may defy the best efforts
of the individual entrepreneur. The norm-based effect of a linguistic
expression in the community is analogous to the market price of a com-
modity: they are partly the result of forces that are beyond the purview of
the individual speakers flow of activity. The deselected variants (with
Kellers example, the angelic sense of englisch) go out, and centenarians
who have not adapted are at risk of being misunderstood if they use words
according to their own unadapted competencies.
Secondly, it follows from the description of variation above that lin-

guistic norms are a plural and multiple entity (cf. Harder 2003a) rather
than the monolithic singular presupposed by Saussure. As stressed by
Bartsch (1985: 67), there are no plausible grounds for assuming that there
is a single integrated set of structural norms that is copied as a whole into
the mind of each individual participant. Capturing this multiplicity of
criss-crossing and interlocking norms is part of the vast descriptive task of
mapping out the dimensions of variation in the langue of a community, cf
above p. 273)
Thirdly, the relation between norms and subjective evaluation needs to
be clarified. In the days of unified science, there was assumed to be a
chasm between ought and is, such that science could only address ques-
tions of what is, while talk of what ought to be was unscientific. This con-
ceptual model is well-entrenched in linguistics, which understands itself as
descriptive in contrast to the bad old days of normative statements about
the split infinitive, preposition stranding, etc. Especially in the context of
sociolinguistic variation, the issue is very much alive in the form of a battle
against normative statements about correct as opposed in incorrect lan-
guage. However, the clearcut distinction between ought and is has turned
out not to be tenable (cf. Searle 1964) for reasons that have to do with the
collective validation of shared values: if you are a member of a community
that recognizes the category of promises, it follows that if you have made
a promise you ought to keep it.
Because of the unclear status of social facts, it has been easy to conflate
the purely subjective component of norms (the attitudinal aspect) with
the social component. Once it is realized that it is vital for human develop-
ment to become a member of a normative community, sharing experi-
ences that are felt to be good, it is no longer possible to relegate the issue
of the norms for interactive behaviour to subjective evaluation. Norms
underpin the whole apparatus of shared practices, including the conven-
tions that assign meaning to linguistic expressions. If this is so, it is not
possible to be generally against norms. What does that imply for the anti-
normative tradition in sociolinguistics?
It is convenient to address this issue in two instalments. The first is tied
up with a particular, pervasive configuration of linguistic norms, the type
in which there is a standard variety alongside other, non-standard varie-
ties. A standard variety, roughly speaking, is one that is socially recognized
as appropriate for certain types of communication, including official busi-
ness. As such, it is linked with the written language, including spelling, and
with the education system. Part of the norm set associated with a standard
language is that it operates regardless of the regional or class affiliations
of individual participants. This is what made promotion of the standard

language part of the French enlightenment, as discussed by Geeraerts (cf.
above p. 68).
Sociolinguists, as already mentioned, have generally been reluctant to
accord Standard English any special place. The main cause of the unease
is that the standard language is far from neutral in relation to speakers,
since the standard form is always closely associated with the language of
the ruling classes, and teaching and promoting the standard variety inevi-
tably involves a corresponding devaluation of the vernacular alternatives.
What is more, it was almost inevitable in pre-sociolinguistic days to iden-
tify the language as such with the standard variety and demote dialects to
being simply wrong forms. The structural correlate of this view would be
to identify the system with the standard variety.
In terms of the picture offered here, such an identification is of course
untenable: the system consists in all the options that are available in the
community, not just the standard. The sociolinguistic battle against sim-
plistic views of correct vs. incorrect language remains fully justified also
from that point of view. It is convenient here to introduce a distinction
between prescription and norm: a prescription is a speech act laying down
the law, while a norm is a fact of life in the community. Old-fashioned pre-
scriptivism can be fought partly by pointing out that its prescriptions are
without foundation in actual linguistic norms.
But the problem is only partly solved by recognizing the multiplicity of
norms. Part of the anti-normative stance of most of sociolinguistics is
directed also against norms that actually exist as a fact of life in the com-
munity most centrally the whole set of norms that are associated with
standard languages as they actually function. Like Eliza Doolittle, speak-
ers of non-standard varieties have problems getting the jobs they seek;
and matched guise experiments tell us the speakers of the standard vari-
ety come across as more powerful, well-educated and even intelligent.
Such real-life attitudes go naturally with the faulty assumption that the
standard is qualitatively better than the vernaculars.
Here again, we need to divide into two issues. One is the question of
how rigid norms for the use of the standard are or have to be. Such norms
can be changed, like other norms (such as norms against gay lifestyle). In
the BBC, linguistic variety has increased in the last generations; in Nor-
way, support of regional variety is part of the official social norm set. The
anti-normative stance is partly a plea for greater linguistic tolerance. Most
linguists would agree with such a plea. However, it must be emphasized
that in spite of the natural association between them, the argument against
restrictive norms is a different argument from the argument against
unfounded prescriptions. Informing people (preferably tactfully) that

their prescriptive views of language are without factual foundation is the
natural prerogative of an expert. Tolerance, however, is matter of cultural
attitudes, and experts have no privileged position when it comes to telling
people what attitudes to have.
The most difficult issue, however, still remains and that is the one
where the question of the standard is bound up with the foundational role
of norms. It is tempting, in trying to eradicate the divisive impact of norms
associated with the standard language, to go for a wholesale elimination
of norms: actual usage is the only reality, so why should norms be allowed
to rear their ugly heads at all?
Something like this ideal seems to be at work in the following expres-
sion of the scepticism against standard language that is representative of
the general attitude in sociolinguistics:
it seems appropriate to speak more abstractly of standardization as an ideol-
ogy, and a standard language as an idea in the mind rather than a reality a set
of abstract norms to which actual usage may conform to a greater or lesser
extent (Milroy & Milroy 1991: 2223)
If there is really no standard language out there, and it is only a norm in

peoples minds, why not just forget about all norms so that each individual
can speak the way they do?
However, it follows from what has been said above that this is in
principle impossible (cf. also Bartsch 1985: 149). Cheval only means
horse because there is a collectively recognized norm according to
which this is the case. If we eliminate the element of approximation to a
norm and regard language solely as a property of the individual, under-
standing would be a random accident. The functional pressure for con-
verging on a collectively recognized linguistic norm is therefore ineradi-
cable. Deviation from such a norm will therefore inevitably be recognized
as such.
One might therefore propose as the minimum amount of normativity
what Bartsch calls the highest norm (Bartsch 1985: 171172): that one
should express oneself in a way that the listener understands, and under-
stand utterances as intended by the speaker. Comprehensibility is often
the slogan that is set up against correctness in language education and
elsewhere. But on closer inspection, that is not enough because it is not
a norm of the kind that makes linguistic communication possible in the
first place. The norm of comprehensibility does not enable cheval to mean
horse. Its status is more appropriately understood in relation to intersub-
jective behaviour in general, as a variant of the basic attunement towards
joint action in the sense of Tomasello and Clark (and also Habermas, cf.
p. 364). Hence, the so-called highest norm, viewed as applying to linguistic
communication, in fact presupposes the existence of other norms, without
which comprehension would be a matter of natural or inferential com-
munication alone, unaided by shared linguistic expressions.
We are back, therefore, with linguistic norms as necessary behavioural
targets in social space, to which speakers have to adapt in order for lin-
guistic communication to be possible. That does not logically entail the
existence of standard norms, of course. But if there is actually a standard
language in operation, the norms that underpin it are sustained by the
interactive practices that replicate them it is not just a matter of atti-
tude. Conformity or deviation in relation to the targets is therefore some-
thing that will inevitably be recognized in the same way as conformity
with other behavioural targets even if tolerance is increased, as we may
hope, with the principle of comprehensibility as the outer limit of toler-
ance.
If the status of the standard language is to be changed in more pro-
found ways than by extending the margins of tolerance, it therefore
requires a change in the practices that sustain the standard norm (more on
the process of social construction in chapter 7). From a functional point of
view, one may be sceptical of a battle against the standard ideology
referred to by the Milroys, if it would aim to eradicate the standard
entirely. If we recognize the existence of dimensions of variability as the
normal situation in a speech community, we simultaneously endorse two
positions: one is that individuals place themselves differently on those
dimensions, and also that their practices bring them in contact with each
other (otherwise we would be back with separate lects). Abolishing the
standard would mean that shared business would always have to be con-
ducted across gaps in individual linguistic locations. As long as the meta-
norm of comprehensibility would permit it, this is entirely plausible, and
in fact I personally support this idea for the purposes of face-to-face infor-
mal communication (for instance among the Scandinavian languages).
However, it is a different matter in the case of those practices for which
a standard typically evolves: official levels of communication like the law,
political agreements, and education. They would become subject to poten-
tial misunderstanding because of undetected subcultural differences (sali-
ence, evaluative difference, etc.) of the kind that are inherent in variation.
This may be preferable from a certain point of view to the hegemony of a
standard that reflects the position of the power holders. But it would still
raise problems. In the case of English, it is hard to ignore the argumenta-
tion of Preisler (1995):
The evolution of a multiplicity of culturally autonomous Englishes, far from

proving the irrelevance of Standard English, means that Standard English will
have to be maintained as an instrument of cross-cultural communication (Pre-
isler 1995: 355).
A point that may be overlooked is that norms do not actually block out
discrepant behaviour since they only influence events indirectly, via
functional pressure and adaptation. Among the choices that would not be
available without norms is the option of flaunting your own opposition to
norms, perhaps to impose your own subcultural norms on a subniche in
the community.
Whatever ones attitudes, from a social cognitive point of view there is
a central task that consists in mapping out the norms as part of the way the
world works. Much of that work can be done by extending familiar CL
concepts to the social dimension (cf. Kristiansen 2001, 2008, and the dis-
cussion below, p. 288). Norms are the stuff linguistic niches are made of.
You can be against specific norms in the same sense that you can be
against other aspects of the way the world works, such as political oppres-
sion, climate change or infotainment. But a descriptive sociolinguist has to
be aware that without linguistic norms he would be out of business.
4.4 Norms and individual competency
Putting the system in the niche makes the relation between the system
and the user less straightforward than assumed in the structural tradition,
where the two were supposed to match up. Saussure assumed that the
monolithic system was downloaded intact in the individual user; Chomsky
stipulated that the linguist could work with an idealization projected from
individual competence to a whole society of linguistically identical speak-
ers. The point of the distinction in this book between langue and compe-
tency (cf. ch 4) is to highlight the fact that there is no guaranteed match
and the relationship is one that needs to be investigated empirically.
The miracle of language acquisition can still be assumed to get every
normal child to a point of mastery of her mother tongue but what pre-
cisely the mother tongue is has become a more problematic issue. Adap-
tive pressure can, as always, be assumed to maintain a pattern whereby
(surviving) individuals acquire a satisficing mastery of the language in
the primary group that centrally includes the mother/caregiver. This is the
linguistic dimension of the basic socialization process that turns the child
into a member of a normative community (cf. ch 2). How does this funda-
mental competency fit into a wider social context?
As an illustrative starting point, we may postulate an idealized Ur-

scene in which the primary group is identical to the whole society: a small
band of hunter-gatherers where everyone speaks to everyone else, main-
taining joint linguistic norms on a daily basis. In such a situation, system
and competency would match up except for purely idiosyncratic differ-
ences (as in the case of the field linguist whose first informant turned out
to have a speech impediment).
In less basic speech communities, however, the dimensions of variabil-
ity presented above will entail that individual competencies vary at least
when it comes to production for instance, young speakers will differ
from older members of the speech community. With increasing complex-
ity, reception will also tend to become less fluent, the further removed the
variety is from that of the primary group, and individual competencies will
tend to cover a smaller and smaller part of the totality of the linguistic
system that is operative in the niche.
To some extent, this can be captured in lectal terms, cf. above. In a
variationist perspective, the basic concept is dimension of variation and
each choice can then be described with respect to where it situates itself
(according to the norms of the speech community) on the relevant scales.
Common core elements (words like house, and grammatical choices like
simple present) will then be equally at home across all variational scales,
while lectally marked forms index specific positions in social space (such
as using pray instead of please, or omitting the copula, as in he dead, etc).
There is a degree of correlation between different sets of choices which
can be captured by stylistic levels, and the greater the correlation, the
closer we get to a situation in which it would be legitimate to speak of a
particular lect as a system in itself but it should be understood as the
extreme point on a scale rather than a neutral point of departure.
The competency angle on this phenomenon is captured in the term
linguistic repertoire. But repertoire differences are not restricted to lec-
tal differences. Also when it comes to different aspects of what used to be
considered one linguistic system, individual repertoires differ. Dabrowska
(forthcoming) gives an overview of emerging research on this issue, where
especially education stands out as a factor that discriminates between
competencies in different population groups when it comes to mastery of
certain forms of complexity. Like other aspects of variational cognitive
linguistics, this is an area that is only beginning to be subject to systematic
empirical investigation.
A thoroughgoing investigation of this area would also add a much-
needed empirical dimension to the issue of how to deal with standard
language as opposed to lectal variation. In the competency perspective,
linguistic repertoire must be viewed in connection with communicative

competence (cf. Milroy & Milroy 1991: 118). As we saw above, the tradi-
tional sociolinguistic position, that all varieties are equally good, is only
unproblematically valid if understood as expressing the debunking of the
belief that there is something inherently wonderful about the particular
linguistic forms which happen to have overt prestige. It cannot off-hand
be assumed that vernaculars are equally good ways of coping with actual
social challenges.
First of all, language attitudes are real, and even a well-founded convic-
tion that they ought to be changed is no substitute for ability to cope with
the world as it is, including actual attitudes. Secondly, if the standard lan-
guage as a matter of fact is the operative medium for certain types of lin-
guistic practices, there is also a matter-of-fact analogy between incomplete
knowledge of the standard when you are in the territory of standard lan-
guage practices, and incomplete knowledge of French when you are in
France. You might feel that if Frenchmen were more reasonable, they
would accept English on a par with French but that takes the issue
beyond a question of attitudes. In the perspective of individual compe-
tency as opposed to social practices, the practical question for the indi-
vidual is how well she can cope whether the practices should work dif-
ferently is a theoretical question.
Greater empirical knowledge of real linguistic barriers is a prerequi-
site for addressing this issue in a way that is both professionally and ethi-
cally adequate. Speaking on behalf of most of the sociolinguistic commu-
nity, Trudgill (1983: 99100) expressed the hope that one can change
attitudes by making people understand that varieties are just as good as
Standard English; but the point of the argument above is that the mistake
of inherent superiority is only part of the issue. In order to settle the argu-
ment with the adherents of standard English (including, most vociferously,
John Honey, cf. Honey 1997), it is necessary to consider what the realistic
grounding would be of a situation in which all normative ranking is sus-
pended between linguistic varieties (compare a situation in which all
clothing was ranked as equally chic).
Honeys claim that Standard English is better suited than vernaculars
for certain practices could do with more empirical documentation, cf.
Trudgills review (1998), but if we go beyond discredited generic claims of
the standard being more logical etc, the question translates into a pleth-
ora of individual issues about how specific forms of language competency
would in fact serve their bearers for different social purposes under differ-
ent assumptions about the state of norms in the community. We need to
know more about actual barriers as well as actual possibilities for remov-
ing them; the job of the experts must be to tell others what they know
about the lie of the land, and try to keep that apart from the attitudinal
dimension. As Trudgill has also pointed out on several occasions (cf.
Trudgill 1998), the issue of empowerment remains beside the attitudinal
question.
The problem is also relevant in foreign language teaching, most directly
in the question of what form of the language is going to be the learning
target. The general unease about hypostatizing the role of the Standard
language has also manifested itself here. Many teachers prefer to operate
with a goal defined in terms of comprehensibility rather than correctness
in relation to a norm but here again, we run into the problem that the
norm of comprehensibility (as opposed to norms that underpin conven-
tions for how to express a given meaning) does not provide a learning
target. An uncompromising variationist might want to replace the stand-
ard form with the whole spectrum of variations, as the only attitudinally
acceptable learning target. But that would render the learning target
effectively unattainable (for the same reason that a predator needs to iso-
late an individual from the flock before it can attack effectively). If you do
not have a clear target, how can you define a clear path forward? A broad
and imprecise anti-normative stance is no substitute for empirically based
knowledge about what the language requirements are for relevant soci-
etal functions and against whom they constitute a barrier, coupled with
knowledge about manageable strategies for those who want to climb
those greasy linguistic poles.
A general question about the relation between individual and society
in relation to language is: exactly how much power should be ascribed to
linguistic norms in the niche as opposed to entrenched patterns in the
individual mind? After all, field work with a single speaker works: you can
describe a (whole?) language that way. Is it not an exaggeration or a dis-
tortion to say that the individuals system is merely one among other
possible ways of being adapted to a whole linguistic niche with myriad
criss-crossing norms? And even if it is, why not say that the individuals
language is his own individual possession, and societal norms are external
to it once he as acquired it?
There is both a relative and an absolute issue. With respect to the rela-
tive issue, the only generalization that can be made is that the strength of
normative pressures is variable. The absolute issue involves the uncom-
promising fact that normative pressure, strong or weak, is always part of
the picture (for reasons discussed above). There can obviously be no
objection to taking an individual speakers competency as ones descrip-
tive target, as long as it is understood that it means to carve out an ele-
ment from a larger whole: the whole variationist approach entails that
language is not complete in the individual as pointed out in the quote by
Hopper (p. 176). Variation entails that the individual is placed in a field of
forces, which are therefore part of the picture. The role of the speech com-
munity is also manifested in the breach, by the familiar experience that it
becomes difficult to describe a language when there are so few speakers
that the mechanisms that maintain linguistic norms begin to crumble.27
In relation to the scope for individual deviation, it must be emphasized
that norms are no more precise than warranted by actual practices in the
community. In the days in which a homogeneous total system was taken
for granted as the point of departure, a slogan for practically minded lin-
guists was that all grammars leak. A more accurate formulation would be
that grammars are only partially specified. Although practices are con-
strained by the partly invisible hand of community norms, a constraint is
different from a full specification. In biology it is generally accepted that
you can only explain a limited part of the properties of individuals as
adaptations to the niche; the same applies to the properties of linguistic
utterances. Also, some forms may float more than others: the double
perfect in Danish (as in I have had borrowed the book) is subject to
more fluctuation than other compound forms and has not yet (as far as
the linguistic community knows) acquired a systematic place even in a
lectally flexible conception of what the system is. But even such floating
can only be described in a universe where the individuals usage is viewed
against the background of a social field of normative forces.
It should be mentioned that there is one exception clause. You can opt
totally out of the grip of the invisible hand both as an economic agent
and as a language user. However, it means you have to withdraw from
those practices that are under the sway of invisible hand mechanisms. In
terms of economics, you can grow your own vegetables and catch your
own fish, sail by the wind and opt out of the monetary system and the
market economy. In terms of language, you can retreat from the wider
community and establish a niche of your own, modelled on communica-
27 Chafe (1992, in discussion) reported how speakers of a native American lan-

guage were not sure how to respond to elicitations because we dont have any
old people any more. These speakers were themselves in their seventies, but
they were referring to the absence of the community of elders, whose language
functioned as the model for the community. Although they functioned as a
visible hand, their role in underpinning the cohesive force of the norm illus-
trates the same point: I as an individual can only know the language if the
language is there in the community for me to know.
tion practices known among identical twins. In those cases, your economy
and your communication will be determined by your own local practice or
usage alone, with no interference from factors operating over your head.
But as soon as you sneak down to the supermarket and say hello to the
shop assistant, you are again in the grip of the invisible hand, of overarch-
ing mechanisms that define your activities partially behind your back.
4.5. The social dynamics of linguistic variation
Above, we have gone from describing the system in the niche to describ-
ing its relation to individual competency. But there is also another level
that is relevant to understanding the implications of a variationist redefi-
nition of language as a system, and that is the anchoring of variation in
social processes at group level. Lectal variation is the linguistic aspect of
social differentiation, and differentiation entails an issue of how the dif-
ferentiated subsystems interact within the shared macro-niche.
The social processes that influence linguistic norms involve an element
of power, cf. (in addition to Humpty Dumpty and Foucault) also Grden-
fors (1998) on the linguistic power structure. This element by no means
disappears when we move from one integrated system or standard to a
network of interlocking subsystems. Geeraerts (2008) has taken up the
issue in relation to Putnams (1975) discussion of the difference in mean-
ing between elm and beech, where ordinary speakers defer to experts. This
is an instance of meaning being settled as part of a social process in which
individuals have unequal status; and Geeraerts shows how this pattern of
deference is only one among several possible patterns. Citing Bartsch
([1985] 1987), Geeraerts associates the standard CL concept of prototype
with a co-operative relationship driven by the highest norm of establish-
ing mutual understanding, and views this form of collaboration as an
alternative to deference. As the last of the three models, he mentions con-
flict, citing Janicki as the one author who has taken up this issue in the
context of cognitive linguistics.
Conflict is a radical example of the consequences of giving up the idea
of one homogeneous set of norms in the community, since it puts a ques-
tion mark against all other basic assumptions, including common ground.
As pointed out by Geerearts, once this issue is raised, the matter cannot
be left there you have to address the question of how to resolve the con-
flict, or what the consequences are if you do not. This issue will be
addressed in chs. 7 and 8, where the Foucauldian notion of discourse will
be reconstructed on social cognitive premises as a format for describing
meaning-imbued social conflict. The general format of the issue is that

general social relations such as authority, collaboration, and competition
will also be involved in relations between linguistic utterances and their
characteristic features because linguistic norms as well as the actual
processes that sustain them are part of the general social process.
One other type of process that we need to know more about is the
dynamics involving differential social distribution of particular types of
meaning. A familiar example is the interface between lay and professional
terminology, involving terms for different types of saws for carpenters and
different types of plants for botanists. More tricky is the kind of perturba-
tion that is due to different types of meaning that may occur when both
the vocabulary and the area of experience is shared between the groups,
but where different groups have different meanings. Such differences
come on top of language barriers due to variational lectal competencies,
as discussed above.
An example from an educational context may illustrate the problem: a
young, progressive teacher from a modern city background invokes the
phrase doing your duty, cf. Hjort (1984). The text is about subservience to
authority, and the teacher asks how you can make things easy for yourself
by just doing your duty. The intended answer is that if you simply do your
duty, you dont have to think for yourself a cop-out, in other words. To the
students, who mostly belong in a traditional agrarian community, this ques-
tion does not make sense because doing your duty is hard work on a daily
basis. It would be much easier if you could just shirk, but that would be
selfishly letting the family down. There are myriad issues of that kind
involved in inter-group communication that we know very little about.
Because variation involves differential social identity, variational
dynamics includes not only semantic territories associated with word
forms but also the resolution of identity issues. In the case of lectal choices
in Britain, Kristiansen (2001) describes how status-relevant linguistic
choices tie in with a complex and variable sociocultural universe, follow-
ing Tajfel and Turners social identity theory. The centrepieces of the
theory are Categorization, Identification and Comparison (Kristiansen
2001: 134). The comparison element is defined in terms of the following
three assumptions, as cited from Tajfel and Turner by Kristiansen:
1. Individuals strive to achieve or to maintain positive social identity.
2. Positive social identity is based to a large extent on favourable comparisons

that can be made between the in-group and some relevant out-groups: the in-
group must be perceived as positively differentiated or distinct from the rele-
vant out-groups.
3. When social identity is unsatisfactory, individuals will strive either to leave

their existing group and join some more positively distinct group and/or to
make their existing group more positively distinct. The basic hypothesis, then,
is that pressures to evaluate ones own group positively through in-group/out-
group comparisons lead social groups to attempt to differentiate themselves
from each other. [] The aim of differentiation is to maintain or achieve supe-
riority over an out-group on some dimensions. Any such act, therefore, is essen-
tially competitive. This competition requires a situation of mutual comparison
and differentiation on a shared value dimension. (Tajfel and Turner 1979:
4041)
The cognitive mechanisms include elements analysable based on CL,

including prototype effects and metonymy. A central metonymy effect is
the one whereby a stereotype is conceived as standing for the whole group.
However, the effect also depends on a process called accentuation, which
is not part of the common-or-garden CL inventory (as stressed by Kris-
tiansen 2001: 142), because it depends on the comparison and competition
element in social identity formation described above. In order to buttress
ones own identity in relation to outgroups, there is a tendency to enhance
similarity on both sides of the divide, thus accentuating differences
between the groups, while providing salient reference points for the cate-
gorizations that are essential to identification and identity formation.
This addition to the cognitive process, as pointed out by Kristiansen, is
essential to the specific type of idealized conceptual model that consti-
tutes a social stereotype, and which plays a significant role in the social
domain. Social complexity thus calls forth simplifying mechanisms that
are not only motivated by the question of what makes categories useful in
general, but specifically by what makes categories useful for social iden-
tity formation. Yet it is essential to understand these as driven by the same
mechanisms that are active in categorization in general, not as something
that is inherently pathological. On the basis of empirical experiments,
Tajfel (whose entire family was wiped out by the Nazis, cf. Tajfel (1981: 1)
as quoted in Kristiansen 2001: 134), thus stresses that exaggeration and
stereotyping (rather than being signs of pure evil) is a way to impose
order and to cope (Kristiansen 2001: 137). But the weights and biases that
skew categorization are part of a web of social causality at the same time
as it draws on the general mechanisms of categorization familiar from
classic CL.
Status as associated with linguistic choices is a niche-level property for
the same reason that status as a feature of career choice is a niche-level
property: it is what other people think that determines what status you
get, not your own mental representations. Status oriented criteria pervade
social reality: being more or less attuned to the kind of action that appears
to be successful and prestigious is relevant for all interactive choices
beyond your own back yard. It is also likely that the non-representational
adaptation mechanisms have a significant impact here, with a smaller role
for conscious awareness than in relation to conceptual content (at least in
spoken communication). This is so because status is more directly associ-
ated with situational force than conceptual content. For the same reason
that the procedural memory adapts to unconscious pin-pricks, we can
assume that the procedural memory adapts to socially successful versus
socially unsuccessful action, so that we tend to adopt the more socially
successful alternatives in recurrent situations.28
In sum, the factors underlying variation, with their differential salience,
weighting and biases (in all senses of the word), are at the heart of the
integrated sociocognitive landscape that is emerging.
4.6 Usage, structure and variation in an evolutionary framework:

a discussion with Croft
The aim of this book is to suggest an overall framework for the ongoing
expansion of CL into the social domain. A not unreasonable question
would be: Whats wrong with the overall format that Croft (2000, 2001,
2009) has already provided? As will be evident, my proposal owes a great
deal to ideas taken over from Croft, including the basic evolutionary for-
mat. In spite of the piecemeal sniping that is also found in various places
above, it may be difficult to see what I understand as the interesting dif-
ference.
In terms of basic orientation, the perspective I adopt attaches greater
importance to offline aspects of language; as discussed pp. 94 and 209
above, Croft understands meaning and syntactic structures more wholly
as usage-level phenomena. Very roughly speaking, the difference has to
do with the role I claim for the niche as the locus of adaptive pressure on
28 This is not to say that status is inaccessible to conscious awareness, of course.

One explicit spillover effect is the semantic pathway from terms indicating
social status to terms for inherent human qualities. We would rather be chiv-
alrous and noble than we would be vulgar or churlish which etymologi-
cally speaking means that we would rather be like knights and aristocrats than
like common people and serfs. This is likely to be due less to superior human
qualities in the upper classes than to a mixture of stereotypes and adaptive
deference to members of higher classes.
language use. This role has no direct counterpart in Crofts theory, which
means that more of the action is understood in strictly local, online terms.
Because Crofts theory is so carefully worked out, it is possible to trace
this difference back to an explicit theoretical assumption. Although the
argument may be hard going, I believe it is worth while being precise on
this central point.
In the following extract, Croft (2006) explains where he places struc-
ture in his theory of language as a population of utterances. A key point
is to argue against positing units that are abstract in relation to utterances.
Structure is inherent in actual use:
the paradigm replicator is a linguistic structure in an utterance. This entity
has not played a major role in grammatical theories, which have dealt with ide-
alizations the phoneme /p/, or the periphrastic future construction, rather
than the specific realizations of /p/ or the future construction occurring in par-
ticular utterances. A significant exception is variationist sociolinguistics, in
which the basic data are tokens of linguistic structures; these are called the var-
iants of a linguistic variable. These variants are sampled from the utterances
in a speech community, quantified and correlated with various social and lin-
guistic factors. The term lingueme is coined in Croft (2000: 28) to describe this
entity.
(Croft 2006: 104).
Linguemes are centrepieces in his overall panchronic theory, because they
are the structural units that persist across generations (a position that I
take over from Croft). In my view, this entails that they are reproduced by
functional-structural causality impinging on participants conscious activ-
ity. According to the argument produced above, I then have to show that
you cannot individuate such structural units at the level of usage alone, as
Croft claims we should do.
So where is the problem? The way I see it, it is the following: the pas-
sage quoted above ends up with the NP this entity, which on the face of it
could have either the concrete variant or the abstract variable as its pos-
sible antecedents. However, if Crofts argument is to hang together, it
must refer to the concrete variant otherwise we would be back at the
abstract units that he wants to get rid of. A footnote in Croft (2000: 38,
note 4) is relevant here: Croft points to the ambiguity involved in talking
about genes as types or tokens in the biological literature and concedes
that he unfortunately carries over this practice to the way he talks about
his structural units (= linguemes).
This type-token ambiguity is very hard to avoid, because the criteria
for talking about the type always license use also about a token (otherwise
it would not be an instance of the type). In the case of genes, it is not a
problem because genes are instances of physical matter with just those
causal properties that are characteristic of the type. But it is a problem
when the whole point is to avoid presupposing the causal relevance of
structural types (such as the phoneme /p/) and replace them with actual
usage events (where /p/ may be represented by the aberrant variant [f]).
The problem is that linguistic usage events do not subsume themselves
under types with identical causal properties, unlike genes which have (as
instances) the causal properties of the physical type they instantiate. The
problem emerges in the following passage which comes just after the
extract cited above:
By taking the replicator as a lingueme, this evolutionary model is fundamen-
tally usage-based: replication is language use. Replication, that is, language
use, produces variation, namely first-order variation in form, meaning, and
their pairing in grammar (section 4). The recognition of this variation is the first
step in constructing a theory of change by replication.
Change occurs at two levels in replication processes (). Altered replication is
change that occurs in a lineage of specific replications. A linguistic example
would be replication of /p/ as [f] instead of the original [p].
The interesting thing is that in the formulation above, it is /p/ that is repli-
cated (either as [f] or as [p]). But /p/ is the idealized phoneme, or at best
the variable rather than the variant. There is no way it can be the physical
and embodied variant because there are two embodied variants, first [p],
then [f]. A concrete variant [f] is not a replication of a concrete variant
[p] there has to be some abstract categorization in order to make them
the same.
This follows from the argument that was made in the discussion of
postvocalic r in relation to Labovian variationism (above p. 270). Croft
borrows the terminology from Labov, and if we are speaking of the same
variant (type), it follows that a variationist investigation of the two rele-
vant utterances would have to class them as representing the same vari-
ant (rather than two variants of the same variable) which hardly makes
sense. As far as I can see, Croft in fact continues to presuppose the exist-
ence of units based on abstractions from actual usage as indeed he must,
in order to have a criterion for what counts as structural variation rather
than random fluctuation between elements in the flow of usage.
The problem of how to understand the interaction between actual
usage events and structural abstractions from them comes out also in
relation to Crofts theory of conventions. I understand his view as basi-
cally equivalent to what I have spoken of as linguistic conventions or
norms:
Linguistic convention is central to the theory of language change. Normal rep-

lication, altered replication, and selection are all defined in terms of conven-
tion (as conforming to convention, not conforming to convention, and estab-
lishing a convention, respectively). (Croft 2000: 99)
Croft bases his notion of convention on Lewis (1969) and Clark (1996), cf.
Croft (2000: 95). Convention is a means of achieving co-ordination
between individuals, including when co-ordination involves linguistic
utterances. But although conventions are essentially collective, as proper-
ties of the speech community, their manner of operation is still individual-
based and therefore in terms of my distinction between individual-level
and invisible-hand-level properties, the same problem surfaces once again:
Convention is a property of the mutual knowledge or COMMON GROUND
of the speech community. Of course, common ground is found in the minds of
speakers, albeit shared with other members of the speech community (Croft
2000: 7)
The problem to my mind becomes relevant in the continuation of the pas-
sage:
Thus there is an interplay between convention and individual speakers knowl-
edge, or COMPETENCE as it is usually called.
If the convention is in the individual mind, what exactly is the mechanism
whereby it interacts with individual speakers knowledge which is also in
the individual mind?29 As far as I can see, the problem is insoluble because
conventions cannot interact with individual minds if they are inside indi-
vidual minds but according to Croft they cannot have meanings if they
are outside individual minds. Croft explains this in terms of the deficien-
cies of the conduit metaphor:
The obvious error is that thoughts or feelings cannot go anywhere outside of
the minds of humans, whether it is into words or into an external space The
Lewis & Clark model of convention and communication also avoids this error.
The whole idea behind a communication problem is that getting speaker and
hearer to converge on the same meaning is a problem precisely because our
thoughts cannot leave our heads.
A less obvious problem that follows directly from the primary one is that
linguistic expressions do not contain meanings. Meaning is something that
29 One theoretical possibility would be to put the common knowledge in a place

distinct from the rest of the individuals knowledge, but since Croft explicitly
denounces the idea that there is a separate dictionary entry distinct from gen-
eral knowledge, that is not an option.
occurs in the interlocutors heads at the point of language use (speakers mean-
ing), or something that represents a memory of a history of uses available to a
speaker, albeit organized into senses and sense relations all embedded in a net-
work of encyclopedic knowledge. Reddy emphasizes this fact, that for instance
a body of texts does not have meaning; there must be a basis for readers to
evoke meaning in their heads through shared knowledge with the culture that
produced the texts.
It is not so obvious that the Lewis & Clark Model of convention avoids this
error. Instead, in the preceding section I argued that one must interpret the
notion of a recurrent situation in the definition of convention quite loosely in
order to accommodate the fluidity of meaning.
Croft (2000: 111)
Crofts claim that linguistic expressions do not have meanings is expli-
cated in such a way that it is possible to compare quite precisely with the
position of this book: for Croft, meaning exists at the level of usage (at
the point of language use) and as competency (a memory of history of
uses) but it does not exist as langue meaning. Recognizing that this cre-
ates a problem for the notion of convention, Croft points to the need for
a loose interpretation of the notion of those recurrent situations which
underlie the rise of conventions. But fluidity does not really solve the
problem: if expressions cannot have meanings, they cannot have fluid
meanings. In practice, Croft also talks about conventions as belonging at
the community level:
speech communities arbitrarily pick one solution, say the string of sounds
butterfly to mean the insect, and stick with it (Croft 2000: 97)
And he also speaks of language in a way that sounds suspiciously essen-
tialist (cf. Croft 2000: 17), and certainly is not equivalent to the definition
in terms of a population of utterances:
At this point we have a precise definition of how a language system is a conven-
tional system for communication: language is a conventional signalling system
(Croft 2000: 99).
Although Croft cashes out these notions in ways that point back to indi-
vidual speakers, I think these formulations are entirely justified in the
form cited above, i. e. as properties of the community rather than the indi-
vidual. As argued throughout this book, social entities depend on indi-
vidual minds without being reducible to them: they constitute supra-indi-
vidual configurations of mental content in the minds of a collective of
individuals. Langue meanings are more structured than mere traffic jams
of meaning they constitute continuing regularities of meaning-assign-
ment in the niche to which speakers have adapted. Because they give rise
to selection pressure, they are in terms of the causal structure of evolu-
tionary processes necessarily in the individuals environment, not inside
the individual.
As such, a langue is a social construction, and social constructions are
the subject of the next chapter. Anticipating the discussion slightly, a cen-
tral property that goes beyond the individual mind is efficacy (cf. p. 310).
A viable social construction stands on two legs: it could not exist unless
participants were capable of understanding it mentally, but in addition it
also needs to be actually working and this is what drives adaptation. The
langue of a given community can be described as the set of affordances
that would enable strangers to participate in communication, if only they
knew the efficacious expressions and their meanings. And that can only be
the langue meanings, because at that point, there is neither a usage mean-
ing nor a competency meaning in existence for the poor outsider only a
social configuration of meanings from which he is excluded.
As far as I can see, Crofts objections against assigning meaning to lin-
guistic expressions as such do not apply to this view. In the niche view,
moreover, variation gets exactly the status described by Croft: when dif-
ferent people enact what they see as the same mental operation, it need
not be exactly the same thing that happens in each case thanks to the
mechanisms of co-ordination with other minds, [f] can be assigned the
status of a variant of /p/. Fluidity and flexibility are therefore essential to
get conventions to work, just as Croft points out. Because of that, we can
also describe how Crofts promissory note on the interplay between the
individual and the collective convention of the community works in prac-
tice: it works by causally efficacious feedback when you try out the words.
If a speaker of a Germanic language goes to Italy, he might be excused for
believing that calda means cold. If because of that mental representation
he then asks for agua calda insistently enough, the waiter might actually
bring him a cup of hot water. If he tries to blame the waiter, other people
will inform him that he was in the wrong: his mental representation did
not accurately mirror the actual causal powers of the word. He may then
adjust his own mental representation for the very good reason that it did
not match the conventions that were actually in force in the community.
The fact that the two elements are understood as the same is due to the
concrete efforts of individual minds; unless people are collaborative in
such cases, things go wrong. But the whole mechanism of conventions
works because individual efforts are aided by causal powers stemming
from co-ordination between individuals. As pointed out by Hutchins (cf.
p. 276), you can change the working of the whole system merely by chang-
ing the way the individual networks are linked up, without changing any-
thing inside an individual subsystem.
This type of causality is also at work in speech communities. Back in
the days when Rask-Grimms law was getting under way, the [p] sound in
certain words increasingly came to be pronounced as [f] so that in the
same words (as understood by members of the Indo-European speech
community) the segment could come out in two different ways. Also dia-
chronically, sameness arises from matching the different segments to
something which is collectively the same. Without the causality associ-
ated with the convention, we cannot understand why there would exist
anything shared in terms of which [f] and [p] are variants of the same
thing. If we ask where that operation of sameness-assignment comes
from, we are back at the nine months revolution and joint attention as a
basic prerequisite of speech. Children are genetically programmed to
regard fellow subjects as potential sharers of sameness experiences: they
can attend to the same things as you do, and crucially they can say things
and mean the same thing that you understand by them. Langue is the
system of samenesses that children have to home in on in order to obtain
participant access to linguistic interaction.
It is important to stress that langue, thus conceived, does not come
under Crofts injunction against essences: a language understood as a set
of conventions that are in force in a given community is still defined in
terms of a population of speakers, as he claims. Conventions are just caus-
ally empowered abstractions which have a different life history than the
population of utterances itself. Conventions therefore live and die with
the population of speakers who enter into causal relations with them
just as the population of utterances does. Also, language does not interfere
with the causal pattern that Croft needs to have to achieve his parallel
with evolutionary change. Crofts concept of language as a population of
utterances also plays a role in the picture advocated here, but as usage
(parole in Saussurean terms); it cannot be the sole carrier of structure.
This difference has implications for the way Croft (2009) uses Chafes
pear stories in illustrating the importance of the variationist dimension in
the future social cognitive linguistics. Croft describes the old CL style of
description in terms of variation in construal: informants describe the
pear story in different ways because they construe it slightly differently:
putting, dropping and filling are different verbs conveying different ways
of conceptualizing what happens to the pears. But this is wrong in terms of
the new, social cognitive linguistics that Croft is introducing. If we take the
social-interactional dimension seriously, he argues, the variations in ver-
balizations must be understood as related not just to the speaker, but also
the hearer, and thus against two different past usage histories with the
inevitable difference that this entails. Precise conceptualization is there-
fore not available instead we have to operate with indeterminacy as the
background fact of life in communicative language use: One cannot put
too great a precision on the shared semantics of linguistic forms. This is
in accordance with the fact that language users, relying on shared knowl-
edge, interpret a range of alternative formulations as more or less alter-
native verbalizations of the same scene (cf. p. 94 above).
Although that is true enough, it does not disprove that the formula-
tions convey alternative construals, or that there is a valid and real struc-
tural difference between the potentials they evoke. Any competent lan-
guage user can tell the difference between putting, filling and dropping,
irrespective of the fact that they may use them as alternatives in describ-
ing the same event just as coast and shore may be used about the same
border between sea and land. Retelling a scene is an onomasiological task,
and it can come as no surprise to anyone that such a task can be accom-
plished in different ways and still be the same task. What description you
get out of a variational analysis depends on what type of unit you choose
(within which you then look for variation). If you choose a unit defined in
terms the task you perform, you cannot use it to say anything about vari-
ation within linguistic units
The other side of the argument is that variation adds an extra dimen-
sion of precision, which presupposes but goes beyond shared conventions.
If you just evoke the whole potential and leave it at that, your understand-
ing will be very imprecise, cf. ch. 5 you have to superimpose the varia-
tional level on the structural level to get it right (as also argued by Croft
and Cruse 2004). Cases where it does not matter what word you choose
are those where the situational target is so well-defined that it will over-
ride differences of encoding.
As a consequence, there are two interpretations of the conclusion of
the following passage from Croft (2009: 418), one of which is true, while
the other is wrong:
Language is a fundamentally heterogeneous, indeterminate, variable, dyna-
mically unfolding phenomenon, just like the human society it constitutes part
of.
It depends on how you read the adverb fundamentally. If it means at the

fundamental level of flow, it is true. If it means that this type of variation
has the last word, it is wrong.
5. Summary: function-based structure and langue

in a social cognitive linguistics
In this chapter I have argued that the social turn must include a rethinking
of structure that reflects the tripartite understanding of language as flow,
competency and langue. I have also argued that a function-based approach
is necessary to understand the social embedding of structure.
Two issues were presented as central: the function-based dimension of
structure, and the role of variation. Building upon the account in ch. 5 of
meaning as input to communicative action, the account of function-based
structure argued that one dimension of structure reflected a very general
feature of complex, structured behaviour: the operator-operand relation. A
complex utterance is a recipe for how to act upon the existing usage situa-
tion, co-constructing a new step in ongoing interaction. This dimension of
structure is analogous to the structured operations of a washing machine in
bringing about an intended new situation with respect to the laundry:
speakers act on the situation with a view to carrying the interactive process
forward. The argument attempted to demonstrate the existence and impor-
tance of this dimension of structure, which is integrated with, but not reduc-
ible to the conceptual dimension of structure that takes it point of depar-
ture in the units of meaning that enter into complex structure.
This argument constituted a defence of the first two claims announced
in the introduction to the chapter: that the top-down approach to complex
linguistic structure is significant in a way that does not automatically
emerge from a unit-based description, and that structure constitutes an
affordance (a set of offline recipes) in the niche/speech community for
interactive, communicative action. Language structure is both a hierarchy
of functional options and a network of constructions, and both sides need
to be profiled in a social-cognitive theory.
The third claim was that a rethinking of the linguistic system as a prop-
erty of the community niche means that the system must be partial, include
variation, and be relatively concrete, rather than monolithic and abstract.
This proposed alliance between variation and structure is perhaps the
most unfamiliar part of the conception offered above. There are several
explanations why variational linguistics is often seen as an alternative to
structural description, rather than an enrichment of it. The fundamental
reason, however, is that structure has traditionally been understood as
being inherent, underlying, and Platonic more basic than actual usage.
Hence, if you (rightly) believe that actual usage with all its variation is the
most basic manifestation of language, you almost automatically tend to
reject a structure-based description. However, once it is realized that
Summary 299
structure serves to (partially) organize usage, rather than constituting an

abstract ideal order, this fallacious inference loses its foundation.
This view depends on a panchronic, evolutionary perspective, which
allows for a complex set of presuppositional relations between structure
and usage. The basic status of usage is easiest to see in the diachronic per-
spective. In the history of evolution, structure presupposes a flow of com-
municative usage, since without it there would be nothing to impose struc-
ture on. There must have been communicative interaction at the start of
the complex niche-constructional process that gradually created human
speech communities and linguistic competencies. Ontogenetically, a child
cannot learn what structures are available in the community if there is no
communication going on. But once a community language is a going con-
cern, presuppositions go both ways: without a structured set of conven-
tions in the speech community (to which individual competencies are
adapted), articulated utterances would be impossible.
A similar complexity characterizes the status of variation as a specific
aspect of usage. On the one hand, variation is presupposed by selection
pressures, because selection works by favouring certain variants at the
expense of others. Socially imposed structure could thus not work unless
there was already a range of variant expressions to select from (as when
selection pressures operate on genetic variants in biology). On the other
hand, in language the only criterion for treating certain forms as variants
of each other is that there is already a structural pattern in terms of which
they can be assigned to the same category. Therefore we can only do vari-
ational linguistics if we presuppose the structural categories in terms of
which they constitute variants.
On this point the analogy between evolutionary patterns in language
and biology thus fails to hold. In biology, the status of genetic forms as
variants (alleles) can be ascertained by physical properties inherent in
the individual organism. Their causal power does not depend on social
patterns. In language, the causal power of linguistic units depends on the
causal-functional setup in the niche. What happens when you say [tak]
depends on whether you happen to be in Denmark, Poland or Holland,
and thus selection pressures work on variants as embedded in socially
constituted larger systems, not directly on discrete variants viewed as
existing on their own. Everything in language is co-determined by the
causal power of aggregate-level (community-level) selection pressures.
Because the language system is part of the cultural environment, it
includes the spectrum of variation that characterizes all cultural environ-
ments. The structure of linguistic choices is an aspect of the structure of
cultural choices, including what clothes to wear, what food to eat, what
careers to pursue, etc. What has made it appear that language was under-
lyingly uniform is its basic status as shared: a language cannot exist with-
out bridging the gap between people who may be different in terms of
other features (including clothing, eating habits and careers). The more
complex the division of labour, in fact, the more necessary it is to have a
shared language through which overall joint-but-divided labour can be
mediated. The position of langue-in-society is in the middle of this field
of tensions: between the pull towards fully shared understanding in order
to conduct interconnected tasks satisfactorily, and the pull towards an
understanding in terms of individually and subculturally different experi-
ential backgrounds.
Using the countable form a community presupposes that speech com-
munities can be individuated. This is more controversial than it may seem,
in fact very tricky once we leave the traditional idealizations behind. The
traditional approach that takes the homogeneous speech community as
the presupposed ideal condition is one extreme position; the opposite
approach would be one in which each individual was basically understood
as having his own private idiolectal variety. In order to avoid this impasse,
it is useful to view community, like other fundamental concepts such as
conceptualization and matter, as basically non-count rather than counta-
ble. Human beings depend on community for being able to survive, while
the question of exactly how to delimit a countable community-unit is an
open question in fact an empirical question about real social structure.
An isolated island tribe would be easily individuated, while anyone would
have a hard time describing the English speech community.
The basic claim of the niche theory is that there are social structures
in the community to which individuals adapt. The theory does not depend
on assumptions about the precise distribution of such social features into
neat individual boxes. Communities are not defined in terms of their
members, but in terms of collective practices; football clubs, political par-
ties, religious denominations. Individuals are free to define the scope of
their own membership ambitions: you can be a member of as many com-
munities as your social competencies, including language competencies,
allow. The speech community is therefore definable in terms of a set of
collective communication practices, which may be more or less easy to
individuate depending on the general organization of social practices in
the community. In a dialect continuum, community may be virtually
uncountable (although communicative practices may have natural units
in the form of villages and towns).
For speech communities of the kind we tend to presuppose in Europe,
this also means that there is an inherent link between the cohesion of the
Summary 301
langue and the cohesion of the whole set of practices that constitute the
society. Disruptions in the social order are likely to lead to disruptions in
the language system that constitutes one aspect of the way the world
(niche) works. As described by Dahl (2004), when channels of communi-
cation are affected by social upheavals, it may lead to degraded transmis-
sion, which may cause erosion of grammatical complexities, leading to
creole type changes in the language system. English shows signs of such
changes, which may be traced back to 1066 and all that. As a result of the
Norman invasion (cf. Blake 1996: 84), the previous standard form of the
language (originally created by Alfred of Wessex) gradually fell into dis-
use, and because the high-status positions in society were literally occu-
pied by Anglo-Norman, no new form of English began to approach stand-
ard status before Henry V, in the 1420s.30
Both events had significant influence on linguistic development, and
the core of them in both cases involved military conquest as well as the
social construction of the nation. The Norman conquest submerged
Anglo-Saxon nationhood; Henry V wanted to resuscitate it in the service
of military success in the hundred years war, warming up to the battle of
Agincourt and propagation and propaganda were disseminated along
channels such as the guilds (cf. Blake 1996: 177). To take one of Geer-
aertss examples, the fact that there is a stronger pull towards a standard
language in Netherlandic Dutch than in Belgian can be linked with the
less integrated nature of the Belgian social structure. The field of forces
that sustain linguistic norms is part of the same overall reality that sustains
30 An anonymous reviewer pointed out that in fact a form of English based on

the East Midlands dialect had been emerging as a new standard in a relatively
continuous process. This is not necessarily in conflict with the main point of
this example, which is the emergence of a standard form as a feature of the
socially constructed niche. This requires that members of the community
assign the status of standard to a particular language form. I quote from
Decker (2008), a review of three books on the emergence of standard English:
[Machan] tells us that numerous writers have suggested that King Henrys let-
ters, written in 1258, are a first attempt at the assertion of English as a symbol
of nationalism (p. 25), or the beginning of a written standard of London Eng-
lish. Machan argues that they could be no such thing, there was no sociolin-
guistic history to sustain significance for English as a broadly national symbol
or to foster a shared memory of its meaning (p. 69). To me, the significance is
that even if this had been an attempt at asserting English as a nationalistic
symbol, it failed miserably. The rise of English as a part of English identity did
not occur for two hundred more years and resulted from socio-political
changes of the day. (Machan is the author of one of the three books reviewed).
social structures in general and thus it is natural that there is a sense in

which an attack on the overall social system will also have consequences
for the language system. The loss of nominal gender in English may be a
casualty of war rather than an instance of progress in language, as Jes-
persen claimed (1892). In Chapter 7, the focus is on the topic of social
constructions, with nations as one example, and the interplay between lan-
guage and other aspects of social causality.
Langue is thus a union of heretogeneous, partial orders inherent in the
linguistic practices of speech communities. Thus conceived, the langue
exists in the same way that other social entities exist, as an aspect of the
cultural environment, a complex entity combining mentally grounded
norms and socially imposed causal relations. Langue is not a set of actu-
ally attested regularities, but the set of options/constraints that attested
regularities have generated as the context of any future potential linguis-
tic acts: it is analogous to gravity as a feature of the physical world, rather
than to a body of examples of how gravity has worked. The low, plant-like
degree of structural integrity entails that parts are expendable (in contrast
to classic structural assumptions): each linguistic form may have its own
unique distribution; each speaker may have internalized her own unique
competency. What cannot be ignored is the existence of langue as a fact of
life in the niche, which the speakers have to adapt to, as well as choose
from, whenever they want to engage in actual language usage.
Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
1. Introduction
The previous chapter was about the re-assessment of linguistic structure

that follows from taking the social foundations of language seriously. A
result of this reassessment was that linguistic structure, including linguistic
meaning, was relocated from the Platonic underground to residing in the
sociocultural niche, where it exerts adaptive pressure on individual speak-
ers.
This chapter broadens the study of the niche dimension of language
into a general theory of meaning as a constituent of social reality. This
account is the centrepiece of the theory promised in the title of the book,
with society understood as the aggregate niche that constitutes the human
habitat.
As mentioned a number of times, social phenomena may be more or
less structured. Of focal interest, however, are the more coherent and per-
sistent types of meaning-imbued social phenomena, Such social construc-
tions, as discussed in ch. 4, are not figments of imagination, but real occu-
pants of social space. Sociocultural niches exert selection pressure because
social constructions are real, although they also are the result of social
construction processes.
The element that keeps some of these processes and their outcomes
coherent and persistent is functional relations, which underpin equilib-
rium-promoting mechanisms across reproductive cycles. For that reason,
the structured parts of social reality consist of Croft-style, panchronic line-
ages. Just as langue consists of linguemes, (other) social constructions
such as football clubs constitute lineages of practice that are replicated
in the community. All such practices are imbued with meaning but mean-
ing is not their only property. In ch. 1, the pathway of meaning was
described as beginning with the meaning associated with material objects:
linguistic meaning is a very sophisticated case, where the vehicle exists
only as a carrier of meaning. In other institutions than language, the vehi-
cles that carry the meaning that is associated with social practices have a
more independent role which is associated with their practical role in the
community.
A theory of meaning as a constituent of the niche thus requires an
account of how mental representations interact with non-mental parts of
304 Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality
the world. Adaptive pressure emerges from both mental and non-mental
features. This can be exemplified with the form of adaptation whereby an
immigrant learns a new language: without the physical presence of utter-
ances in the new language, there would be nothing to drive the adaptation
process but without the mental content of other minds that enter into
the creation of shared understanding, there would be no target for the
adaptation. On the population level, selection pressure also involves both
the vehicle and the meaning: with the example of fashion, selective fitness
in the season depends not just on whether you get the message, you also
have to get the actual clothes.
The fact that the object of description is social and involves non-men-
tal factors does not mean that cognition is marginalized in the theory I
present: the whole point will be the collaboration between cognitive mod-
els and social processes. While this will sometimes show mental content in
roles relatively detached from reality (as in bullshit, cf. section 3.3), it will
also show the crucial role of mental content for underpinning aspects of
hard social reality. For instance, mental models of national identity, while
problematic in other respects, have a key role for the rise and persistence
of universally acclaimed social constructions such as democratic govern-
ments.
In the context of CL, the main point is to show that the full story of
cognitive models does not emerge from the mental dimension alone, but
depends on which of many different forms of social construction the cog-
nitive models team up with. In relation to the rival point of view that sees
social processes as primary, the main point is to show that social processes
always depend to some extent on the mental models that (at any given
time) are constituents of social reality. Either way, the aim is to provide a
balanced approach, offering a framework for studying the role of cogni-
tive models in society without having to be a cognitivist, and for studying
the role of social processes without presupposing radical social construc-
tionism.
A major aim of this chapter can be summarized in relation to two
properties of social constructions: acceptance and efficacy (cf. p. 313
below). Acceptance designates the extent to which a social construction, as
represented in the cognitive model that partly constitutes it, is endorsed
by members of the community. Acceptance it is crucial because social con-
structions can only exist if participants are willing to play along. Efficacy
designates the extent to which social constructions actually work in the
way that they are mentally represented as working. Efficacy thus high-
lights the aggregate-level causal machinery rather than the cognitive mod-
els. A key part of the academic ambition of this book is to show that it is
Introduction 305
necessary to have a place in the theory for precisely how cognitive models
are hooked up in social reality, not just in terms of the acceptance dimen-
sion, but also in terms of efficacy. The civic side of the issue is that as citi-
zens we need to worry about how cognitive models function in the proc-
esses that reproduce social reality over time. This is true whether we want
to promote them or to throw a spanner in the works.
The main claims argued in this chapter, accordingly, are:
A: The academic claims:

(1) An adequate theory of meaning-in-society cannot understand the
issue from the cognitive side alone. Meanings-in-society enter into social
constructions of very different types, which determine their status in social
reality and a theory of the statuses meanings can have is a necessary half
of the story.
(2) An adequate theory of the social side of meaning-in-society must

include the fundamental social embedding of human individuals in the
experience of joint, collaborative activity. This side must be counter-
pointed with the role of aggregate-level, impersonal forces but meaning
cannot be understood in terms of impersonal forces alone. An extended
evolutionary framework, one that includes a visible as well as an invisible
hand, can accommodate both the individual and the aggregate perspec-
tive without reductive simplification.
B. The civic claim:

(3) An adequate analysis of meaning-in-society is part of the practice of
democratic citizenship one for which language experts have a special
responsibility. In order to live up to that responsibility, it is necessary to
conduct the analysis while keeping the perspectives of the members of the
community in mind. For reasons associated with claim (2) above, under-
standing meaning-imbued action as reflecting a particular discourse is
not enough to fulfil this civic obligation.
The structure of this long but central chapter is the following: section 2
outlines the emergence and anatomy of social constructions (i. e. the con-
stituents of social reality). First (2.1), I describe the path from mind to
society, and the dual nature of social constructions as depending both on
participant awareness and aggregate-level causal factors, correlated to the
acceptance and efficacy dimensions. In 2.2 I discuss the place of social
constructions in the evolutionary framework. I then discuss first the mini-
mum and then the maximum role for mental content in a social construc-
tion: based on the habitus level, I discuss (2.3) how close you can get to
the point where mental representations play no role whatever, and I then
go to the other extreme, proposing (2.4) the notion of the Platonic projec-
tion to capture the mechanism whereby a concept can acquire an almost
self-contained status as part of niche we live in.
Section 3 focuses on the issue of acceptance and its partial independ-
ence of the efficacy dimension. This independence is relevant for socially
constructed beliefs (section 3.1), for understanding the relation between
the flow and the niche (section 3.2), and, strikingly, for assessing the role
of bullshit in society (section 3.3). Because of the real force of conceptu-
alizations, however, there is also an issue of how and why to gain accept-
ance for new conceptualizations of reality (3.4). Two socially forms of
grounding are proposed, supplementing the classic dimension of bodily
grounding: sociocultural and factual grounding, together establishing a
grounding theory with some affinity to Bhlers triangle (cf p. 82): bodily
grounding is most directly associated with the speaker, sociocultural
grounding with the audience understood as members of a community, and
factual grounding with conveyed meaning used as a map of the world.
Based on this outline of types of social constructions, the two following
sections (4 and 5) confront the social cognitive framework with poststruc-
tural discourse(s) analysis first on the level of principle, then in relation
to an illustration case where discourses analysis has played a significant
role in the analysis of meaning in a hard social science, International
Relations.The invisible hand is a crucial side of the causality that shapes
the proliferation and the functions of meanings in society and this
includes discourses. A major point is therefore that the hidden hand of
poststructuralist theory can be understood (and demystified) as a special
case of the invisible hand that enters into evolutionary dynamics: part of
the social power that shapes individual conceptualization behind our
backs boils down simply to adaptation.
Discourses thus have to take their place in a richer theory of the phe-
nomena that populate the social world. They retain a role, because there is
a well-defined, somewhat deviant type of utterances for which poststruc-
tural discourse analysis is well suited. However, it has to take its place
within a wider framework that includes collaborative agency.
The last sections return to the issue of conceptualization viewed in the
light of the social dimension. Section 6 is about the relation between con-
ceptual models and social constructions viewed from the perspective of
the individual; section 7 views the analytic framework in the perspective
of existing work in the CL tradition on meaning in society; and section 8
sums up the conclusions.
The growth and structure of social constructions 307
2. The growth and structure of social constructions
2.1 The bottom-up trajectory. From construals to social constructions1
The path of exposition follows the historical trajectory in CL from the

mind via usage to society; and since usage is the basic manifestation of
language, the relation between mental and social dimensions is presented
as reflecting a generalized model of emergence from usage.
The path is divided into three phases: conceptual construal, discursive
construction and social construction. Construal is the strictly mind-inter-
nal phase, while construction begins in the individual mind but goes
beyond it. Discursive construction refers to the social outcome of a usage
event viewed as belonging to online flow, while social construction refers
to an outcome that constitutes a stable feature of the niche.
The division into a mind-internal conceptual phase and a mind-exter-
nal social phase represents an analytic distinction between two aspects of
a usage process. One consists in using your conceptual resources to con-
struct a potential utterance meaning, and the other consists in imposing it
on the situation. This theoretical two-phase model can be applied to both
production and reception and presupposes that mental representations
have a crucial role in both.2
The crucial property of construal, as discussed in ch. 1, is conceptual
freedom: human subjects can invoke alternative conceptualizations of the
same input. The construal process is like children (re)shaping a blob of
plasticine as it suits them, before they announce that this is a doggie.
Because the mind has a vast store of conceptual material available, includ-
ing a range of more or less elaborate idealized conceptual models, human
conceptualizers possess a virtually boundless capacity (as a simulation
engine, cf. ch. 1) to conceptualize what they are attending to, real-world
states as well as imagined possibilities.
1 The issue is discussed in greater detail in Harder (forthcoming).

2 I am not claiming that there are two temporally distinct phases in actual utter-
ance events. However, if mental models are to have causal relevance, they
have to be present before the social effects they trigger, even if there are social
and mental aspects present throughout. I use the word construal about the
first, conceptual sub-process, while I use the word construction about all sub-
processes that place the mental content in relation to social facts. Hence, in my
terminology, the fully achieved result of a communicative event is not a matter
of construal alone.
Construction processes, in contrast, are like physical construction proc-

esses in that they create something that was not there before. Construal
and construction are related in that a construction can always be spelt out
as containing or reflecting a construal; but construction is about what hap-
pens to the situational target of conceptualization. From a classic CL per-
spective, it may appear weird to talk about cognitive processes that end up
outside the individual mind; but the concept of intersubjective grounding
(cf. the discussion in ch. 2 of Verhagen, Sinha and Zlatev) reflects the
intertwining of minds that is presupposed in meaning construction. The
built-in role of the mind-external dimension is also reflected in the fact
that conceptualize and understand are transitive verbs. We conceptualize
other people, and we understand (or do not understand) what they are
trying to say; and by using a shared language to convey our understanding,
we can put it beyond individual mental content and make it an object of
joint attention. The mental content remains inside the individual minds, of
course, but this private entity is joined by a public entity that is not reduc-
ible to the sum of individual mental entities. Over time, such entities
acquire a functional (rather than conceptual) relation to the joint event
and functional relations belong in collective space rather than in the indi-
vidual mind.3
In language use, this type of process is the basic format of collaboration
between mental representations and the causality that operates in the
social domain. The causal (including evolutionary) relevance of mental
representation depends on such links. In the case of linguistic utterances,
the interaction involves what Austin (1975: 117) calls taking effect, and
what Clark (1996) calls collaborative co-construction. As a result of the
construction process, conceptual content is mapped on to the discourse
target, thus starting a causal trajectory that reaches beyond the individual.
The most basic type of construction process, and the one that is a pre-
requisite for all the others, is the one that brings about a mental construc-
tion (aka a mental model, cf. Craik 1943, Johnson-Laird 1983, or mental
structure, cf. Gernsbacher 1990). A mental construction adds to the con-
strual an intentional relation to an object in the world of discourse. Alter-
native construals are things you can play around with and entertain simul-
3 The conceptual skill of humans is exceptional in that it does not work solely
via direct causal triggering from the environment, so that it can work mind-
internally. But just as the linguistic context (cp. ch. 6) is a special and sophisti-
cated case of context in general, so is conceptualization that targets mind-
internal entities alone a special and sophisticated case of conceptualization
targeting objects impinging from the outside.
taneously, before you make up your mind (as it were) but when you
understand one construal as being the situationally appropriate represen-
tation of an object, you put a construction on it with potential causal
implications. If you categorize someone as a friend, it has implications for
the way you think of him in subsequent discourse, and if you have formed
a mental construction of an act you have witnessed e. g. of someone
being mugged that mental construction is potentially relevant for the
way you choose to act upon the world (e. g. by telling the police).
However, the causal relevance is conditional on some action or conse-
quence triggered by the mental construction. The second step, and the one
that more tangibly takes us beyond the individual mind, is a discursive
construction. Discursive construction is what gives an utterance further
relevance for the way interlocutors treat an object that has been spoken
of, as when someone is blamed for an accident, or when you call your
friend an idiot. Discursive constructions are part of the flow and need not
last beyond the moment, and therefore have a very uncertain causal role.
They constitute the online, situated phenomena that are central in
approaches such as Systemic-Functional Linguistics and discursive psy-
chology, cf. ch. 3, but are necessary elements in any theory of language use.4
The third subtype of construction is a full-fledged social construction.
Social constructions are the potential end products of discursive construc-
tions that stick. When a socially available target of understanding is
understood in a particular way, that achieved understanding may become
a part of its (enriched) situational identity also beyond the immediate dis-
course and thus it may get causal relevance for social life in general, not
just for linguistic interaction in the immediate situation. While discursive
constructions stay within the realm of joint-attention scenes that run their
course at a particular time and place, social constructions are part of the
furniture.5
4 The concept of meaning construction, cf. ch. 2, can be understood as covering

either mental or discursive construction; the difference does not matter if you
are taking the perspective of the individual mind.
5 In this basic scenario, a construal can thus enter into the social world and
become a discursive or even a social construction when it is uttered, under-
stood, accepted (at least for the duration) and attached to an element in the
shared world. It is essentially the same process as cultural learning when it
functions in the service of niche-building, cf. p. 76. It works through the joint
attention event, in which two people focus on the same object, which thereby
acquires the basic status as what were on about for the two people involved.
Through discursive constructions joint-attentional status can become imbued
In the description of construction above, I have focused on the key

semantic act of categorising an entity. But there are both more elementary
and more sophisticated ways of establishing social constructions. At the
pre-conceptual end, the primordial social construction is a we that arises
when the prefigured we in the childs mind hooks up with people around
her; an operational, social we does not require conceptual mediation. At
the more sophisticated end, we find the whole inventory of conceptual
structures that were put on the map by classic CL, cf. ch. 1: idealized cogni-
tive models, framing, mental spaces, blending, etc. For all structures with
conceptual content, however, the basic relationship described above
between the mental and the social dimension is essentially the same: there
is a mental side as well as a mapping on to a target in social space. The
discussion of conceptual categories stands metonymically for the whole
range of conceptual structures in society.
The essential difference between social constructions on the one hand
and mental and discursive constructions on the other is that social con-
structions have the status of being social facts in the sense discussed in
chapter 4. This means that they constitute causally relevant facts about the
world as understood by a community of people, regardless of any particu-
lar individual person or any particular utterance. For example, the fact
that the White House is the official residence of the President of the
United States is a social construction: no further discursive construction is
necessary at this point.
Although the distinctions made in this section have been presented as
phases in the life history of a single process, they can also be viewed sys-
tematically as three different types of entity. They belong in different com-
partments of the ontology described in ch. 4: construal is a feature of indi-
vidual competency, discursive construction is part of the flow, and social
constructions are features of the niche.
2.2. Acceptance and efficacy: the evolutionary dynamics

of social construction
Above we followed an idealized narrative schema, with a touch of the

fairy tale about it: our hero, the conceptualization, ventures forth from the
mind into the social world and ends up as a well-entrenched social con-
with conceptual content: we can change the world by projecting shared mental
content into it (cf. Clark 1996).
struction. The simplification was designed to introduce the basic differ-

ence between mental, discursive and social constructions. We now need to
go from the foundational narrative to full-fledged social reality.
Since social constructions are inhabitants of the niche, they are subject
to the selection-adaptation dynamics that drives the process of niche con-
struction. We have seen how evolutionary mechanisms of replication,
working through interplay between individual-level and population-level
effects, could account for key aspects of language, both in the biological
and the sociocultural time scale. The present section applies the same
logic to social constructions like presidents and monetary systems. That is
what makes them instances of what Croft calls lineages: successive repli-
cations of entities across generations, depending on the same causal-func-
tional processes that keep biological species and linguistic expressions in
business. Seagulls, swearwords and governments share the exposure to
selection pressures, and as a result they show effects of adaptation.
It may not be obvious that social constructions such as monetary sys-
tems, governments, schools and corporations qualify as lineages in
Crofts sense. To the individual they may appear to be rather like moun-
tain-tops that simply live on without being subject to selection pressure
and demands for reproduction. This (Durkheim-style) view of institutions
as eternally inflexible fixtures is less obvious to those who have worked
in one of them, who will know that the question: in what form can we
survive in the next round? is always an issue. As teachers will recognize,
the sort of thing that causes an educational institution to persist involves
a large number of things which have to be reproduced every time a new
school year begins just as the persistence of biological species and
words requires replication across generations. Teaching practices as well
as learning practices (including practices of applying different conceptu-
alizations to ranges of objects) are subject to selective pressures of vari-
ous kinds and therefore persist only by virtue of being selected. And
businessmen will have no trouble recognizing selection pressures, the
need to adapt, and efforts to improve the business niche in which you
find yourself.
Some social constructions are more stable than others, just like bio-
logical species. Crocodiles have been with us for 400 million years, and the
White House is not likely to be de-selected as official residence any time
soon; but this does not contradict the fact that both survive by a process of
replication that, for the White House, takes place whenever a new admin-
istration moves in. Social constructions thus, in a totally unmetaphorical
sense, constitute lineages that need to be reproduced from one period to
the next or else undergo extinction.
The causality of survival has both an immediate and a long-term

dimension. The short-term dimension may be expressed as a question of
whether an idea is viable. In the long term, looking at a social construction
that exists as part of the social world, we may ask whether it is sustainable.
Viability depends on the balance between causal pressures at the particu-
lar time, which determine whether a construction project can get on its
feet (a business company, a football club, a political party, a research
project). Sustainability is a matter of the forces that are at work across
several reproductive cycles. Even if it turns out to be initially viable, i. e. we
succeed in getting the social construction up and running, we cannot be
sure what the long-term balance will be between erosion and replication.
The type that has been discussed until now is the central kind that will
be referred to as operational social constructions those which, like
money, are indisputable parts of social reality. Like all social constructions,
they have a mental side and a causal underpinning. First of all, their men-
tal side has the status of shared representations, which constitute common
ground for members of the relevant communities. Secondly, their causal
underpinning works so as to reproduce the whole system across genera-
tions (= replicative cycles). A stable democratic system of government is
an example: it is mentally represented as the legitimate form of govern-
ment in the minds of its citizens, and elective processes duly reproduce the
system across successive terms of office.
Operational constructs have the methodological advantage that they
can be identified by their stable causal patterns. Durkheims theory of
objective social laws appears plausible in case of such operational con-
structions. The type of statistical methods that are part of quantitative lin-
guistics can also be used to document the life histories of social construc-
tions under different circumstances and test out predictions in different
cases. A methodological link with variational analysis in linguistics is Croft
and Poole (2008): the method of multidimensional scaling turned out to
be adaptable from voting patterns to typological variation. In a different
domain, Poole and co-workers have shown how options may be distrib-
uted in social space, in that political selection pressures in the US used to
depend on two dimensions, which have now been reduced to one (cf.
McCarty, Poole and Rosental 2006): race is no longer on a separate scale
but has been subsumed under the general left-right scale as part of the
causality of American politics.
Because of this tangible quality, the operational type of social con-
structions constitutes a useful point of departure for resolving the dilemma
that has made the nature of social constructions such a slippery topic in
public and academic discussions. The fundamental reason for the persist-
ent confusion is the foundational relation between the two sides of socially
constructed entities, the mental content and the embedding in the evolu-
tionary causality of social persistence. To those who focus on mental con-
tent, social constructions appear rather like the emperors new clothes,
and the typical message is dont be fooled by apparently solid features of
social reality theyre just socially constructed! To those who focus on
the quasi-objective causal laws, such as economists (cf. the discussion in
chapter 4), social forces are just as inexorable as physical forces. We need
to integrate the two perspectives if we want to avoid being at the mercy of
competing half-truths.
As a contribution towards this integration, I think it is useful to distin-
guish between two types of causal hook-up that a social construction can
have in social reality: acceptance and efficacy. Acceptance designates the
causal power that stems solely from citizens attitude to the mental, repre-
sentational side of a social construction. Acceptance goes beyond pure
mental content in that it influences the way you act: you will tend to sup-
port the social constructions you like and resist the social constructions
that you cannot accept. As defined here, acceptance is understood as
depending solely on the idea, not the practical functioning. Efficacy, con-
versely, designates brute operationality: does it work in accordance with
the way it is represented (whether you like it or not)? Will money buy you
goods, do the police apprehend criminals, does the president exert execu-
tive power?
Both acceptance and efficacy involve causal power. The point of the
distinction is to factor out the kind of causal impact that is directly depend-
ent on citizens mental representations, in order to establish the impor-
tance of the causal power that depends on aggregate-level mechanisms of
replication. Radical social constructionism overlooks the second kind, the
efficacy dimension. Cognitivism does not necessarily overlook it, but has
no account of it because cognitivist analyses focus on the mental side
only.
This is where I hope that the account of this book can be useful mak-
ing it clearer how to inquire into the precise social significance of cogni-
tive models. In addition to an analysis of the cognitive content, it is neces-
sary to have an account of precisely how this cognitive content is hooked
up in social reality, not just in terms of the acceptance dimension, but also
in terms of aggregate-level efficacy. This is a big project, because it
demands cross-disciplinary collaboration, not just at the level of founda-
tions, but also at all levels of concrete analysis: those who know about
cognitive models must collaborate with those who know about social cau-
sation in all individual cases. The only thing I can hope to do here is to
point the way towards the appropriate form of integration between the
two sides.
This is where the operational type of construction is a useful point of
departure. In an operational social construction, the two sides mutually
depend on each other: efficacy is a condition on acceptance, and accept-
ance is a condition on efficacy, as discussed in relation to the nature of
status functions in ch. 4: red lights means stop, and therefore they cause
people to stop and the fact that people stop is what enables red lights to
continue to mean stop. This mutual dependency sounds suspiciously like
the circular see-saw kind of relationship (cf. above p. 178): paper notes can
be used to buy things, and therefore people accept them; and because peo-
ple accept them, you can buy things with them. But the full story depends
on the whole process of selection-adaptation dynamics, which crucially
includes feedback from the environment. The see-saw logic would predict
that the two sides could sustain each other forever; however, external fac-
tors may cause the functional relations to get out of the equilibrium state
which is necessary to reproduce the system. World War I is an example: for
reasons which had nothing to do with either the mental representations of
German Marks or with any unwillingness on the part of shopkeepers to
part with goods for money, the German monetary system collapsed and
the Mark lost its value. The see-saw logic cannot capture such events.
The moral of the integrated story of social constructions is therefore
that our mental representations matter, that the aggregate causal set-up
also matters, and that you need to know how the two sides interact func-
tionally. The social constructions we produce become part of the natural
world (indeed, where else could they be, cf. Fink 2006: 217) and there-
fore the combined message is take social constructions seriously!
There are other social constructions than the balanced, operational
ones. But before we move on to the other kinds, we need to add two extra
dimensions to the operational kind. First we look at the potentially mini-
mal role of the mental dimension (section 2.3); then we look at the maxi-
mally independent status that mental concepts may have (section 2.4).
2.3. Habitus vs. conceptual models:

do we really need mental representations?
Both previous sections took mental representations as the point of depar-

ture. While venturing into the social domain, the questions addressed
implicitly took the classic CL point of view, asking: what sort of thing can
happen to mental entities when they move into the social sphere? Even
under causal pressures, mental content remained the hero of the story.
There is a source of error here which can be illustrated if we approach the
relation between representations and social constructions from the oppo-
site end of the path beginning with the social constructions in the niche,
and ending up in the individual mind.
The champion of this approach is Bourdieu (cf. ch. 3), with his claim
that social processes work essentially through habitus formation, i. e. by
imposing a bodily adaptation that works at a pre-conceptual level. This
idea can be illustrated with his analysis of the situation in a radically tradi-
tional society, where the existing social pattern is taken for granted to the
extent that explicit and conscious representation plays only a minimal role
in the community. In the extreme case, the pattern may be totally embed-
ded in routine practices and no one thinks about it, giving it the status that
Bourdieu (1977: 169) called doxa. Taking this observation to its logical
extreme, one might ask whether mental representations have to play any
causal role at all: could it be that procedural causality inscribed in the
embodied habitus of community members is the only thing that matters?
For reasons discussed in ch. 5, mental representations must be assumed
to play a variable but ineradicable role. Ant communities (presumably)
have to be hard-wired by deterministic mechanisms regulating everything
from genes to pheromones in order to be feasible, whereas the thought of
a society driven by total mechanical causality is the vanishing point for
what we see as human relations. Joint attention is a mental state. More
variable is the role of conceptual understanding. The argument suggested
that Bourdieu is right in claiming that we cannot assume that the level of
explicit mental representation is necessary: elements of everyday life can
have the same pre-conceptual status as the we that arises out of elemen-
tary joint experience. Therefore we need a concept for the more elemen-
tary level of bodily wiring, when it is not assumed to be functionally
hooked up with explicit representations.
Because of the continuism of CL (adopted openly in Holland and
Quinn 1987: 6, as discussed above p. 203), this level is not traditionally
distinguished from embodied cognition in general. Intuitively, however, it
corresponds to the very basic level that is evoked by the title Metaphors
we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). When conceptual models are also in
play, we get the problem of how the two levels act together, which was
discussed at the level of competency in ch 5. The problem has interesting
dimensions also at the collective level, as illustrated by Bourdieus analy-
sis of the development from tradition to modernity.
In Bourdieus analysis, a radically traditional societys form of life is
totally embedded in actual practice and is not explicitly represented men-
tally (a status Bourdieu calls doxa). People do what they do purely out of
habit(us). Conceptual representations may arise when practices are chal-
lenged; and from a conceptual point of view, one might think that acquir-
ing an explicit representation would be a form of strengthening these
practices, but the opposite is the case:
The dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and
exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have
an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in
its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy. (Bourdieu 1977: 169)
The strongest position a form of life can have is that of being quasi-natural
habitus that members rely on in the same way that they rely on the solid
ground under their feet, representing an all-pervading adaptation among
members of the community. Explicit representations, in contrast, invite
opposition by their very explicitness, and orthodoxy therefore requires
much greater effort to sustain than doxa (which is one reason powers-
that-be in a traditional society prefer to burn heretics at the stake rather
than arguing with them).6
Because habitus states have no intentional relations to states of the
world, they do not constitute truths or falsehoods they are simply states
of bodily adaptation. Bowing automatically to the emperor is not a false-
hood while for instance a mental representation of the emperor as wor-
thy of deep respect might be false. If habitus fails you, it therefore feels
worse than simply being wrong about something; the metaphor of the
ground giving way under your feet is frequently used to describe the
mental experience of cultural change.
In sum, as suggested by Bernardez (2008) and Sinha et al. (in press),
there are strong arguments for a social cognitive linguistics to adopt the
concept of habitus, enabling it to move towards a more precise account of
the social context of cognition that simultaneously integrates the element
of bodily grounding in a more precise form. The potential in making the
distinction can be illustrated with reference to familiar CL territory in the
6 In organization theory, the distinction between the level of entrenched prac-

tice and explicit representations was made famous by Edgar Schein, cf. Schein
(1985): a corporate culture has two distinct levels, those of basic assumptions
(~ habitus) as opposed to espoused values. Basic assumptions are what really
count, because they are embedded in actual corporate practices. Espoused val-
ues are what the managing director talks about when he hires new employees
and in his introduction to the annual report. Like other explicit representa-
tions, they may both be explicitly challenged and compared with reality (cf. the
discussion of bullshit p. 339).
form of Lakoffs (1996, 2004) two family models, the strict father model
and the nurturing family model. Both are good examples of cases where
there are both lived practices and explicit conceptual models involved, as
demonstrated by Lakoff. But what about families where lived experience
does not reflect any of the two models such as radically dysfunctional
families where children are subject to heartrending practices of neglect,
abuse and violence? There can hardly be any doubt that children have an
embodied adaptation to this kind of family life, reflected for instance in
the risk of abused children becoming abusers in later life. But there is
nothing that obviously qualifies as an idealized conceptual model for this
type of family, only lived practices kept in the dark.7
More generally, if we follow the CL path of emergence, also in ordinary
families, representations come later than lived practices. Experiential cor-
relations are the basis of primary metaphors. The standard CL theory (cf.
ch.1) can be understood as representing what Max Weber would call an
ideal type where there is the kind of iconicity and continuity between
levels that would justify a complete reliance on converging evidence:
sensorimotor routines are matched by image schemas which organize
conceptual mappings corresponding to primary metaphors that underlie
complex, high-level extensions. In an ideal type situation, a child may thus
grow up in a nurturing family and acquire the corresponding habitus,
develop an explicit model of family life that reflects this pattern, and map
this on to an understanding of government as a framework for mutual
support.
While it is important to have an awareness of the canonical status of
this type of case, clearly it is not all there is to say about embodiment and
conceptualization.8 We need to have a conceptual apparatus that can
explicitly capture the types of non-canonical cases that arise, and the rela-
7 Lakoff (2008:29) mentions the lack of honored narratives for the reality of
Americans who work hard and cant climb the ladder of success because there
are no rungs on it
8 Lakoff himself is of course fully aware of this. We have models also of cases
that do not match our own experiences; including for instance both the two
family models that Lakoff discusses (cf. Lakoff 2006: 67), and align ourselves
with them to different degrees. (Even those who do not support the strict
father model can watch Schwarzenegger movies, as pointed out by Lakoff in
discussion 2008). In a similar vein, Billig (1992) found that people had both
loyal and critical conceptions of the Royal family, and rather than uniformly
support one of them, they might align themselves with both types, depending
on the local discourse context the social framing.
tionships they illustrate including the case that Bourdieu is particularly

interested in, where top-down social pressure rather than bottom-up
emergence determines what comes to be embodied in the individual.
The next section moves to the opposite end of the spectrum. If there
are cases where explicit representations play only a minimal role, is there
also a type of case where mental entities play a crucial role on their own?
2.4. The Platonic projection: concepts as part of the niche
The subject of this section is central to a theory that aims to be cognitive

and social at the same time: what is the role of concepts in a social as
opposed to a purely cognitive context? Issues that raise the question
include: what is the role of the concept of self-reliance in American cul-
ture? How does the concept of woman affect young girls who grow up in
Denmark?9
In the operational social constructions described above, the collabora-
tion between conceptual content and social causality standardly takes the
form of a mental status assignment to a material vehicle. The vehicle, such
as a president or a dollar bill, has the causal properties. Once they are in
operation, we do not need to worry all the time about the mental repre-
sentation of money or presidents: we just pay over the counter, and let
politics take its course. The case I am going to focus on in the following is
the one where the vehicle has only a minimal presence and the conceptual
content itself has the central role. With a slight exaggeration, this section
describes the process of assigning social, causally relevant status directly
to concepts per se, irrespective of any particular material anchoring.10
9 In the preceding sections, I have emphasized the importance of the link

between conceptual content and the causal structure of the social world. It is
important to make clear that I am in no way retreating from that position. On
the contrary, I hope the point has become so firmly established that it is now
safe to take up the independent causal role of concepts. There can be no going
back to a descriptive practice that operates on the implicit assumption that
purely mental entities are all we need.
10 The basic pathway is the same that has been described above: concepts enter
the sociocultural environment via language use. The word projection is used
as a general name for the attribution of a mental property to something in the
external world (cf. also Jackendoff 1983). The term is recruited from psychoa-
nalysis and has an association with pathological cases. This is a useful connota-
tion, because the process is fraught with difficulties: Freuds concept of reality
check is essential, also in a cognitive context. The cases I want to focus on are
What makes the niche a necessary part of the world picture is its causal
role as the source of selection pressure. I take it for granted that opera-
tional social constructions have causal power as niche properties: in their
process of socialization, children adapt to money, police and (operational)
traffic lights as part of dealing with the material world. Do they also adapt
to concepts?
As already implied, I think it makes sense to suggest they do. The Pla-
tonic projection of the section heading refers to the process whereby an
entity that is wholly conceptual, hence belonging essentially in the mind,
ends up as part of the environment. This is the most radical manifestation
of the fact that the human environment is imbued with mental content. In
order to understand how this works, we can again begin with the case of
money. Money has come a long way from barter via gold via paper notes
to credit cards but it seems there still has to be a way of checking its
material existence: attempts to buy things in a shop would not succeed
unless the presence of a means of payment could be reliably checked. Yet
even in the case of money, if the level of mutual confidence is high enough,
the checkable entity can have an extremely abstract and indirect manifes-
tation. Certain people can always buy on credit, as long as their general
social standing is maintained.
The point I am making is that ultimately the basic currency, in any
monetary system, is social trust. This applies not only to the individual as
an island, but to the whole niche: trust in the currency depends on a reli-
able state of the social world. Another way of demonstrating this form of
causality is that if social relations decay, the process will begin to reverse
itself. As conditions worsen and the community slides towards chaos,
increasingly solid means of payment will be demanded by sellers credit
will be first to go, then paper money (as the currency collapses), ending up
with real goods as the only accepted means of payment when all trust has
disappeared.
The ultimate criterion, therefore, is the way things work in social inter-
action. As long as status functions are recognized, by however indirect
means, the status assignment that defines the causal potential of a social
object can remain viable. The causal underpinning depends on how peo-
ple respond in interactive situations, not on the material manifestation
itself. Myths abound of the deceased king whose reign can be perpetuated
those where there is no reasonable doubt that a concept plays a causal role in
a community. Based on such cases, we can then try to understand the more
equivocal situations.
by his surrounding minions, until the physical absence of the king one day
creates problems. People could in theory go on forever attributing the
status of king to the same person, whom they might never have seen in the
flesh anyway. This opens the way for (almost) purely conceptual entities
to come to play a role in the niche as well.
It is useful to compare with the reverse of the status assignment proc-
ess, cf. p. 85, the production of a material anchor for a mental process, as
described by Hutchins (1995) and A.Clark (1997), cf. ch. 2. The compass
and the abacus provide physical objects that represent elements of mental
processes, thus making it possible to offload part of the process into the
environment, easing the cognitive burden. In performing a calculation,
you project on to the beads of the abacus the status of units in the transac-
tion that you are carrying out that is why the presence of a certain
number of beads at the end may count as a claim that so and so much
money needs to be paid. But the abacus is a dispensable intermediary it
all boils down to the reliable functioning of the overall social process, i. e.
the transaction. Also here, the degree of materiality of representation and
status-assignment is variable.
The causal role of concepts begins with their function as containers. A
functioning concept is used to subsume phenomena in the world of expe-
rience, reducing complexity to a manageable format, cf. ch 5. As we know
from basic-level concepts, that format may at the same times go with spe-
cific motor routines, i. e. ways of dealing with instantiations. But in the case
of basic-level concepts, the actual instantiations (cars, trees, mothers) are
arguably enough to explain the causality that is at work. The concepts that
are core candidates for Platonic status are therefore those which have a
more clearly independent role in relation to instantiations and also have
a strong normative element. In such cases, there is a more clearcut causal
role for the container in itself as opposed to the actual instances.
A case which was the subject of a very well-known ethnomethodologi-
cal study, cf. Wieder (1974), is a half-way house for narcotics offenders on
the way to being released from a term of imprisonment. A pervasive fea-
ture of life in that halfway house was the convict code, a set of norms that
the residents lived by. It depended on a basic division between residents
and staff, and demanded loyalty towards the other residents and distance
from the plans and activities of the staff. Central in it was the concept of
snitching, i. e. informing staff of the criminal activities or plans of other
inmates. Basically this never happened, because it was top of the list of
what simply isnt done.
Snitching is therefore a good example of a concept with Platonic
status in the niche a concept with normatively based causal power, even
in the absence of formal status, material anchoring or actual instantia-

tions. The concept itself should therefore be understood as part of the
niche, rather than the mind of the individual. This may appear to be in
conflict with Wieders own account, because his focus is on the constitu-
tive role of the flow of activity whereby the code is sustained. His study is
profiled against the background of positivist sociology, and makes a point
of showing that the convict code is not simply objectively there. Wieder
(1974: 223224) describes the essential interdependence of acts of telling
and the code itself by saying that the acts of telling are instances of the
code, that they exhibit it rather than simply describe a pre-existing
objective reality.
Both formulations, however, are compatible with the view I am argu-
ing for. The flow, i. e. the telling of the code, is basic, but that does not entail
that we can ignore the niche presence (or the inmate competency) associ-
ated with the code, including the concept of snitching. If there was nothing
but the telling, the code would exist only in those acts of telling that instan-
tiate or exhibit it and that is not the case. The staff makes it clear to
Wieder (1974: 162) that if somebody was caught snitching, causal conse-
quences would not be conditional on any online act of telling the code
(death being judged as the most likely outcome).
I see this case as an illustration of the limitations of the position of
discursive psychology (cf. the discussion in ch. 3), where everything is
understood to be constructed online. The case is the more apt as a coun-
terexample, precisely because everything in Wieders analysis illustrates
the importance of the discursive process that constitutes their focus of
interest: the telling. However, because the approach is polemically
opposed to causal, especially mental, structure that pretends to be inde-
pendent of online processes, they underemphasize the causal structure
that arises as the result of the pervasive activity of telling and that is
precisely the stuff of which niche construction is made. The normative
concept of snitching is part of the landscape in a way that is analogous to
the presence of a dam in the landscape of the beaver: in both cases, the
fact that it is constructed does not make it less real.11
11 On the other hand, it also illustrates where Durkheims position is insufficient

(even if it is not as objectivist as it is sometimes made out to be, cf. the discus-
sion on p. 140 above). Although he is quite clear about the partial autonomy of
both mental and social facts (in relation to brute facts as well as in relation to
each other), he lacks an account of the mechanism that underpins social facts
i. e. the relation between the code and the telling. Because the flow of commu-
nication is peripheral in his perspective, social structures and the functional
The causal role of the concepts associated with the convict code could
not exist in the niche if it did not exist in the minds of the participants. In
this case there is a strong element of habitus involved; many residents
describe themselves as having lived by the convict code all their lives.
Nevertheless, habitus in the form of directly embodied response patterns
cannot capture everything about the way is works. Acts of conceptual cat-
egorization (and discursive construction) of a potential act as snitching
(and therefore as motivations for a refusal to comply) constitute an impor-
tant part of the usage practice of telling the code and sometimes the
categorization task can be quite delicate (cf. Wieder 1974: 170). And in its
absence, extraordinary steps may have to be taken. Wieder (1974: 162)
describes the case of a new resident who was a bit stupid and who started
to talk in a way that the staff realized would count as a violation of the
code so the staff (!) tried to tell him to be less co-operative, and put him
in special section for a while to protect him.
The role of the staff is instructive here, because their intervention can
be explained neither by habitus nor by the force of online discursive pres-
sure. The staff do not lead lives totally submerged in the convict code, as
the inmates might be assumed to do, and they step in precisely because
there is no online discourse to warn the potential victim. Hence, the staffs
protective interference can only be understood as an adaptive response to
the way their world works because of the concept snitch, by the mere risk
of the offender being put in that conceptual container: waiting for the
actual instantiations to drive the process would be too dangerous.
Although indirect, telling the code is still a form of material manifes-
tation, which is of course necessary otherwise a (quasi-)Platonic concept
could manifest itself causally only via ESP. All such concepts depend for
their persistence on social practices that sustain them. Thus the feudal
concept of honour lost its status when the social practices that sustained
it (such as duelling) fell into disuse. The epithet Platonic therefore has to
stay within inverted commas. Nevertheless it makes an important point
which can also be generalized to concepts that have more direct material
anchoring, including frequent instantiations. Because you use conceptual
categories to reduce complexity, categories bias your adaptation proc-
esses towards the particular abbreviation defined by the concepts.12
relations between them acquire that more static and objective character with
which Durkheim is generally associated.
12 As pointed out above, p. 310, other conceptual structures are subject to the
same mechanisms as concepts. The concept of snitching is part of the whole
idealized cognitive model that is reflected in the convict code, which captures
Prototype effects also have a potential social dimension. In a purely

mental perspective, prototype effects are biases in mental categorization
only. Prototype effects associated with niche concepts bias the social con-
tainers we put individuals into. If there is a highly valued male prototype
in the culture, for instance, males will be assigned social status according
to their closeness to the prototype (a real man). Hegemony therefore
triggers social prototype effects: in cases of hegemony, other groups
understand themselves as marginal, and by behaving in accordance with
this marginal position, they reinforce the hegemony (cf. p. 109).
Sinha (2009b) points out that certain conceptualizations could not
exist without material anchors, the key example being units of time. With-
out clocks, it is unlikely that minutes and seconds would be viable con-
cepts in the community. He therefore suggests that these entities are con-
stituted by the material system of representations, minutes being in effect
minutes-as-materially-represented-by-clocks. I think it is more precise
to say that minutes and seconds share with all other socially significant
conceptual categories the dual anchoring in mental representations and
causal-functional processes. Clock movements therefore represent sec-
onds (more or less accurately), rather than constitute seconds. If all clocks
stopped at five seconds to midnight, it would still be midnight five seconds
later. But if the clocks did not start again, the causal-functional mecha-
nisms that depended on seconds would not be sustainable, and seconds
would lose their status.
Like other social constructions, socially entrenched niche concepts are
lineages in the sense that Croft takes over from Hull (cf. the discussion in
ch. 6). They therefore change over time, reflecting feedback mechanisms
with reality. Also in this domain, there is a variational dimension. Gender
roles in the modern world are powerful, but to some extent conflicting. As
such, they have variable causal implications to the extent they enter into
variable practices in the community (such as favourable treatment, yield-
ing selection biases), depending on the extent to which individuals approx-
imate different normative ideals. In certain cultural contexts, such as the
the whole underground form of life, and adapting to the concept of snitch as
part of social reality enters into the larger process of adapting to the convict
code as a whole. What is special about snitching is just the lack of instantia-
tions other elements of the convict code such as staff vs. inmates are physi-
cally fully instantiated and thus less illustrative of the adaptive force of the
mental dimension. Just as there is a distinction between competency concepts
and niche concepts, there is a distinction between competency idealized cogni-
tive models and niche idealized cognitive models.
world of Kipling, being classed as a real man will have favourable conse-
quences for the options you have available; in the present-day cultural
climate there are signs that the symbolic market value of this Platonic
ideal is on the decline, judging from the social success rate of what used to
be real boys.
This status of concepts has implications for some time-honoured issues
that involve the role of language for cognition, including the Whorfian
issue, or linguistic relativity. In relation to time, Dehaene (2007) has pro-
vided evidence that suggests an influence of the availability of number
expressions for number cognition. As pointed out by Sinha (in discussion,
2007), this is not really a Whorfian effect, but rather a Vygotskyan effect,
to do with the kind of niche you live in. In the terms used above, if you live
in a community where number units have Platonic status, then these units
are part of the external, social world in which you live. Language is not the
basic, one-way causal factor that imposes categories on the unsuspecting
mind, but part of a functional equilibrium. That functional equilibrium
would probably be difficult to maintain if there were no linguistic expres-
sions available but the causal power of the linguistic categories must be
understood as part of a larger whole that includes their role as anchors of
conceptual categories, and of the success affordances (e. g. in arithmetic
classes in school) of operating with such precise number categories 13
13 Numbers (and other mathematical concepts) have always been prime candi-
dates for Platonic status. As pointed out by Deacon (in discussion, 2006), they
live up to the reputation in having properties that do not depend on how the
individual mind conceives them for instance, a civilization that found out
about numbers on their own would also some day discover the existence of
prime numbers. From the competency angle, mathematics also has a life of its
own. The existence of mathematical prodigies like Ramanujan, as pointed out
by Butterworth (1999), shows that number cognition does not depend on
beings socialized into a language of number concepts. There is thus no reason
to assume a one-way determination from a mathematically imbued social
niche to individual ability. On the other hand, the existence of prodigies does
not prove the irrelevance of adaptive processes (of which education is one
type). This type of development is also essential in relation to the discussion
about time as such, as pointed out by Sinha et al (in press) in an analysis of
cultural and linguistic practices in the Amondawa community. The concept of
time as a domain entirely separate from and abstracted out of actual events
depends both on the existence of numerical practices and on language-
dependent cultural practices that make reference to units of abstract time. For
that reason, time as such is not a universal concept, as assumed in classical CL,
but a concept that may or may not arise as a result of cultural processes.
The essential conclusion of this section is that human environmental

niches include conceptual constructs. Although these constitute a subtype
of social construction, it will be useful to have a special term for such con-
ceptual formations in their capacity as part of the social sphere. For that
reason I use the term niche concept for those conceptual constructs that
play a (causal) role in a social community.14 For every social construction
you can therefore ask what conceptual specification it is associated with,
and thus get what I would call the niche concept: if you look at what con-
stitutes a family in a community, you get the niche concept of family, etc.
Niche concepts are different from competency concepts, because compe-
tency concepts are not bound by currently operational social construc-
tions. You can read a book about gallant knights and (with the relevant
competency) understand the concept of honour as it works in the book
without worrying about what the current niche concept of honour may
be in your own culture. Snitching in the halfway house is extreme because
there were no instantiations and the causal pressure worked anyway. But
also cases that do have instantiations count as niche concepts, because
the causal patterns depends on the way members grasp current practices
in the community, and who they are disposed to put in which containers
not just on the actual instantiations.
Niche concepts could not be in the niche if they were not also in the
minds of individuals, but it follows from the logic of niche construction
that this does not entail that they are solely a property of the individuals.
The criterion for whether something is part of the niche is that there is a
selection pressure that triggers adaptive change. I have argued above that
this is the case for concepts which have the status of something you live by
in the community. In some communities, there are minutes and seconds
and six-digit figures and quantum dynamics out there, all of which you
may have to get your head around. In other communities, you may still
be safe from the adaptive pressure they exert.
14 The totality of niche concepts covers something like the same area as Foucaults
episteme (cf Foucault 1969) but has the plant-like loose cohesion that was
discussed above p. 272, and does not determine what is thinkable, only makes
some thoughts more readily thinkable than others for people with competen-
cies adapted to the niche.
3. The role of acceptance
3.1. Beliefs as social constructions: causal power and grounding
In operational constructions, there is a mutually stabilizing balance

between mental representation and social replication. The twin pillars of
acceptance and efficacy may serve as the basis of a fuzzy distinction
between two types of social construction: efficacy-heavy vs. acceptance-
heavy. Institutions like money are essentially efficacy-heavy: if the
causal machinery of monetary transactions breaks down, the mental rep-
resentation of the currency as a means of payment will not last long.
Acceptance-heavy social constructions are those where much of the inter-
est is associated with what people think, and there is a less direct relation
with aggregate-level patterns of replication. In this section, we are going
to look at some acceptance-heavy cases, and use them to be precise about
the differences between a social constructionist approach and the social
cognitive approach advocated in this book.
A closer look at the acceptance factor is interesting also because both
in cognitivist and social constructionist approaches, it is often implicitly
taken for granted that acceptance is the crucial or only factor that deter-
mines the social impact of conceptual models. As pointed out above p. 137,
it is sometimes difficult to tell conceptual models from discourses, since
the two approaches share an interest in patterns of thinking and often
have little to say about the non-representational aspects of the way the
world works. By focusing explicitly on different forms in which accept-
ance may relate to other aspects, we can highlight the reason for having a
theory that focus only on the conceptual content.
A natural point of departure is the case of beliefs. To understand the
role of beliefs per se, it is useful to begin with beliefs of the kind that enter
into the operational type of construction discussed above, using the legal
system as an example. The mental side consists in a collective belief as well
as a status assignment (cf. ch 4, p. 168) whereby the laws are the rules we
play by. The efficacy dimension is the set of practices through which offi-
cials deal with violations in accordance with the rules. The belief side is
essential because if people do not believe the system works, it will under-
mine the status assignment as well. The result may be that the social con-
struction of the legal system as the guardian of law and order disappears,
and with it the behavioural allegiance of the people to the system.
The lack of belief may be a consequence of the facts on the ground, in
which case the real cause is the failure of the operational side of the sys-
tem. The critical case is the one where the legal system is in fact working,
The role of acceptance 327
but people do not believe that it is working and start pursuing their own
justice, for no other reason than what they believe. That is why justice
must not only be done it must be seen to be done (cf. Harder 2003). The
same mechanism is at work when there is a run on the bank, triggered by
a rumour that it is going bankrupt: if everybody tries to withdraw their
money at the same time, even the most solid bank will be in serious trou-
ble. The belief that a bank is going to close down may in fact close down
the bank. This shows that the acceptance dimension is causally relevant.
But it does not show that beliefs can do the trick on their own. As an
example, if the government guarantees investors deposits, the run will not
close down the bank, whatever people may believe.
Beliefs are at the acceptance-heavy end of the scale: acceptance alone
is enough to create an individual belief. At the population level, prolifera-
tion (as always) adds a non-mental dimension. The extent to which one
can speak of popular belief depends on the number of people who share
it; but I am going to distinguish between a pure traffic jam of belief (such
as a rumour that a bank is going bankrupt) and a socially constructed
belief: there has to be an element of collective status assignment in order
for a belief to have the status of a social construction. With Searles term,
it has to be a belief of the form WE believe that .
This formula still leaves room for considerable variety. Closest to idi-
osyncratic individual beliefs are shared beliefs on the lunatic fringe, such
as those of UFO societies (Wikipedia on August 27, 2008 lists 21 different
active organizations). The social dimension need not constrain the mental
representations it may consist solely in a community-of-belief among
the participants: WE take such-and-such incidents to be sightings of emis-
saries from extraterrestrial civilizations. Even so, there is the germ of a
causal structure: integration into a larger network of fellow believers will
tend to reinforce beliefs (for the reasons discussed in ch. 6, p. 276), and
loss of belief would lead to the loss of membership in the community. If
for the sake of the argument we disregard the role of actual intrusions
from outer space, communities of this kind are instances of beliefs that
owe their existence almost entirely to the acceptance dimension of proc-
esses of social construction. In general, in any closely knit discursive com-
munity, sub-lineages of belief will arise that do not necessarily depend on
any relations with the environment. Social acceptance is the only factor,
and the construction lives in a soap bubble of its own. Every scathing
deconstructionist remark in the social constructionist repertoire applies
to such constructions.
But this is a sitting duck, and is just as uninteresting as the hard opera-
tional case to social constructionists. They typically reserve their energy
for constructions with normative implications in the cultural and political

domain, including large coherent sets of representations (ideologies)
and representations of gender relations. The appeal of social construction-
ism tends to be associated with the emperors new clothes effect, i. e.
pointing out that what masquerades as fact is really something that people
have made up. Since it is part of this idea that social constructions can
decouple themselves from the force of causal factors (otherwise social
constructions would have a realist explanation and be much less sexy),
causal factors are beside the point. The point is to see the construction as
a mere representation, especially its biases and omissions. By saying that
the emperor has no clothes on, you hope to dethrone him and put some-
thing in his place, namely your own preferred social construction. Old
gender identities and political systems can be replaced by new and better
gender identities and political systems.
This in fact puts causality right back in the centre of attention. The
question is how to replace bad constructions with better constructions.
But because social constructionism is mainly interested in the critique of
objectivism, it does not have a great deal to offer on this point. The causal
factors addressed by social constructionists are mainly factors to do with
mental and discursive representations, i. e. the acceptance part of the
agenda. Because of the general reluctance to address causal factors, it
would be misleading to take this to entail any specific theory about how
changes in the real world can be brought about, but one can perhaps say
that unless the standard belief in the see-saw effect (reinforce-and-be-
reinforced by) included a belief that reinterpretation in itself had a certain
efficacy, there would not be much point in a social constructionist critique
of the way things are. When people shake themselves free from outmoded
beliefs and associated practices, this in itself goes some way towards mak-
ing better practices accessible to them.
This is true in at least three different ways. First of all, expectations
influence everything from cancer survival to job performance. If a change
of belief induces changed expectations, they will change peoples lives.
Secondly, and perhaps most obviously, if you believe that there is a better
way to do things, you may take agentive action in order to change the
world (which you would not do if you could not see a way forward). Cen-
tral in this context is that this option includes collective intentional action.
Joint intentional action is not restricted to playing a symphony (cf. p. 155);
in democratic societies, you can join up with others to bring about changes
in the way WE do things. This is what was called the visible hand: the col-
lective aim (as symbolized by the conductors hand) enters into partici-
pant awareness. And thirdly, even those mechanisms which come under
the invisible hand can be adjusted in the interest of intentional change, by

what in economic theory is known as incentives. Beliefs are not the most
obvious examples, but Max Webers theory of the protestant ethics and
the rise of capitalism would be an example: belief that success was a sign
of Gods grace had the aggregate effect of promoting an entrepreneurial
society because people were more eager to improve themselves if they
could interpret success that way. (A purely economic example is taxation
of unwanted behaviour: if you add 50 % to the cost of emissions, economic
agents will bring down their emissions, even if they do not give a damn
about the collective goal of protecting the environment.)
Common to all these three ways in which a change of belief may be an
agent of social change is that social constructionism does not have a great
deal to say about them because it is not interested in causality. Whatever
one may believe about the scope for social construction, it means that it
can only be part of the story. A social cognitive linguistics can hope to fill
some of the gaps.
One of the things a variationist cognitive linguistics can do is relevant
for all these causal patterns: there is also a variationist dimension in social
constructions. Social constructions and their status are not the same across
the community, and prestige is not associated only with lectal choices, but
also with the beliefs and cultural manifestations you are oriented towards
(cf. also Bourdieu 1984). This includes a dual value scale of overt vs. covert
prestige, corresponding to Labovs findings: the socially dominant con-
structions (including their conceptual content) may have high overt pres-
tige but be associated with lack of warmth and trustworthiness while
local community constructions may be reassuring and familiar (even if
they may not count for much among the high and mighty). One sector
where this pattern tends to assert itself is in health care: medical diagnoses
are often felt to be a message from on high in an alien code, and as a result
help is sought in countercultural agencies, including various forms of
alternative medicine, where ailments are couched in less forbidding terms
and concepts. Also, prescription medication is widely shared in the com-
munity, to the horror of doctors, because people prefer to use pills based
on the good experience of a mate rather than having a doctor prescribe
some unknown drug.
Further, some types of experience may reflect different dominant pat-
terns of experience in different social groups. For instance, at least until
recently getting a loan was a good thing in middle and upper class terms
but a bad thing in lower class terms because in less moneyed subcultures,
a loan was a sign that you could not make ends meet and financial disaster
might be the result. If you want to understand the social potential of
beliefs, without an awareness of this variation you are essentially blind-

folded.
In general, if you want to change social reality for the better, you are
into what might be called projected social constructions. As manifested in
political programmes and action plans, they have a different direction-of-
fit from statements which purport to describe the way the world already
works. However, efficacy is still relevant. It is not enough that the repre-
sentation of the world sounds good, you also need to worry about whether
there is a plausible relation between the ends and the means: is the pro-
jected construction viable, and sustainable? Again, beliefs are only half
the story.
Although explicit purposeful acceptance of an idea can successfully
drive change on its own, as it did to some extent in the introduction of the
welfare state in Denmark, it always has a sleeping partner in the form of
concurrent macro-level invisible hand processes and the micro-level
adaptation processes they trigger. The classic confrontation between con-
servatives and social democrats in Denmark in the early to mid 20th cen-
tury came across as an ideological confrontation between two representa-
tions, with an affinity to Lakoffs two family models. Which representation
of the world do you believe in: do you align yourself with the state as a
helping parent or with a belief that you should solve your own problems?
However, acceptance of these beliefs depended on what kind of social
reality would emerge as a result of the reforms. If welfare reforms created
a society of people incapable of helping themselves, that would affect the
level of public support for the idea. If you believed in the welfare state, it
was therefore natural to deny that the causal structure of the world would
work in such a way. The two sides are functionally related, because bad
real-world effects would undermine the sustainability of the project.
The history of ideas can therefore only be studied in connection with
the social reality that the ideas are about. In Denmark, some of the wel-
fare institutions had invisible hand effects that were seen to promote
acquired helplessness and undermine equilibrium conditions to such an
extent that they were abolished again. Reforms were instituted that
increased incentives to be self-supporting a general feature of third
way social democracy. But allegations that the whole idea was unsound
and people would respond to welfare by refusing to solve their own prob-
lems and wait for the state to do everything for them, have by and large
turned out to be wrong: people did not generally want to be welfare cli-
ents, and much to the chagrin of new liberalists, Denmarks compromise
flexicurity position has created a business environment that is consist-
ently rated in the world elite.
The possibility of democratic change has implications for how to

understand some politically central and controversial operational social
constructions: nations, and national identities. Modern nation states
belong historically at a point after Bourdieus transition from doxa to
orthodoxy (cf. p. 316), which is generally assumed to have to do with the
fact that a nation state requires an explicit conceptual model. Nations are
Imagined Communities, cf. Anderson ([1983] 2006) because they have
too many citizens for a direct community-of-practice to be possible. In
this, they differ from the hunter-gatherer community which in virtue of
language could grow from the size of bands of monkeys up to the size of
150 people, cf. Dunbar (1996).
The concept of imagined community has the usual hint of emperors
new clothes about it, and as we shall discuss in more detail in chapter 8 on
multiculturalism, it is a key target of deconstructive social construction-
ism. However, the term imagined should not in this context be under-
stood as contrasting with real communities (cf. Anderson 2006: 6).
Instead, it provides an interesting example of complex causal relations
between conceptual representations and social forces. Conceptualizations
that played a constitutive role in relation to nation-building had to align
themselves with aspects of existing social reality, and Anderson points out
various such anchorings, from administrative units in Latin America to
the market forces combined with the printing press as agents of the ver-
nacular languages in Europe. But the conceptual representations them-
selves also contributed to the causal process for instance by the basic
function of concepts in providing a container for entities that would not
be bedfellows except in virtue of this particular conceptualization. The
alignment that was brought about by the new concept of national identity
therefore helped to undermine the old feudal divisions:
If Hungarians deserved a national state, then that meant Hungarians, all of
them; it meant a state in which the ultimate locus of sovereignty had to be the
collectivity of Hungarian-speakers and readers; and, in due course, the liquida-
tion of serfdom, the promotion of popular education, the expansion of the suf-
frage, and so on () not least because the conceptual model was set in ine-
radicable place (Anderson 2006: 82)
The causal power of this conceptual alignment (as allied with all the his-
torical processes Anderson describes) also underpins the loyalty that a
nation can count on. This loyalty works via incorporating the tie with the
community (as conceived or imagined) into the individuals sense of iden-
tity. Among the consequences of this loyalty is not only the willingness of
citizens to go to war and sacrifice their lives for the sake of the nation, but
also to accept election results because the majority of the citizens voted
for them, even if you personally voted for the other side.
Without that loyalty, representative democracy would be impossible.
This has a moral for the projected social constructions that leftist social
constructionists are typically interested in: if you want to deconstruct
nations, but want to preserve democracy, you need to have an (idea about
an) alternative unit that can command equal loyalty, or you will (as a mat-
ter of causal efficacy rather than belief) deconstruct democracy together
with the nation. As we have seen, nations are real communities only
because they are imagined.
This section has discussed various forms of social constructions where
acceptance of beliefs play a crucial role. The general moral is that an
account of social constructions is incomplete without an account of the
relations between the representations and the rest of the world. Social
cognitive linguistics can follow in the footsteps of classic CL by capturing
this reliance on context in terms of grounding. Based on the discussion
above, we can begin by setting up a concept of sociocultural grounding as
a designation for the underpinning that a particular belief has in the com-
munity. It is meant to capture the whole status-cum-causal efficacy that is
relevant for understanding how participants will respond to utterances
evoking this belief.
Because of selection pressure, there is a link between sociocultural
grounding and bodily grounding: participants adapt to beliefs that play a
role in the community, because it would be impractical not to be able to
take part in a community life predicated on those beliefs. The alliance
between doxa and habitus also exemplifies the link between sociocultural
and embodied grounding, but constitutes a vanishing point for explicit
beliefs: the world just works that way.
3.2. The interface between niche and flow in social construction(s)
The focus on acceptance also provides a suitable approach for describing

the interface between the niche and the flow in relation to (other) social
constructions rather than language. This can simultaneously throw light
on another aspect of the difference between the social cognitive view I am
defending and the more radical forms of social constructionism.
In chapter 3, we saw that there are forms of social constructionism that
focus strongly on the dynamics of online processes and miminizes reliance
on pre-existing mental and social structure. Social reality is continually
being constructed online, and the construction processes that are going on
right now might any moment be disrupted and replaced with processes
that bring about different constructions. It follows from the niche-based
approach, however, that there are social formations which exist also
offline, i. e. distinct from actual online processes. These offline features are
not objective or Platonic (as in the forms of realism that social construc-
tionists typically point their guns at) but understood as sediments that
emerge from and are maintained by the flow. What does this imply for the
understanding of the process dimension in social reality?
The most central implication is that there is no contradiction between
saying that social reality is basically a process and saying that at any given
time it has certain properties rather than others. Like language (cf. ch 6),
social reality as a whole is panchronic, not (just) diachronic or synchronic.
As we have seen, for operational social constructions this implies that in a
stable ideal equilibrium, the flow dimension works so as to reproduce the
niche properties at the end of each cycle: jurisdiction works so smoothly
as to uphold the laws to everyones satisfaction, etc. This also applies to
socially constructed beliefs, which are thus confirmed by a collective social
process.
This view of social reality contrasts clearly with the extreme view which
has been mistakenly ascribed to Derrida (cf. p. 113): one interpretation
gives rise to the next, and there is nothing else to say about what is the
case. No one adopts this view explicitly but it exerts a continuing under-
ground fascination. What plausibility this anything goes position has is
probably due to its association with literature (where Derridas main
influence is felt), and with an individual reader or author. In such a situa-
tion, what is involved is not a social construction, but an individual mental
construction. The lack of an adequate theory of collectively shared mean-
ing has made it easy to confuse the two, with unfortunate consequences. In
the absence of feedback from the interpretive community (cf. the discus-
sion of Fish p. 190), anything goes may not be far from the truth.
The niche view implies that the meanings people live by are those
that are shared with the community. This does not preclude individual
creativity or forays into the unknown, but contextualizes these within a
field of forces defined by meaning in the community. The causal underpin-
ning of this assumption is the constant everyday processes of mutual
negotiation and confirmation of meaning described by ethnomethodolo-
gists, cf. Garfinkel (1972): you can behave deviantly, but also in your own
understanding, it will be felt as a deviation (in accordance with the causal
structure of hegemony).
Ethnomethodology is among the frequently cited sources of the view
that there is no fixed structure, only a process. But as shown in the case of
the Garfinkel-inspired account of the concept of snitching in the halfway

house, ethnomethodology most certainly does not imply that anything
goes. The presence of this constant process cuts both ways, as indicated in
the niche approach: it shows that there are socially anchored meanings
and norms in the community, and what you say will be evaluated (and
responded to) against that background (cf. the discussion of gender iden-
tity below p. 349 f.). Yet Garfinkels experiments showed that the rules
could be changed, it might be argued. Some students who started to hag-
gle in the supermarket came home with cut-price goods. So perhaps any-
thing goes after all?
The crucial distinction between the niche-plus-flow perspective and
the flow-only perspective is between two time scales. The immediate,
online flow of events is not the only thing in the universe it is one instal-
ment in an overall panchronic pattern. In addition to online events, there
exist reproductive cycles of events in which selection mechanisms deter-
mine what is going to be around in the long run. The individual may choose
to ignore the long run and see where it gets him; but a scientific account
has to include the long run. If attempts to haggle are successful, haggling
will proliferate and become a new feature of the niche but that is not a
process that can be captured by looking only at the current online hag-
gling event.
In this context, an especially interesting case is the presence of recur-
rent structures such as the blaming game described Potter and Wetherell
(cf. above p. 124). Such entrenched behavioural patterns are examples of
how flow and structure are interdependent both in the niche and the
competency dimension. Lawyers, witnesses and criminals know the game
and play it with varying degrees of skill, and membership of the commu-
nity entails that you have participant awareness of what is going on. As
characteristic of niche features, it exerts selection pressure on the criminal
community: the more artful dodgers of blame assignment get increased
selective fitness.
It is also interesting because it clearly has an underpinning in pre-con-
ceptual embodied habitus: everyone is familiar with the physical discom-
fort that you feel when you end up with the blame. We may suppose that
this is associated with fear of reprisals, loss of status in the pecking-order,
and thus links up with very basic selection pressures. This also explains
why the blaming game (once it is up and running) takes priority over the
rational agenda: when a question of blame emerges in an official meeting,
those who blunder on with the rational agenda are easy prey to executive
predators. In some sub-niches blame assignment is more important than
others, and this will determine the quality of life in the niche as well as the
adaptive competencies of participants. So in terms of this book, to describe

the blaming game as something that only exists when it is actually going
on would not be a full account. (The destructive consequences have moti-
vated the management philosophy of appreciative inquiry, cf. Ham-
mond 1996).
The dual time scale is the same that was discussed in relation to lan-
guage change in ch. 6: only when conventions change has there been a
language change: a usage event is not enough. An interesting speculation
is: are the mechanisms whereby flow events get sedimented as niche prop-
erties the same units of language as for units of accepted beliefs? As docu-
mented in in usage-based linguistics, frequency is crucial for the historical
development of linguistic expressions (cp. Bybee and Hopper 2001, Bybee
2006). If it works for language change, why not for belief change?
There is clearly something in it, as expressed by Lakoffs point that you
strengthen a frame by evoking it (cf. p. 60). But a certain caution is called
for. The person associated with the observation that brute frequency is
what matters also for the entrenchment of political ideas is Joseph Goeb-
bels. If that were the whole truth there would be identity between propa-
gation and propaganda: all you need to do is physically reproduce your
favourite ideas often enough. The Goebbels position thus reflects an
uncompromising social constructionist position avant la lettre: the mind
reflects constructions of meaning as represented in the text, and there is
no access to text-independent reality.
Nazi propaganda was frighteningly efficient; but there are reasons to
believe the parallel is not complete. Words are means of evoking meaning
potentials, not belief systems. There is a lineage involved both for word
meaning and belief, but the two are not the same lineage. It is natural to
expect that the expressions that are used most frequently are also those
that evoke meanings most efficiently but that does not necessarily
extend to beliefs. Beliefs, as we have seen, may be anchored in the causal
structure of the world in various ways, and these might be expected to
stand in the way of blind processes of reinforcement both because of
invisible selection pressures, and because human beings sometimes actu-
ally know what they are doing, even when acting collectively. Individuals
clearly download beliefs from the ongoing traffic but there are two
processes that distinguish real people from repositories. First of all, adap-
tation implies selection rather than knee-jerk impact. Second of all, indi-
viduals have a life history and a set of priorities that follow from their
epigenetic development and participation in normative communities
(p. 278) There may be a few cultural dopes around, in Giddenss (1979)
phrase people whose mental representations simply reproduce the
norms of the social community. But in being so totally adapted, they con-
stitute deviations.
Recognizing the mutual dependence-and-distinctness of flow and
niche can also throw light on a continuing misunderstanding that has
plagued the debate on social construction in relation to the institution of
science. Science as an institution is interesting because of its ambiguous
status when it comes to the balance between representation and causal
underpinning. As pointed out gleefully by social (de)constructionists, the
organizational structure of the scientific community is basically identical
to that of any other subculture, including UFO societies: meetings and
discussions, disagreements, competing beliefs and groups, focusing on dif-
ferent observations and theories to account for them, with loyalties and
pressures in relation to group identification. But this does not imply that
science as a set of operational beliefs is no better than those of the UFO
society. Although science includes many representations which have
doubtful functional relations with the surrounding world, there are two
forms of flow without which science as a social construction would not
have the status it actually has.
First, in experimental disciplines conceptual representations interact
with the environment: experimentation gives continuous feedback, which
by the rules of the game counts as supporting or eroding confidence in
the predictions of the conceptual models. Secondly, based on such predic-
tions, new technology can be constructed, from the steam engine to the
cellphone: if the conceptual representations stand up as predictions of
what happens, the bridge will stand up. Both processes have to make
themselves felt via the Darwinist dynamics of publication described by
Hull (1988), and that is by no means trivial but these mechanisms are
anchored outside the online, UFO-like social process. Rather than abso-
lute truth, we may speak of the factual grounding of statements based on
experimental evidence, understood as the track record of representations
in predicting the way the world works (we return to this concept in more
detail below in the discussion of bullshit).
This has important implications for the understanding of conflicting
discursive constructions of science. Potter and Wetherell (1987: 146f, citing
Gilbert and Mulkay 1984) describe two different interpretive repertoires
for beliefs about science, roughly associated with two different sets of gen-
res (formal papers vs. informal conversation). In the empiricist reper-
toire that is found in formal papers, empirical data is the central driving
force; in the contingent repertoire, prior commitments and personal
characteristics play an important role. The discrepancies are reconciled by
reference to the truth will out device, abbreviated TWOD, expressing
the belief that whatever the turbulence introduced by the personal fac-
tors, in the long run the data will be decisive.
If you leave the analysis at that point, consisting in the two discursive
repertoires plus the TWOD as a rhetorical device, you have prevented
yourself from understanding relations between the conceptualizations of
science as part of the discursive flow and the social construction that con-
stitutes science as part of the human niche. In the terms of the position I
have defended, Potter and Wetherells analysis (if left to stand on its own)
is an instance of usage fundamentalism in the theory of science: letting
the properties of the flow have the last word. The point is not to vindicate
a positivist belief in the universal victory of data-driven truth. The point is
that the relation between the process of talk on the one hand and science
in the niche on the other is functional, driven by the dynamics of selection
and adaptation (cf. Hull 1988: 354f).15
The same simplistic confrontation, between a discredited eternal
objective reality on the one hand and an all-encompassing process on the
other, is also found in relation of sociolinguistics. An example that involves
both sociological and linguistic dimensions is the discussion in Eckert
(2000) of the relationship between macro-level factors and local processes
of self-construction, as mediated both by choices of linguistic variants and
self-categorization.
Eckert rightly points out the essential contribution of the local activity
against presumptions that everything can be explained by macro-social
causal factors such as gender or class. But because Eckert wants to avoid
both objectification and the notion of the cultural dope (Eckert 2000:
44), she describes her view in terms that may appear to go against the
notion of niche properties:
15 There is thus nothing inherently contradictory in saying that the personality

and prior beliefs of scientists play a role in the online process of science, and
simultaneously believing that the long-term selection pressure will winnow
out these effects. The most important conclusion is that it focuses on the
degree to which the conceptual representations of a scientific school actually
have functional interaction with the world outside the community of accept-
ance. As competition for research grants increases, the logic of evolutionary
pressures will tend to favour approaches that manage to insulate themselves
from detrimental feedback from the real world, including critical discussions.
It will be an important criterion of health for academic communities whether
they manage to withstand those pressures which is another reason to wel-
come the ongoing empirical turn in CL, cf. ch. 2.
It is impossible for a social theory of language to view langue as a pre-existing

convention, for a social theory of language must be about the process of con-
ventionalization. By the same token, it is impossible for a social theory of lan-
guage to view the individual speakers competence as a simple internalization
of convention. Convention and individual competences are mutually produced
and reproduced in practice, thus linguistic practice is not simply the consensual
use of a common system. Convention is not a thing but a process (Eckert
2000: 45)
Her argument against pre-existing convention, however, does not apply

to a view of langue and competency as properties that have emerged from
usage without being identical to usage. For a child who acquires the lan-
guage of the community, convention is in fact pre-existing in relation to
the childs socialization process. It is true that convention and individual
competences are mutually produced and reproduced in practice but it
does not follow, as Eckert claims, that they are not pre-existing (viewed
from the perspective of the individual online event). Convention is a mov-
ing target, but it moves in a different time scale from online flow.16
However, her actual account of the relation between individual events
and the community is (as far as I can see) in agreement with the niche
flow distinction. An example is the case of those highschool students who
are categorised as in-betweens: the niche (in my terminology) offers two
positively specified options: jocks/preppies or burnouts. Faced with
those two, some students opt for the non-excluded middle but this cat-
egorization is obviously not the result of purely local acts of self-construc-
tion it shows, as pointed out by Eckert herself (Eckert 2000: 3), that
these categories dominate the lives of even those who studiously avoid
them. Unless you operate with offline niche properties (as the context of
the process of identity construction), there is no place where can you put
the jock and burnout identities, and no account of the (selection) pressure
they exert. Bourdieus theory of symbolic capital also captures the pres-
ence of these identities as part of the aggregate construction of the com-
munity (just as the overall monetary system is part of the aggregate con-
struction of financial capital); and significantly, Eckert uses Bourdieus
16 I discussed this with a sociolinguist colleague, arguing that when you entered
the community it was handy to be aware that hello would be understood as a
greeting, while defenestration would not. Without batting an eyelid, he argued
that nothing stopped people from using defenestration as a greeting if they
wanted to. My point is that it would take more than a single situated usage
event.
term linguistic market (Eckert 2000: 13), which means that she in fact
recognizes mechanisms that work at the invisible-hand-level of symbolic
economy.
Kristiansen (2008) shows how pre-existing features and the options
for personal choice of speech styles go naturally together in a social cogni-
tive framework; and Eckert (2000: 12) gives an anecdote about her seven-
year-old nephew that can be used to illustrate this. Shortly after his family
had moved to a lower-class linguistic community, she asked him how he
felt about it, to which he replied: Im the Jersey Jerk and I live in the
sewer in perfect New Jersey vernacular (with which Eckert was famil-
iar from her own childhood). Eckert uses it to illustrate the high level of
awareness that children have of the social dynamics around them, and
how this is reflected in their own personal linguistic and self-constructive
agency. But this triumph of personal social agency presupposes rather
than refutes the pre-existence of niche community norms (to which he
had so impressively adapted).
3.3. Bullshit: function and factual grounding
Bullshit is the type of communication that constitutes the greatest chal-

lenge if you want to understand language use as having a crucial interface
with extra-discursive reality: the extreme point on the scale when it comes
to the balance between acceptance and efficacy. Bullshit also illustrates a
phenomenon that has its strongest point in the flow, rather than in the
mind or social reality. But for that reason it can throw light on why it
would be wrong to see unconstrained Derrida-style semiosis as the whole
truth, rather than just as an interesting special effect.
Bullshit has been insightfully analysed in philosophical terms by Frank-
furt (2005). Its key characteristic is that the speaker does not care whether
what he says is true or not. The liar and the person who speaks the truth
are (cf. Frankfurt 2005: 60) playing the same language game: it is impor-
tant for both whether reality matches the statement or not. When Joe says,
I want the $5 you borrowed the other day, and you reply But I have already
paid you back you may be lying or you may be speaking the truth, but in
both cases the facts matter.
The bullshitter, in contrast, i. e. the Fourth of July speaker who says
(Frankfurt 2005: 16) our great and blessed country, whose Founding
Fathers under divine guidance create a new beginning for mankind, does
not care whether the audience believes this or not. The point of bullshit-
ting as a type of language use is that the speaker says something because
it sounds good in the situation, and the issue of whether it is true or not is
beside the point. There are occasions when bullshit occurs more naturally
than at other times: Frankfurts Fourth of July is a good example of the
genre that Aristotle called epideictic rhetoric, i. e. ceremonial occasions
where it is important to make the audience feel good about itself as a
group.17
Frankfurt, in accordance with the philosophical tradition, takes for
granted that truth vs. falsity is the key property of a sentence. Cognitive
linguistics, in contrast, does not have a clear-cut account of the place of
truth (for reasons outlined above, p. 18). The issue of bullshit, however,
pinpoints the need for a social cognitive linguistics to develop an approach
that can address Frankfurts concerns. The basic features of such an alter-
native can be inferred from Crofts evolutionary framework, if we com-
bine it with the distinction between internal, representational and consti-
tutive properties of linguistic meaning (cf. p. 164).
In a social cognitive context, this is an aspect of the grounding issue
the relation between meaning and its experiential basis. The dimension of
grounding that is critical in the case of bullshit is not sociocultural ground-
ing, because that captures the status of a belief in the community, and
bullshit may well have a strong sociocultural grounding. Factual ground-
ing, as briefly introduced above, designates the track record of a represen-
tation in predicting the way the world works. It may be understood as a
special case of the efficacy dimension, the one that is functionally relevant
when you use a conveyed meaning in dealing with the world: is it an effi-
cacious guide to the world? 18
It follows from chapters 5 and 6 that instead of having a presupposed
objective relation between language and the world, we need to view a reli-
able relation between linguistic description and states of the world as an
achievement. Such an achievement depends on a lineage that needs two
17 Note that this description exemplifies a specific location in the niche where
bullshit is functionally relevant. Bullshit used in situations where bullshit does
the trick is a form of adaptation a language game that you might want to
learn to play. If there is no well-founded reason for feeling good about who-
ever is staging the event, bullshit may be the only way to make the occasion a
success. The ethical problem is limited if Granny does not hear the exact
truth about herself on her 90th birthday, who cares?
18 In contrast to bodily grounding and sociocultural grounding, factual ground-
ing thus applies mainly to representations used as maps to reality, including
assertive statements made in discourse. It is less interesting, although margin-
ally applicable, to games, questions, imperatives, fiction, etc.
legs to stand on: on the one hand, a reliable coordination of conventions,

on the other a co-ordination between utterance content and the way the
world is. What keeps these two sets of processes, in spite of lying and bull-
shit, on the rails (to a variable extent) is the same functional mechanism
that keeps all aspects of language on the rails: language and language use
adapt to feedback, and those who cry wolf may fall prey to the selection
pressure they thereby generate. Naturally, feedback can only keep linguis-
tically encoded representations accurate if messages are tested against
feedback from the world. This is a crucial difference of perspective
between the concepts of truth and factual grounding statements may
be true irrespective of testing, while it is the track record of testing a
usage based property, in other words that constitutes the factual ground-
ing of a statement.19
Not all statements can very easily be furnished with factual grounding.
If someone tells you that the new government policy will bring an end to
unemployment, there may be no reliable way to ascertain what relation
this has to reality and thus there may be no factual grounding. Most peo-
ple develop a sense of the standard rate of factual grounding in speakers
with whom they regularly interact because it is useful to know whether
it is wise to adapt your dealings with reality to what these people say. We
tend to make a note of those people of whom it is true that there is no
reliable relation to any feedback from the hors-texte.20
This is relevant for understanding the social niche of bullshit. Bullshit
is evolutionarily ill fitted to situations where language is used as a guide to
the represented world, while it would not run into selection pressure in
contexts where no one uses it that way as at grannys birthday. In this, it
19 This is not limited to scientific communication. Being able to give an accurate

representation (for instance of what you are going to need as a tourist in
Egypt) is functionally useful for an audience of people who are travelling to
Egypt. The mechanism is the same as what drives sociolinguistic adaptation: if
you do not get the right outcome of using a particular linguistic expression,
you may select a different form next time. Travel guides that are written based
on experience in the country and regularly used and revised based on feed-
back from users thereby acquire factual grounding, without having to be true
in a foundationalist sense. The world changes all the time and what was true
yesterday may be false tomorrow, and so there may be factual grounding also
in the case of statements that need to be improved and updated.
20 The factual grounding of a social construction may sound reminiscent of its
causal underpinning, but the causal underpinning is what keeps it going, and
that may have very little to do with its predictive powers.
is like fiction: it is part of the rules of the game that fiction does not have
to match up with referents and properties in the world. The competent
reader builds up a universe of people and events whose point is the expe-
rience of entering into the fictitious world, whether for the aesthetic expe-
rience, for instruction, or for existential enrichment.
Bullshit, however, is less clearcut than fiction. Even on the most cere-
monial of occasions, self-congratulation works the better the more real
the achievements invoked are. Bullshit comes in different varieties, and
can to some extent be placed on a scale with fiction at one extreme and
lying at the other. When you tell not strictly truthful anecdotes about
yourself and others, listeners may take it either way. What is ethically
interesting, however, is the kind of bullshit that approximates lying. This
occurs in cases where there is an element both of making people feel good
and of dealing with the real world. The issue becomes especially salient in
relation to acceptance-heavy social constructions, where causal efficacy
plays a relatively minor role. Nowhere is this mixture more explosive than
in politics.
The most effective form of bullshit is the one that can invoke an accept-
ance-heavy social construction with solid sociocultural grounding. The
Fourth of July speaker invokes the founding fathers because he knows
they will go down well; and whether this is innocent or doubtful depends
on whether the ceremonial acceptance of the national lore is merely a
cause for celebration or it is used to promote acceptance of something
that engages with the real world. Voters need to be alert here. It would be
absurd to cavil at the fact that voters respond favourably to hearing things
they like, but it would also be cynical to deny that voters also have an
interest in whether the words of the politicians hook up with they way the
world works (both at the fact end and the promise end two different
directions of fit that are both crucial!). The functional contribution of fac-
tual information to the functioning of democracy is different from the role
of facts in speeches at Grannys birthday.
Because our world pictures are socially constructed, the social proc-
esses whereby they are constructed matter. If bullshit is spreading in the
political context, as also stressed by Frankfurt, it is in a sense more danger-
ous than lying, because in lying you take factuality seriously. Bullshit is
useless as input to the process of constructing a picture of the way the
world works, so whenever you recognize that you are listening to bullshit
you turn off the process of adjusting your understanding. The easiest way
out is to put the blame on the politicians but that would be to shortcut
the social complexity that is the issue here. Functional mechanisms are
never a single persons fault. The reason we as voters cannot avoid respon-
sibility is the role of the invisible (or visible) hand. We need to search our
own souls: do we favour politicians who say pleasant things to us, or do we
prefer politicians who say only things that engage operationally with the
world at both the fact and the promise end?
And the risk of oversimplifying does not stop there. There are many
grey shades between bullshit and Sunday school truthfulness. Hype may
be considered one of them, understood as the extreme positive end of the
scale of what can be said about someones merits without downright viola-
tion of the maxim of quality. It differs from bullshit in that the sender
cares about whether the description is true or not but it is similar in that
the desire to praise is motivated independently of how well-deserved the
praise is. There is a social competency issue involved in dealing with the
different shades of grey: a nave listener to hype may draw conclusions
from it that would never occur to more seasoned citizens.
This is politically significant also in relation to another grey zone genre.
Like hype, spin is different in principle from bullshit. The metaphor of
spin draws on a source domain in which you can add a property to some-
thing (e. g. a tennis ball) which nevertheless remains the same, and spin is
therefore related to construal. It would be hard for cognitive linguists to
insist on the centrality of construal while protesting against all forms of
spin; and if we follow Lakoffs advice and try to frame the debate, we can-
not blame others for doing it. Political communication has always relied
on the ability of politicians to get the public to see things their way, and
the only new thing about it is the rapidly increasing degree of profession-
alization. When professional spinners up the ante, we as participants in
the joint activity of democratic debate need to upgrade our ability to rec-
ognize what spin is being applied. It would also be a democratic advantage
if the visible hand could be mobilized to exert pressure on what is going to
be acceptable. Lakoff rightly includes the commitment to reason and truth
in his higher rationality (Lakoff 2006: 256) We may understand bullshit
in a broad sense as covering all forms of hype and spin that go too far
and try to rally voters round factual grounding and the demand for
accountability that goes with it.
Whether or not this ideal aim is successful in concrete cases, I see no
alternative once it is realized that that voters as a population are respon-
sible for the selection side of the evolution of democracy. If (s)election
processes winnow out bullshitters, bullshitting will be eliminated from
public affairs, regardless of the ethical standards of individual politicians.
If there are things we want to believe so very much that we do not care
whether they are true or not, politicians who say those things will get
elected. Both cynicism and self-indulgent lack of interest in factual
grounding in the electorate will cause a spiral of deterioration. If people

have stopped believing in anything the politicians say, there is no longer
any possibility of electing a politician whose statements actually engage
operationally with the way the world works. Political action, like justice,
must not only be done but also be seen to be done.
Politics is not the only problematic domain; all complex organizations
face the problem of corporate bullshit. But selection pressures work dif-
ferently at different levels of a hierarchy. At the lowest level, employees
are typically engaged with the world outside the organization, whether at
the assembly line, at the coal face or with social clients. The feedback they
get comes from that interface. The higher you get, the more your feedback
comes in linguistically mediated forms. Mid-level managers are expected
to adjust the organization in relation to strategic targets, which are some-
what less tangible than actual material output. The ability to describe the
current state of the organization in ways that make readers feel good has
higher survival value the higher you go in the organization.
This will be familiar to those who have been functioning teachers and
at the same time taken part in academic or administrative discussions of
education. Administrators and politicians who discuss teaching and learn-
ing without direct experience in the practice of teaching, naturally anchor
their statements in reports and programmes. These people are evaluated
by their ability to suggest and implement reforms (including strategic tar-
gets) that make audiences feel good about the current and future state of
the educational system. They get status, or symbolic capital, by talking
about and promoting linguistically encoded visions, not by adapting their
utterances to what really happens in the classroom.
This, of course, does not prevent them from believing in what they are
saying, and from doing their best to learn also from feedback emanating
from the classrooms. But clearly if the pressures of work force them to
choose, it would be far less risky for them to stop paying attention to the
real world in the classroom than it would to get out of sync with the mech-
anisms of status assignment in their hierarchical position. If accepted pol-
icies are at odds with reality on the ground, the causality of the institu-
tional environment may thus, by selection pressure, ruthlessly eliminate
all representations with any factual grounding from the executive tier of
the organization.
If you have a social constructionist approach, this might appear to con-
firm the autonomy of social constructions from the causal structure of the
real world. But of course the opposite is the case: it is a causal mechanism
that is behind the propagation of bullshit. If you want to drive out the
bullshit and replace it with something that is more operational in relation
to the represented world, simply to offer a picture that one thinks is pref-
erable will not do the trick. It is the causal feedback with the environment
that has to be changed. Education is of course not the only field in which
there is a considerable public situated at a comfortable distance from the
coal face of reality. Both bullshit and radical social constructionism have
higher viability in such communities, including the academic communities,
than most other places. The Sokal Hoax would not have been possible
otherwise.
For this reason, bullshit is relevant to the discussion of the difference
between poststructural discourse analysis and a grounded socio-cognitive
approach. It is perfectly true that there are many social situations where
there is no feedback from any represented world, and discursive construc-
tions are all we have and this may be used by clever people to promote
their cause. The more short-term the perspective, the less feedback there
will be, and in the total immediacy of online communication it is therefore
largely true that there is no hors-text available. Functional feedback
takes time. In fiction, this is harmless in fact it is the whole point: we read
novels in order to get at the constructions it triggers in us, and the more
totally absorbed we are in the fictional universe, the better. But political
and corporate bullshit is a different matter. Unless our descriptive appa-
ratus includes a role for feedback from the represented world, there is
something missing.
This problem is not equally prevalent in all cultures. We may tenta-
tively posit a scale from hunter-gatherer communities, who get their living
from direct interaction with the physical environment, via a path of
increasing sociocultural complexity up to present-day postmodernity. This
is not just a question of complex hierarchical organizations. In a society
where virtual reality is a growth industry, where futures can be bought and
sold, the link between symbolic representations and tangible reality gets
more and more indirect. Typical of face-to-face cultures is a scepticism
with respect to the trustworthiness of linguistic representations (cp. e. g.
Willerslev 2007: 171), and insistence on relying on your own direct experi-
ence. In continuation of this, one might expect that the more cultural com-
plexity, the greater the scope for bullshit also in situations where repre-
sentations are actually used as a guide for action. It may still be impossible
to fool all of the people all of the time, but other people than Frankfurt
sometimes get the uncomfortable feeling that the proportion may be
going in the wrong direction.
3.4 Re-conceptualization and social reality
Acceptance is the main constituent of sociocultural grounding, which

includes entrenchment (also at the individual, embodied level). To the
extent you understand conceptualization solely as emerging from such
grounding relationships, you have to live with the concepts you have got:
one thing you cannot replace is the sum total of your previous experience.
But if concepts and their grounding are viewed as part of a panchronic
pattern that includes persistence or erosion over time, new perspectives
arise. In a system where selection was entirely due to impersonal forces,
one would have to wait and hope; but because of the role of the visible
hand in sociocultural evolution, that is not all there is to say. By visible-
hand collective action, it is possible to aim at a change affecting meaning-
in-society based on collective aims as expressed in joint, collaborative
communication. You can, for instance, invite fellow members of the com-
munity to change their acceptance pattern and adopt new concepts that
allow them to grasp reality in other ways.
Both in relation to competency and niche, we have seen that concepts
are parts of reality in their own right, irreducible to the properties of indi-
vidual exemplars. Otherwise it would not matter what categories were
used to generalize about things in the niche, and the individual usage act
of categorizing an instance as belonging to a category would be empty.
Reconceptualization as visible-hand activity targets niche concepts, not
competency concepts: it is OK for members to remain capable of under-
standing concepts in the old way, as long as they collectively start to act on
reality in terms of the new ones.
The freedom to align objects in the community in alternative ways is a
consequence of the same basic freedom of construal that in classic CL
liberated the mind from point-to-point correspondence with objective
facts. Concepts provide an essential potential for decoupling from founda-
tional determination and acting upon the world in alternative ways. As has
been argued throughout, this conceptual freedom must be kept from
becoming submerged in social-constructionist relativism, usage funda-
mentalism or too literal interpretations of grounding.
I am going to give two main examples of usage events that illustrate
the potential of reconceptualization as an event in social space: the first is
about diagnostic categories in psychiatry, which exemplifies a high-level
issue with a focus on the categorial level. The second tackles a basic-level
concept in a variational and meaning-constructional perspective, the con-
cept of woman. The reasoning applies to both the niche dimension and
the competency dimension but as always, they are not guaranteed to

march in lockstep.
In 1979 a new set of categories of psychiatric diagnoses were launched
(the 10th International Classification ofDdiseases, cf. Kaplan and Sadock
2000: 671). Categories of diseases are potentially richly grounded in all
dimensions. Psychiatric conditions are experientially based in human life;
they are socially salient and historically variable (as described by Foucault,
among others); and they are now being studied with new levels of preci-
sion through experimental findings in the form of molecular and brain
imaging data. The development of a new set of diagnostic categories in the
last decades of the 20th century had a quite specific role in the process of
trying to improve the ability of psychiatrists to benefit as much as possible
from sharing experience.
The heritage of psychiatric diagnoses was a mixture of elements from
different traditions (French, German, Scandinavian, Latin American, cf.
Kaplan and Sadock 2000: 692), based on mixed criteria including theories
of the origin of the disease (Scandinavian psychiatry, for instance, had a
category of psychogenic psychosis, i. e. insanity caused by mental expe-
rience). The result was that psychiatrists had difficulties in finding out
whether cases described in the literature were similar to cases that they
came across in their own practice. (A line from the film Analyze that
comes to mind, in which Robert De Niro, playing the mobster, asks Billy
Crystal whether he can keep the talk going by being a bit vague, and Billy
Crystal answers: I am a psychiatrist. Believe me, I can be vague).
The new international catalogue therefore sets out to provide a range
of diagnoses based solely on phenomenological criteria, i. e. overtly man-
ifested features that avoid all assumptions about underlying causes. The
diagnoses are not classical all-and-only, they refer to prototypes and
allow for atypical and residual cases, and they are based on observations
along several different axes with scope for variation in feature attribution.
The process involved a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the whole
field of instantiations of psychiatric illness. Crucially, however, they did
not reflect
(1) changes in the experience of mental illness, i. e. they were not based on
patients reporting their condition in new ways
(2) changes in assumptions about discursive or practical consequences of cate-
gorizing a patient in a particular way, i. e. they were not bound up with specific
assumptions about treatment or doctor-patient communication
(3) changes in assumptions about underlying causes of disease, i. e. they did not
reflect a new theory of how the objective world works
The categories were therefore (partially) autonomous in relation to the

levels to which rigorous cognitivists, social constructionists and objectiv-
ists would like to nail conceptual categories. They served a function that is
uniquely associated with linguistic categorization, namely to align a com-
plex multivariate field of instantiations by categorizing them in ways that
might in future turn out to be functionally useful. The categorization is
therefore subject to functional pressures that will cause it to change in
subsequent editions (as explicitly heralded when the new diagnostic cat-
egories were introduced). Naturally, there have been intense debates and
suggestions for improvement, and no one knows what the ultimate socio-
cultural (also in the professional community) and factual grounding will
be, or how the conceptual apparatus will evolve.
This set of categories was explicitly designed to cut practices free of all
existing forms of grounding. But they were normatively bound by the
grounding requirement in the sense that they would live or die according
to how well they enabled doctors to get a better grip on the real world of
psychiatric disease. Orientation to the future licences a severing of ties
with a past that needs to be transcended but unless new and better
grounding can be achieved, the new concepts should be given up again. If
there were no pre-existing properties, no valid pattern could be imposed
upon them. There are different co-existing motivations for concepts, and
concepts reflect these without being dictated by them, in order to have an
independent contribution to make. Divergences, in other words, are cru-
cial in order to understand the specific role of conceptualization in the
world.
Agentive innovation of this type may be called conceptual engineer-
ing, as long as it is kept distinct from conceptual fraud. This is what is usu-
ally understood by Orwellian Newspeak: the attempt to change peoples
ways of understanding things by giving them new names that gloss over
unpalatable aspects: war is peace, ignorance is strength, etc. But I think it
is useful to have an explicit category of conceptual fraud for cases where
a clear discrepancy can be established in order to have a clear distinc-
tion from bullshit and spin, which are suspicious but is in principle per-
missible, cf. above. The Bush administration at one point claimed that its
pension scheme of personal accounts was different from the earlier pro-
posal of privatization of social security, which had acquired undesirable
connotations. As pointed out by Krugman (2004: 276), at the same time
the Cato Institute, which had designed the proposal, still called it The
Project on Social Security Privatization on their website. This makes it a
clear case of conceptual fraud. No engineering had taken place, only re-
labelling.
Conceptual engineering is in itself neutral: it may turn out to be func-

tionally detrimental, beneficial, or to make no difference. The social con-
struction process that is always the aim of conceptual engineering will be
fraught with all the difficulties that always go with social change, but that
is not the point in this section, which focuses on the specific role of the
conceptual dimension. The scope it allows for agency is essential to pre-
serve the accountability and the freedom from foundationalist dictates.
This also applies to the kind of conceptual engineering that works with
well-entrenched everyday categories. As a key example of the socio-cog-
nitive landscape of conceptualization I would like to offer an analysis of a
particular usage instance of the Danish word kvinde (woman). The anal-
ysis aims to illustrate the concepts, understood as ways of grasping, that
are involved, and they way a process of reconceptualization both builds
on and reaches beyond grounding.
Psychiatric diagnostic categories can be socially constructed via fairly
narrow and specific channels, and work top-down via educational and
professional hierarchies. The task of reconceptualizing women works in a
very different context. In order to understand how the concept of woman
can be changed, we need to look at the extension in social space of central
and naturally grown concepts. Crofts term lineage has been used above
for linguistic and well as social constructions viewed as entities that are
replicated in changing form across generations. This converts a point in
static space to a line across generations but the mental association with
a single line involves the risk of suggesting that evolution is a ladder rather
than a bush (cf. Gould 1980). Conceptual lineages, like biological lineages,
diverge in all directions at the same time and massive extinction is neces-
sary to give the kind of figure that moves from Australopithecus via Homo
erectus, etc., up to modern humans. More successful lineages are much
messier. In the case of concepts, success stories give rise to complex con-
figurations in panchronic space; an example is the concept of culture, cf.
Fink (1988). Even in such complex cases, the possibility of reconceptuali-
zation is crucial. Raymond Williams (1958) suggested an influential recon-
ceptualization of the concept of culture that included the labour move-
ment in its history in Britain. However, clearly reconceptualizations take
their place in the existing bush and must be understood in that context.
The following example illustrates this.
In taking up the illustration case of woman I emphasize that the anal-
ysis is about a single usage event, not about the whole Begriffsgeschichte
(a task that would take us well beyond the scope of this book). As
announced, I take up a single usage event and use it as an example of the
properties of concepts in social space that I would like to highlight. The
analysis simultaneously illustrates the division of labour between central

terms including CL concepts such as frame, mental space and conceptual
model that has been developed in chapters 1 and 5, and the notions of
discursive and social construction presented in this chapter. The usage
event is the title of a very successful Danish book from the 1970s, Kvinde
kend din krop, Woman, know your body. The book was written by a
group of women and associated with the feminist cultural climate of the
period. It contained a handbook-style, matter-of fact outline of female
anatomy, bodily functions and recurrent problems, including those associ-
ated with sex.
In order to fully understand the word woman in this position you need
to invoke several different variant concepts. First of all, we need the clas-
sical category an example of how variationism can provide new roles
also for classical concepts: it is not a question of either believing in Aristo-
telian all-and-only concepts or believing in variation. In this case you need
the classical Aristotelian concept, defined in terms of the criterial attributes
female, adult, human because the book addresses itself to everyone with
the anatomy of a female, adult, human person not only to young liber-
ated feminists.21
On the other hand, the title as a whole also frames the concept in a
particular manner, thus promoting a particular construal that therefore
gave rise to discursive constructions when readers got hold of the book.
The title is an exhortation a language act that calls upon the woman
addressed to act as a self-reliant, confident free agent. This is a conceptual
modulation that goes beyond the classic all-and-only category. Part of the
framing is that the book is written by a broadly feminist group of authors
and printed by a left-wing publisher: looking at the book, the public would
know that the traditional conceptualization of women was being chal-
lenged here.
As part of that challenge, however, the book indirectly invokes the tra-
ditional idealized cognitive model: telling a woman to know her body
makes sense only in a context where it cannot be taken for granted that a
woman does in fact know her body. In the traditional model we find
21 As frequently pointed out, it is not quite true that tertium non datur, in that
there are persons that do not clearly belong under either the female or the
male sex. But for reasons stressed by Putnam (2001:38, following Wittgenstein
1953, par. 88), this does not really matter: The book wants to appeal to a sharply
delineated group of potential users, and is relevant to people in the grey zone
to the extent they match the precisely defined criteria.
women who shy away from facing and discussing sex problems, bodily
fluids, abortions and smells, and who leave it to experts, usually male, to
contemplate distasteful issues like that, should they arise.
The title thus invokes two alternative mental spaces, confronting the
reader with two options to choose between: are you ready to take charge
of your own life or are you going to stay in your self-imposed tutelage?
The emerging idealized conceptual model of the modern, self-reliant
woman beckons the reader to move away from an identity predicated on
the outdated model. But this alternative does not emerge from the usage
act itself. Both alternatives are niche concepts in variational contrast, with
fairly precise core properties that may be adapted to ephemeral and indi-
vidual circumstances in the moment of interpretation.22 The two variant
concepts, moreover, are not just available as wares on the shelf of the
mental concepticon, to be picked off when the occasion calls. They are
simultaneously placed in a social network and field of forces. The two sets
of overlapping and conflicting conceptual specifications place woman
(1) and woman (2) in a network that shares some properties with Lang-
ackers illustration example of ring (cp. Langacker 1987: 15), which
includes ring as a sound, a piece of jewelry, and boxing ring. However,
unlike wedding ring and boxing ring, the two concepts woman com-
pete for the same class of instantiations. The conceptual freedom of grasp-
ing the same instances in competing ways thus at the same time has a
performative potential (cf. the discussion of identity construction p. 337
above). The book is trying to push this potential and is thus part of an
anticipated process of social change, of the social expectations that women
are up against (including their own expectations of each other). In under-
standing the title and the book itself, female readers are thus simultane-
ously faced with a conceptual domain (the classical concept of women,
which is presupposed by both idealized conceptual models) and a social
frame (the projected identity change, within which the vocative woman
must be understood).
The collective authorship might have chosen to act as individuals pro-
ducing separate utterances in which the concept of woman was launched
into the social process. In fact they chose to join forces in producing one
22 During the 1970s in Denmark, the modern woman might have been conceptu-
alized with a scarf made from self-dyed nappy, and the conceptualizing subject
might come to think of an obnoxious sister-in-law or alternatively of a merci-
fully competent colleague who had learnt to handle all issues with both tradi-
tional male and traditional female expertise, as a result of having to compete
on both fronts.
collective utterance that addressed the entire potential audience. Between

them, they constructed a collective intention that was realized as collec-
tive act instantiating the visible hand. As a very concrete example of
social construction going on, the authors united under the pseudonym K.
Vinder (= W. Omen). Contract laws at the time meant that books with
multiple authorship were not eligible for certain types of royalty pay-
ments. Thus the author K. Vinder was a formal and legal social construct
with causal relevance of a desirable kind. Vinder, incidentally, means win-
ner. I think one can fairly congratulate the authors with their prowess as
social constructors.
It is a design feature of social causality that the invisible hand is always
in action, essentially (I have claimed) via the mechanisms of selection and
adaptation (which for some means falling through the cracks); and this is
also part of the story. If we look at the lineage of the niche category of
women, we see a new prototype emerge, marginalizing the older proto-
type, with discursive confrontations shaping, and being shaped by, the sur-
rounding socially constructed landscape. Old and well-entrenched gender
roles and associated practices and performances go on, of course, as long
as they are viable. Women who say and do exactly the most adaptive things
in terms of those patterns may still outperform their sisters in certain
familiar respects, and the patterns and mechanisms of success are only
partially accessible to the consciousnesses of the participating individuals.
These years the arena of management careers is perhaps one in which the
battle lines between old and new discursive patterns are particularly sali-
ent for women who enter the fray.
The discussion of the concept woman thus again highlights the foun-
dational role of many-dimensional variation and the ontological role of
stability and order as constraints on variation, rather than as the underly-
ing, ultimate reality. It also highlights the fact that as long as we stay at the
level of concepts rather than social constructions, alternative conceptuali-
zations can co-exist rather than standing inherently in ideological conflict
(cf. Lakoffs (2008: 69) notion of being biconceptual). Thus we can have
the classically defined class of women, the prototypical traditional woman,
an emerging modern prototype and dispersed clouds of exemplars inter-
acting in understanding the same sentence. However, the usefulness of
concepts depends on the extent to which members of the community can
put things into containers in the same way just as it did in the case of
psychiatric diagnoses. A variationist stance does not mean that you can
choose whatever variant you want within the conventional meaning
potential it means that unless you are sensitive to variationist dimen-
sions, you are going to miss something. Acceptance is a crucial success
criterion for attempts at reconceptualization, and that necessarily requires

successful competition with other variants in social space.
The perspective in which concepts are ways of dealing with complex
social processes exemplifies the implications of the functional construal
(or reconceptualization) I have proposed of the core concepts in classic
CL. If we regard categories, frames, domains, idealized conceptual models
and mental spaces as static mental constructs stockpiled inside our minds,
it would be difficult to decide whether the modern self-reliant woman that
is evoked by the book would constitute a category, a frame, a (sub)domain,
an idealized conceptual model, or a mental space. With the functional con-
strual of these concepts, we have seen how the same conceptual material
can do different jobs in bringing about an actual situated construction
initially as meaning construction, but possibly proceeding along the path
via a discursive construction towards contribution to an ongoing process
of social (re)construction of the terms.
An obvious arena for processes of reconceptualization is education. I
use the word as distinct from training: the aim of driving instruction is to
train a practice, ideally habitus-entrenched, that will minimize danger to
self and others. This is true not only of the individual level (although that
is what is currently in focus), but also at community level. Education takes
people out of their current activities in order to create an enhanced poten-
tial to deal with the world in unforeseeable ways. This is why it is an essen-
tial goal of education to foster the development of conceptual systems
that are more differentiated than warranted by immediate practical, per-
sonal and social requirements. I am thinking not just of fostering the kind
of normative rationality that I return to below on p. 397, but also of the
general ability to grasp complex aspects of the world. Mathematics is an
example of this: it is a system of conceptual relations that is inherently
ungrounded or rather de-grounded from practice. Unless you can manage
to decouple the differential calculus from (e. g.) the laws of physics, you
have only understood the physics, not the mathematics. Mathematical
concepts are grounded in experience, cf. Lakoff and Nez (2000), and
knowing how they emerge from experience makes it a whole lot easier to
understand them. But the wonder of mathematics is that it has in fact
emerged and now constitutes a conceptual potential that can be imposed
in alternative ways on the experience from which it emerged.
Once detached from the strictly bodily grounding, mathematical think-
ing can then enter into other relations with the sociocultural world
including the technology that has transformed everyday life in the West-
ern world, most saliently in relation to the computational revolution, with
the status that this entails for computer literacy.
In section 3, we have seen that the relation between conceptualization

and the rest of the social world can partly be understood by extending the
concept of grounding to the social dimension. In addition to bodily
grounding, which is most directly associated with the individual sender,
there is a question of sociocultural grounding, which is most directly asso-
ciated with the addressee(s) understood as members of the community
within which the communication takes place. It is closely related to the
intersubjective grounding of Verhagen (2005), but understood so as to
include the aggregate, social level, and not just the basic speaker-hearer
situation. Common to the aggregate and the local situation is that the
mental content is subject to a process of status assignment that depends
on the way addressees place it in relation to their (social-cognitive) world.
And thirdly, there is a dimension of factual grounding associated with
mental content in its role as map of the world. The three dimensions of
grounding are not the same thing as Bhlers triangle, but reflect the same
basic embeddedness of language in a situation where speakers, hearers
and the world they inhabit are the three central anchors of meaning.
4. Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics
4.1. What precisely are Foucault-style discourses?
Until now I have been most concerned with claim (1) in the introduction:
the need to have a differentiated theory of how meaning enters into dif-
ferent types of relations with society, rendering an approach solely from
the cognitive side necessarily incomplete. I have tried to give an impres-
sion of how mental representations can have very different statuses and
correspondingly different types of grounding, and in doing so I have tried
to show that the framework I have argued for can help to address those
issues.
I now turn to claim (2), which addresses the relations between the
social cognitive framework I defend and approaches which take their
point of departure in discourses understood as non-agentive social forma-
tions. The civic dimension that is addressed in claim (3) is also taken up,
but the main argument is postponed until chapter 8, which takes up a par-
ticularly salient illustration case.
Basically I am going to argue for a critical reconstruction of poststruc-
tural discourse analysis, which places it as one rather special cell in the
wider framework proposed in this book. In addressing Foucault-inspired
discourse analysis from a CL perspective, I continue a development that
Discourses analysis and social cognitive linguistics 355
has created a growing shared territory between the CL community and

critical discourse analysis (as reflected for instance in the volume Cogni-
tive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis, Hart & Luke 2007).
The discussion will be in three instalments. The first is an attempt to
define as precisely as possible what I think is the focal object of descrip-
tion for a Foucault-inspired type of discourse analysis. The second aims to
show how the specific features of such discourses can be accounted for in
the theory I am developing. The third compares this socio-cognitive model
with the poststructural way of thinking about discourses. In conclusion,
building also on positions of other authors, I argue that the kind of dis-
course analysis that is predicated solely on the poststructural understand-
ing is an unsafe analytic practice, which may not only systematically mis-
represent constitutive features of its objects of description but also
jeopardize the wider social aims it wants to serve.
I propose the following rather restrictive definition of a prototype dis-
course in the Foucauldian sense, in order to have something clearly pro-
filed as a point of reference for the discussion. In the discussion of what I
see as the failings of a purely poststructural understanding, I also discuss
how this narrow concept can be extended and what kinds of extensions
are problematic. The definition may at best constitute a prototype for the
field, but as it stands, it is simply a stipulative delimitation of what I am
going to discuss below:
1. A (countable) discourse is an offline entity, whereas discourse (non-

count) is online flow. The relation is analogous to the relation between
concept (off-line and countable) and conceptualization (online and
non-count). A discourse has as one necessary part a specific category, e. g.,
the New Labour discourse (cf. Fairclough as quoted on p. 120), or revi-
sionist discourse (cf. Laclau & Mouffe 1985: 33), which is instantiated by
online instances.
However, Foucaults point is not captured if we see a discourse simply
as a standard conceptual category plus its actual instantiations it would
then reduce simply to text type. The crucial phenomenon that he is
after is the historical emergence of a body of texts which via their trajec-
tory in social space exercise an influence on other texts and practices in
the same social and historical space. Before Blair had given a sufficient
number of performances to create a recognizable trajectory in social
space, it would be vacuous to talk of a New Labour discourse, for instance
(cf. p. 121). A discourse, thus conceived, is constituted by a series of
actual utterances that collectively shape the options for what can be said
and done.
This feature is bound up with a central point in Foucault (1969): the

historical discontinuity between discourses. At one time, there is a given
medical discourse, and a given legal discourse (etc) then suddenly the
wheels of history may turn, and new discourses take over.
2. In order to qualify as a discourse, the sequence of utterances must

involve
(a) a way of talking about the world that is linguistically identifiable in
terms of keywords (~ nodal points, cf. Laclau & Mouffe (1985:
112)
(b) which denote one or more key concepts/conceptual models in
terms of which the world is (discursively) constructed in a particular
way
(c) that reflect a particular ideology (set of norms)
(d) as manifested in a sequence of attested utterances (since dis-
courses are historical objects)
3. Discourses are sources of power, which is exerted whenever the dis-

course is instantiated. Since the individual does not control the dis-
course, power exertion is not optional.
4. An encounter between participants practicing different discourses

takes the form of a discourse struggle (cf. Rabinow 1984: 6; Jrgensen
& Phillips 1997: 15). One of the sources of this principle is the (post)
structuralist descriptive agenda of opposition and contrast; another is
political orientation and the hermeneutics of suspicion, going back to
Marxs class struggle between the rulers and the ruled: we need to flush
out the hidden agenda and confront it with an oppositional alternative.
5. You cannot step out of the discourse: since the world is only accessible
as mediated by discourses, there is no shared, non-discourse world to
seek recourse to, and thus no common ground.23
As will be apparent, the above definition captures a rather special phe-

nomenon; it is not a general theory of linguistic communication. It can be
23 In Rabinow (1984: 247) Foucault makes explicit that his approach rules out
analysis in terms of foundations including foundations of power: There are
only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between intentions in rela-
tion to one another.
described as a kind of language game, with the peculiarity that it is one-

sided, rather than a game shared by speaker and listener (as presupposed
by Wittgenstein). When you are practicing a discourse, you are exerting
power over the addressee, not engaged in joint activity such as playing a
symphony.
This is a crucial difference, which explains the alliance between dis-
course analysis and the hermeneutics of suspicion. To illustrate this natu-
ral alliance, I am going to suggest an example where most people would
think that suspicion is in order: the Nazi discourse. The Nazi discourse is
identifiable as historically manifested in a collection of utterances; it has
keywords/nodal points including race, Aryan, Jewish-plutocratic conspir-
acy, Volksgenosse, Weltanschauung; it constructs the world in accordance
with a particular ideology, involving master and subject races; it is meant
to exert power and dominate over rival discourses, which it confronted in
discourse struggles and there was no common ground available from
which one could view both the Nazi discourse and the alternatives.
However, the analytic principles must be the same whether you ana-
lyze friends or enemies. Another identifiable discourse is the gender-
inclusive variety. It is manifested in the word chairperson, or in agree-
ment patterns (from Wikipedia) such as Tomorrow I will meet my new
doctor; I hope they are friendly. As long as traditional practices last, the
gender-neutral discourse stands out as a particular way of talking about
things; it constructs the world in a way that reflects a set of values; it can
be attested by a body of utterances, is meant to exert power over the soci-
ocultural world, enters into a discourse struggle, and there is no neutral
alternative available.
This definition is designed to maintain the link with Foucaults key
original insight: a discourse can only be understood from a point that lies
behind or beneath the whole body of texts, rather than as a feature that
inheres in the individual texts or authors. The individual contributor is
thus not in a position to shift the whole discourse in order to accommo-
date a newcomer. I believe discourses in this sense exist and CL needs to
expand its theoretical base in order to cover them in an adequate manner.
They are associated with frames, idealized cognitive models and mental
spaces, but not precisely captured by any of these concepts, because dis-
courses have a specific historical anchoring and are conceived as agents of
impersonal social power: when you do discourse(s) analysis, you are not
looking for a symphony with participant access to jointly shared activ-
ity you are trying to find a controlling pattern that works behind indi-
vidual awareness.
4.2. How can discourses be understood in terms of a social cognitive

linguistics?
In a social cognitive linguistics, the flow is basic in relation to the compe-

tency and niche aspects, also when it comes to understanding discourses:
we need to look at actual practice first. Discourses thus emerge, like all
other off-line regularities, as a result of regularities in usage. An individual
statement that occurs as part of the flow does not in itself qualify as a dis-
course it must be recognizable as a contribution to an already existing
body of statements.
The beginning of the process whereby that happens can be captured in
an exemplar-based approach. Referring to Pierrehumberts (2001)
account of exemplars in phonology, Croft (2007) proposes an account of
how a body of usage exemplars can give rise to semantic effects that are
not in the individual usage event and this can be generalized to lineages
of texts in discourse space. In order to become a discourse, a series of texts
has to constitute a lineage, based on individual texts, but with properties
that go beyond them.
These lineages become offline properties of the niche, if they acquire
sufficient sociocultural grounding to begin to exert selection pressure
and this is when they qualify as discourses in the sense defined above. The
extent to which this is the case depends not on acceptance alone, but on
their status in terms of social efficacy. Again, the Nazi discourse may serve
as an example: in describing the scary process whereby the Nazi govern-
ment swept the defences of the traditional institutional landscape aside,
the psudonymous Sebastian Haffner (2000) reports an occasion when he
realized that on demand he had classed himself as an Aryan, thus saving
his skin by going along with Nazi discourse in the act of exerting power.
The reason why a social CL needs to include the countable concept of
discourse is that this was more than an isolated usage event (an online
act of individual cowardice) unless you also understand it as an instance
of yielding to general selection pressure in the niche, you are missing an
important part of the picture. As a feature of the niche, a discourse thus
exerts pressure on speakers to find a position within a field of forces that
is defined in advance of the individual contribution, and thereby biases
the propagation of what speakers say depending on where they belong
24 Grdenforss concept of the linguistic power structure (1998:30) can be

extended to the power structure of the discourse space. Because Grdenfors
sees the issue of meaning outside the head in terms of essentialist referential
semantics, he sees his concept of linguistic power structure as an argument for
in that field. As also emphasized by the Foucauldian tradition, these

forces emerge from the social formation within which the statements are
made.24, 25
What I suggest is therefore that Foucaults hidden hand is a special
case of the invisible hand. When a body of previous texts acquire the sta-
tus of a lineage, it becomes a discourse and sets a standard that new instal-
ments will be evaluated against. And such a discourse shares the condi-
tions of other social constructions: they have viability criteria, affordances,
processes of reproduction and suffer extinction like other lineages in
social space.
It is debatable to what extent discourses and their social trajectories
can be understood wholly by hidden or invisible mechanisms, as implied
by Foucault. In operating with the visible hand, I am making the same
point as Edward Said (1978/2003: xvii; 23) in his presentation of the ori-
entalist discourse. While acknowledging his debt to Foucault, he argues
that the individual author cannot be understood merely as a puppet in the
grip of discursive forces. First, the individual contributor to a historical
discourse has a distinctive personal voice within the overall whole; and
secondly, the individual humanist who looks at the whole issue (as in
Saids own case) can push back the realm of what is hidden. In other
words, participant access may defy the constricting force of even a dis-
course that is replicated across centuries.
This position entails that the central post-Foucauldian concept of
power needs to be re-examined. In a social cognitive picture, there are two
forms of power that are simply causal, i. e. due to the way the world works.
Each individual utterance shares with events like traffic accidents and
earthquakes the property of being part of the world of cause and effect; on
maintaining a cognitive view of meaning but his arguments are the same
ones I use to say that meanings in social contexts take on other properties than
those they have inside the individual mind.
25 This is closely related to a point made in relation to literature by T. S. Eliot
(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1920): new authors are not assessed by
their own merits alone, but in terms of their place in the overall picture. Also
in the community of high culture, the hidden hand of selection works in ways
that do not depend on the individual talent or text as deserving but unsuc-
cessful authors of all ages will agree. The cards are stacked in advance in the
shape of the field of forces that are active in the social space where the works
are placed. This is true whether we take the standards set by the panchronic
literary canon, as in Eliots case, or those set by the cultural market forces
(enabling some authors who fail to get into the canon to compensate with
what Noel Coward called the bitter palliative of commercial success).
one level they simply happen, and unpleasant consequences of an utter-

ance may be due to someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In addition, there is the invisible-hand type of aggregate selection pres-
sure, which is also simply a part of the way the world works. This imper-
sonal causality is central to Foucaults most pervasive question, when he
asks about historical conditions under which certain ways of speaking and
thinking become possible.
But the visible hand means that there can also be agentive action in the
social sphere. This may be by grass roots initiatives or via formally
anchored social constructions. When social pressure is the result of agen-
tive action, unwanted consequences enter into a field of forces that is
within participant awareness and whose ontology therefore includes sta-
tus assignment, such as abuse of power or even crime. The principle of
accountability applies within this sphere of joint activity, both to business
leaders and to those who are by democratic processes entrusted to act on
behalf of the community. Brute causality is at work there, too, and it is
always difficult to determine the precise extent of accountability, just as in
the individual perspective there is no way of knowing the exact balance
between unconscious (pin-prick-driven) adaptation and agentive, con-
sciously accessible choice.26
In order to capture this distinction, it is essential to distinguish between
emergent discourses, which arise by impersonal processes, and orches-
trated discourses (pursuing the metaphor of the conductors visible
hand) which arise when a group of people purposely select a way of
addressing issues with all the characteristics described above. This is
clearly an act of collective power play, and hence accountable, rather than
just a feature of the way the world works. In political contexts, most of the
interesting discourses are of the orchestrated kind (including the Nazi dis-
26 Politicians therefore have to develop strategies that take both sides into
account. Exhortations to behave in a socially responsible manner can thus be
combined with taxation of unwanted behaviour the two by no means exclude
each other. This mixture, rather than a focus solely on hidden hand-level phe-
nomena, is especially relevant for understanding institutional language use, a
type of communication that is frequently analysed in post-Foucauldian terms.
In that context, when the espoused values (in Scheins terms) of an organiza-
tion are manifested in the language acts performed in the institutional prac-
tices, they constitute a discourse (orchestrated); and we have to presuppose an
ability to consciously respond to management-controlled discourse pressure
for the same reason that we have presuppose participant access to democratic
decision-making.
course). Seeing such discourses as agents of impersonal and ubiquitous

power, in Foucaults fashion, fails to address the accountability dimension.
This differentiation in understanding power plays a role also in under-
standing what the relevant frame for political action is. Discourses analy-
sis very often takes up cases of language used in exerting the kind of
power that institutions exert over citizens and employees. In understand-
ing what is going on, the balance between impersonal forces and partici-
pant accountability is a crucial factor: if everything is due to forces work-
ing behind the back of human agents, there is nothing they can do about it
and it does not make sense to ask them to change their ways. If they have
the sovereign power we associate with Stalin and Hitler, everything is
their fault. Most situations are in between and the point where criticism
can be most effective is the non-Foucauldian cases where accountability
can reasonably be brought to bear. As an example, a Danish discourse-
analytic investigation of the treatment of drug abusers belonging to ethnic
minorities (Stauns 1998, as quoted in Jrgensen and Phillips 1999: 10),
found a clear-cut example of the institutional power of categorization:
institutions for substance abusers categorized this group as being the
responsibility of institutions for ethnic minorities, and institutions for eth-
nic minorities took the reverse stance, thus putting this group outside the
purview of existing institutional assistance. Similarly, the category of ille-
gal combatant was explicitly designed to put a certain group of military
captives outside the purview of the Geneva convention. Both are clearly
cases falling within the sphere of accountability.27 The aim of unmasking
27 If we look at the processes that drive selection and adaptation of employees in

an organization, a similar mixture of forces is at work. The mechanism whereby
employees who create trouble for the institution are removed from circulation
is partly an instance of the same mechanism whereby specimens with deficient
wariness responses are picked off by predators. Part of this may be a question
of basic assumptions at the level of habitus, and thus truly a matter of invis-
ible hand mechanisms: offenders are picked off one by one as a result of their
individual cock-ups. Those who remain are simply those who do not trans-
gress and no one will need to know exactly what it is they are not supposed
to do as long as they dont. No one has access to the centre of the spiders web,
because there is no centre. It therefore makes sense to understand speakers as
mere mouthpieces (animators, in Goffmans terms) for a body of assump-
tions and values, rather than the authentic and agentive source of the meaning
that they convey. On the other hand, participant access makes the individuals
more or less aware of what is going on and acts of compliance or revolt are
accountable to the extent they enter into the sphere of conscious awareness
and agentivity.
the way institutions work, and the indignation with which it is pursued,
shares with ordinary assumptions about communication the understand-
ing that there is an element of personal accountability involved. Dis-
courses analysis therefore needs to be placed in a framework where agen-
tive accountability has a theoretically motivated position.
Whether orchestrated or emergent, discourses as defined above are
clearly deviant compared with the characteristics of what everybody con-
siders the most basic form of human communication the kind of com-
munication that makes language acquisition possible, and where the driv-
ing force is the attunement to shared meaning (cf. ch. 4, p. 155). This is true
even in politics:
Language in the service of power has thus been a central concern, and perhaps
rightly so. But if one is seeking a theory of language and politics, it is not enough.
Why not? For one thing, politics involves cooperation as well as conflict.
(Chilton 2004: 198)
In everyday communication, I have argued throughout the book that the

basic status of co-operation cannot seriously be doubted (as also stressed
by Chilton 2004: 200). This in no way implies that the lion and the lamb are
destined to found a community together only that the existence of conflict
presupposes the existence of co-operation. Those who conduct successful
conflicts with other groups tend to have a solid foundation in joint experi-
ence within their own community. Senft (2007) describes the Trobriand
Islands in a way that can be plausibly generalized: in the human niche, suc-
cessful competition is based on close cooperation between members of
competing groups. Looking out for your own interests requires taking good
care of your home base. Discourses have their ecological niche at the inter-
face between different subcommunitities when participants speak as
group members rather than as individuals reaching out beyond the group.
We may illustrate the role of collaborative agency by returning briefly
to the Danish concept of women in the book title analysed above. The
way in which the two variant concepts or construals of what it means to be
a women was brought into play by the book has certain features of a dis-
course struggle in the Foucauldian sense. But one of the reasons for the
success of the book was that it did not stage itself as a confrontation with
forces hidden from the awareness of the readers. There was no implication
that readers had to give up the previously held false beliefs that they had
been victims of, and from which the superior insight of the authors was
going to save them. Rather, they invoked, in a co-operative manner, sali-
ent features of a shared world as something that would be relevant to all
readers subsumed by the classical Aristotelian concept of woman.
The deviation from the basic we situation is reflected in the discom-

fort that most ordinary citizens feel when cast in such roles where co-
operation is set aside for the purpose of promoting group interests at the
expense of the other party. Part of the discomfort can be expressed by say-
ing that the ostensive addressee has more of third person status than sec-
ond person status28.
The intellectual groupings that constituted Foucaults original exam-
ples share the feature of internal cohesion and external demarcation in
relation to each other, as well as the historical shifts, cp. the similarity to
Kuhn scientific communities with their competing paradigms. Young
researchers will recognize the adaptive pressure that is exerted by aca-
demic subcommunities to construct results according to the frameworks,
and the academic politics involved. In that context, they therefore func-
tion as discourses rather than just as frameworks of scientific investiga-
tion.
Above all, discourses are functionally anchored in social divisions.
They flourish in situations where homogenous idealizations become inad-
equate, and we need to operate with competing groups within a shared
wider social context. From a birds eye view, of course, this means just
about always but not always to the same extent. And discourses analysis
can only point to the cracks in the sociocultural terrain it cannot tell us
what is actually going on (more on this in ch. 8).
28 The conditions under which one would expect discourses to be functionally

viable as constituents of discourse struggles can be spelled out as follows:
(1) the mental and social construction of a particular domain of facts is not
shared with other subcommunities
(2) members of the subcommunity are faced with recurrent situations where
this is the subject of communicative interaction (cp. the orthodoxy vs. doxa
situation, p. 316).
(3) the mental and social constructions in other subcommunities are in conflict
with the social constructions that are preferred in the subcommunity, includ-
ing causal conflict: either one set of social constructions is viable, or the other,
but not both
This is typically the case in political communication, broadly understood.
Politics is by definition about imposing a particular construction on the rele-
vant domain of issues; a political movement has to have a vocabulary to con-
vey its beliefs, and if you choose a different way of talking about the issues, you
are letting the side down. In politics, the time to sit up and take notice is often
when people suddenly say something different from what they usually say,
because the safest thing is to stay within the established discourse that
encodes your partys construction of the existing political field.
4.3. Where Foucault-style analysis belongs and where it is inadequate
In chapter 4, the conclusion stressed the foundational role of joint atten-

tion and activity, and of shared understanding and common ground as
part of this foundation. This understanding of human communication is a
common feature of many different approaches, empirical as well as theo-
retical. The rigorously empirical analysis of Conversation Analysis in
terms of preferred and dispreferred continuations of adjacency pairs
reflects the orientation towards aligning with the others needs as the
default option. Audience design (aka recipient design, cf. Schiffrin 2006)
similarly shows that messages are designed so as to fit into the opponents
perspective.
Among philosophical counterweights to Foucaults position, when it
comes to the normative basis of language use, the major figure is Haber-
mas (cf. Habermas 1971, 1976, 1981). His view of the human community is
based on the distinction between the empirical fact of strategic and power-
laden communication and the counterfactual expectation of symmetry
and collaboration between speaker and hearer.29 The latter constitutes a
normative basis which casts the communicative exercise of one-sided
power as a deviation rather than the basic fact. The site of this normative
expectation is the lifeworld (cf. Habermas 1988: 236), which is a presup-
posed as background in Searles sense, with an emphasis on the intersub-
jective relation grounded in human speech.30
29 There is a clear affinity between the empirical findings of Tomasello on attune-

ment to other minds and collaboration and Habermass philosophy of the
relation between strategic and ideal communication, and so it was entirely
appropriate that Habermas gave the laudatio when Tomasello was awarded
the Hegel Prize in 2009
30 The position is expressed as follows:
The common speech situation constitutes the center and not, for instance,
my body, as an anthropologizing phenomenology has claimed in which social
spaces () converge prior to any objectivation through measuring operations.
The spaces and times experienced are the co-ordinates of our respective shared
world () Habermas (1988: 244),
The normative basis of this symmetry in communication has three elements:
truth, truthfulness and right action, all dependent on the principle of reversi-
bility in human communication, i. e. the fact that in communication roles
between participants can be turned around (cf. Habermas 1971, 1976). As
such, it has clear affinities with Tomasellos theory of joint attention as consti-
tutive of human relations with fellow subjects (cf. Harder 2007c, Fultner 2008).
The poststructural approach has no counterpart to such normative

expectations. There are many reasons for this, but the basic one is hard-
wired into the basic position: scepticism towards foundations of any kind,
focus on the power-imbued discursive process of imposing interpretations
on whatever may have come before, and the associated hermeneutics of
suspicion. The whole idea of going behind discourses to match them
against a normative standard is incompatible with this approach. Derri-
das rejection of the attempt to go outside the text (cf p. 113) is a clear
illustration: while it captures the dynamics inside the discursive flow, it has
nothing to say about an utterance as part of joint activity in a community.
The radical expression of this impasse is the maxim a se mis en abme,
literally that puts itself in the abyss, i. e. that deconstructs itself which
prompted the following response from Putnam (2001: 38) in a discussion
with a young deconstructionist intellectual:
I asked the young man, Do you really think that every utterance deconstructs
itself?, and he said, Yes. I said, A minute ago I said, Pass the butter. Did
that put itself in the abyss? He paused for a moment, I saw his Adams apple go
up and down as he gulped, and then he bravely said, Yes. (Putnam 2001: 38)
The absence of co-operation is not an oversight. Some discourses analysts

have suggested that agreement might be necessarily be preferred in con-
versation, cf. Billig (no date, note 2); cf. also Edwards and Potter (1992: 8)
for a suggestion that conflict of interest rather than consensus should be
the norm. In any case, there is no room for a presupposed interactive
anchoring including normative foundations for bringing about under-
standing.
The lack of a recognition of joint action as the basic precondition for
language defines the specific niche for discourses analysis, and simultane-
ously explains why it is risky outside that niche. In manifesto-type mes-
sages that enter into ongoing conflicts between groups, discourses analysis
As pointed out by Widell and Jrgensen (2007), Habermas in his argument

makes the error of generalizing normative expectations based on co-operation
about mutual understanding to co-operation about the actual acts carried out
by the speaker. The result is that he extends normative ideals also to the legit-
imate territory of non-cooperative strategic activity, the site of Foucault-style
exercise of power. In other words, there are forms of activity (also in the social
domain) whose centre is in the body with its strictly first-person singular
demands. The normative basis is thus not guaranteed to be in operation at all
times it depends on entering into the kind of fellow-subject relation that is
constitutive of a joint action relationship. (This will become crucial in ch 8).
serves the useful purpose of telling us what position the text reflects. An
example is political campaign material: the point for the competing sides
is to impose their constructions on the topic and achieve a dominant posi-
tion. When viewed as representing one side of a conflict, such texts lend
themselves to being abstracted out of any dialogic context and regarded
as part of the political landscape: positions rather than acts. Political pam-
phlets, neon advertisements and inscriptions on monuments do not obvi-
ously involve a fellow subject relation between sender and addressee
(more on the niche for discourses analysis at the end of ch. 8).
However, if this kind of analysis is applied to utterances that have a
clear anchoring in communicative interaction, it will result in misrepre-
sentation. The analyst can only get at the interactionally dysfunctional
dimension, not the functioning collective practice. When this analytic
technique is applied to institutions which are part of the actual dynamics
of the social process, it cuts off the analyst from building up an under-
standing relationship with the practitioners. Luke (2007) illustrates this
with reference to a quotation from Chris Woodhead, a former Chief
Inspector of Schools in England, used in a text defending a Critical Dis-
course Analysis approach to education:
There is too much to do in the real world with real teachers in real schools to
waste time decoding unintelligible, jargon-ridden prose to reach (if one is
lucky) a conclusion that is often so transparently partisan as to be worthless
(cited in Luke 2007: 183 via MacLure 2003:12)
In response, the author criticizes Woodheads rhetorical appeal to the

real and his discourse of derision going on to say that a discourse-
oriented educational research would attend to the multiplicity of mean-
ings that associated with everything in education and
be immensely interested in how appeals to real teachers and real worlds
work as rhetorical power-plays that try to install some versions of reality by
disqualifying others.
(MacLure 2003: 12, as quoted in Lukes 2003: 184)
However, for those engaged in the practice of teaching, the focus in dis-
cussions about education tends to be on its grounding in the actual social
process. Contesting the existence of real schools in order to focus on mul-
tiplicities of (conflicting) meanings, as pointed out by the former Chief
Inspector, is not really helpful in that perspective. Even when social-con-
structionist academic approaches make a valid point, their analyses usurp
the place of a potentially constructive dialogue between teachers and the
rest of the community (see also section 3.3 on bullshit) and what is more,
as pointed out in Luke (2007: 18485), the use of critical discourse analy-
sis in relation to education is very often simply an attack under the guise
of analysis (which is a natural consequence if a discourse struggle is the
only form of communication recognized in your theory).
There is also a problem when it comes to the understanding of power:
it offers no distinction between discursive power and other forms of
power. Seeing discourse as the prime mover is problematic also on
Foucaults own premises, as argued in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982), whose
part I is entitled the illusion of autonomous discourse: sealing off dis-
courses from the rest of the world is an instance of the same fallacy that
resulted in autonomous structure. In Foucaults own case, it would also
sever the link with non-discursive, institutional forms of coercion, as in the
case of the penal system which he describes at great length in Foucault
(1975).
The basic source of this problem is the missing theoretical link with
extra-discursive practice, as discussed above. But in many cases this prob-
lem goes with a methodological fallacy that is bound up with the vague-
ness of the central concept of discourse itself, and which is easy to make
if causality is not included in the framework. In my narrow definition, I
stressed that in order to say that an utterance was an instance of a dis-
course, there must be a historically attested population of utterances
grouped by the defining features (whether classical or prototype-based)
of the category to which they belong. This contrasts with a looser defini-
tion according to which analysts are free to define a discourse as they
choose. In other words, any given text can be assigned to a discourse
merely based on certain features that the analyst points to in the text. A
text that talks about health could thus be assigned to a discourse of health,
simply based on that fact.
If a discourse is postulated merely by virtue of features of an individual
text, the concept loses its explanatory potential: you cannot without ram-
pant circularity claim that an ideological formation that you have ana-
lyzed out of the text itself lies behind the text. This does not entail that
interpretive claims about texts made in the name of discourse analysis are
necessarily wrong. It merely means that their interpretations are just that,
text interpretations. In other words, rather than being an analysis that
brings out the hidden hand behind the text, it is simply a paraphrase.31
Let me repeat that I have in no way distanced myself from the enter-
prise of critical analysis of communication in society. The Platonic projec-
31 This risk is pointed out by Antaki et al.(2002).

tion makes niche concepts and conceptual mappings part of the world we
live in hence, we need to think about whether other ways of imposing a
mental order on the niche we live in would be better. Discourses come
and go, involving projected constructions with different causal and mental
baggage. Where social constructionism started out as a tool for critical
analysts, the weak points in the theory have made it an ideal tool for power
holders, cf. the statement cited by Lakoff (2008: 40), where an anonymous
aide of George W. Bush described the position of his administration by
distinguishing between the reality-based community committed to
enlightenment (such as the interviewing journalist) and the representa-
tives of empire who create their own reality. The tools of power holders
therefore include (1) Derrida-style semiosis (in the short term) and (2)
persistent discourses (in the longer term). The higher echelons use bullshit
for survival purposes, and in doing so try to keep it as impenetrable as pos-
sible viewed from below, minimizing the risk of self-empowerment by the
people who are at the coal face of reality.
In short, the need for critical analysis of meaning in society is growing
daily. But the growing need is also a good reason why it is necessary to
know what discourses analysis can do for us and what it cannot do. The
central thing it cannot do is situate the analysis in the context of collective
agency the natural context of human communication. Since critical
awareness is a form of participant awareness, this is a very basic flaw. The
most crucial problem, in fact, is not that discourses analysis gets it wrong
it is that too much is missing.32
32 I would like to make clear that as always, disagreements are much less striking
when you read the actual analyses in socially oriented, critical tradition, than
when you look at the credos. From Karl Marx to Jonathan Potter, very often
concrete understanding is much broader than the schematic theoretical posi-
tion (including the positions I have defined above) would suggest. Marxs
thinking is in fact based on the essential elements in niche construction (cf.
Marx/Engels 1932: 1011): the special nature of man as opposed to (other)
animals started out when human beings began to produce the conditions on
which their existence depends because this is what started the development
that made possible the division of labour and all the social consequences that
he analyses. When Marx claims that consciousness and language are socially
constituted (Marx/Engels 1932: 20), he does it in connection with an argument
that contrasts human beings with animals which he understands as being
totally submerged in a practice to which they do not have a conscious relation-
ship at all. In contrast, human beings by virtue of their shared practice also
share language as an instrument of conscious understanding, so that either
instincts become consciously manifested or consciousness (as manifested in
Meaning in hard social science: the case of International Relations 369
5. Meaning in hard social science:

the case of International Relations
5.1. The Copenhagen school of international relations (CIR)
Inevitably, this book has viewed the issue of meaning in society mainly
from the CL perspective. In this section, however, I view it from the per-
spective of social science. The aim is to demonstrate that the framework I
have argued for is not just valid from the purely linguistic point of view. I
regard that as something I owe the reader, since the basic idea in the book
is to argue that we need to get a grip on social reality before we can sensi-
bly discuss the role of meaning in social reality.
As pointed out in ch. 3, most of the increasing interest in language and
meaning in social sciences is a part of the increasing interest in social con-
struction. In the softer social sciences such as anthropology and cultural
studies, the issues are not too different from what is the case for cognitive
linguistics. For my purposes, the most interesting case is thus the harder
social sciences those where meaning has acquired a new significance in
relation to non-cognitive macrostructural facts. This is the key testing
ground for the relation between mind and social causality that is the cen-
trepiece of the discussion above.
language) takes the place of instinctive mechanisms in the beginning only as

consciousness of the immediate context of nature and fellow human beings,
but developing gradually along with the scale of social complexity. But Marxs
historical mission was of course to emphasize the extent to which material
practices drive consciousness, rather than the other way round and it is dif-
ficult to find fault with his priorities in an age where the most influential posi-
tion was that ideal universal reason had incarnated itself in the institutions of
the Prussian state.
In present-day critical discourse analysis, one can take the example of Teun
van Dijk. In van Dijk (1998: 2340), he carefully analyses the relation between
social and cognitive elements in his view of what is sociocognitive, in a way
that as far as I can see is not essentially different from the views I have pre-
sented. Having done that, however, he focuses on the directionality that goes
from socially entrenched ideology into language:
Thus, despite personal and contextual variation, opinions about events may
be expected to express underlying ideological frameworks that also monitor
social practices, and hence discourse, in strategic, self-interested ways (v.
Dijk 1998:41).
What I have described in this section are therefore, two different descriptive
strategies, not necessarily different theories of how the world works.
The case I take up is International Relations (= IR), where the dis-

courses type of analysis has come to play a significant role, especially in a
Danish context. Based on the analysis above, I try to show both why dis-
courses analysis works well in that specific context, and also why the
framework I offer would be able to provide some missing elements in the
discourses approach. The case is well suited to this purpose, because the
problems have been taken up in the IR discussion itself relieving me of
the need to reinvent the discipline in order to prove my point.
In the past fifteen years, the so-called Copenhagen school of Interna-
tional Relations (henceforth abbreviated CIR) has had growing influence
in the field, cf. Wver (1998, 2008), Wivel (1995), Buzan, Wver and de
Wilde (1998), Hansen & Wver (2002), Hansen (2006). Their agenda
focuses on the role of discourse in shaping international relations. A key
case is an analysis of security as shaped by discourses. The focal phenom-
enon is the discursive process of securitization of policy areas that used
to be outside the purview of security. But CIR has also provided analyses
of a number of other issues, including European integration and the Bal-
kan wars, from this perspective.
This approach profiles itself against the tradition of looking only at the
causal background of objective factors as sources of explanation. An
influential example is the so-called neo-realist approach, as represented
by Kenneth Waltz (see Waltz 1979), cf. Hansen (2006: 3). The critique of a
dominant objectivist approach constitutes an affinity with poststructur-
alism, which also has its point of departure in a critique of meaning as a
representation of objective reality (cf. the discussion in ch 3). This makes
it natural for the CIR group to adopt an approach to meaning based on
the French poststructuralist tradition: they define themselves (if pres-
sured, cf. Hansen in Hansen & Wver 2002: 4) as poststructuralists in
the sense that our primary and most abstract concern is with the produc-
tion of structures of meaning. This includes an adoption of the core post-
Foucauldian heritage:
In our definition of discourse, we draw primarily on the tradition influenced by
Michel Foucault, including notably Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. (The
understanding of language is primarily from Jacques Derrida, and again,
Laclau and Mouffe.)
(Wver in Hansen & Wver 2002: 23)
The discussion below is designed to demonstrate both for what relatively

narrow purposes these linguistic foundations may be useful and also
why they are insufficient for the whole domain.
In the area of security studies, the post-Foucauldian framework is

attractive for several reasons. The traditional realist position entails that
security is a hard fact about the world in which states find themselves.
Whether a state prevails in military conflict, so the logic goes, is not a mat-
ter of interpretation, and this carries over also to the underlying causal
processes that bring about the outcome. The realist approach is therefore
unable to capture the fact that in recent years an increasing number of
policy areas have been addressed in terms of security, the most recent case
being climate change (with the Nobel peace prize being awarded to the
UNs climate committee and Al Gore). The extension of the concept of
security also creates new developments that link up international and
domestic politics; thus, the Homeland Security Act in the US brought a
number of additional activities under the purview of security measures,
which entailed that ordinary standards of civil liberties were suspended
because of the licence for emergency measures that traditionally goes
with security threats.
This area is therefore a striking example of how changing and compet-
ing interpretations can have consequences for what used to look like
rock-solid objective facts. Starting with security as a nodal point in the
sense of Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 112), you can describe developments
by shifting alignments between security and other points in the space of
social issues such as religion, climate, energy and civil rights. In a Derrida-
like fashion (cf. the discussion p. 113), all statements about security have
to be understood as contributions to this ongoing semiosis, and there is no
recourse to a safe haven (hors-texte) that can be used to say that one way
of speaking about security is the true one and the others are false. The
relation between different alignments take the form of sharp divisions
between adversarial positions in social space, such as the Bush administra-
tion vs. the liberal opposition and the European sceptics and in the aca-
demic debate, the traditional security theorists vs. their challengers. There
are indeed discourses out there, understood as lineages of linguistic
statements in social space, which struggle for hegemony, and the balance
between the power they exert has consequences for what happens in the
social world.
I am now going to argue, continuing the argument from the previous
section, that these compelling results of poststructural analysis can be
contextualized within the larger framework proposed above and this
would solve problems that have arisen within CIR itself.
5.2. The need to distinguish between the niche and the flow
The first issue that I take up involves the distinction between the niche as
the causal source of section pressures and the flow. CIR is clearly inter-
ested in both the flow and the constraints that it is under, and uses dis-
course analysis for that end, cf. Wver (2002: 28): The basic idea is to let
discourse analysis deliver the coherent, well-structured constraints on for-
eign policy.
This means that CIR have to opt out of a thoroughgoingly poststruc-
tural flow-orientation. They explicitly announce that their foundations
include structuralism as well as poststructuralism (Hansen 2002: 5; Wver
2002: 23). The stable elements are thus understood as a structure that
serves as a background for the poststructural variation: a structure of
nations and governments and military and economic alliances, etc. In order
for this dual position of variation and stability to be possible, there have to
be two objects of description, one of which can vary while the other stays
the same. This means that discourses have to be supplemented with an
extra ontological domain, where the stability can reside. Put differently: we
find the variation in the (flow of) security-related texts and negotiated
positions, but where do we find the structure? A throughgoing structuralist
would refuse to answer the question of where this structure resides, because
the structure itself is the rock bottom level of the universe; but this is not
an option if you simultaneously want to allow structures to vary.
The sociocultural niche, however, has exactly the properties that are
necessary to be the home of structural constraints on foreign policy as
flow (just as langue constrains language usage in the niche): it consists of
sediments from the flow, but at any given time those sediments constrain
how the river can flow on. Unless the flow acts to change those constraints,
they stay the way they are in security politics as well as in linguistics. The
poststructural framework, in contrast, is badly suited to capture the con-
stant interplay of flow and structure not least because the key (post)
Foucauldian concept of discourse covers both flow and niche (cf. the
quotation discussed by Fairclough in ch 3). Wver realizes this (2002: 32
footnote 15): The present concept of discourse is therefore simultaneously
process and structure, realization and precondition. The problem with this
broad understanding, if the aim is to capture constraints on the flow (as
indicated in the quotation above), is that discourse operates as both the
dependent and the independent variable: it is discourse (as structure) that
constrains discourse (as flow).
This is more than a terminological inconvenience it is part of the mys-
tification about causality that pervades poststructuralism: if both stable
and changing features are discourse it is easier to argue that there is

nothing outside the discourse, and hence no room for causality beyond
the ubiquity of power within discourse itself. This is equivalent to the fal-
lacy of autonomous discourse: as pointed out in Part I of Dreyfus and
Rabinowitch (1982), discourses are no more autonomous than linguistic
structures. As the search for constraints show, CIR clearly include causal-
ity in their approach, so poststructural indeterminacy is really an anomaly
in their framework. Although Wver (2002: 30) programmatically asserts
that the analysis stays at the level of discourse, and this is true if you
define discourse in Foucaults sprawling manner as both structure and
process. Yet clearly there are two different objects of description involved,
only one of which can be (located inside) the online flow of discourse
itself (but cf. Hansen on the impossibility of causality, Hansen 2006: 25).
In suggesting that structures are functionally anchored in the social
environment that constitutes the niche, I can again support the argument
by reference to positions within the CIR group itself. Wver speaks about
structure as belonging in the national conceptual landscape (Wver
2002: 40), a phrase that is more or less identical to the idea of niche con-
cepts. The kind of causality that goes with locating structure in an exter-
nal landscape is also part of a framework proposed by Wivel (1995), who
proposes a formula for integrating poststructuralism into a frame that also
includes realism in the manner of Waltz (1979). Wivel suggests a division
of labour in which the realist form of explanation deals with issues of sur-
vival, while the poststructuralist position deals with issues of identity. Thus
nations are part of a universe where they have to form policies that ensure
they stay around, but within the space of operation that leaves open, they
can also pursue policies based on discursive construals of identity (as
explored in poststructural terms free of extra-discursive causal determi-
nation).
Wivels proposal thus explicitly locates the realist half of IR in the pur-
view of function-based structure: survival across successive historical peri-
ods is what drives functional adaptation. As pointed out by Wivel (1995:
19), death is very rare, which is a weighty argument for assuming that
functional adaptation is in fact taking place. Further, citing both Waltz and
Wver, Wivel (1995: 1718) argues that the factors that influence survival
do not work by direct but indirect causation and functional, adaptive
causation is one salient type of indirect causation.33
33 Chilton (1996, esp. 91102) presents a thoroughgoing analysis of the concep-

tual structure of the realist position in American thinking about international
However, in terms of the theory proposed in this book, functional cau-

sality is at work also within the area of conceptualizations of national
identity. Because of their constitutive role in social constructions, national
identities as construed in discourse are not outside the world of cause and
effect. As long as conceived identities stay within the private world of
mental processes, they may survive by private mental acceptance alone.
However, to the extent they enter into the constitution of international
relations and otherwise they would hardly qualify for a place in the the-
ory of IR they are subject to feedback from the events they trigger. This
means that survival-related causal pressures will also shape the concep-
tual lineages of national identity in the community, the niche.
Not all aspects of national identity, obviously, are functionally opti-
mal but without a functional dimension, there can be no way to inquire
about potential tension between functional and non-functional parts of
identity constructions. For example, feedback patterns are currently exert-
ing an impact on the extent to which the US conceptualization of itself as
sole superpower will be stabilized or undermined in the 21st century, and
the force of this impact will be critical for Obamas chances of establishing
a more internationally collaborative framework for US foreign policy. In
my own more local perspective, Danish delusions of national grandeur
became adjusted as a result of military disasters in the 19th century a bit
late, but better late than never! In general, surviving nations understand
themselves at least partly in ways that are functional to them.
5.3. Niche construction and the grounding of layered identity structure
If we take it that structure is outside the flow, the problem is how to ground
that structure. This is the problem that structuralism in itself cannot solve,
because structure is its point of departure. Wver recognizes the problem
relations, with Hobbes Leviathan as the grim ancestor figure. The analysis
includes all major theorists and practitioners, and gives a compelling account
of the mindset dominated by Realpolitik, territorial integrity and relations of
dominance between states pursuing only their own interests. While this dimen-
sion is essential in understanding the causal trajectory of realism in interna-
tional relations (cf. also Lakoff 2008, ch. 15), the point in this connection is not
the actual form of realism, but the foundational position of realism: are there
operational mechanisms that cannot be captured by reference to conceptual
models, but only by reference to causal mechanisms that determine the condi-
tions of persistence of nations?
in relation to the issue of change, which was also an impasse for structural-
ism in language, cf. Gregersen (1991). In response, Wver introduces what
he calls a layered structure which in this context means that some levels
are deeper than others:
A main problem with much structuralism and to a large extent also with
Foucaults concept of discourse is that change appears in the form of incompre-
hensible jumps between synchronic and structural orders . One of the advan-
tages of the concept of a layered structure is that it can specify change within
continuity. Change is not an either-or question, because we are not operating at
one level only. The concept of a dominant discourse becomes relative, too.
That something is in opposition or even marginalized, means only that it is
outside and different at the level of manifest politics, most likely it shares
codes at the next (deeper) level of abstraction (Wver 2002: 31)
This can solve the immediate descriptive problem but it does not solve
the grounding problem. The where question remains in a new form:
where are the layers and the dimension of depth?
Logicaly enough, in trying to solve the problem, Wver ends up in the
company of Chomsky. While stressing as a virtue of discourse analysis that
it focuses on publicly available discourse rather than on what goes on in
peoples minds (Wver 2002: 2627), Wver as expressed in the quotation
above sees also the need for abstractions that go beyond individual texts.
Wvers rationale for not staying at the level of attested instances (2002.
33 and 41) is essentially the same as Chomskys argument against the
search for discovery procedures in taxonomic linguistics (Chomsky
1957: 5056): there is no way to go directly from empirical data to theory,
and (as expressed in a quotation from Ruggie 1983: 266; 280), deep struc-
tures are not visible directly, only through their hypothesized effects;
structures are even said to be generative (p.33), and contrast with a
surface level.34
On this point, niche construction may not just fit with the CIR frame-
work, but even be able to provide a rationale that is absent in the current
version. If there is a functional basis for layered structure, there must be
stronger feedback mechanisms sustaining the deeper layers. In Wvers
system, the deepest layer is the level of the individual national unit, viewed
as a constellation of state and nation. Higher-level units that relate to
Europe are less deep and hence more susceptible to change. In poststruc-
tural terms, there is no obvious correlate to this; Wver (1998: 105) speaks
34 In order to provide a locus for his underlying structures, Chomsky resorted to

innate tacit knowledge an option which is not open to Wver.
about the hopeless discussion about the relative power of loyalty to

Europe versus that to the nation/state, quoting as an example an author
who explains it in terms of a lack of myths and symbols at the European
level. He goes on to argue that you cannot understand the issue in terms
of an either-or, because the national and the European levels interact (as
captured in the layered framework) and involve (internationally) visions
for Europe and (internally) domestic articulations of a project for Europe.
However, by situating himself suicidally in the middle of a confron-
tation between an explanatory and a poststructural theory (Wver
1998: 103), Wver has also put himself in a position that is compatible
with an account in terms of functional relations between conceptual and
causal mechanisms. The general bottom-up directionality of the cognitive-
functional approach in itself offers a useful point of departure. As dis-
cussed above on p. 331, human societies started with bands of primates
that could sustain group integrity by grooming relations; according to
Dunbar 1996, the rise of language as a means of communication may have
enabled humans to extend group size to about 150, because language is
more cost-effective than physical grooming and so on upwards. History
has gradually created larger units, with nations as imagined communities
depending on a shared conceptualization, a national identity construction.
The relation between the identity construction and national cohesion is a
functional relation: because people understand themselves as loyal citi-
zens, they adapt their actions to national policies (including taxation and
national defence). Larger units, by analogy, have to provide something
that is even stronger simply because they are larger. The solutions that
made old-fashioned empires possible are no longer available.35
35 This identity construction has to be able to support large-scale community

action to the extent this is necessary for survival; salient examples in an inter-
national context are for instance the willingness to go to war on behalf of the
nation and to pay taxes also for purposes you may not agree with. This is not
just a matter of how people conceive of national loyalty, but a matter of how
functional relations are between acts by state representatives and responses
by citizens. The state/nation constellation would crumble unless citizens
responded to collective action in ways that enabled the whole unit to persist
from one period to the next. This is why desertion rates are interesting in secu-
rity studies and why the functional interaction between desertion rates and
conceptions of the nation must be part of the story. If we want to know about
the role of a given nation in the context of international relations, we need to
know about both sides, and about how they interrelate.
For that reason it is not surprising that the state, the smallest unit in
Wvers layered structure, is more firmly socially constructed than the
larger unit that involves the whole of Europe. Indeed, the nation is some-
times too large a unit to (effectively) supersede lower-level units. An
example is the state of Papua New Guinea (which I have had the pleasure
of visiting in my capacity as a bird watcher). In PNG, the most substantial
units of loyalty are below the national level.36 It extends to clans and tribes,
with shared language as a very powerful constituent: wantok in Tok Pisin
being the name of someone to whom loyalty is due because you share one
talk=wantok. But identification with higher levels is very limited, and
for the national level, the celebration of Independence Day on September
16 is the one visible manifestation of widespread grassroots commitment;
a possible bid for what sustains the social construction of the nation is
simply that it is preferable to dependent status (which lasted until 1976).
A consequence of the predominance of lower levels is that it is impos-
sible to enforce a general system of taxation which in turn means that
government depends on concessions for mining and forestry extended to
international corporations which in turn means that higher level officials
are (not entirely without good reason) suspected of being in cahoots with
international finance rather than accountable to the people. The entrepre-
neurial Huli owner of a guest house in which we stayed told us that his
success had been noticed by government officials who suggested that it
might be time he agreed to pay some tax. The gestures of disgust with
which he accompanied this narrative were illustrated by reference to the
road on which we were travelling in his jeep at the time it took four
hours and a puncture to travel the 25 miles to the local airstrip, which was
situated towards the end of a national highway, just before it petered out
into nothing.
The (dys?)functional interaction between peoples conceptualization
of the overall state/nation and the causal mechanisms at work are obvi-
ously essential to understanding both the acceptance and the efficacy
dimension of PNG as a social construction. An approach that tries to take
each side separately is not going to be able to grasp social reality. Simi-
larly, it is widely assumed that the redistribution of national loyalty that
occurred with devolution in England, Scotland and Wales is partly due to
36 Again, this depends on community practices. In Denmark, lower levels have

lost most of the interactive cohesion that used to sustain local community loy-
alties.
the loss of Empire: being British no longer opened the same opportuni-
ties, and Britain as a result lost ground as a carrier of identity.
Also in cases where functional feedback is solid enough to make nation
states effective agents, internally as well as externally, we must understand
the conceptual and emotional representations of citizens in relation to the
practices that sustain them. These practices are to some extent rooted in
collective habitus; for instance, embodied responses to people who speak
your own language are different from embodied responses to people who
speak a different language, and in nation states this factor underpins
national loyalty, just as it undermines it in PNG. As mentioned above, sur-
vey investigations of life in Denmark (cf. Gundelach 2002; Gundelach,
Iversen and Warburg 2008) also indicate a high level of identification with
shared values, including a high level of mutual trust, which if it is to be
effectual must have a grounding in habitus in addition to its conceptual
aspect. (This contrasts with the situation in America as described by Rob-
ert Putnam, cf. R.Putnam 1995).37
It is thus not surprising that Europe as a larger political unit can count
on nowhere near the same solidity of sustaining relations with existing
community practices. National voter populations do not hesitate to reject
proposals viewed by the elite as critical to the successful persistence of the
European project. What sustaining relations the EU has with other units
are via the member states. For that reason, Europe as a social construction
can at most be as strong as the member states, and if member states decide
to weaken the sustaining relations (as Margaret Thatcher, saliently, did),
the EU will be weakened while the national level is strengthened. The
need to look at both causal-functional feedback and at shared conceptu-
alizations does not of course entail that a clear explanation will always be
available it only specifies what such an explanation must take into con-
37 The layer 1models of nations offer interesting examples of different constel-

lations (see Hansen & Wver 2002). Salient elements are the different rela-
tions between state and nation. As a result of historical experience, in Ger-
many there is a clear differentiation between Germany as Kulturnation and
modern Germany as a political unit while in France the political unit and the
nation are totally fused. In the Nordic countries, the role of the common peo-
ple as a unit of identification is strongly marked, and has formed an alliance
with the welfare state as a concept of social organization. In Norway and Den-
mark this is combined with a contrast to the political elite while in Sweden
this is less marked. This has influenced attitudes to the EU with more strongly
expressed scepticism in Denmark and Norway because the EU was perceived
as an elite project rather than a project for the people.
sideration. Once again, functional relations are only a small part of the
sum total of relations in social space.38
5.4. CIR, agency and factual grounding
The most important element that is missing in the poststructural account

of discourses is the role of the niche of social reality as a non-discursive
hard fact. But there is also the role of the participants to consider, acting
alone or in concert the visible hand. Again, the CIR groups theory
goes beyond impersonal discourse structures on this point. Buzan, Wver
and de Wilde (1998: 24) make clear that security studies, including the
discursive struggle between different groups, are subject to agentive
choices not only by individuals but also by collective institutional
actors including governments and agencies such as the UN; and Hansen
(in Hansen & Wver 2002: 219) says that which possibilities are ulti-
mately articulated depends on the creative forces of political agency.
This reflects the same heterodox position that was asserted by Said, as
discussed above on p. 359 in relation to strict Foucauldian impersonal
forces. Foucault-style discourses are part of the niche; in a given niche,
there may or may not be a security discourse around, and we cannot know
merely by looking at an individual text (although, as pointed out in Buzan,
Wver and de Wilde (1998: 177), we can reasonably infer that if it is not
manifested in central policy statements, it does not exist). Conversely, a
linguist of my acquaintance, who on an American flight talked about what
she felt George W. Bush deserved, was detained and grilled by agents of
Homeland Security, and was thereby reminded that there was in fact a
discourse of security in operation, and it had recently been extended to
imposing itself on the practice of voicing open discontent.
This is something you have to know about the way the world works
but it can only be fully understood if the role of agency is also recog-
nized and agency in the community depends on norms and the force
they have. This is recognized by Wver (2002: 27), when he concludes an
38 Functional relations include relations with the non-mental environment but

that is also recognized in the Copenhagen School:
To point to the importance of discursive structures is not, however, to claim
that material factors, or interests, have no impact. Obviously, it makes a differ-
ence that in the Norway of the 1990s oil resources made it possible to fence off
economic arguments in favour of integration to a different extent than in the
Danish context (Hansen, in Hansen & Wver 2002: 222)]
argument for the force of discursive structures as opposed to structures

which are only in the minds of participants by saying that
it is always necessary for policy makers to be able to argue where this takes
us (who they have to argue this to depends on the political system, but they are
never free of this obligation) and how it resonates with the states vision of
itself (Kissinger 1957: 146)
In other words, we have not an impersonal discourse but a political agent,

with participant access to the niche (the states vision of itself cannot be
inside an individual utterance, if it is to provide the resonating background
for the utterance). The discursive structure works because it is manifested
in linguistic action and has sociocultural grounding in community norms.
Even more obviously agentive are the cases where securitization is an
act in itself (cf. Wver 2008: 105): a declaration that this policy area is
now within the purview of security policies. As such it belongs within a
wider theory in which human agents act under presumptions of collabo-
rative engagement with a shared world. It has a human agent (the agency
that carries out the act of securitization), a referent object (the policy
area that it is imposed on), and an audience (the other players who now
have to respond to the imposition of security status on the policy area in
question.
The argument about securitization as discussed by Buzan, Wver and
de Wilde (1998) can be paraphrased in terms of the path outlined from
construal all the way up to operational social construction. Individual
authors argue about what it will lead to if they extend the discussion of
security to new referent objects and this cannot be answered merely
by looking at the conceptual model itself. We can use the model described
by Hull (1988) to show how the (in)visible hand may work to promote
certain scientific concepts within one subsystem, the academic commu-
nity and a Hull-type account may suggest what direction future Interna-
tional Relations textbooks will take. However, that is a different subsys-
tem of society than the one in which political decision makers operate. In
order to describe the implications of academic concepts for actual politics
we have to know what the feedback relations are from the academic
authors to political agents, as well as the kind of actions that are in fact
triggered by politicians who are influenced by particular conceptualiza-
tions of security.
What is more, the investigation of securitization rightly focuses on the
consequences of the act, thus introducing a causal dimension rather than
just the element of discursive restructuring. Securitization licences meas-
ures that are more drastic than otherwise allowed, thus triggering a
restructuring of the way the world works. Evaluation of this a thor-

oughly interdisciplinary challenge (Wver 2008: 109) must include a
consideration not only of nonce changes but also the new equilibrium
condition that may be the result of enhanced securitization of different
policy areas. And that can only be raised in the context of viewing re-
articulations within the wider context of conditions of persistence and
functional pressures. Also the poststructural element of unconstrained
conceptual variation is more interesting if it is viewed in the context of
causal embedding in the social niche.39
The acceptance dimension obviously plays an essential role in political
contexts, but there is always factual grounding to consider. Since post-
structuralism does not recognize anything outside the discourse, it cannot
tell the difference between bullshit and operational policies. Even if bulls-
hit may be spreading, Abraham Lincolns views about fooling all of the
people all of the time are likely to remain in force for a while yet. The
argument about the welfare state is a good example; liberalist economists
have argued for decades about the dysfunctional adaptive effects of high
welfare benefits and the high taxes that are required to finance them. This
debate has been modified by repeated findings that Denmark is in the
international lead when it comes to rating as a business environmets
which has given the concept of flexicurity some international attention.
The welfare model has adapted too, pruning obvious dysfunctions, includ-
ing the mechanism that for a while adjusted wages upwards when the
country became poorer as a result of worsening trade relations. The point
39 More generally, this picture outlines a format for describing what the role of a
conceptual structure is in the way the world works. In this, it goes beyond both
classic CL and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis. Saying simply that there is
a security discourse is only a beginning just as saying that there is an ideal-
ized conceptual model is only a beginning. The nurturant family as described
by Lakoff exists only in participant individuals, where it can be invoked as a
framing device for politics. In the picture offered here, we can see that it can
also have the status as part of the niche as it has in the Nordic states. In the
Danish community it exerts strong selection pressure on politicians, to which
they therefore adapt. A very visible instance is Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, who before he came to power wrote a book on the minimalist
conception of the state with a clear intellectual debt to Ayn Rand. Shrewd as
he is, in the election campaign which he won, he promised to take over the
welfare commitments of the Social Democrat government that he replaced,
and when occasionally one of his ministers openly expressed views which
clearly agreed with his own previously expressed position, he was very quick
to call them to order.
is not exactly how well socially entrenched mental models adapt the
point is that there is function-driven feedback at all.
The term flexicurity also illustrates a point of principle. The last half
of the blend is security in a sense which shares the roots of the concept,
cf. Wver 2008, in the Latin se cura without worry. In the welfare context,
the relevant worry is about standard of living, but the basic concept is
much the same. A natural way of accounting for this in classic CL would
be to posit a polysemous network of senses that included military, emo-
tional and social security with the without worry element in a schematic
position; it might even be a panchronic network which captured the paral-
lel between the schematic and etymological priority of the without worry
element. For purely conceptual purposes there can be no objection to
such a description; but it would not capture the specific lineage in social
space that constitutes the securitization issue; and its limitations would
have to do with the causal impotence of essences as stressed by Croft.
The argument is analogous to the argument about variational linguis-
tics in ch. 6 above: if we want to understand phenomena as variant mani-
festations of social constructs, we have to understand them against the
background of a structured universe, sustained by functional pressures.
Abstracting from that wider context would be to see them as fluctuations.
As with variational linguistics, in international relations, too, variant dis-
cursive articulations constitute an essential dimension of depth. In them-
selves, generalized function-based structural patterns would only give a
very skeletal account their role is to be the necessary background for
understanding the variations.
So, to sum up with reference to the key concept of security: the dimen-
sions that can be captured in classic CL include its evocation of embodied
experience in the root sense of freedom from worry, and its association
with a polysemous network of senses that can be disambiguated by col-
locates such as emotional, military and social. In terms of the increasing
emphasis on usage and variation, the process of meaning construction can
capture the process whereby any new exemplar joins the population of
utterances, situating itself at the same time in a unique new point in the
ongoing flow of meaning, and as aligned with previous actualizations of
the same linguistic meaning potential. In terms of Crofts theory of change
each instantiation, via processes of selection and propagation, may influ-
ence the form in which the concept will persist across replicative genera-
tions. Among such lineages are the countable discourses that may or may
not be part of the cultural environment but they are only one type of
inhabitants of the niche that also includes governments, laws and subcul-
tures and much else besides.
Individual conceptualization and the social constructor 383
Perhaps most importantly, the niche dimension entails that the signifi-
cance of a usage occurrence of a category such as security can never be
described adequately by simply classing it as the manifestation of a par-
ticular discourse (such as the extended security discourse). First of all, it
can be part of normal collaborative communication, in which case the idea
of a discourse struggle is misleading. As such, it can be an agentive act at
either individual or collective level, in which case it is accountable and
open to challenge; it can be linked (or not) with patterns of causality, as
when the US president or the UN security council pronounces something
a security threat; it can be part of a particular subsystem within the wider
community with its own causal patterns, such as an academic debate; or it
can be part of a political discourse in connection with an election cam-
paign seeking to impose a particular interpretation that will motivate peo-
ple to vote for the speaker. Bodily grounding, conceptual construal, fac-
tual grounding and functional-causal embedding all need to be addressed.
And that illustrates why hard social science needs the full ontology of a
social cognitive framework in order to make concepts, discourses and
explanation cohere.
6. Individual conceptualization and the social constructor
As the argument above has attempted to demonstrate, social construc-

tions are real whatever else they are, they are not mere social construc-
tions. In relation to classic CL, this raises the question of how meaning-
imbued social construction interfaces with embodied conceptual meaning.
The point in this section is to point to the existence of the interface and
the implications of divergence (as opposed to the classic orientation
towards convergence).
In Harder (2004), I discussed the controversy about the boundary
model of child care a classic and well-documented case of a discourse
struggle in Denmark around the turn of the millennium. On the one hand
there was the boundary discourse which sought to reorganize child care
in thought and institutional practices according to the metaphor whereby
a child needed to recognize and respect boundaries, and so adults needed
to be able to draw the line in the right place when they were responsible
for children. On the other hand was the broad left permissive opposition
to the boundary model, which sought to prevent this movement, arguing
that children needed opportunities rather than boundaries. In this con-
text, the point I want to make is the implications of this discussion for the
social construction of well-functioning family life.
There was a large-scale social process involved in the form of the

decline of old-fashioned authority and the disappearance of the house-
wife. The normal situation for Danish children, within a period of less than
twenty years, changed into one where they were in day-care institutions
for most of their waking hours. The point in this context is that the concep-
tual models, and the discourse struggle they gave rise to, do not exhaust
the issue that was discussed. The perceived problem of children that were
unreasonable or even chaotic, and on the other side the perceived prob-
lem of harsh and restrictive attitudes on the part of parents and caregivers,
must be seen in the context of the absence of an operational social con-
struction of family life and child-adult relations generally after these radi-
cal changes.
The discussion started when I was a practicing family father, and the
boundary model resonated with certain aspects of my own experience;
like many other people I had the vague feeling that on some points per-
missiveness had gone too far. I was also a teacher for a number of years,
which gave me other chances of reflecting on the problem of destructive
patterns of behaviour in children. However, even if you think you know
what is reasonable, one thing that all parents and teachers know is that
this does not immediately translate into an operational practice in the
home or the class.
The focus, therefore, must be on the actual work of building up a social
construction that reflects what you think is the best model. Class and fam-
ily need to be constructed neither is determined by objective laws nor
by armchair conceptualization. What is more, even acceptance-in-princi-
ple is not enough. There is no way round devising a causal feedback pat-
tern that sustains the practices you aim for. Conceptual models such as the
nurturant family model and nicely worded discursive constructions are
insufficient (just talk). Unless the family actually (= causally) begins to
operate in this way, the mechanisms of adaptation which are the basic
driving force will work counter to all explicit and conceptual answers.
Therefore there will be a conflict that the most well-intentioned alliance
of talk and conceptualization is bound to lose when pitted against actual
practice.
The role of basic bodily experience can be discussed in a way that both
reflects embodied experience and the joint-attention scenario on the one
hand and also adjusts both the permissiveness and the boundary models.
It is inspired by Jesper Juul (a family therapist who uses the boundary
model with some caution) and may be summarized as follows: what chil-
dren need and want are parents who show who they are, and what they
like and do not like, simply by being themselves in interaction with their
children. When they act in the capacity of real people in joint activity, par-
ents and other responsible adults constitute boundaries that the children
come up against in everyday life, thus naturally imposing constraints on
childrens plans and desires. Childrens respect for boundaries as part of
the human world will then be grounded in recurring experiences of how
interaction with others comes with the constraints arising from the need
to respect the territory of fellow subjects.
If this were the way things inevitably happened, we would have some-
thing like a primary metaphor in Gradys sense, cp. Grady (1997): just as
the mapping between warmth and affection works through repeated
experience of bodily contact with loved ones, so the mapping between
boundaries and harmonious relations with the world arises from repeated
experiences of how the joys of human relationships and the ability to
adapt oneself harmoniously to other people go together. This example
illustrates that the action is at the interface between what emerges out-
ward from the body and what emerges inward from social interaction. The
socio-cognitive point is that the world has to be so constructed: it does not
come for free.
Discourse struggles, as usual, have their niche when two groups are
confronting each other rather than engaged in dialogue. Idealized cogni-
tive models, as usual, offer conceptual options that you can map on to
your experience. But there is no substitute for the patient work of making
the models you go for enter into a constitutive relationship with actual
practices. Part of the societal variation that we all know from our own
lives consists in divergencies between how we think the world should be
constructed and the way it actually works. Like beavers, we have to con-
struct our own niche; and social construction can be hard work.
The lack of guaranteed convergence can also be illustrated from
another angle. This involves another controversial area, gender identity.
Free scope for social construction is attractive to the left-wing community
because it entails freedom from being a helpless victim of biological foun-
dations (and other objective factors). A familiar way of making this point
is that instead of just two genders there are an unlimited number of gen-
ders out there. A favourite phrase is that of doing gender, stressing that
gender is not something that is inside you, it is a social-constructive activ-
ity that you actively perform as part of the online flow. So you can go out
there and be a new women, shedding obsolete and oppressive attributes
of the female gender.
In terms of the picture suggested here, however, the actual flow of
(gendered) activity has to be understood in relation to two other manifes-
tations of social reality: the social construction that is part of the sociocul-
tural niche and the underlying competency to make the role your own.
This means that the individuals flow of activity depends on two enabling
relationships: (1) at the social level, you need to create an operational
social construction, and (2) at the competency level, one that depends on
embodied competency to perform the flow of activity. The niche is defined
by the collective status assignments of fellow community members: will
they make it possible to uphold the status the individual claims for her-
self i. e. that of being a new woman?
First, the social level (the local niche of personal relations): to stress
this need may seem to be a defeatist attitude why not just state your
position and expect others to respect it, now you have defined your new
role to your own satisfaction? But there is no way round the process of
ensuring community recognition. To get oneself socially constructed as
having a new identity is a necessary part of the project. Indeed, if a new
female gender role could be defined without needing outside recognition,
there would be no need to involve husbands in the process of liberating
oppressed wives the wives could just reinvent themselves in their spare
time.
This means that the euphoria of discovering that oppressive features of
reality are merely socially constructed must be tempered with a sober
reassessment: what exactly will it take to carry out a successful process of
social deconstruction-cum-reconstruction? The inevitability of under-
standing your own doing against a social background and the need for
recognition is discussed e. g. in J.Butler (2004: 3), who concludes that when
I act as a gendered individual, my human agency starts from a baseline
that includes the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never
chose. The (in)visible hand has you by the scruff of the neck, and you
need to actually prise yourself free.
This is the implication at the level of socially constructed meaning-in-
society, of the relation between variation and general categories that was
argued in relation to linguistic categories (cf. the discussion with Croft,
p. 291). Just as you cannot understand variation in linguistic categories
without presupposing that there are such general categories (and not just
differences), you cannot understand variational social construction of
gender identity without presupposing that there are socially constructed
genders. This means that you cannot just stipulate a hundred different
genders; you are up against the socially constructed (niche) identities that
happen to be available.
The good news is that this identity in turn can only be understood as
involving the spectrum of actual variation. A category never says every-
thing there is to say about its instantiations, any more than a token itself
will tell you what category to subsume it under in a given case (cf. p. 292).
Also when it comes to niche concepts, the overall container and the dif-
ferential instantiations are part of the same complex reality if you see
the two levels of description as competing alternatives, neither of them
will tell you what you need to know.
Secondly, at the competency level: on this second front, you depend on
your body adapting to the new role you have carved out for yourself. This
may appear to be a trivial consequence, in the sense that we always have
to live with our own decisions. But the question of embodied competency
to perform in a new role is not a matter of choice alone. The verb change
as in I change into a new identity is not a performative verb. You may
find that your sense of selfhood, your desires, and your performance of the
new identity, work differently from what you have imagined. That is, of
course, not to say that we can only be who have traditionally are. Our
great grandparents would probably not have believed the successful inte-
gration of women in the church, the police and the military. But it means
that building a new personality may involve problems for the same reason
as building a new house: the available material may not serve as well as
anticipated in the new capacity. Function and material, slot and filler, con-
stitute an irreducible interface, and convergence cannot be taken for
granted.
Status assignments that affect human identity involve an element of
sociocultural centrality: what is middle class, for instance, may be more
central than what is upper-class or proletarian. Further, it involves nor-
mative pressure: merely being an outlier in the spectrum is often norma-
tively risky. Deviant is not a term of praise. Lady Bracknell, although
unusually explicit, expresses the tacit views of the majority when she talks
about losing both parents being considerably above the proper average
that statistics have laid down for our guidance. It is also associated with
power: if you are closer to the social norm in salient respects, your views
have more clout, because you are associated with the hegemonic position
in the social landscape. Prototypes are ideals, also in terms of beauty: if
nose length (etc) exceeds certain limits, you rank yourself lower, thus con-
firming the hegemony.
In the macro perspective, low prestige comes on top of the personal
experience of not fitting in. The prototype mother thus is not just one
who has all the relevant conceptual features (is a birth mother, a nurturant
mother, is married to the childs father, etc) it is also the culturally nom-
inated standard. In some countries this entails being white, Christian and
middle-class, even if this has nothing to do with the conceptual specifica-
tion of motherhood, only with what is socially normal and normative:
single Black mothers are two down in terms of prestige as well as being
one down in terms of conceptual features.
The intellectual insight into the fact of social construction is therefore
not enough, although it is a good starting point. It is better to be up against
entrenched practices than it is to be up against the basic structure of the
universe, or the Almighty God. But exactly what this allows you to do
depends on your own agency your powers as a social constructor. This
involves the points that were discussed in relation to language change
above on p. 158: to what extent can the visible hand change things at the
collective level?
Therefore the intention to make a better world needs to do more than
point out undesirable conceptualizations or discourses the real test is to
enable practices that sustain the preferable alternatives: square holes have
to be socially constructed for square pegs to fit into, or the misfit experi-
ence will persist, and the stigma associated with the category will resur-
face as soon as the new, sanitized term becomes usage-based. The
progress from nigger to negro to coloured to black to African-American is
genuine progress precisely to the extent the usage basis in actual practice
changed along with the terminology. Factual grounding is essential, or
conceptualization practices will end up as bullshit.
There is a position according to which the goal must be to do away with
all forms of normativity because of the stigmatizing effect it has: all norms
are so many biases. This is impossible in principle, however. Harmonious
human development entails growing into a normative community, sharing
a life that is felt to be good with fellow members of the group and there
is no way something can be good without its absence being felt as bad.
Rather than eradicate all evaluation of things as being good, the strategy
must be for goodness to be extendable to all relevant categories. In other
words, the way forward is via a social construction process, not via decon-
struction.
This section has illustrated the inherent complexities in understanding
mental, conceptual models that are simultaneously under social construc-
tion. In relation to classic CL it illustrates why it would therefore be a
mistake to let a general strategy of looking for converging evidence
trick you into postulating one unified object of investigation, from which
all findings can be explained. The approach in terms of interfaces between
the levels of the tripartite ontology that has been suggested above, with
iconic relations but separate natures, is necessary in order to have the fis-
sures where seeds of change can grow, also in dealing with identity.
One last form of divergence is that between appearances and reality. A
social constructionist position would be different form a position based on
embodiment in this area. Schilhab (2007) describes an experiment that

was designed to address this issue as it applied to the way your under-
standing depends on personal experience. Based on a belief in grounded
cognition, the point was to test (and hopefully disprove!) the claim by the
sociologist Harry Collins (cf. Collins 2007) that you could learn to talk like
an expert merely by adapting to expert talk, to such an extent that you
would be indistinguishable from those who really knew their stuff. The
test issue was a very embodied type of expertise, namely the experience of
having given birth to a child.
To Schilhabs disappointment, the findings confirmed Harry Collinss
results. But according to the interface approach suggested in this book, it
is not to be expected that there is complete iconicity between embodied
habitus, conceptual mappings, and patterns of talk. Exactly how much
can be inferred from actual talk is not decisive unless one believes in the
Turing test. A belief that you would always be able to tell would be overly
foundationalist, believing too strongly in an underlying true reality that
would necessarily assert itself against all surface appearances.
It would be plausible to suppose that there are limits of variation
within which viability is unproblematic, and too great discrepancies will
betray themselves in various ways. Factual grounding also has an experi-
ential and embodied dimension, which illustrates this. In the domain of
deception-related types of performance, Paul Ekmans investigation of
lying is an illustrative example of the kind of complexity that we need to
look out for. In the terms used here, lying involves a discrepancy between
ones mental and discursive construction of the facts, and thus the discur-
sive construction does not reflect ones inner, mental state. There is thus a
lack of both factual and subjective grounding, which gives the discursive
representation a degenerate status not just for Gricean but for other rea-
sons as well.
Fortunately for those who do not believe that anything goes, Ekmans
research points to lying being universally accompanied by little bodily sig-
nals betraying unease but he has also found (cf. Ekman 1996) that we
usually cannot tell, so that liars generally get away with it. In a TV show
that I once saw, he demonstrated this by slow-motion close-ups, including
one from an interview of a prominent Danish business leader who later
committed suicide after the revelation of billion-scale fraud the closest
thing to an Enron-type scandal in Denmark. The reverberations are still
felt, almost twenty years later. (Clearly learning to read body language
may be more than a scoring trick!). But the TV show also demonstrated
that even experts cannot always tell. Some people appear to be inured to
lying, to the extent of being able to lose all awareness of when they are
lying and when they are telling the truth. Ekmans striking pictorial exam-
ple was a film sequence of Oliver North in (discursive) action.
As discussed in relation to bullshit above, the public should monitor
divergences of this kind, especially in relation to power holders. In addi-
tion to the invisible and the visible hand, we may therefore speak of the
concealed hand as an especially central target of critical analysis: the
hybrid case where agency is involved but covert.
In short, public and embodied understanding interact all the time, and
convergence is only one of the possible relations between them. Because
a thoroughgoing social constructionism assumes that the social process
determines embodied understanding, and a thoroughgoing commitment
to embodied grounding would entail that personal experience would
always prevail, both theories are wrong. Functional equilibrium-promot-
ing mechanisms may lend a helping invisible hand. But human agents had
better realize that no one is going to take away personal responsibility for
promoting the kind of convergence that satisfi(c)es normative optimality
criteria, especially their own
7. Cognitively based critical analysis

a comparative perspectivization
As demonstrated in various places above, critical analysis of meaning and

conceptualization in the social sphere is well-entrenched in CL. Now that
I have presented the extended foundation I propose for an overall expan-
sion from cognitive to social-cognitive linguistics, it is natural to ask: what
difference does it make? If work is already well under way in the area I
am staking out, it is not obvious why such a foundational exercise should
be necessary.
In stating what I hope to contribute, it may be useful to operate with a
cline of descriptive aims, beginning at the end that is closest to classic CL
aims and gradually moving further into social territory. Closest to classic
CL is the kind of work that deals with cultural cognitive models, with
Holland and Quinn (1987) as a seminal book. I emphasize again that there
is no necessary disagreement between what I have tried to say and analy-
ses focusing on the cognitive dimension. The seminal insight of the cogni-
tive pioneers, cf. the preface to Holland and Quinn (1987), that social for-
mations are imbued with cognitive content and need to be analysed in
cognitive terms, is still as valid as it was then. In this kind of work, with
Lakoff as a central inspiring figure, cognitive models basically reflect the
descriptive universe of classic CL: the fundamental locus is in the indi-
Cognitively based critical analysis a comparative perspectivization 391
vidual mind, and what is social and cultural about these models is mainly
that they are important in the community because many individuals have
them and use them in social and cultural contexts. This makes it more
important to describe and understand these particular models rather than
others which may be less culturally central.
In terms of the cline that I am invoking, the path moves further into
the social domain when the descriptive focus shifts towards attributing
gradually greater significance to social and cultural practices as targets of
description. This does not necessarily entail any change in the under-
standing of the nature of cognitive models, only that the aim changes
towards describing communicative or institutional practices by means of
the cognitive models that they use. This entails that more independent
significance is attributed to these practices rather than solely to the cog-
nitive dimension in itself. As examples of work that has shifted its focus
further towards the analysis of types of discourse in society, we may take
Nerlichs work on cognitive models in science communication, cf. Nerlich,
Elliott and Larson (2009), Polzenhagen and Dirven (2008) on the under-
standing of global English, and the concept of discourse metaphor intro-
duced by Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich (2008). At the most social end of
the scale, we find work that is explicitly targeted on political aspects, and
which thus moves into the same territory where critical discourse analysis
belongs, such as Hart and Luke (2007), Koller (2008) and Chilton (1996,
2004).
Distinctions between different points on the scale should not be exag-
gerated. Across the board, it demonstrates the potential of CL analysis for
throwing light on the conceptual half of social reality. This covers the
dimension of meaning-in-society that can be captured by remaining within
the cognitivist perspective (cf. the discussion ch. 2, p. 58 f.). This type of
work is central also in the social cognitive linguistics I envisage, and often
it stresses some of the same basic points that recur in this book.40 One
particular strand, which has had considerable and well-deserved impact
also beyond the usual disciplinary boundaries, is work on metaphors in
the social political domain, cf. Chilton (1996), Charteris-Black (2004;
40 Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich (2008), for instance, make a point of the fact that
discourse metaphors evolve in historical time (Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich
2008: 368), and that the individualist view of cognition needs to be supple-
mented with a socioculturally situated view (Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich
2008: 379).
2005), Goatly (2007), Morgan (2008), Musolff (2008) and many more. If
the aim of this book had been primarily expository, it would have been
natural to give a full review of the literature in this area. However, the
intended cutting edge of the book is the attempt to expand the theoretical
foundations, and in doing so to highlight the role of the functional dimen-
sion in understanding meaning in society. In terms of that purpose, what I
have to add to the cognitive analysis of pervasive cultural models essen-
tially boils down to one thing, that the cognitive analysis ultimately needs
to team up with an analysis of the non-cognitive dimensions of the social
sphere. Hence, instead of attempting to squeeze a necessarily incomplete
descriptive account of this very rich tradition into the present book, I con-
fine myself to the more modest aim of trying to illustrate what advantages
the extended framework I argue for may have, taking one example from
the classic CL end of the spectrum and one example from the most social
and political end.
With respect to the most cognitive end of the spectrum, the contribu-
tion I can offer is to provide a format for discussing how cognitive facts
and social facts interact. While in a cognitivist framework it is the cogni-
tive side of the picture that drives the process, a central feature of the
analytic framework I have defended is the irreducibly two-way relation-
ship, shaped by evolution-style dynamics, between cognitive and social
structures. It is generally accepted that cognitive models both influence
social reality and are influenced by it but typically this is viewed in the
non-predictive, quasi-circular mutual influence fashion. Crucial to the
theory I defend is a functional and panchronic relationship where the
individual mind is part of a larger pattern that involves adaptation to com-
munity-level forces outside the individual mind.
Croft (2000, 2006) has shown how evolution-type dynamics can be
applied to language change; I have tried to show how constituents of social
reality are subject to the same mechanisms. Following Henning Andersen
(2006), I have also argued that mechanisms of reproduction in human
communities are different from and more complex than mechanisms of
reproduction in biology (p. 158 above): in addition to the strictly local and
accident-prone type of reproduction that is analogous to genetic repro-
duction with attendant mutations, there is the type of reproduction that is
driven by identification with community-level, cultural patterns. This is
even more important when it comes to the lineages that constitute social
constructions, because they are part of the reality we live in in a more
direct sense than the lineages that constitute linguistic items: social con-
structions are part of the furniture of the world, while linguistic items are
means of interaction with fellow subjects. Hence, the outcomes of linguis-
tic interaction are more important than the linguistic means for carrying
out this interaction. Based on that, I have tried to describe a number of
different formations that arise in social space, with different types of rela-
tions between cognitive content and social causation, from efficacy-heavy
social constructions like armies to quasi-Platonic niche concepts, hoping
that this will make it possible to be more precise about the pathways that
cognitive follows may follow in the social sphere. As I see it, it may be use-
ful also in relation to analyses at the most cognitivist end of the scale to
offer a framework that makes it possible to follow conceptualization on
its path beyond the individual mind. To illustrate this, I am going to discuss
some aspects of The Political Mind (Lakoff 2008) and suggest where
aspects of the descriptive format I have outlined above may supplement
Lakoffs analysis.
Lakoff himself in fact makes reference to a number of phenomena that
are outside his own core analytic framework. An example that is particu-
larly central from my perspective is that Lakoff refers to what he calls
systemic causation (Lakoff 2008: 188) as a key factor in the problems he
is addressing. Understanding systemic causation is crucial precisely
because direct causation is easier to grasp and thus conservatives suc-
cessfully manage to get members of the public to understand problems
such as crime and Abu Ghraib to be due to bad individuals rather than to
failures of the whole system, which is a misrepresentation of the facts of
the matter.
Lakoff anchors his understanding of systemic causation in the collec-
tive interaction that is built into the nurturant family model. Regardless of
the merits of this analysis, one thing is how the conceptual model in con-
figured in the individual mind, another is how systemic causation actually
works out there in society. In the framework of this book, one central type
of systemic causation is associated with the selection processes that are at
work at aggregate levels, as opposed to reproduction-level acts by (in the
case of crime, possibly deviant) individuals. Such systemic causation would
be at work if those who commit crimes (including war crimes) are favoured
by the selection processes that occur in the relevant social system41.
Whether such processes work by orchestrated or emergent processes, the
same individual-level propensity to commit crimes will lead to a very dif-
41 A panel led by former (Republican) defense secretary James R. Schlesinger

strongly suggested that it was actually system-level causation i. e. mecha-
nisms that were imposed upon individual-level practices from above that
were responsible for war crimes such as those committed at at Abu Ghraib.
ferent outcome than in a system that is less selectionally favourable

towards perpetrators. The crucial issue is whether the survivors are those
who are willing to transgress official regulations: individual-level propen-
sities are then not responsible for the outcome, once reproductive cycles
take their course, and evil is allowed to flourish
Lakoff (loc. cit.) sees understanding of systemic causation as a key
element in the New Enlightenment that he calls for, and I offer this
social-cognitive analysis of social constructions as a potential contribution
to this enlightenment: understanding the relation between individual
agency and aggregate selection processes is essential, as I see it, to have a
strategy for promoting democratic accountability of the kind that Lakoff
rightly insists on. It may be argued that a detailed analysis is not really
necessary in order to invoke systemic causation or other theory-external
concepts they can just be imported from outside the theory itself when
they are needed. While this is true up to a point (you do not have to rein-
vent the wheel every time you need to go for a drive), there is a risk asso-
ciated with importing concepts from the outside if you do not rethink the
theory to make sure they fit in: the imported concepts may carry implica-
tions that run counter to assumptions that underlie other elements in the
theory. This can be exemplified with reference to the issue of the under-
pinning in Lakoffs own core theory of the New Enlightenment: I think
this excellent aim is difficult to fit into a purely cognitivist framework.
The difficulty arises in the following way. A major point in The Political
Mind (Lakoff 2008) is to urge progressive citizens to take seriously the
realization that human understanding, including understanding of politics,
is embodied rather than abstract and impersonal. This means that political
debates based on purely abstract intellectual analyses are not going to
work for progressives (especially since conservatives are so much better
at invoking patterns of understanding that are socioculturally grounded
and well-entrenched in American minds). Lakoff has a point here that one
would expect Karl Rove to endorse. In Lakoff (2008) it is expressed in
many different ways, including this:
Concepts dont exist in some abstract philosophical universe, where they can
somehow be distinguished from conceptions or instantiations. Each person
has a concept that makes sense to him or her. That concept is instantiated in the
synapses of the brain. (Lakoff 2008:178)
This has implications not only for how to communicate effectively in poli-
tics it also has implications for the situation of those who are profession-
ally interested in the role of conceptualization in politics. If concepts are
essentially properties of individual embodied minds, the only way to
change them is to interfere with peoples brains.42. Lakoff also uses physi-
cal facts as an analogy for his work on the family models underlying polit-
ical thinking in the US:
Newton, as a scientist, described how objects move; he had no power to make
them move that way. The same is true here. American politics does use those
models. All I can do is describe them .you cannot impose some other model
on peoples brains. (Lakoff 2008: 77)
Yet when it comes to the aim of bringing about a new enlightenment,
changing the models in peoples brains is exactly what Lakoff wants to do.
Talking about sexist models of womens life, he says
That they have become permanent fixtures in the brains of so many Americans
should make it all the more urgent that we recognize their existence and their
persistence and start routing them out of our brains! (Lakoff 2008: 28)
For the sake of the argument, let us assume that it is in fact possible to rout
sexist models out of our brains, while it is impossible to stop Americans
from thinking about politics in terms of family models. Even so, we would
need a theory that can explain why the two sets of embodied models differ
in this respect. That requires an analysis that goes beyond concepts viewed
solely as facts about individual minds/brains. This does not entail that con-
cepts exist in some abstract philosophical universe but it does entail
that they can somehow be distinguished from instantiations (pace
Lakoff 2008: 178, as quoted above).
I suggest that the theory of concepts as features of the niche and as
sources of selection pressure goes some way towards offering an account
of how concepts can exist outside the individuals mind/brain, and of how
they may enter or be routed out of the minds of individuals: if life
in a niche where they are entrenched (e. g. one in which gender roles are
differently conceived) appears to have more to offer, that will give these
concepts a selective advantage on the acceptance scale (cf. above, section
3.4).
Another example of the need to operate with an aggregate level as
well as an individual level of meaning in society is the conceptualization
of politics in terms of the left-right scalar model. Lakoff wants to elimi-
nate that conceptualization because he thinks it glosses over the funda-
mental differences between progressive and conservative values as
embodied in the two family models. In order to do that, however, it is not
42 Lakoff acknowledges that this is what is needed (2008:12), recognizing the

Frankensteinian overtones of the project.
enough to consider the level of the individual you have to take into con-
sideration what role this model has at the aggregate, population level. As
we saw on p. 312 above, analysis of voting patterns (McCarty, Poole and
Rosenthal 2006) has shown that the left-right axis has emerged as the sole
aggregate dimension, while a previous scale of racial attitudes has disap-
peared. Lakoff (2008: 47) stresses that the left-right model is real because
it is in peoples minds but in order to understand the issue fully, it is also
necessary to understand that it is real also in the sense of being part of
social reality: voting patterns are analogous to market forces in belonging
at the invisible hand level, outside the individual minds. Like the success
or failure of entrepreneurs, the success or failure of political candidates
reflects selection pressures at population level. If selection pressures have
been reconfigured so as to reflect the left-right axis alone, individual
attempts to avoid being placed in terms of left-right axis will be unsuccess-
ful until the aggregate pattern changes.
This does not mean that one should desist from arguing against
unwanted conceptualizations, of course but it means that unless candi-
dates take mechanisms working at the aggregate level into consideration
(e. g. by developing a strategy that formulates the protest against the left-
right scale in a way that optimizes selection possibilities while the scale
remains in operation), it is more likely that selection pressures will weed
them out.
Once again, I see this analysis, as a natural part of Lakoffs new enlight-
enment and the associated metadiscourse (reminiscent of Diskurs in
Habermass sense, cf. Habermas 1971) that Lakoff calls for. The project
presupposes the possibility of taking conceptual patterns out of the cogni-
tive unconscious and subjecting them to conscious examination: in several
places (e. g. 2008: 19; 34), Lakoff describes his aim as trying to change
reflexive thought (the type that is associated with automatic, unconscious
cognitive processes) into conscious, reflective thought. This is in the best
enlightenment tradition, reminiscent of a long line of positions from
Kants Aufklrung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschul-
deten Unmndigkeit. (Enlightenment is mans release from his self-
incurred tutelage Was ist Aufklrung?, 1784) to Freuds motto (usually
traced to a lecture at a Psychoanalytic congress in 1933) Wo Es war, soll
Ich werden (Where id was, there ego shall be).
This may seem at odds with Lakoffs rejection of the 18th century mind
in the subtitle of his book (Why you cant Understand 21st-Century Poli-
tics with an 18th-Century Brain). Lakoff (in my view rightly) claims that
there is no conflict between seeing reason as embodied and often uncon-
scious, and the deeper rationality that he argues for. What is missing,
however, is a clear account of how the two go together. Based on his own
account, Lakoff is in fact making himself dependent on the 18th century
mind to drive out the unwanted mental baggage that voters are carrying
around in the 21st century, when he says Reflective thought is what I
have called old Enlightenment reason (2008: 223). A niche-based theory
can provide foundations for a Lakoff-style re-enlightenment because if
offers a foundation for rationality that lies outside the individual mind.
In Harder (1996: 131) I argued that the traditional Platonic reliance on
underlying eternal ideas to correct deception in the social flux needs to
be replaced by the realization that the social force of true (factually
grounded) knowledge depends on a social knowledge contract. Only if
knowledge is backed up by social endorsement will it have a chance to
prevail over more immediately convenient falsehoods. In other words, to
strengthen rationality in the political realm we need to think in terms of
strengthening its sociocultural grounding, not just attempt to rewire peo-
ples brains. Institutions such as schools, universities and public debating
fora need to work so as to establish a selection pressure that favours
rational argument. In the social sphere, the status of rationality is to be a
norm and if it is to prevail, it needs to be part of the normative com-
munity that young minds adapt to when they graduate into full member-
ship of civil society.
I see that as being essentially what Lakoff is arguing for, and again
offer the theory I have defended above as an extended social-cognitive
foundation for what he and other cognitivist analysts of meaning in soci-
ety are trying to do. I believe it has advantages also for analyses which
follow the classic CL trajectory by taking their point of departure in con-
ceptual structures.
The argument I have pursued above also has implications for how to
understand the central concept of frame. Lakoffs use of the term
expresses his broad, fundamental point against Cartesian Reason under-
stood as operating in an abstract domain separate from human experi-
ence. In order to make sense to people, all communication has to tap into
experience as manifested in the conceptual patterns in their minds, and
the basic units are frames (Lakoff 2008: 22). While this is certainly true, the
concept frame is too broad to provide the underpinning for Lakoffs
enlightenment project. In the introduction (p. 5) I claimed provocatively
that conceptual frames do not exist, in the sense that they do not consti-
tute a specific class of conceptual units. Any meaning-imbued part of the
social cognitive world (however constituted) is a potential frame: there
is nothing that is characteristic of a frame as opposed to an idealized
conceptual model, a domain, or even a concept, cf. the choice between
crime and war on terror for framing the response to 9/11.43 The crux is
the framing, rather than the frame.
This means that the concept in its undifferentiated form spans two very
different cases. In Fillmores seminal calendar example, the act of under-
standing the word Sunday has to work via accessing the calendar frame
without that frame, the term simply makes no sense. This is a good exam-
ple of how (as Lakoff stresses) the basic process of understanding works
below the threshold of consciousness and so does not lend itself to agen-
tive control. But in political communication, the central issue that Lakoff
addresses is that conservatives are so much better than progressives at
framing, and progressives therefore need to take a leaf out of their book.
This presupposes a very different type of process, one in which the to-be-
understood unit can be inserted into alternative frames and the trick is
to frame the issue in a politically effective way. The act of framing as it
applies to politics thus involves a rather sophisticated form of agency,
which is rather different from what follows from seeing frames as part of
the cognitive unconscious. It is a form of strategic action, which presup-
poses the ability to detach issues from the frame in which they are pre-
sented by other people and furnish them with preferable frames.
As such it not only presupposes that the political communicator has
changed reflexive into reflective thinking, but also raises issues in relation
to Gricean and Habermasian ideals of communication. For those who
want to occupy the moral high ground, it raises the issue of what kind of
strategic framing is compatible with that ambition. Without a specific
analysis, the zero hypothesis would be that one framing is as good as
another, and it is just a matter of a battle for who gets most votes. Lakoffs
use of conceptual engineering, by introducing the concept of privateer-
ing as a way to capture the piracy- and racketeering-like aspects of priva-
tization as practiced by Enron, from a strictly strategic point of view is not
in principle distinct from the Bush administrations use of personal
accounts (cf. above p. 348). More generally, the advice against using the
opponents framing is no different in principle from the Bush administra-
43 As pointed out by Lakoff (2008), at first 9/11 was framed as a crime, but later
it was framed as an event in the war on terror. Both are frames, but the war
on terror is at the same time a metaphor while crime is simply a concept: it
applies literally to what happened, since it is against the law to bomb high-rise
buildings, killing thousands of people. This shows that it is the act of framing
that is distinctive: there is no way to define what a frame is (as opposed to a
metaphor) based on purely conceptual characteristics.
tions policy of not giving opportunities for taking photos of coffins return-
ing from Iraq.
As is evident from Lakoffs emphasis on new enlightenment and
deeper rationality, this is not what he has in mind. This is another reason
why charting the social embedding of framing may be useful. The poten-
tial of this extended foundational exercise can perhaps be illustrated via a
comparison with (a mildly caricatured version of) post-Foucauldian dis-
courses analysis. Viewed as a free-for-all framing battle, Lakoffs strategy
is not too different from starting a poststructural discourse struggle. The
inaccessible force of unconscious cognitive models would be similar to the
inaccessible force of the hidden hand of prevailing, power-imbued dis-
courses. However, from the perspective of an analysis based on the hidden
hand of power as manifested in discourses, Lakoffs concrete project
would come across as hopelessly nave. Not only is there a whiff of positiv-
ist belief in objective facts in his comparison with Newtonian physics,
there is also and more fundamentally a lack of awareness of impersonal
social power of the powerful discourse of regimentation (governmental-
ity) which, backed up by large-scale corporate capital, is lurking behind
his individual-based model of the strict father family. Attacking such a
formidable position of social power by a strategy based on changing indi-
vidual minds makes the charge of the light brigade appear like an odds-on
bookmakers favourite in comparison.
As against this, the foundational understanding I have argued for may
offer a way of understanding Lakoffs project that assigns a more promis-
ing status to it. The issue can be viewed as a matter of grounding in rela-
tion to the social dimension. By relating his agenda to ideals embodied in
the American constitution, Lakoff (2008: 6) addresses what I have called
the sociocultural grounding of his projected reconstruction of American
politics. By subjecting the rational actor model to an analysis in terms of
inaccuracies in relation to historical and future effects, Lakoff (2008: 217)
is testing the conceptual model in terms of what I have called factual
grounding. Both reflect an understanding of conceptual modelling as
being subject to evaluation in terms of the standards of a normative com-
munity. Although reframing is a strategic type of action, the type that
Lakoff argues for operates under Habermas-style normative rules: it is
accountable to (culturally entrenched) norms of right action and of truth-
ful communication.
This does not say anything about what precisely the odds are for
Lakoffs project to succeed but it specifies why it has a chance. As
opposed to the poststructural view, the social cognitive view implies that
there is a social reality behind discourses, even the most powerful ones.
The social causality of power is ultimately subject to the dynamics of

acceptance at the individual level and selection at the population level
and neither is eternally fixed. In a usage based framework, nothing is
guaranteed over and above the dynamics of cycles of actual events. Any
change can alter the dynamics in ways that cannot be stipulated in advance.
Lakoffs project is an instance of the visible hand strategy, and involves
the project of creating an orchestrated (counter-)discourse a way of
speaking about political matters imbued with shared norms, cf. p. 360
above designed to alter the pattern of selection pressures that are oper-
ative in the American political landscape. Although corporate power may
well be estimated to have greater clout than grass roots organization in
most situations, this kind of project is essential to democracy as an opera-
tional construction (for reasons discussed above on p. 360). A purely post-
structural analysis such as the one presented above would therefore be
equivalent to a facile, anti-democratic cynicism.
Let me emphasize that what I have argued for here is not Lakoffs
political project (although I happen to share most of it privateering, for
instance, has also become an issue in the Danish political landscape, spe-
cifically with respect to health care). The argument above is about how to
think about concepts in relation to politics. Thus, even if Lakoff were to be
proven wrong in every particular of his concrete analysis, it would not
affect the principle of the argument I have tried to make. On the founda-
tions I have sketched out, by making himself accountable in terms of the
social anchoring of his analysis in ways I have tried to capture, Lakoff has
himself made it possible to evaluate his analysis in ways that a thorough-
goingly social constructionist analysis would seal itself off from.
I now shift from the end of the scale where individual cognition is in
focus to the end where the aim is to describe political formations and posi-
tions to the type of CL-based work that has taken up the issues that are
addressed by critically oriented discourse analysis, and which has thus
situated itself in the domain that my civic agenda addresses. Some
authors in this field adopt a position that is closer to the Critical Discourse
Analysis position than I have argued for; thus Hart (2007) and Luke
(2007) argue that adopting a CL-type cognitive analytic dimension would
strengthen work based on the CDA agenda, such as the analysis of ideolo-
gies of social inequality. Although I think this is true enough, the reserva-
tions I have argued for above on pp. 366 and 373 entail that I do not think
this is the key avenue of progress, and I see the criticism of CDA offered
by Hart and Luke (2007) themselves as an argument for replacing the
CDA perspective with the framework grounded in collaborative agency
that I have defended above.
Closest to my own position is perhaps the work of Paul Chilton (e. g.,
1996, 2004, 2005). Chilton situates his work equally in a conceptual and an
interactive perspective (e. g., Chilton 2004: 197), analyzing politics as a
matter of mental representations intertwined with discursive action, and
at one point his position involves a combination of CL and CDA:
A cognitive approach, however, is only half the story. The impetus for the appli-
cation of a reinvigorated understanding of metaphor to the particular domains
of politics and international relations springs also from the critical discourse
analysis developed by British, German and Australian linguists in the 1970s
and 1980s. Of particular relevance is the work of Fairclough and Fowler, Hodge
and Kress. (Chilton 1996: 3)
However, if one compares formulations from 1996 and 2005, some disen-
chantment is discernible, cf. the concluding paragraph of Chilton (2005),
summing up a detailed criticism of CDA:
The upshot of these ruminations is that CDA may not be the field within which
the most perplexing questions can be pursued that concern the nature of the
human mind, of human language, of human language use and of human society.
(Chilton 2005: 46).
This may be part of the reason that Chilton (2004: 198) adopts what he
calls a broadly cognitivist perspective. This characterization reflects that
a larger proportion of his detailed analyses of texts and political events
deals with the representational universes that politicians and political
analysts construct which are at the same time mental spaces in the sense
of Fauconnier (1985), and text worlds in the sense of Werth (1999), cf.
Chilton (2004: 57, 61). In terms of the classification used in chapter 2, the
focus of his work comes under the heading of meaning construction the
study of cognitive structures and mechanisms to build up meaning as part
of utterance understanding in context. From the point of view of the
approach presented in this book, this reflects a focus that is chiefly on the
cognitive side rather than the social sphere: although it is an account of
discourse understanding, it is primarily a description of how meaning can
be constructed in a text by an (expert) observer, not a description of
events as constituents in a social process.
However, the hedge broadly reflects the fact that his analytical appa-
ratus is by no means strictly cognitivist. Among other things, it explicitly
includes strategic action, divided (2004: 4546) into three types: coercion,
(de)legitimization and (mis)representation. From my perspective, this
constitutes a functional dimension that serves to contextualize the repre-
sentational side of the analysis (the functional dimension is saliently illus-
trated for example in Chilton 2004: 125130). Viewed in the context of
Habermasian validity claims, the inclusion of strategic action in the ana-

lytic framework situates the discursive representations not only as part of
gradually unfolding world-changing plans of action, but also in a norma-
tive universe of the kind that was described as an alternative to the purely
power-based scenario associated with discursive struggle. Thus the domi-
nant role of (self)legitimation in political texts, as demonstrated for
instance in an analysis of Clintons speech announcing the bombing cam-
paign against Serbia in 1999 (Chilton 2004: 137) must be understood in
terms of the kind of causality that is at work in the (American and inter-
national) community rather than in purely conceptual terms. What mat-
ters is not that people understand the representation of the war as a justi-
fied war what matters is that they accept it, cf. the discussion of the
acceptance dimension of social constructions above.
The (mis)representation issue as part of Chiltons framework similarly
takes political analysis beyond the purely conceptual sphere, raising the
issue of truth and factual grounding. An example is the comparison
between the cold war conceptual representation and the reality of Soviet
Russia in 1946 (cf. Chilton 1996: 154). Coercion is roughly equivalent to
causal efficacy, covering the same ground as the generalized Foucauldian
notion of power and the operational dimension of social constructions as
discussed above. All in all, Chiltons analytic universe goes well beyond
the cognitivist perspective; and I see no conflict in relation to the frame-
work I have presented in this book.
In the light of this assessment, it is natural to return to the question of
what this framework, aiming to serve the civic purpose of providing a
sounder foundation for the analysis of meaning in the social sphere can
have to offer over and above what Chilton has already provided. The
answer is partly implied in Chiltons own characterization of his approach
as broadly cognitivist: its focus is on describing the conceptual architec-
ture of policies and political texts, rather than on providing an account of
the social dimension for which Chilton no longer finds Critical Discourse
Analysis adequate. In the preface to Chilton (2004), Chilton suggests that
the pursuit of a more coherent theory of language and political behaviour
may now be possible. While this book certainly does not claim to provide
such a complete theory, I hope it may have something to offer when it
comes to including in the theory itself some of the salient parts of the
social landscape in which political texts and conceptualizations belong.44
44 I can illustrate what I see as the difference of perspective by taking up his

presentation of the concept of frame (Chilton 2004: 51), which to my mind
Summary: Conceptualization in society 403
8. Summary: Conceptualization in society
This chapter has argued for three main claims that were listed in the intro-
duction. The first, which was the main focus in sections 2 and 3, was that
something important is missing if you approach meaning-in-society only
from a cognitive perspective. The role of causal efficacy was demonstrated
in a range of contexts, beginning with operational social constructions, as
a necessary supplement to mental representation in understanding the
social role of conceptualization.
Section 2 presented a series of analyses designed to show that the same
conceptual content could team up with the way the world works in very
different ways, as shaped by the same type of evolutionary dynamics that
is behind language change. Among these ways were, at one extreme, the
minimal role in habitus-driven practices and at another extreme, the
independent causal role that conceptualizations may have in their capac-
ity as quasi-Platonic constituents of social reality in their own right. More
generally, the distinction between competency concepts and niche con-
has inherited the problems inherent in the familiar fuzzy CL sense(s) of the
word, as discussed above and in ch. 5: frames comprise everything from long-
term knowledge in general (including schemata, scenes and conceptual mod-
els) via areas of experience in a particular culture (cited from Werth 1999) to
the type of frames that enter into the meaning of specific verbs (cf. Fillmores
FrameNet project). Further, they are theoretical constructs, while at the same
time they are said to have some ultimately, neural reality. For reasons pre-
sented above on p. 397, I think this vagueness may be inevitable if the aim is to
talk about what is in the individual mind, since there is a very indirect relation
between the politically relevant sense of frame and constructs in any indi-
vidual mind. As pointed out, what one can hope to be precise about is the act
of framing, i. e. of situating a focal message against a particular background.
Because it is then presented as having presupposed status, challenging it would
be a face-threatening act (Chilton 2004: 64). In other words, the status of some-
thing as a frame and the conditions of success of framing have a great deal to
do with the social dimension, while the purely conceptual side is compara-
tively vague.
Similarly, although the concept of frame as used in the articles in Nerlich,
Elliott and Larsson (2009: 68) focuses on the core functional sense, i. e. the
issue of how a scientific topic can be inserted in different contextual frames,
they maintain the very broad sense in which frames can also be scripts, inter-
pretive packages and story lines (p. 6), and to frame something can be to
select some aspects of perceived reality and make them more salient (cited
from Entman 1993: 52).
cepts was introduced as a way of distinguishing between the individual

and the social role of conceptual content.
Section 3 focused on acceptance, which is often implicit understood as
the main factor in making conceptual models socially relevant. To provide
a more differentiated picture, the focus was on cases where acceptance
could operate with loose and variable relations to other dimensions of
social reality, including at one extreme the case of bullshit. To enable the
theory to put this form of variability on the map, two forms of grounding
were proposed: sociocultural grounding as a term for the extent to which
a conceptual model is entrenched in community life, and factual ground-
ing for the extent to which a conceptual model has been shown to be a
reliable map in dealing with reality. This theory contrasts equally with a
purely social constructionist and a purely cognitivist understanding of
conceptual models.
The second claim was that a theory of the social side of meaning-in-
society has to be founded in joint, collaborative activity. The argument for
this claim, ultimately based on the arguments presented in ch. 2 for the
status of intersubjectivity and joint attention as prerequisites for human
language, took the form of a comparison with the position of post-
Foucauldian discourse(s) analysis. The argument had two main stages.
In section 4, an account was offered showing how the role of conflict
and impersonal power could be accommodated as one rather special
aspect of human communication, where the form of power that was cen-
tral to Foucault was reinterpreted as selection pressure of the type ema-
nating from the invisible hand. In addition to that form of power, however,
an adequate theory needed to operate with the visible hand of collective
agency also in order to have a theoretically founded role for accounta-
bility (which is incompatible with power in the strictly impersonal form).
In section 5, the argument was conducted with reference to the post-
structural theory of International Relations represented by the Copenha-
gen School, with the aim of showing how the issue was relevant also in
hard social science. It was claimed that although this approach could
account well for the impersonal and confrontational power play as mani-
fested in successive rationales for foreign policies, there was still a dimen-
sion of functional relations that was occasionally acknowledged, and
which could be captured by a social cognitive linguistics that incorporated
a grounding dimension that was absent from poststructural thinking.
The third claim involved the civic dimension of what an analytic frame-
work needs to cover, which is specifically to address the social framework
from a perspective that incorporates the perspective of the participant. It
is closely related to the second claim above and was taken up in connec-
tion with the accountability issue but the main discussion is the subject
of the next chapter.
A continuing undercurrent in the argument of this chapter is the
importance of divergence (in addition to the focus in classic CL on con-
vergence). There is no guarantee that concepts downloaded from com-
municative interaction will automatically match up with concepts that
emerge from personal embodied experience, or that niche concepts and
competency concepts will always match up or that socially constructed
entities actually work the way they are mentally represented as working.
Convergence, however, is normatively preferable: it is a constitutive prop-
erty of conceptual grasping that it is expected to grasp the world as it
really is, and that understanding is a joint property between individuals.
The potential divergences become more and more important as we
move along the cline from the categories and conversational exchanges of
familiar everyday life towards the larger and more abstract macro-social
events and contexts. The balance between what is due to immediate per-
sonal experience and what is downloaded from linguistically mediated
sociocultural practices gradually shifts, and this necessarily has conse-
quences for the role of bodily grounding. Ordinary people may tend to
become more and more suspicious as they move along that cline: what
does this have to do with reality?
Social constructions that persist even in spite of their increasingly dis-
tant links with everyday experience are not phoney as a general rule.
Large corporations and social institutions are real enough. But the scope
for partial divergences with other parts of reality increases with the dis-
tance. This is where the issue of bullshit comes in and where the question
of causal-functional underpinning therefore increases in importance. The
whole point of this book depends on the assumption that there is a natural
relation between meaning and personal experience. But the conclusion
cannot be that only personally grounded meaning really exists. Rather, we
have to take large-scale social constructions seriously, too: in the human
context we can no longer distinguish between nature and civilization,
because we adapt to the niche as we rebuild it. Therefore there has to be
a way of thinking and speaking also within large-scale social constructions
that does not surrender to bullshit and floating signifiers. That is why the
question of factual grounding increases in importance, as we move towards
the macro-social end of the scale. We need them to find out when signifi-
ers float away from reality, and when communication turns into bullshit or
even orchestrated conceptual fraud.
The ecology of socially constructed entities that arise when constraints
based on personal experience become weaker includes the sense of dis-
course that I have adopted as something a social cognitive linguistics

needs to take seriously. Central to it is that there is a well-entrenched set
of categorisations with normative underpinning that are routinely brought
to bear on targeted phenomena in order to block out alternative construc-
tions of them. This is a necessary concept, precisely because such dis-
courses are parts of the social process that look like communication, but
really arent. This is why we need to know about them and tell our stu-
dents about them. When we see the signs (Beware of the Balkan dis-
course!), we know that utterances manifesting such a discourse are not
grounded in personal experience, are resistant to joint co-construction
and reflect an entrenched collective pattern of thinking, which is typically
orchestrated for strategic purposes. In that case, protagonists can and
should be called to account, hopefully with the result that they shift gears
into collaborative communication. However, as suggested by Foucault,
discourses may also emerge by historical processes behind the backs of
individuals, so that in a given situation there are no apparent alternative
ways of addressing the issue at hand.
In my account of the collaboration between conceptual content and
social constructions, I have concentrated on the simplest process, that of
categorization. But let me offer two examples of how more sophisticated
conceptual operations such as metaphorical mapping and blending can
follow the same trajectory from mind to society.
Both can be discussed on the basis of one issue, the war on terror (cf.
also the discussion in Lakoff 2008: 125). As a conceptual metaphor, it
involves the apparatus of mappings recruited from a source domain of
classic territorial war with nations and armies fighting until (hopefully)
enemy forces have been routed. The conceptual part lives its life in the
mind alongside MORE IS UP, partially submerged in the manner of back-
stage cognition. However, the metaphor was from the start conceived as
part of a formal social construction, namely the implemented policies of
George W. Bush. As such, it becomes aligned with targets in sociocultural
reality (actual suspects, institutions and practices) and acquires both effi-
cacy and acceptance dimensions. The war on terror as an operational
social construction is thus much more than the war on terror as a concep-
tual metaphor.
This creates an interface that needs to be addressed. The issue of tar-
get domain overriding acquires new and interesting dimensions when a
metaphor serves to underpin an operational social construction, because
it is not clear how the actual policies are going to be adapted on those
points where social reality refuses to conform to conceptual structure
recruited from the source domain. One example is the fact that terror is
not an enemy state that can be occupied and forced to surrender, so it is

not clear how to bring the war to an end the way other wars are ended.
Another is that opponent forces are not regulars with a name and number
that can be exchanged after the war is over in the usual manner of POW
treatment.
At the point where the metaphor does not deliver any clear answers,
we therefore start to move into a social situation that is more like a socially
constructed blend than a socially constructed metaphor: there are emer-
gent effects in the real world that need to be addressed, although they are
present neither in the war input space nor in the terror input space. Enemy
combatants, are salient examples, both the category and the instantia-
tions: the category was invented to avoid having to abide by the Geneva
conventions that apply to ordinary wars, but also reflects the fact men-
tioned above: there is no enemy army that can claim them as their own.
Another example is that if terror is assumed to arise out of causes that are
different from wars, when the causal agents associated with warfare have
been applied there is no guarantee that victory has been won.
This was recognized by various people and Bushs social construction
has been targeted for deconstruction by the Obama administration.45 But
because a social construction is not just in the mind, deconstruction is
more than an intellectual exercise: it has left Obama with a residue in the
form of emergent social effects that are not so easy to undo.
I have now presented the whole theoretical apparatus of the social
cognitive linguistics that I am arguing for. In the next chapter, I am going
to show how it can be applied to perhaps the greatest challenge for embod-
ied, socially situated cognition: the multi-ethnic issue.
45 Even officials in the Bush administration became uncomfortable with the

phrase and tried to shelve it, but it was kept going when Bush insisted that it
was still a war to him, cf. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/03/23/the_
end_of_the_global_war_on_t.html, accessed April 30, 2009.
Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies:
discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
1. Introduction
This final chapter is about perhaps the most important challenge for con-
ceptualization in the social domain. The topic has been a subject of focal
interest for critically oriented, social constructionist discourse analysis, and
their analyses have been the most salient type of academic work in the
area. The issue may appear to be tailor-made for this approach: one of the
central concerns in social construction and discourse analysis is the distinc-
tion between us and them, the question is associated with Foucaults
concern with marginalization as analysed in the history of sexuality and
prisons, and the exercise of power by the dominant group constitutes a link
with intellectual lineages from Marx, cf. the discussion in ch. 3.
When the distinction is systematically invoked in opinions about life in
multi-ethnic contexts, it constitutes a discourse of us and them, also by
the restrictive definition (cf. p. 355) of the term. This discourse is at work
when divisions are discursively constructed (i. e. invoked in communica-
tion) such that one population group is regarded as the central in-group
and the other is the marginalized out-group. As such it is the mother of all
power-wielding discourses, implicit in various more specific discourses
such as orientalism (cf. Said 1978) and tolerance (Brown 2006). Among
broadly left-wing debaters, the discourse of us versus them is regarded
as a key cause of ethnic division. A position that combines this causal
explanation with an analysis of (1) us and them as being due solely to
social construction (i. e. without factual grounding) and (2) support for
this distinction as being due to xenophobia and prejudice, has had some-
thing like hegemonic status in some contexts.
The analysis presented below aims to point out what is wrong with this
position, academically as well as from a problem-solving point of view,
and thereby to promote a preferable alternative. To take a concrete
example: In the introduction (p. 1) I quoted an influential leader of the
critical Muslim community in Denmark for the statement that every-
thing starts with the language meaning that the discursive distinction
between us and them is where it all begins. For reasons discussed in
chapter 7, I think this analysis captures so little of what is going on that it
The ethnic other: an ultra-brief historical overview 409
must be regarded as seriously flawed. The flaws affect both the analytic
and the political dimension, and I am going to address both of them. The
goal of this chapter is to show what is missing and how an approach
grounded in human experience and collaborative communication can
both offer a better analysis and a better foundation for civic and political
action.
The point is not to reject the results of the critical approaches; I accept
most of the points and share most of the concerns of analysts such as van
Dijk (1998), Blommaert and Verschueren (1998), Riggins (1997) and
many others. That is in fact precisely why the flaws in the analytic practice
need to be made clear. Not only do the flaws prevent analyses in terms of
discourse struggle from getting a grip on important parts of the processes
they describe these analyses thereby also become part of the problem
rather than part of the solution.
2. The ethnic other: an ultra-brief historical overview
The question of how to conceptualize other peoples has been part of west-
ern history from the days of slavery until today. The battle lines have been
drawn in terms of two continuous, contrasting lineages of beliefs and prac-
tices. Very roughly, one side is efficacy-heavy and grounded mainly in eth-
nocentric economic and political practice, although with legitimizing
beliefs in idealized cognitive models of European biological, cultural and
religious superiority. The other lineage is acceptance-heavy and involves a
gradually evolving idealized cognitive model of universal humanism: peo-
ple of different races and cultural backgrounds are human beings like us
and essentially equal. The global expansion of successive western empires
raised the question (among critical voices) in all those places where west-
ern emigrants settled and made their power felt.
European expansionism reached a high point in the first half of the 20th
century. A turning point was reached with the Second World War, which
left Britain, the last traditional empire, in a state of exhaustion, and the US
as the dominant world power. At the same time, the war was won against
powers representing the most repulsive manifestation in history of beliefs
in racial and cultural superiority. No one wanted to be anywhere near that
dustbin of history in which Nazism and Fascism were dumped in 1945. In
this way the war against Hitler gave a powerful boost to the lineage of
universal humanism. The founding of the United Nations and the Charter
of Human Rights empowered this belief construction with an interna-
tional formal grounding.
410 Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies: discourses vs. social cognitive linguistics
Neither acceptance nor formal underpinning automatically guarantees

unlimited causal efficacy, however (cf. p. 314). Formally equal status only
guaranteed groups against explicit formal discrimination (and thus turned
South Africas apartheid regime into an international pariah). But in a
wider sense, e. g., in terms of living conditions, equality between races and
ethnic groups is a matter of a projected change in the way the world works,
rather than an operational fact. As a project, however, it has been fairly
successful: in the post-war period, there has, for a long period, been a
bumpy but reasonably steady path of progress.
A significant part of this development was that Jim Crow was gradu-
ally dismantled in America. Zaller (1992:10), echoing Myrdal (1944: 92),
suggests that part of the development in the U. S. was due to a shift in the
scientific world picture, i. e. an erosion of the factual grounding of the con-
ceptual model in terms of which Blacks were inferior to Whites. Scientists
had previously claimed that white people were biologically superior, but
this now changed (at least to some extent!); the example cited is Carl
Brigham, who after concluding in 1923 that the superiority of the Nordic
race had been demonstrated, in a review article in 1930 retracted this
statement and declared earlier conclusions without foundation. If that is
the case, insight in the way the world works was one factor in the develop-
ment towards racial equality, and undermined the discourse of biological
racism. More recently, we have seen a development from integration in
education to African-American secretaries of state and finally to an Afri-
can-American president that was met with very broad acclaim.
This development has been paralleled elsewhere: The apartheid regime
in South Africa was brought down, and in Australia relations with the
aboriginal population have travelled a painful path from the days of
unadulterated white supremacy with land confiscations and forced adop-
tions to movements towards redressing historical wrongs, including a
recent national apology from the Prime Minister.
De facto discrimination, however, never disappeared. Also, the prob-
lem acquired a new dimension with the new patterns of migration that
were associated with the dismantling of empires, as well as with the need
for labour during the boom years of western economies. The post-colo-
nial development as a whole brought a considerable number of people to
Europe as migrant workers, students, refugees and immigrants. For many
Europeans, the question of how to conceptualize people from other eth-
nic groups went from being an abstract issue to being part of everyday
life. At the level of intellectual history, post-colonialism became a major
force, with the task of dismantling the belief structures left over from the
defunct empires, and re-inventing the cultures of the no-longer-colonized
The ethnic other: an ultra-brief historical overview 411
people(s). In the west, it also involved the task of coming to terms with
the now somewhat less glorious heritage of imperial supremacy.
The tension between official equality and factual marginalization has
been a continuing source of political disagreement, as manifested in cases
where measures taken to improve conditions for minorities collided with
group interests, with the Nimby type of response (Not In My Back Yard)
as a recurrent feature. It has been a hallmark of the broad left to insist that
principles should be followed up by political action, and politically ori-
ented linguists contributed to the process by documenting pervasive bias
in news reporting and administrative practices against minority groups, cf.
Van Dijk (1991, 1998). In the US, the principle of affirmative action rep-
resented an attempt to redress imbalances that had a tendency to repro-
duce themselves because people in privileged positions tended to favour
successors that belonged to the same groups as themselves. The much
reviled movement of political correctness was an attempt to eliminate
forms of speech that positioned minority members as marginalized and
defective. For a long time, the policies of the broad left met with little
explicit resistance, because it was bad form to defend a situation of de
facto discrimination.
However, at a certain point there was a significant reversal. Vocifer-
ous groups arose in a number of countries re-asserting the traditional
beliefs against multicultural and post-colonial tendencies. As a result, the
political climate with respect to the multi-ethnic issue has gone through
phases of more or less drastic social and conceptual reconfiguration in
(among others) the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, Canada, and Den-
mark. The threat of Muslim terrorism, with 9/11 as the focal point, caused
conceptualisations such as the clash of civilizations to gain widespread
currency.
Among the factors in this movement was the increasing salience in the
social landscape of minorities who used to keep their heads down. In some
countries, this was partly the result of immigration. However, there was
also a historical backlash against sixties permissiveness, i. e. youth cul-
tures and dissolution of established structures associated with 68 and all
that. Traditional nationalist feelings, most strongly in areas where national
and ethnic group relations had always been a source of conflict (e. g. Bel-
gium), also blended in. Whatever the mixture in actual cases, there arose a
new position in the overt political landscape, where parties sprang up and
started to defend what had until then seemed not to require active defence,
namely the traditional white conservative community, against perceived
risks associated with increasing presence and visibility of minorities,
including their cultural practices. Examples are the British National Party
in Britain, Vlaams Blok/Belang in Belgium, Dansk Folkeparti (= Danish

Peoples Party, henceforth DPP) in Denmark, le Pen (who once came in
second in a Presidential election) in France, etc.
It is in this context that discourses-oriented social constructionism has
become a central voice in attempts to counter the new wave of nationalist
and ethnocentric sentiment. The key argument is that the basis of identifi-
cation invoked by these parties is based on something that is just made up,
mere social constructions rather than solid foundations: negative con-
structions of the ethnic other, and positive constructions of outmoded
national categories. I regard this criticism as basically accurate: aggressive,
badly grounded social construction is a dangerous feature of modern life;
and (re)constructed national positions with outmoded underpinnings are
used as a basis for ethnic divisions, including outright warfare. In Ex-
Yugoslavia, Milosevic revived national divisions essentially by discursive
means, conjuring up a monster from the past, with civil war, concentration
camps, ethnic cleansing and genocide as the results.
In my terms, this is an objective fact about the social world that ought
to be taken seriously no matter what side you are on. Moreover, badly
grounded and potentially explosive social construction is not limited to
old-fashioned Nationalism, but has a counterpart in the form of burgeon-
ing Islamic fundamentalism, often among those young Muslims in the
West who are least rooted in traditional Islamic culture. The problem is
real and that is why we cannot afford to leave it to an analysis based
solely on discourses and social constructionism.
3. Social construction and universal humanity
Below, I have chosen to cite formulations from Debating diversity: analys-

ing the discourse of tolerance (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998) to illus-
trate what I see as the problem. The reason for this choice is that I regard
it as a best case scenario, where I share a maximum of assumptions with
the discourses approach. I have great respect for both authors, and I want
this to be an argument between people who share the essential concerns,
not the demolition of a straw man.
As discussed above, the point of departure is a social constructionist
critique of social divisions used as a basis for exclusion. In their discussion
of group relations, cognition and language (cf. Blommaert and Ver-
schueren 1998:22), an argument is quoted with approval from Ronen
(1979:9) suggesting that we ought to take for granted only two basic
human entities: individuals and all humanity. The reasoning is as follows:
Social construction and universal humanity 413
Various unifying factors, such as language, religion, and color of skin, seem nat-
ural. I propose that none is. Language, culture, a real or assumed historical
origin, and religion, form identities for an us in our minds, and only so long as
they exist in our minds as unifying factors do the entities of us persist.
The passage goes on to illustrate how each of the factors mentioned is

susceptible to historically and geographically variable construction, and
criticizes the status that such unifying constructs can achieve as a domi-
nant ideology. The argument reflects the critique of essences that is a
basic point in social constructionism, and it makes good sense against
opponents who make their position dependent on such a naturalist argu-
ment. An example would be biological racism of the Blut und Boden type
associated with Nazism.
Let us assume that no one in their right mind would disagree with this
analysis in such cases. The question is what is missing in the analysis. First
of all, if we assume, as argued in the chapter 7, that social constructions
can be part of reality without being dependent on biological foundations,
the naturalness conceptualization is not crucial. It may have a certain
legitimizing force, but it needs to team up with forces in society (as it did
in 1930s Germany) in order to play a causal role. In relation to present-
day divisions (e. g., according to language, religion and color of skin, cul-
ture and historical origin) it is not clear that a misguided conceptualiza-
tion of divisions as natural or biological has the same force as it did in
the Nazi Weltanschauung. Group identity can be an operational fact with-
out being dependent on an assumption that it is a natural fact; when
Shakespeares Henry V talked about we few, we happy few, we band of
brothers, the historical occasion was the chief unifying factor in the argu-
ment. For that reason, the emperors new clothes argument is invalid
against group identity it is analogous to an argument saying that since
paper money is not really matched by gold in the vaults of the National
Banks, it is really worthless.
Secondly, it also means that the alternative to existing group identity is
also offered without considering the problem of sociocultural grounding.
Universal humanism would in fact come easy only if you accept the force
of natural essences: since all of humanity is the only natural group, that is
the group we should align ourselves with. In Blommaert and Verschueren,
this position is manifested in their critique of the practice of addressing
the issue of diversity and seeing it as abnormal, instead of just seeing is
as natural. They even (1998:14) go so far as to call it a basic biological
fact: there is a whiff of suggesting that our essence (universal humanity)
is more natural than your essence (the nation). But for reasons argued in
ch. 7, natural essences (whether phoney or real) do not capture the dynam-
ics of constructed niches.
However, Blommaert and Verschuerens analysis of the discursive con-
structions involved in reinvented national supremacy is compelling,
including the hollowness and hypocrisy involved. They make an additional
point which is also central in the position I defend: they show that the
mechanisms that marginalize ethnic minorities have a much broader base
in the community than hard-core right-wing groups. There is much less
difference than one might expect between the way immigrants are discur-
sively constructed by the right wing and by the mainstream, including peo-
ple who understand themselves as model citizens when it comes to rela-
tions with minorities. Citing a host of sources including laws, pamphlets,
political statements, white papers and UN reports, they show that minori-
ties are understood as potentially threatening, as people who need to be
kept under control and surveillance, and who ultimately may need to be
sent back where they came from. As they say,
Not a single member of what we designate as the tolerant majority will recog-
nize him- or herself in the Western or colonial ideas or attitudes sketched
(almost by way of caricature) and criticized above. But this is exactly why this
book had to be written. Our analysis reveals that professed awareness of a
Foucauldian perspective on social life i. e., the common philosophical and
socio-scientific lore referred to does not stand in the way of rhetorical opera-
tions which, at various levels of implicit meaning, clash with overtly accepted
critical beliefs and attitudes. In particular, there is a level of ideological work
which is shared by mainstream pro-migrant rhetoric, i. e. the rhetoric of toler-
ance, and anti-migrant rhetoric alike.
(Blommaert & Verschueren 1998: 21)
In the terms defined in chapter 7, they unmask as bullshit a large part of
the high-minded official talk about immigrant issues. Blommaert and Ver-
schuerens critique of the actual role of the common Foucauldian lore is
in harmony with the point I have made about the absence of a role for the
human subject in post-Foucauldian analysis. The impersonal force of dis-
courses as social macro-agents decouples the analysis from personal
understanding and agency. What better confirmation of this impotence
than the massive documentation offered by Blommaert and Verschueren
that members of Foucaults own natural constituency remain in the grip of
the hidden hand that they point to?
The problem of social grounding is also relevant in relation to an argu-
ment in the book quoted from Richard Lewontin (1982: 113): migration
and fusion of groups are pervasive features of human history, not an
abnormal situation that must be stopped. This is true as a critique of pho-
A social cognitive analysis of the distinction between us and them 415
ney assertions of ethnic purity, but the invited inference that migration
is not a problem does not follow. Again, naturalness is not enough: an
equally pervasive feature of human history is the violence that has accom-
panied migrations. An example without racial overtones is the disruption
that happened in the US in the thirties, as familiar from Steinbecks
Grapes of Wrath. The dispossessed sharecroppers from Oklahoma who
went west had impeccable credentials as Americans, and did not come as
enemies; they were affected, like most of the nation, by bad times. Never-
theless the encounter with the residents of the area to which they emi-
grated gave rise to the formation of a malignant us-them dichotomy com-
plete with a derogatory (dysphemistic, in the word of Talbot, Atkinson
& Atkinson 2003: 15) categorisation of the newcomers as Okies.
Identity construction as an issue is becoming common ground between
sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, and thus the distribution of the dif-
ferent agendas is becoming more blurred in the academic landscape. The
position I am defending here reflects some of the features of classic inter-
actional sociolinguistics. As an example, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz
(1982) describe an instance of interethnic communication where it would
be natural to focus on the confrontation between two very different dis-
cursive positions, and there is something going on that might well be
described as a discourse struggle. Since the case involves a confrontation
between the view of an immigrant social worker and the view of an offi-
cial committee, the potential for a critical analysis is not hard to see. How-
ever, they focus instead on the interactive sequence of events, showing in
what way the initial bureaucratic position makes sense, and also by what
mechanisms it becomes possible to establish a platform that allows ends
to meet, in spite of the evident risk of an impasse.
The bottom line is: the analytic approach to pernicious exercise of
social power in connection with othering and us-them divisions needs
to be re-assessed from a perspective that includes sociocultural and fac-
tual grounding, instead of using a socially ungrounded conceptual model
of universal humanism as the presupposed point of departure.
4. A social cognitive analysis of the distinction

between us and them
So, what is missing in an account that focuses on criticizing the discursive

construction of a difference between us and them?
From the point of view of a social cognitive linguistics, it is necessary to
look first of all at the grounding of central concepts in embodied experi-
ence. We have already seen that a crucial element in human experience is

the attunement to joint attention and activity through which human
beings become members of the primordial social construction, the we (cf.
ch 7, p. 310). To be human is to be a fellow subject, and so unless you are
severely deprived, you cannot help becoming part of an us grounded in
elementary experience. The most damaging insufficiency of the social con-
structionist understanding is that it does not recognize the fundamental
role of the pre-verbal, pre-discursive us.
The basic mechanism for building us communities is shared immedi-
ate experience. Human cultural learning, however, makes available mech-
anisms for extending the sense of belonging beyond the scope of immedi-
ate experience, cf. above p. 331: from the hunter-gatherer band via the
village to the chiefdom to the Polis (city state) etc., as social formations
based on gradually wider links of identification. As discussed above, such
extensions depend on mental capacities in the members to a greater
extent than smaller communities sustained by immediate physical interac-
tion. Whereas direct acquaintance can create shared practices supported
by joint activity, national loyalty depends on shared cognitive constructs,
on imagination. The natural directionality is bottom-up, beginning with
the family.
This leads us to the next point on which the social constructionist anal-
ysis is insufficient. Because it has no theory of what underpinning is
required to create a community, it sees its task as deconstructing commu-
nities based on social constructions, leaving only universal humanity.
However, beyond the face-to-face community that Dunbar claimed could
be extended to 150 people (through the invention of a shared language),
we need to resort to social constructions in order to make a community.
It is in this perspective that one has to approach the projected construc-
tion of a universal human community: it has to be understood not as what
remains when we remove all socially constructed divisions, but as the ulti-
mate extension of the bottom-up pathway that starts with the primary
caregiver however natural it may be, it still needs to be socially con-
structed.
This analysis may appear to point to the obvious path that lies before
us. We started out in small competing bands and now we have reached the
stage where the global village is just round the corner. If global humanity
is not a natural given, maybe we can hope that it is the next step?
However, we have already seen that there are other social processes in
the real, socially constructed world than the gradual, harmonious exten-
sion of communities to new members. The troubled path of the European
Union illustrates many of the problems that this process is fraught with.
We saw in the discussion of International Relations (ch. 7) that construc-

tions of Europe are far less well-entrenched that constructions of nations
(as the 2009 elections to the European Parliament confirmed). Social con-
struction is hard work.
It is this laborious path that constitutes the necessary context for ana-
lysing the conceptualizations of multi-ethnic societies. In this perspective,
it becomes apparent that there are social facts that need to be addressed.
Although at national level the issue does not involve all of humanity, it
raises many of the same issues. The defining characteristic of a multi-eth-
nic society is that people in it do not automatically enter into joint activi-
ties of the kind that would make them members of a shared sociocultural
niche. They may grow up to have non-trivially different social construc-
tions, including niche concepts and status functions, involving such things
as gender roles, family loyalties, religious authority, etc. As an example,
events that occur in the course of cross-ethnic encounters, such as birth-
day parties in schools, cannot be expected to be the same for different
ethnic groups. The formation of a universal us is difficult, also at nation
level.
Variation is of course not limited to multi-ethnic societies. The basic
role of variation in all societies also holds for the sociocultural dimension.
As stressed by Kristiansen and Geeraerts (2007), a description of cul-
tures understood as well-defined wholes associated with different lan-
guages misrepresents the complexity of cultural practices. The question
that is crucial to the multi-ethnic issue is the density of links between sub-
communities. The standard post-feudal variational pattern includes an
overall frame where individuals can move around (to some extent) in a
partially shared social space that has both a geographical and a social sta-
tus dimension. In a multi-ethnic context, social life may be configured so
that there is little sense of such an overall space and correspondingly little
freedom of movement. Each subcommunity may have a variational spec-
trum of cultural scripts that keeps it apart from other subcommunities.
At this point we need to look at the other half of the issue, them. The
basic status of us means that at any given point, there is also by implica-
tion a them consisting of all those people that are not part of us. But this
implied group is not inherently threatening or construed in contrast to
us; it is basically irrelevant. The formation of a them that is socially con-
structed as a relevant factor distinct from us may in principle never hap-
pen if the individual in his widening social experience always meets with
other people in situations mediated by joint activity. In a face-to-face com-
munity, we might in theory imagine people whose we has gradually
expanded to include the whole society, and who are at all times immersed
in managing their lives at various levels of joint activity from family life to
all-tribe ceremonies.
It is immaterial to the argument whether this ever happens. The fact is
that this is not the way life standardly works out for everybody provided
they steer clear of the us-them- discourse. Conflict among groups arises
frequently for non-discursive reasons, such as competition for scarce
resources. In Papua New Guinea, where life is still largely shaped by vil-
lage-size units, there is fierce rivalry at many levels, including among clans
and tribes. What is perceived as unfair distribution is pointedly addressed
in ways that create very clearly defined divisions of us and them. During
my own visit, our group visited a village by agreement with a clan that was
willing to receive us and allow us to enter their clans land in order to
watch a lek of lesser birds of paradise (for which we had paid an agreed
fee). We had good contact with several in the group and trade started for
the locally made bilums and other artefacts, with everybody having a
good time until a neighbouring clan felt that they were unfairly left out
of this unexpected bonanza. Feelings ran high, demands for money were
made and our group had to be evacuated in a hurry. And if this may appear
to be an artefact of our intrusion from the outside into Papuan natural
life, the ancient practice of raiding neighbouring villages, leaving no adult
males alive, illustrates that operational distinctions between us and
them antedated colonialism. Nearer home, many will remember child-
hood rivalries with kids from another block (of which parents were gener-
ally blithely ignorant) as an instance of how social experience may deviate
from the undisrupted extension of us to wider circles. The fact is, just as
us in various shapes is part of social reality, so may various manifestation
of them present themselves as unavoidable parts of social experience.
In the multi-ethnic context, this process works in essentially the same
way. The features that make it difficult to construct an us that includes
the whole population, however, are simultaneously the features that can
very easily construct a number of they experiences. To the extent minor-
ity members speak their own language, go to their own schools, practice
their own religion and befriend only each other, they are as a matter of
social fact partitioned off from members of the majority culture. This
would make it functionally natural for mainstream members to categorize
minority members as them rather than us, because there would be little
underpinning of an understanding of such minorities as partners in joint
activities. The same would apply, of course, to members of the minority, for
whom the mainstream are naturally them.
Some of the force behind the argument against speaking in terms of an
us-them distinction is due to the standard case in which us is always
the well-off mainstream majority. However, this is just a matter of per-

spective. In Richard Hoggarts pioneering description of working-class
culture in Britain, The Uses of Literacy, events imposed by public or pri-
vate agencies of power were generally reported in terms of what they
had done. Raises in rent, lay-offs, tax return schemes and other such inter-
ventions from forces beyond the control of a working class family were
imposed by them. It would probably not occur to members of the critical
tradition to take a traditional working class family to task for arbitrarily
imposing the category them on the powers that be instead of regarding
them as us.1
An essential issue in relation to social grounding is the case where the
practices of the relevant subgroup constitute a threat to the practices of
the mainstream. During the German occupation of Denmark 19401945,
there were two ethnic groups living in Denmark, the Danish majority, and
the Germans who had migrated into Denmark. By the criteria discussed
in chapter 7, the categorization of Germans as constituting the enemy had
all the marks of an entrenched, operational social construction with solid
factual grounding. Correspondingly, the Danes constructed themselves as
an us, i. e. the group they identified with and to whom other Danes were
expected to be loyal. This was not a formal, legally sanctioned status and
understandably enough, a number of people who entered German service
felt betrayed by the authorities when they were treated as traitors after
the war. The conceptualization of Germans as the enemy was a (quasi-)
Platonic idea structuring empirical reality without requiring formal
enshrinement. There was also a category of snitches, cf. the discussion of
Wieder (1974) on p. 320 f., about whose status no one was in any doubt.
That was how Danish socio-political life was constructed, and therefore
Danes and Germans by and large led separate lives in Denmark. Because
operational social constructions are part of the way the world works,
knowing that this is so and acting on that knowledge is an essential part of
general coping skills. This did not prevent occasional discreet contact also
on grass roots level, predicated on the assumption that Germans were
human beings, too the point is that such contacts also had to be based on
recognizing that Denmark was socially constructed as divided into us
1 If subcommunity practices make little difference to mainstream community

life, minorities may not be visible enough to be categorised at all. The Chinese
community in Denmark has led its own rather separate life for many genera-
tions without attracting much attention. Few respondents would be likely to
think of members of the Chinese community as them when answering a ques-
tionnaire about minorities in Denmark.
and them rather than denying it. If parents did not teach their children
that this was so, they would have been extremely derelict in their parental
duties.
A social constructionist theory of marginalization in a multi-ethnic
society would fit with a hypothesis that differences are created solely by
the negative side of Rosenthal effect (cf. Rosenthal and Rubin 1978): if we
categorize people as different and less employable, they will live up to
such a categorization. And even if that is not the whole truth, why not give
them the benefit of a positive Rosenthal effect following from a full rec-
ognition of them as citizens, exactly the way they are, with no need to
adapt to majority culture? Unfortunately, Koopmans (2006), discussing
what went wrong for multiculturalism in the Netherlands, provides figures
suggesting that there is a direct relation between the strength of a multi-
cultural immigration policy and factual marginalization of immigrants
and that the effect is strengthened by the existence of a strong welfare
state based on universal entitlement. The process is described for Den-
mark in Matthiessen (2009), documenting in detail the link between on
the one hand the marginalisation of immigrants and on the other hand the
mounting pressure on the finances of the welfare state.
Hall (1976: 210) also sees the problem as having a different explana-
tion than overt attitudes:
Theoretically, there should be no problem when people of different cultures
meet. Things begin, most frequently, not only with friendship and goodwill on
both sides, but there is an intellectual understanding that each party has a dif-
ferent set of beliefs, customs, mores, values, or what-have-you. The trouble
begins when people have to start working together even on a superficial basis.
There is an affinity with the problems of the tolerant majority as ana-

lysed by Blommaert and Verschueren: the problems lie deeper, but still
reflect biases that we should try to get rid of. Halls answer is that human-
kind must tear itself free from cultural types of identification, ending up
with a total separation between personal identity and unconscious culture
(the final exhortation of the book, p.211). Although the point about not
sticking forever with what you have become used to is similar to the point
I make with platform-building below, there is something astonishingly
naive about this panacea. It is an intellectualist utopia which would require
a complete elimination of the bodily grounding of understanding, so that
intellectual understanding could persist unhampered by the influence of
entrenched practices.
The bottom line is that for the large majority of citizens, socially con-
structed reality includes not only a variety of us groups, but also a variety
Where discourses fail 421
of groups that are outside these, and which therefore are naturally referred
to as them. Of these two types, the us experience is the basic and pri-
mary one, and reflects a fundamental value that is constitutive of human
life. They, or the others, are basically negatively defined as non-mem-
bers of us. How such groups are understood depends on their experien-
tial status in individual and collective life in the niche as presently con-
structed. The basic feature of their causal history is actual events in relation
to which two groups take different roles: where you live, what school you
attend, who gets invited to birthday parties, football teams, what educa-
tion you take, where you work, who you vote for. Hostile they construc-
tions basically arise from conflicts of interest, such as competition for
scarce resources (whether in indigenous communities in New Guinea or
among marginalized groups in Denmark). Discourses as understood in
this book do not necessarily play any role. We return later to cases where
they do.
5. Where discourses fail: the decline and fall

of the anti-racist discourse in Denmark
The missing elements in the discourses approach to the issue of us and

them in relation to ethnic conflict can be illustrated with the develop-
ment in Denmark in the past decade. The discussion illustrates both the
academic and the civic deficiencies of a discourses approach. The latter
includes a strategic deficiency: it is an example of a discourse struggle that
the broad left lost in a spectacular manner.
Before the present Danish government coalition came in, the issue was
socially constructed in the standard post-WW2 manner described above,
with the idealized cognitive model of universal humanism in a hegemonic
position. The us and them discourse that was the target of the critique
discussed above was in a socioculturally marginal position, kept down by
the broad lefts anti-racist discourse (as it was christened by the Turkish-
born sociologist Mehmet Necef from the University of Southern Den-
mark). To speak of ethnic or religious groups (not to mention races) as
distinct from or problematic in relation to the Danish majority was stig-
matized.
In 2001, however, the Social Democracy-led government lost the elec-
tion, chiefly because the winning centre-right party promised to address
the issue of immigrant numbers. When the new government came in, it
introduced strict immigration laws with the help of the Danish Peoples
Party (= DPP) which had until then been stigmatized also in Parliament
because of their hostile attitude to immigrants. At the level of informal

constructions, the anti-racist discursive ban against talking about prob-
lems as immigration-related lost its force across the board. How could this
happen?
One possibility would be a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment a traffic
jam-type accidental development but there is nothing to suggest that
this was the case. Based on surveys over a period of thirty years, Andersen
(2002) found that no great changes had taken place.
Above, following Zaller (1992) and Myrdal (1944), it was suggested
that the erosion of perceived factual grounding for the Idealized Cogni-
tive Model of biological racism contributed to the dismantling of racial
segregation in the U. S. I suggest that in this case it was the the anti-racist
discourse that was undermined partly because of problems with factual
grounding. The construction of immigrants as non-distinguishable from
ethnic Danes was at odds with the way the world actually worked, and
this was becoming obvious, partly through scientific evidence. Mehmet
Necef (in contributions to public debate) argued that the anti-racist dis-
course had prevented an adequate discussion of the issues that came up
in relation to immigration, because it only allowed problems to be
explained by factors on the Danish side, primarily racism. Other factors,
for instance gaps between immigrant backgrounds and the demands of
the Danish labour market, could not be addressed. But now research
groups were beginning to publish surveys (cf. Mogensen and Matthiessen
2000; Trans and Zimmerman 2004) addressing the issue of what precise
consequences immigration had. The issue was gradually becoming
addressable.
After the election immigration problems were at centre of voter
attention. Whatever the original causes for the weakening of the anti-
racist discourse were, they were joined by an invisible hand effect: politi-
cians who did not address the issue that voters accorded top priority
would be at risk of being removed by (s)election pressure. The option of
maintaining the anti-racist discourse existed only for politicians whose
constituency was totally outside the development, i. e. the most progres-
sive. For many politicians this entailed an unpleasant divergence between
what they felt comfortable with (in terms of embodied, gut feeling) and
what top-down pressures forced them to do.
The shift caused a macro-level change in the construction of the politi-
cal landscape, cf. the discussion of McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal (2006)
on. p. 270. In America, however, the change went from a situation where
voting patterns reflected two dimensions, one based on race and ethnic
difference and another based on the left-right continuum, to one where
only the left-right dimension remained. US politics was thus reduced to

one axis. In Denmark, the change went in the opposite direction: attitudes
to immigration acquired a role that was not reducible to the traditional
left-right spectrum, and a large chunk of the voters responded by moving
from the mildly left Social Democrats to the DPP.
In this change, there is a variationist dimension associated with the
high status vs. low status (H vs L) dimension of the community. The new
sociocultural situation brought to the fore a cluster of idealized cognitive
models based on national allegiance and scepticism towards immigrants
that used to be associated with low sociocultural status. (It may also be
understood as associated with an internationally widespread movement
against earlier high-status gravitas and logos values that also brought
George W. Bush to power in the US, cf. R.Lakoff 2010). In the (mostly
low-status) electorate of the DPP, there is a belief system based on an
idealized cognitive model with Danishness as the positive pole on the
axis where Muslim and globalization belong at the opposite end. If we
look at the level of individual concepts, the concept Muslim in this con-
struction has a considerable admixture of the threatening ethnic other
(cf. Karim 1997).
This socially skewed distribution reflects a number of different factors.
One of them is the difference in terms of who felt the problematic effects
of immigration on the ground. It was not wealthy white suburbs that were
directly faced with a majority of immigrant children in schools and a rise
in immigrant-related crime. Some of the wealthiest municipalities have a
long history of successfully dodging allocation of refugees, for instance.
Another was the feeling of being the victims of a cultural hegemony that
prohibited the discussion of immigration.
This change was therefore hailed by the winning coalition as a cultural
revolution that (finally!) brought down the arrogant, in American par-
lance liberal cultural elite (to some extent associated with 68) that had
told ordinary people what they should think an interpretation that was
emphasized in the Prime Ministers first New Year address to the people
(on the tyranny of pundits and arbiters of taste). This represented a source
of framing for the debate that was used to great effect: instead of framing
opinions on the issue against the background of the ICM of universal
humanism (as the anti-racist discourse had done), the new powers framed
the same opinions against the background of an ICM that combined
national allegiance with the voice of the people a social construction
that became the new majority position. The anti-racist discourse lost out
partly because it was widely perceived as the voice of an elite that was out
of touch with ordinary people.
I now turn to the second phase in the development that brought down
the anti-racist discourse in Denmark: the so-called cartoon crisis. This was
one of the few events where Denmark has really hit the headlines world-
wide. It began with the publication of cartoons of the prophet Moham-
mad in a Danish newspaper and culminated in riots and embassy burn-
ings in the Middle East. In this context, an interesting aspect is the role of
polarization for understanding processes involving meaning in mind and
society.
Polarization is one of those cases where there is a very direct relation
between embodied, emotional response and macro-level social processes
(cf. Harder 2005). What drives it is the sense of being under threat and
the more massive the external threat, the stronger the internal embodied
response. When groups are involved, responses on each side of the divide
are reinforced by fellow subjects via the mechanism of confirmation bias
(cf. Hutchins as discussed on p. 276).
Discourse struggles can in principle have many parties as in general
elections but the classic case is the two-way variety that is construed in
terms of the battle between right and wrong. This makes an approach in
terms of discourse struggle easily susceptible to the mechanisms of polar-
ization. As argued in Harder (2005), this puts conceptualization under
pressure: the higher the level of polarization, the less emotionally accept-
able it is to have nuances in between black and white. The mechanism puts
social pressure on framing: the freedom to frame issues against other
backgrounds than the division between us and them is greater, the less
polarized the situation is. Wagners music used to be framed by many
against the background of its status in the Third Reich, putting pressure
on the alternative framing of Wagner as an element of high culture, which
has gained ground as the memory of World War II recedes. Conversely,
concessions to a perceived enemy become more and more like treason,
the higher the level of polarization.
While the anti-racist discourse had hegemonic status, its adherents in
fact practiced a degree of strategic polarization. When the topic of prob-
lems associated with immigration reared its ugly head, a formulation such
as immigrants are not a problem, but a resource was a widespread slogan
used to silence it again. This reflects the defining characteristic of polariza-
tion: it does not allow something to be a mixture of good and bad; the
possibility that immigrants can be both a resource and a problem is not
admissible.
However, two can play at that game. The embassy burnings created a
situation where the nation was under attack. In the media, the whole
world saw irate Muslims treating Denmark as a hostile them. The appear-
ance of a common enemy is a powerful source of group-level joint atten-

tion; and in this case an instant process of enhanced us-formation took
place. No discourse was necessary to drive the construction process; the
anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim position could simply refer to a Muslim
them burning Danish flags on TV.
In this situation, an argument to the effect that nations are artificial
social constructs without natural foundations did not address the situation
as currently constructed in the community. The polarized picture inherent
in the anti-racist discourse now came back to haunt the anti-racist side
with a vengeance. The poll ratings for the DPP rose sharply, and those of
the Social Democrats (perceived as shilly-shallying in the prohibited mid-
dle ground) dropped even more sharply. The new cartoons variety of the
us-them discourse was also partly the result of collective intentional
action (the visible hand): defenders of the government closed ranks
against attempts to impose hostile conceptualizations on the PM, who (cf.
Harder forthcoming for a more detailed account) had incurred a measure
of responsibility for the calamity by refusing to meet with ambassadors
from Muslim countries to discuss the cartoons.
As always in cases of polarized discourse struggle, it involved a process
of standardization and generalization and also accentuation of differ-
ences in the sense used by Kristiansen (2001), cf. p. 289. The pervasive
public discourse pressure constructed all criticism of government policies
in terms of a contrast between a positive pole defined in terms of freedom
of speech which was identified with being Danish and democratic, and a
negative side which was understood in terms of suppression of free
speech, Islam, and dictatorship. The crisis therefore strengthened the
social construction in terms of a Muslim-instigated danger to the nation,
to democracy and to free speech.
This is a particularly illustrative example of meaning in the mind being
confronted with meaning in society. There were a range of conceptual
models involved in this confrontation, but possibly the most interesting is
the cluster associated with the concept of freedom of speech. Gallie
(1956) showed that it is possible to disagree about a concept and still have
a rational argument about it, if there are shared exemplars that are agreed
to instantiate the concept: we know what democracy is because we agree
on historical instances of it but we may not agree on what the most
essential features are of true democracy. George Lakoff (2006, 2008), dis-
cussing the concept of freedom, suggested that this could be understood in
terms of a shared core meaning and a contested periphery such that
opponents understand the concept not in terms of the abstract core but in
terms of their own full-blown variant (which depends on their specific
perspective, differing in Lakoffs case between progressives and conserva-

tives in America).
The case of freedom of speech in Denmark illustrates the relationship
between contested concepts and social processes. What might have been
assumed to be a solid uncontested core turned out to be much less impor-
tant than the contested periphery. The core involves the absence of a bar-
rier to voicing ones opinions in public the contested periphery involves
the nature of that barrier and the extent of the freedom. What happened
was that a culturally well-entrenched construal of the concept was blasted
out of public space. The pressure was so powerful that it illustrated pub-
licly how such pressures interfere with the mental processes of individuals.
In this, it illustrates that meaning construction is a two-way street: not just
embodied meaning emerging into public view, but also configurations of
meaning in public space a traffic jam of meaning (cf. p. 6) obstructing
and channelling individual thought processes.
What happened was the (temporary) annihilation in the Danish public
sphere of the construal of freedom of speech that is generally attributed
to Voltaire, I disagree with everything you say but I will fight to the death
for your right to say it. Applied to the case at hand this would amount to
what was the standard position internationally: that while it would be
unacceptable censorship to forbid the cartoons, the publication was unfor-
tunate because it was needlessly offensive and disrupted good relations
with the Muslim community.
At the purely conceptual level there is no inherent contradiction
between supporting freedom of speech and aiming for good interethnic
relations. Nor would there be any conflict (in relation to the facts of the
matter) between supporting the unchallengeable right of the newspaper
to publish the cartoons while saying that actually doing it was not such a
brilliant idea. The point was made by many people, including a former
foreign secretary (who was also the former chairman of the party to which
the PM belonged), but to no avail. Calling for peaceful dialogue between
cultures placed you on the wrong side, aligned with Muslim fundamental-
ists and dictators. The former foreign secretary was actually accused of
treason (!) by members of the DPP, illustrating how powerful the framing
pressure of the us vs. them construction had become.
Another factor has to do with the dynamics of language game of blame
assignment, familiar from Potter and Wetherell (1987) which for a while
was just about the only game in town. Allowing the Voltaire construal
into social space would shift some of the blame for the embassy burnings
to the Danish side and was thus out of the question. As an example, a
well-known spokesman of multiculturalism publicly announced that faced
with the choice between mutual respect between religions and freedom of
speech, he chose freedom of speech.
While Gallies argument that rationality can be preserved in argu-
ments about contested concepts is entirely valid, this turned out to be
impossible in practice. In principle, consenting adults in private could of
course weigh the factors that counted in favour of an interpretation that
ruled out criticism of the publication of the cartoons and another that
allowed it, but it is interesting to note that otherwise astute observers
were having visible difficulties in actually understanding (at the time) the
position of people who on the one hand supported the right of the news-
paper to publish the cartoons and at the same time maintained that it
would have been better not to do it.2
There was little effective opposition to this polarized interpretive pres-
sure. Mehmet Necef (cf. the Danish newspaper Information, February 26,
2006) suggested that the cartoon crisis caused the definitive collapse in
Denmark of the anti-racist discourse, because its standard discourse
choices (mutual respect between religions, etc) were identical with those
found in statements published by representatives of Syrian and Egypt dic-
tatorships and fundamentalist imams.
The force of social pressures on conceptualization is an illustration of
the type of phenomenon that the whole idea of the hidden hand depends
on, and of the reality of discourse struggles as a fact of life. To that extent
it is a textbook case for post-Foucauldian analysis. That is why it also
starkly illustrates what is missing: it had no account of what caused the
defeat of the anti-racist discourse apart from superior social pressure on
the wrong side.
In the period after the crisis, the anti-racist constituency manifested
itself chiefly in the weaker form of deploring the tone of the debate. This
once more revealed lacking awareness of variational sociocultural
grounding and put them in the same losing frame that had been involved
in the 2001 electoral defeat. The source domain of the tone metaphor is
music: the right tone is harmonious, others are jarring or shrill. The
metaphor gained ground during the 17th and 18th centuries in the target
domain of language. In the history of the concept, the code of upper-class
polite society had the status of harmonious while lower-class language is
a jarring deviation. This was not just a conceptual model, but also a niche
model that partitioned social space in a way that underpinned social
2 The Prime Minister actually cited, in good faith as far as I can judge, the Vol-
taire position in defence of his own position.
exclusion: lack of the right tone meant that you were excluded from
polite company.3
Tone therefore resonates differently depending on your social back-
ground: if you are well brought up, you tend to regard tone as a good
thing, designed to minimise face-threatening acts (cf. Brown and Levinson
1987). If your social background is in the lower half of the spectrum, you
are likely to associate tone with the tyranny of upper-class manners over
your own everyday forms of speech. The tone model thus historically
reflects the same social variation that we saw above in the PMs attack on
pundits and arbiters of taste. In Denmark, the linguistic split between an
increasingly hegemonic polite society and the vulgar people is part of the
same historical development that created a dominant standard language
that has all but wiped out classic forms of lectal variation in Denmark
over the past 150 years.
After the sixties (including 68), there has been a considerable erosion
of the traditional hegemony of taste (cf. Bourdieu 1984). Good taste, good
manners, and being cultured, have lost much of the status they had fifty
years ago. Linguistic prestige norms also felt the impact; although it came
too late to save Danish dialects, active suppression of them in the educa-
tional system ceased. Sociolinguists are by and large united in condemn-
ing as oppressive the hegemony of the standard over varieties, and adher-
ents of the broad left would in most cases align themselves with this
position also in its broader implications for low vs high culture. It is
ironic therefore that by criticizing the tone, the broad left became part of
the same once-hegemonic social lineage. What is more, they confronted
the enemy on the most unfavourable territory imaginable a battleground
that had in effect already been lost. The counter-move was a walkover: to
reject (once again) the right of the cultural hegemony that lost the 2001
election to tell the people what they could or could not say.
3 As an illustration, Inge Lise Pedersen (personal communication) describes the

development whereby terms like arse and prick disappeared from written
collections of proverbs during the 19th century; I remember my delighted sur-
prise when at university I came across (in a selection from the standard medi-
eval collection) a proverb translatable as if a mouse would fart like a horse, his
arse would crack among the boringly familiar easy come, easy go, etc.
Strategies based on collaborative agency 429
6. Strategies based on collaborative agency:

platform building and niche (re)construction
The previous section argued that the discourses approach is seriously defi-
cient both in terms of how much of the relevant process it can account for
and in terms of its strategic potential. So what can be put in the place of
the discourses-based strategy that simply consists in exhorting everybody
to stop conceptualizing ethnic minorities as a problem, as them, and
instead understand them as part of an extended us?
This book has argued that we need to address issues of meaning-in-
society in terms of three dimensions: flow, competencies and niche, and
that there are two levels of causal factors involved, the individual level
and the aggregate level. The basic directionality is bottom-up, so let us
begin with that.
Constructing a we bottom-up involves joint attention and activity so
the basic process must be one in which individuals from different ethnic
groups enter into a flow of joint activity. This is not without problems,
however. Most joint human activity depends on language, and language is
not unproblematically shared in multi-ethnic contexts. If people do not
speak the same language, this option not only requires extra efforts (more
on this below), but is also not guaranteed to be available few situations
offer the possibility of me-Tarzan-you-Jane interaction. Even if there are
some shared linguistic resources, they do not ensure shared understand-
ing; there has been extensive research in the kind of discrepancies that
may cause misunderstanding in cross-cultural situations (e. g., Blum-
Kulka, House and Kasper 1989, Hofstede 1980, Pan, Scollon and Scollon
2002). More generally, adaptation to different sociocultural niches, for
reasons discussed above, entails that not just words but also things have
different meanings in different ethnic groups. In short, common ground is
not unproblematically achievable in multi-ethnic contexts.
This means that basic human competencies are inoperative when we
venture out of our own ethnic context. When normal input and output
conditions do not obtain, with Searles (1969) formulation, your speech
acts are liable to misfire. Bluntly speaking, leaving your cultural home
ground means that you become incompetent. The feeling of being out of
your depth has the natural consequence that you do not go out of your
way to seek out such experiences as part of everyday life. Unless there is
a special occasion to do it, you stay within the territory where you feel you
can cope. A likely consequence is that cross-ethnic flow may not get off
the ground. The most basic process of we-formation simply does not hap-
pen. An experienced field linguist once summed up his experience of
working with face-to-face communities by saying that the ground rule is:
if you dont know people you dont talk to them. If anything can be said to
be the natural situation in multi-ethnic contexts, it is certainly not for
universal humanity to prevail automatically.
To get beyond this, you need competencies that are not automatically
obtained as part of human primary socialization. A bottom-up strategy
literally depends on people being willing to go out of their way to build
extended wes. The good news is that this is not an outlandish skill it is
merely one that cannot be taken for granted. It is not only in multi-ethnic
contexts that there are groups that do not interact. In all societies except
face-to-face communities, people have to some extent to be able to handle
situations where common ground needs to be negotiated.
A central dimension is the scale between high context and low con-
text cultures (cf. Hall 1976), where high means that there is a high level
of shared knowledge that people feel entitled to take for granted with-
out a need to be explicit about them. The dimension is known in modern
communities from the contrast between city life (where you do not know
your neighbours) and village life (where everyone knows everyone). City
people therefore get used to taking less for granted, and more trained in
filling the gap as they go along which means they talk far more, and far
more explicitly, than people back in the high context village. It may be
regarded as a skill that enters naturally into a broadly understood sec-
ondary socialization, and one that is part of the (post)modern experi-
ence. The capacity for bricolage, with Baudrillards term, i. e. building
culture out of available fragments, has a role also in this one-on-one con-
text.4
This path is a useful point of departure for developing a strategy for
handling multi-ethnic contexts. To explain what it takes, the concept of
common ground can be extended by what I shall call a common platform
because if you have to communicate in an unfamiliar context, neither
shared knowledge (in the relevant form) nor shared practices are availa-
ble. The word platform is meant to evoke two associations: it shares with
common ground the property of being something you can stand on, but
it is something that needs to be constructed and it is less stable that the
ground itself.
4 This is reflected in language use as well: city children in multi-ethnic neigh-

bourhoods use whatever comes to mind from the whole panoply of available
linguistic conventions, cf. Quist (2008), Mller and Jrgensen (2009).
In relation to the extension of CL from the mind to society, platform

building illustrates the potential of blending, or conceptual integration.
The concept arose (pp. 42, 95) in relation to the rise of mental spaces as a
way of handling referentially opaque contexts, and I suggested that a func-
tional construal of mental spaces should put special emphasis on their
potential in handling alternatives. If you want to imagine a situation that is
different from the present but shares features with it, a mental space is the
way in which you can handle sameness and difference at the same time
and if you want to take the additional step of going from two spaces to a
third that has emergent effects not found in the input spaces, the blending
specifies a format for the process.
Platform building depends crucially on this type of activity. Unless you
can imagine an alternative to a sub-optimal situation, it is hard to do
something about it. And unless you can envisage a blend between the two
perspectives that are involved in a situation of hamstrung communication,
it is hard to see what the new platform could be.
Although conceptual alternatives and blends are potentially helpful,
they are not sufficient in themselves. They need to be translated into social
practice. The other person must be invited to join the mental space you
envisage, and also accept the invitation. The shared space with the emer-
gent effects must be co-constructed in the manner described by Clark
(1996). During the construction process, there will be three mental spaces,
which arise out of social construction, in operation: the two base spaces
that participants started out with, plus the emergent platform. There is no
knowing how successful such a process will be but at least it beats dis-
course struggle as a potential way forward.
I suggest that the advice of the social cognitive linguist to the world
should be that it is a good thing to get used to the need to build such plat-
forms in both multi-ethnic and other postmodern contexts. The signifi-
cance of this strategy lies in the fact that it taps the basic fellow subject
attunement that (in contrast to universal humanism) is indeed a universal
human feature. Platform building starts by assigning other people the
status of candidates for becoming part of a we, without taking for granted
that they already are, and points to immediate embodied experience of
intersubjective joint attention and activity as the universally available
channel for we-formation. There is a sense in which the we is pre-figured
in the individual mind and thus does not need to be constructed (cf.
p. 310) but actual membership of that we is not pre-figured. Until peo-
ple from a different culture are part of an actual we-event, they are not
constructed as being under the Habermas-type normative umbrella of
mutual recognition and shared understanding.
In terms of the way human groups work, universal mechanisms of

mutual recognition and symmetrical relations are just mechanisms at
the level of lived practice, they are not pre-given inalienable rights. Impos-
ing them would be an act of asymmetric discourse struggle, and thus
unlikely to succeed unless the imposer has overwhelmingly superior sta-
tus: we do not generally let other people decide for us who our friends are.
The human ability to adapt to the community that you are born into can
be assumed to be kept in place by brute Darwinian selection: those who
are bad at it get fewer offspring. Since communication with strangers is
not equally essential to the human form of life, there is no similar reason
to expect that everybody can do that.
But bottom-up is not the only avenue it is only the most basic one.
Like other hierarchies, social structures can be addressed from both per-
spectives. If we look at the multi-ethnic issue in a macro-.perspective, is
there a top-down strategy that would work better than the failed strategy
of combating divisive discourses?
Again, the first prerequisite is to take your point of departure in the
real (socially constructed) world. The sustainability of aggregate level
social structures, such as democratic government, welfare systems and
education, will depend on the extent to which members of subcommuni-
ties can be successfully integrated in them. If participants in social con-
structions do not act so as to promote their successful persistence, these
systems are going to be unstable. We therefore need to look at the term
integration in the perspective of the picture I have been painting. This is a
point where the aggregate-level advantages of a socially enriched cogni-
tive linguistics over an analytic practice based on discursive struggle can
be brought to bear on the multicultural issue. The Foucauldian strategy of
criticizing a socially constructed divide between us and them lacked a
causal mechanism for promoting a desired outcome, because it was predi-
cated on a non-agentive view of social causation. The social cognitive
framework, in contrast, relies on collaborative agency not only at the indi-
vidual level but also at the level of the visible hand. Collective agency is
possible (if always only as part of a larger process that also includes invis-
ible hand effects). This means that we can address questions at the niche
level at the same time as we address them at the individual level.
The general formula for this type of activity is niche re-construction. It
follows from what I have been saying that there can be no universally
applicable recipe for doing that. But something interesting follows from it
in relation to the discussion in critical and internationally minded circles
about integration. Before the rise of new nationalisms, the politically cor-
rect attitude was to be sceptical of demands for integration, because they
smacked of ethnocentric demands that other people should be like us.

Demands for assimilation, it was supposed, lurked right behind the more
innocent-sounding word; and indeed, demands for integration are fre-
quently accompanied by concrete examples which are clear instances of
demands for assimilation. Based on the argument above, however, one
can state the demand for integration in a principled way: in order to be
accepted as part of the community on an equal basis with members of the
majority, minority members must find a way to enlist in a new and enlarged
community with practices that are shared to a satisficing extent by minor-
ity and majority members.
This is the aggregate-level correlative of what was above called plat-
form-building and at the aggregate level it is even more difficult to
practice successfully. However, if intellectuals are to be of any help in this
process, they need to point to where and how the solutions can be found.
One implication of the analysis defended here is that there can be no such
thing as a thoroughgoingly, uncompromisingly multicultural society. What
we already have, and what we need to get to work better, are multi-ethnic
societies. There can be no society (in the sense of a shared sociocultural
niche) that leaves subcommunities totally free to do their own thing with-
out in any way taking other subcommunities into consideration. If the
aggregate is only an empty shell, a collection of diverse cultures living
inside the same political unit, there is no society. Without shared practices,
all social events and structures would count as different things depend-
ing on what culture you belong to. No political system would be possible,
since political structures depend on status functions: Prime Ministers,
police officers, judges and tax collectors can only exist if people recognize
them as being Prime Ministers, police officers, judges and tax collectors.
Teachers can not teach, if subculture members do not recognize their right
to perform the speech acts that enter into teaching (such as issue instruc-
tions for work in class).
The message, which applies equally to majorities and minorities, is this:
in multi-ethnic as well as other postmodern societies, we need to come to
terms with the fact that it is not a given thing how to live together. If sub-
communities (or their intellectual supporters) start out by proclaiming
their inalienable right to continue to live as they have always done, the
project is doomed. The good news is that subcommunities have never lived
as they have always done. Niches inevitably change over time anyway;
what we have to do is lend a hand. The essential new thing is that members
of the broad left (if they want to play a constructive role) need to give the
following advice to immigrants: when you move to a new country, you
need to figure out how to live together with other groups in the new envi-
ronment and this process can only succeed if migrants regard their tra-
ditional set of practices as negotiable to a satisficing extent.
Naturally, the same principle applies to established majorities: when
new population groups arrive, the residents must regard traditional prac-
tices as negotiable in the interest of getting the future sociocultural niche
that they would like to have. Those who feel a visceral rage at the idea of
letting the arrival of strangers muck about with the niche that they know
and love have to realize that change is not optional. The passage of time
along with the presence of new population groups is going to change
things anyway; the question is whether we try to make the best of it or not.
I am going to make one more possibly controversial but in my view self-
evident observation: if the process works, the balance between the forces
of reconstruction will be such that it reflects the norms and values of the
indigenous group more than the new arrivals. Nature and culture do not
work by completely new deals from brain evolution to educational
reforms, it always works with what is there.
The other possibility is that the process does not work, and no new
community comes into being. The result is then a state of Durkheimian
anomie. As far as I know, no one wants that outcome. This is one reason
why the deconstruction of national identities is a dangerous enterprise (cf.
p. 141). One of the key concepts used in the debate about the conse-
quences of immigration in Denmark is social cohesion. This concept is
suspicious for the same reason as integration, because it appears to call
for the subjection of minorities under a majority code. However, this risk
does not eliminate the need to consider the social reality that the concept
points to. In a number of international surveys (cf. Gundelach 2002; Gun-
delach, Iversen and Warburg 2008), Danes come out as having a high level
of trust in each other. (An informal confirmation of this came from the
British ambassador to Denmark 198386, James Mellon, who said that
Denmark was not a nation, but a tribe, cf. Mellon 1992). This is a form of
social capital which cannot be taken for granted; as mentioned above, its
decline has been a much-discussed topic in America following a seminal
article by Robert Putnam (1995). With high levels of trust you can do
things together which are impossible if you instinctively expect others to
cheat you may even be able to reconstruct a shared niche in sensible
ways in collaboration with immigrants.
The broad left is suspicious of the notion of social cohesion, because it
is used as a stick to beat immigrants with, and it is suggested, cf. Holtug
(2009), that it may not be immigration but rather anti-immigrant move-
ments that undermine social cohesion by marginalizing immigrants. From
the point of view I have been defending, however, these are not two com-
peting theories there is every reason to think that both processes con-
tribute to eroding cohesion. Only if the debate is seen as a blaming game
rather than an attempt to understand what is happening are the two theo-
ries in conflict.
Recognizing the need to build a niche for an extended us entails that
the statement I am in favour of the multicultural society is either
untenable or merely pious. It is untenable if it means that subcultures are
entitled to play entirely by their own rules. It is merely pious if you mean
that you are in favour of members of different subcultures living side by
side peacefully. So is the vast majority, but that does not address the
problems.
The principles I have laid out in general form above, I believe, are not
just abstract stipulations they constitute a pointer to concrete social
practice. In this, they contrast radically with the anti-racist point of depar-
ture in an abstract universal humanity. The ban, in polite society, against
speaking of problems related to immigrants or members of non-main-
stream ethnic groups as something that calls for political initiatives
because associating immigrants with problems reflected a discursive con-
struction of immigrants as them made it impossible for a long time to
start constructing a new enlarged niche that would be different from what
both groups knew. During the 1970s and 1980s this ban was imposed
upon a number of Social Democrat mayors of towns with large immi-
grant subcommunities. The mayors pointed to economic and social prob-
lems due to the fact that a significant proportion of the population did
not speak the language, had low employment frequency and low educa-
tional success rates, and called for the party to define a way forward.
However, while the socially constructed ban was in force, the only per-
missible option was to speak instead of socially disadvantaged persons.
Since their problems were not identical to the problems of majority mem-
bers with social problems, the growing number of immigrants presented
the local authorities with tasks they could not handle with the means at
their disposal. And so the immigrant communities were left in their mar-
ginalized position.
This is an illustration of the pernicious consequences of thinking in
terms of discourse struggles in cases where collaborative communication
is an untried option: well-intentioned intellectuals steeped in the post-
Foucauldian lore contributed to making the problems worse by waging
discourse war on people who tried to address problems associated with
immigration on the ground. The situation today might have been differ-
ent if representatives of the broad left had found a way to discuss collabo-
ratively how to address the problems (or issues, if that had been more
palatable) that arose in communities with large immigrant concentra-

tions.5
Like individual-level platform-building, the niche reconstruction task
can be viewed as an instance of blending transposed to the sphere of social
construction, rather than purely conceptual integration: there are two
social input spaces, which need to be socially reconstructed as one blended
space hopefully with beneficial emergent effects. Whatever you may
think about conceptual integration, however (cf. Harder 2005), social inte-
gration certainly does not come for free.
7. Asymmetric communication and the pathological they:

the niche for discourses
I started out this chapter by saying that I agreed with most of the analyti-
cal points made by critically oriented discourse analysts. Since then I have
given a number of arguments to show that this form of analysis is aca-
demically, civically and strategically inadequate to address the issue. So
what part of the picture is it that discourses analysis can safely be allowed
to address?
I said in ch. 7 that the natural context for discourse struggles is com-
munication between two conflicting (sub)communities, especially mes-
sages that are best understood as position statements. In the terms
described above, that means that discourse struggles belong in situations
where there is already a well-entrenched them available. This is not an
5 A similar, frequently expressed view is that each person should be understood

as a unique individual (not as a member of any category). However, the ability
to understand (or construct) someone as a unique individual depends on
having uniquely individual relations with that person, which in turn requires
one-on-one interaction. For that reason the principle expresses the ideal bot-
tom-up strategy, the best possible path to personal platform-building. How-
ever, at social macro-levels (such as law enforcement), treating everybody
solely as a unique individual is not an option. Equality before the law means
that the same rules apply to everybody who is relevantly similar. For the same
reason, if immigration gives rise to problems that get political attention, saying
that each person should be treated as a unique individual translates into say-
ing that it would be a mistake to address immigration problems at the macro-
level, because it would automatically establish a category of them, and
thereby an us-them discourse which, by the principles of poststructural dis-
course analysis, would create a problem that was not there before. This leaves
laissez-faire as the only option.
Asymmetric communication and the pathological they 437
unusual situation. It follows therefore that there are many cases where
discourses analyses have a job to do. In ch. 7, political campaigning was
offered as the obvious context for an exchange of mutual us-them con-
structions. This goes for all political parties and candidates that are up for
election. People who are attuned to this form of communication will find
it natural to analyse linguistic communication in terms of discourse strug-
gles, and this may be one reason it comes naturally to politically active
academics. When you are dealing with texts that enter into political con-
flicts, there is a legitimate academic and civic point in an analytic proce-
dure that looks for what interests, discursive constructions and values the
text is designed to propagate. Faircloughs (2000) analysis of the New
Labour discourse is an example of this type of analysis, dealing with pub-
lic, asymmetric communication that is designed as a blueprint for how to
(re)construct the social and political situation in Britain. Discourses anal-
ysis that avoids the problems discussed on p. 367 can thus bring out the
ways in which the openly advertised priorities and aims go with less appar-
ent and problematic sides of the position defined by the sender (the small
print and the gaps) and thus help readers articulate their own position.
The same obviously applies to the analysis of international relations, as
discussed in section 7.5.1. Dialogue between nations on the international
scene can safely be assumed to involve careful considerations of where to
situate the national we and its interests in relation to them, i. e. the other
nations involved in negotiations or exchange of position statements. CL-
inspired metaphor analysis goes naturally with this critical agenda, as
exemplified and argued by Chilton (1996).
Also in other institutional contexts, whenever statements are binding
for official bodies, it is necessary to formulate texts that define the official
position in ways that do not put institutional rules or commitments at risk.
Management position statements, for instance, need to construct company
practices in a way that reflects current policies. Abstracting from dialogic
orientation is a relevant strategy for understanding texts of this kind, pre-
cisely because they are designed to safeguard the interests of the sender
rather than reaching out towards the addressee.
There is also a personal dimension involved in understanding language
as defining a position rather than entering into an interactive relationship.
For people who speak or write in a professional context, their products
are important parts of their own social identity construction in A.Clarks
(1997) terms, they are parts of the person that extend beyond the body.
This function ideally collaborates with an attempt to ensure understand-
ing but ideal collaboration can never be taken for granted. The desire to
present a position that constructs the world in a particular manner may
get the better of attempts to ensure ideal understanding (I speak from

personal experience!). In such cases a critical look at the construction of
the world that seems to emanate from the text is also well motivated, even
if there is no group or institutional conflict involved. Sometimes it is more
pressing to figure out where people stand than to interact with them.
In the case of ethnic divisions, discourse analysis continues to have a
job to do in pointing out those ways in which other people are constructed
as inferior, alien and hostile by not immediately transparent textual means.
But from the point of view of linguistics as a scientific endeavour, this
should not be practiced in such a way that blinds the analyst to the fact
that discourses are part of a larger social reality that includes collabora-
tive agency. This expanded field of vision does not diminish the critical
potential quite the contrary. It is essential to know whether statements
that reflect a particular, identifiable offline discourse do so merely because
they are puppets of the hidden hand which in my preferred formulation
means that they represent a mindless adaptation to dominant ways of
speaking and thinking or they represent the senders best attempt to
communicate. It should also be pointed out that if look only at the discur-
sive position and not at its factual grounding, you are unable to tell vicious
bullshit from an articulation of real issues.
With respect to the us-them division, this requires a revised position
according to which it becomes possible to distinguish between factually
grounded everyday constructions of them on the one hand and patho-
logical cases on the other. Pathological cases are those where hostile con-
structions of other people take on a life of their own, severed from any
attempt to understand the world and other people in it. Such cases need
careful and focused analysis, not least in terms of their missing factual
grounding; and this is possible only if the analysis goes beyond document-
ing the text-internal contrast between us and them.
8. Final remarks: why critical analysis needs functional relations

and collaborative agency
I have described multi-ethnic contexts as the most challenging case for

analysing meaning in the social sphere. This links up with the fact that the
functional dimension that is otherwise a salient part of the contribution of
this book has been more or less absent. The reason is that where ethnic
divisions prevail, they sever functional relations between the aggregate
and the individual perspective: there is no overall collective of which the
individual understands herself as a member. Since there is no shared col-
Final remarks 439
lective in the first place, the question of whether invisible hand mecha-
nisms cause it to persist or erode away does not arise, and even more
obviously, there is no question of visible hand initiatives (which depend
on collaboration among people with membership status and participant
awareness). That is why status functions, such as those assigned to child
birthday parties, do not allow shared activities where ethnic divisions take
priority.
Nevertheless, joint activity and functional relations constitute the pre-
supposed foundations of the entire discussion in this chapter. This is
because the normative foundation of the argument (which Blommaert,
Verschueren and I share in complete agreement) is a commitment to the
goal of establishing societies where all have full membership status. The
argument in this chapter is based on the assumption that such a situation
can only be a sustainable part of social reality if there is an aggregate
social construction of which individuals can see themselves as members,
such that functional relations between individual and population-level
practices cause it to persist. It follows from the functional and joint-activ-
ity-based apparatus of the social cognitive framework that I have argued
for that the only way forward is to set about establishing what is missing.
Since the basic direction according to this framework is bottom-up, the
place to start is what I have called platform-building: establishing com-
mon ground on a face-to-face basis. This is because once there is common
ground, we can rely on universal human competencies to start pulling in
the right direction. On the ground, everybody prefers joint activity to
anomie or conflict.
This position would be touchingly nave if it went with a denial of the
top-down perspective. As frequently pointed out, however, once higher
levels have emerged they are part of social reality. Although in multi-eth-
nic contexts there are problems with perceived membership status across
dividing-lines, in societies like Denmark and Holland there are sociocul-
turally well-grounded democratic governments, law enforcement, public
health care, welfare and lots more besides. Ethnic divisions do not prevail
over all these socially constructed practices. The platforms need to work
at all socially constructed levels, and people in positions with enhanced
visible-hand type influence have a special responsibility for extending this
activity to more aggregate levels. The point of stressing platform-building
is just that you cannot build a community by working only from a top-
down perspective. This is where the strategy predicated on universal
humanity and legally enshrined equality failed.
People with special responsibility include intellectuals and academics.
This is where the civic agenda of this book comes in. Whether or not
Myrdals report and the retraction of scientific claims about white superi-
ority actually played a significant role for the dismantling of institutional-
ized racism in America, you have to be a very vulgar Marxist or anti-
humanist6 to deny any role to a normatively based and factually grounded
understanding of the way the world works in shaping policy decisions. The
most remarkable and deeply moving example in living memory is the role
of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in avoiding wholesale bloodshed
after the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. If it had not been for just
these two people in key visible-hand positions, there is no knowing what
would have happened. Crucial in this context, however, is that what is
special about them is not that they were for harmony and against may-
hem; they were hardly alone in that. What was special was that they found
a way to make their visions prevail in the process of getting a new society
up and running.
This is a daunting example to set. But the point that I think applies at
all levels of understanding and influence is this: the key issue for all those
who would like to use their understanding of policy issues to promote
civic causes is to have a theory about how this can actually work. How can
a conceptual understanding, with its necessary normative foundation,
enter (efficaciously) into the social process?
On this key point, I suggest that the social cognitive framework I have
put forward has advantages over both a purely cognitivist and a purely
social constructionist approach. What I hope to contribute is a theoreti-
cally founded approach to the relations between conceptual understand-
ing and social reality. The functional perspective is essential because it
points to the conditions under which social constructions that we support
in principle need to be supported also in terms of patterns of actual
causal relevance. In the case of ethnic division, the central implication is
that we-formation above face-to-face level is grounded in collective prac-
6 Bourdieu analyses education (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990) and language use
(Bourdieu 1991) as aspects of the mindless reproduction of social power. I
have tried to show that in the social cognitive framework such processes,
understood as pin-prick driven adaptation, are part of the picture, and it
would be nave to see individual understanding as the only player on the scene.
Even worse than ignoring such processes, however, would be to conclude that
they are the only thing that is real. Bourdieu (1991: 109) claims that the
spokesperson is an impostor endowed with the skeptron, where the skeptron
is analogous to the conductors baton that constitutes his visible hand but if
we take that statement as the whole truth, there could be no point in ever
choosing a spokesperson to address issues of common concern.
Final remarks 441
tices and cannot be sustained by normatively imposed conceptual models

alone. If practices do not sustain such processes of we-formation, top-
down formal stipulation is not going do the trick forever (at least in dem-
ocratic societies).
While there is no disagreement, as far as I can see, with other CL
approaches to civic issues, only a suggestion for extending the foundations
of the inquiry, there is a key disagreement with the discourses approach.
This is the analytic practice that understands social problems as due to
discourses, and stops there. Even if we disregard Schegloffs point (that
everybody means something different when they talk about discourses, cf.
p. 114), the most serious problem remains: the analyst makes no attempt
to understand how the conceptual content of unwanted discourses can be
replaced with something better, also in the way the world works. The sub-
text of the analysis, as pointed out by Luke (p. 366), is often to blame the
author, even though that makes no sense in terms of understanding dis-
courses as impersonal forces working behind agentive control. The analyst
in fact places himself in a superior position above the fray, looking down
upon the scene where other human agents are milling about without really
knowing what they are saying and why. By the logic of the analysis itself,
that makes the insights of discourses analysis unusable and thus use-
less to people involved in the practices that have been analyzed.
The social cognitive approach, in contrast, recognizes the existence of
impersonal forces (as due to invisible-hand type causality), but situates
them in a larger picture together with joint activity and collaborative
agency, thus making it possible to act, on the individual level or via the
visible hand, to counteract and ultimately even derail unwanted mecha-
nisms of aggregate-level power.
With respect to social constructionism, I hope with this book to con-
tribute to the process whereby the use of the term mere social construc-
tion is phased out. The process ought to work by the standard selection
pressures of academic life, if there is sufficient competition from factually
grounded descriptions of social reality. This pious hope applies even in
cases where discourse struggles are one part of the story: even politicians,
professional communicators may be trying to get into a dialogue, and if we
only want to wage discourse war, we are responsible for ruining the
chances of dialogue when they are there.
This position has an implication that applies directly to the academic-
civic interface. To the extent the focus is on identifying ways of thinking
that deserve criticism, i. e. on undesirable conceptual positions that are
expressed in discourse (such as hostility towards other ethnic groups, sex-
ist gender models, defence of social injustices, etc), the subtext of blame
may situate the whole analysis as a move in the blaming game. As also in
non-academic contexts (cf. above p. 334), this language game is likely to
replace whatever other business is at hand with its own powerful agenda.
Its purpose is to allocate blame (cf. p. 124), and when that has occurred the
game is over. This makes a symbiosis with the language games of science
and scholarship, whose purpose is to understand what the object of
description is like, a risky business.7
I believe that if academic analysis of meaning in society is to serve its
civic purpose, it needs to be unambiguously committed to understanding
what is going on in the object of description, rather than to apportioning
blame. Even when allocation of blame is fully justified and serves a clear-
cut civic purpose, academics have no privileged role in that process they
need to make common cause with the rest of civil society in order to
achieve democratic legitimacy. For civic purposes, this is the most impor-
tant reason why a framework for critical analysis of meaning in society
needs to include collaborative agency, factual grounding and functional
relations like the social cognitive linguistics I have tried to outline.
7 Even Chilton, disillusioned as he is with the potential of critical discourse

analysis, occasionally retains a whiff of the blaming game that is prevalent in
critical linguistics. In Chilton (2004, ch. 7) he analyses Enoch Powells rivers of
blood speech (warning against violence resulting from immigration), as well
as a conversation many years later between a group of violent young men
suspected of a racist murder including their use of Powell as an authority
figure. To his great credit, Chilton (2004: 134) draws a clear line between aca-
demic description and the allocation of blame:
At this point one leaves the domain of description. It is the critical inter-
preters responsibility to evaluate discourse of the kind we have been inves-
tigating and [the] relevance of Powells public oration and its mediation.
Nevertheless, by concluding the chapter with these lines, he suggests that it is
this evaluation and the associated apportioning of blame that constitutes
the public use of the academic description. For the same reasons that Chilton
has laid out so clearly in his own writings in relation to CDA, I doubt that
bringing down this superlatively sitting-duck target will contribute a great deal
towards achieving ethnic equality and harmony.
Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives
As announced in the title, this book has tried to make a contribution to

the ongoing expansion of CL into the social sphere the social turn. This
contribution is based on a functional orientation, where individual usage
events are viewed as belonging in a field of forces that include patterns of
causal feedback over time. This sets up a panchronic perspective as the
canonical way of understanding meaning in society, the focal object of
description. This implies that a purely synchronic perspective is insuffi-
cient (because it does not allow us to ask what causes reality to be the way
it is), and that a purely diachronic perspective would be equally insuffi-
cient (because it does not allow us to ask what relations are between dif-
ferent aspects of overall reality as constituted at this point in time). The
basic framework for this type of analysis is evolutionary theory, building
on (but on some points modifying) the theory of Croft (2000, 2001).
The book has pursued aims at two levels. At the academic level the
purpose was to provide a useful foundational extension for Cognitive Lin-
guistics in dealing with meaning in the social domain, integrating aspects
of theories of social facts in a way that was consistent with core concerns
of classic CL. At the civic level, the purpose was to provide a framework
for the analysis of meaning in society that would avoid the shortcomings
especially of the discourses family of approaches, while enabling a criti-
cal approach that would have greater chances of making contact with
social reality.
The time has come to assess what has been achieved. I will now list
some of the most salient implications, sum up why they matter, and end up
by analysing two cases as illustrations.
I have tried to capture the social turn in CL in terms of three stages of
successive recontextualization: from autonomous linguistics to meaning
in the mind (classic CL); from underlying mental constructs to meaning in
a variational and intersubjective perspective (current developments)
and finally to meaning in society (my own focus).
The three steps follow a path of evolutionary complexity. There must
be minds before there can be sensitivity towards other minds; and sensi-
tivity towards other minds (in turn) is necessary for having collective
social structure based on meaning. Joint attention is the crucial factor that
triggers this development. My own main focus is on the joint world (the
sociocultural niche) that arises at the last stage.
444 Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives
Human language begins when the flow of communicative activity in

the niche begins to have sediments in the form of offline features: when
signals acquire meaning through collective activity rather than via genetic
wiring. In the social niche, offline features are a source of selection pres-
sure; internalized in participants, offline features constitute individual
competencies. A comprehensive theory of language includes all three
dimensions: language in the mind (competency), language in the flow of
activity (usage/parole), and language in society (langue).
The different aspects are kept together by functional relations (by the
same causal mechanism that maintains other equilibrium states between
organisms and their environment): features that promote replication tend
to persist, while others may disappear.
Functional relations operate at many different levels and also link up
mental and non-mental parts of the human world. At the level of the indi-
vidual, neural structures are reinforced if they underpin successful lan-
guage use or conceptually based achievements. At the level of the socio-
cultural niche, lineages of linguistic expressions, meaningful activities and
social constructions persist if they if they are sustained by invisible as well
as visible hand processes in the speech community.
The context in which this book places classic CL thus includes non-
mental structures inside and outside the individual, as well as meaning-
based structures in the sociocultural niche and locates mental structures
in the individual mind as parts of panchronic lineages under functional
pressures from the environment.
So if this is the framework what are the arguments for using it?
Let me confess that at the general survey level, I think all this is really
sort of obvious. What is perhaps less obvious is that the differentiated pic-
ture is necessary also for descriptive purposes where it tends to be
ignored. In going through the implications below, I therefore try to show
where they make a difference in relation to existing descriptive practices.
I begin at the cognitive linguistic end of the story, and end up at the dis-
courses end.
(1) Divergent and variational properties are part of the same reality that
also includes convergent and invariant properties; the two sides are interde-
pendent and equally important parts of the picture
Classic CL was oriented towards continuity and convergent evidence

both across the community and between levels of description (from pri-
mary experience via cognition to language). It was typically assumed that
there was some sort of cognitive object of description that was the central
Final remarks 445
fact of the matter, and which could be viewed as belonging in the mind
while also manifesting itself as part of culture (cf. Holland and Quinn
1987: 6, as discussed on p. 203). From such a generalizing and cognitivist
view, divergences across the community or between mind, language and
society are essentially noise. However, in a differentiated account, prop-
erties of individual minds may diverge from properties of usage events,
which in turn may differ from sociocultural facts as a result of variation
at all levels.
In the differentiated framework, convergent evidence reflects an ideal
equilibrium condition in which there is full participant agreement, the
sociocultural world operates the way participants believe, and perform-
ance error does not occur. Although such cases are interesting as ideal
types in Webers sense, they do not provide insight in the dynamic rela-
tions between cognition and society. Just as Labovian variation may pre-
dict language change, divergence between cultural norms, usage events
and individual conceptions may reflect or predict social change (as in the
example of Gunnar Myrdal pointing to the discrepancy between sociocul-
turally entrenched norms in the US and actual discriminatory practices).
This means that investigating the full differentiated picture of concep-
tualization in society requires an extensive collaboration between two
types of analysis: on the one hand, categorization based on qualitative
participant awareness, and on the other, empirical and quantitative
description of the variation within categories. Such collaboration depends
on recognition of this as a genuinely joint project: categories are void
unless linked up with instantiations, and variational description presup-
poses shared categories within which one can identify variation (as
opposed to mere fluctuation or difference). In a linguistic context, this
is exemplified with for instance the Leuven group (cf. p. 67); in the area of
meaning as a force in social change, it ultimately demands a wider cross-
disciplinary alliance.
(2) Functional relations, involving both replication and selection, are an

essential part of the dynamics of meaning-in-society. Local cause-effect
relations, two-way and one-way, are everywhere and constitute a back-
ground of fluctuation but in understanding meaning-in-society they are
never the full story.
From a local perspective, sometimes it may be justified to claim that a

conceptualization triggers a social process, or that a social process triggers
a particular conceptualization, or there may be evidence of influences
going both ways, In the panchronic perspective, however, knee-jerk causal-
ity is at best only part of the truth. Because conceptual structures that enter
into sociocultural reality are lineages, there are functional mechanisms at
work, which are responsible for non-random patterns of persistence.
Such patterns have a privileged status both for scientific and civic pur-
poses: in both cases, it is essential to get at the patterns that prevail. This
perspective thus has a key anti-reductionist role: only in a panchronic per-
spective can the properties of an individual usage event be divided into
idiosyncratic and functional features. This applies both to meaning as
competency and meaning in society, in the niche. In a strictly local per-
spective, a conveyed meaning cannot be factored out into conventional
meanings (either by the learner or the linguist) this requires reference to
other instances of the same lineage.
(3) In addition to bodily grounding (inside the individual), grounding also

includes sociocultural grounding (in the niche)
As understood in CL, grounding lies between dogmatic foundationalism

and deconstructionist detachment. In a social cognitive linguistics, this
relationship includes both functional relations and causal constraints
(inside as well as outside the individual): functional pressures work by
selection and cannot generate what circumstances do not allow.
Conceptualization and language are grounded in bodily experience
(inside the individual), and in participation in the community (outside the
individual). If bodily grounding was alone on the scene, we could not have
words or concepts for things of which we have no personal experience; if
sociocultural grounding worked alone, without bodily grounding, we
would always talk like a blind man about colours.
The two forms of pre-conceptual grounding, bodily and sociocultural,
go together in habitus formation: pin-prick adaptation (the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune) gives rise to embodied response patterns to
which consciousness has no access. These are closely interwoven, however
(as implemented by the interweaving of procedural and declarative mem-
ory in the brain), with conscious experience of membership of the socio-
cultural community. An illustration of the co-existence of mental and pre-
mental dimensions as well as the interweaving of bodily and sociocultural
grounding is colour categories (cf. p. 177).
(4) Meaning as part of individual competency must be understood as

potential-for-use accumulated through the flow of usage. This represents a
reversal of the approach in the Platonic tradition where the flow is a debased
reflection of underlying ideal stability
Final remarks 447
Viewed in a competency perspective, both language and conceptualiza-

tion contribute to and enter into the abilities of human subjects. Semantic
competency enables speakers to evoke a range of offline meanings, which
constitute potential input to the flow of events. These meaning potentials
are shaped by selection pressures to enable participation in whatever is
going on in the niche community; and the meanings that persist thus
have functional properties for speakers. These do not correspond to neat
Aristotelian categories, but neither are they indeterminate (any more
than the functional properties of organs are indeterminate). Variational
description is a form of precision, not a form of vagueness.
Concepts are ways of grasping aspects of the socioculturally available
world, and each time you use them you grasp different segments of current
reality. Linguistic expressions are ways of evoking meanings, and each time
you apply those meanings in context, the results are different. If classic CL
constructs are viewed as parts of offline linguistic competency, they thus
have to be understood as prerequisites for action: frames have the compe-
tency role of enabling the act of framing, profiles of profiling, etc.
(5) Meaning-in-society, i. e. meaning as a constituent of the sociocultural

niche, forms part of complex entities with extra-mental (including causal)
properties. A crucial type of such entities are niche concepts which repre-
sent the way the community cuts the pie as part of lived practices.
Meanings as parts of social constructions are parts of the furniture,

attached to non-conceptual parts of the world you live in and associated
with norms and values. Conceivably the most important implication of the
framework proposed in this book is that it forces a distinction between
concepts as part of the niche and concepts as part of individual compe-
tency.
The lack of a clear conceptual apparatus for dealing with meaning in
society is not specific to cognitive linguistics. It also occurs in academic
contexts that are centrally concerned with the role of conceptualization in
society, such as conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). Thus in his descrip-
tion of how civil society was conceptualized in Germany, France and Eng-
land in relation to the Enlightenment, Koselleck (2002: 216) describes the
French constellation as follows:
In France, a dualistic conceptuality stemming from the Enlightenment pre-
vailed that permitted rhetorical rigour and impact but stood in the way of all
pragmatic solutions. A grand bourgeois could be distinguished from a petit
bourgeois but not a high citoyen from a petty citoyen. Semantically, no lasting
compromise was possible between the interests of the economic bourgeoisie

and the general civil rights that the French Revolution granted to everyone.
The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the Paris Commune rebellion of 1871
were linguistically preprogrammed, so to speak
Part of what this book has tried to show can be expressed by saying that
the words conceptuality, semantically and linguistically are insufficient to
capture what is going on here.
What is at stake is a social process, consisting in changes in niche con-
cepts ways of dealing with the world as part of lived practices rather
than mental and linguistic competencies in individuals. In terms of the
framework I defend, there are at least three steps from conceptualization
to this type of historical process: first of all, the concepts have to enter into
a construction of the relevant part of reality in this case, into (conflict-
ing) constructions of the French Republic. Secondly, these constructions
must acquire a sufficient amount of acceptance in the community. Thirdly,
in order to gain efficacy they need to be anchored in social processes with
the requisite form of causality. Mere opinions are not enough, any more
than mental processes. It was not conceptualizations, word meanings and
language that brought down successively the Bourbons, Louis Philippe
and post-imperial authorities in Paris it was the causality of social struc-
ture in France as shaped by a complex interrelationship between language
and conceptualization on the one hand and social processes on the other.
This is clearly part of Kosellecks view, too, as shown by the reference
to economic interests the vocabulary just does not include a clear dis-
tinction between concepts as part of the mind and conceptually imbued
parts of social reality 8; 9
8 Wver (1998) provides empirical evidence showing that constructions of

France based on identification between the citoyen and the Republic are in
fact causally efficacious. From the point of view of a social cognitive linguistics,
it illustrates the need to develop the quantitative dimension of the descriptive
approach, also in a macro-political context.
9 The problem of the relation between social history and conceptual history is
discussed by Koselleck, who makes a number of the same points that have
been raised in this book. For instance, he rejects the idea of a simple causal
relationship between conceptual and social categories, and points instead to
functional relationships, cf. Koselleck (2002: 173). However, his basic concern
is to establish what I would call the partial autonomy of conceptual history
from social history: Social history and conceptual history stand in a recip-
rocal, historically necessitated tension that can never be canceled out (Kosel-
leck 2002: 23). The notion of a social construction that integrates conceptual
Final remarks 449
This example forms a convenient transition point from academic con-

clusions relevant to the social turn in CL, towards the civic purpose of
handling meaning in society better than the discourses approach: insuf-
ficient differentiation is also a basic problem in relation to the discourses
approach. This is because discourse has the same all-purpose role in dis-
course analysis that conceptualization has in classic CL. The result is that
intuition-based discourse analysts and cognitive linguists may in fact be
talking about the same fuzzily outlined entity, which is not clearly identifi-
able as being either a conceptual, linguistic or an institutional object. The
discourse of tolerance (cf. Brown 2006), for instance, is occasionally hard
to distinguish from an idealized cognitive model of tolerance.10
This purpose brings into focus additional properties of the integrated
framework:
(6) The primordial social construction (before conceptual categories enter

into the picture), is a we. Going from the prefigured mental we to becom-
ing part of a socially constructed we is the normative foundation for iden-
tity formation (as participant) and a prerequisite for language acquisition.
It is therefore also a prerequisite for entering into discourse struggles.
Human beings come equipped with a prefigured, embodied we that is

not a construction but exists independently of all social experience. As a
crucial part of (epigenetic) development, however, the implied we hooks
up with a widening circle of fellow subjects to construct socially actualized
and operational wes. An operational we has causal powers that individu-
als do not have on their own, including affordances for constructing shared
practices. The capacity for joint experience and activity thus becomes a
channel for assigning joint (=we) status to concrete activities and values
that enter into shared life. Being a human language user thus entails mem-
bership of normative communities.
A side effect of entering into a we is the emergence of them as the
category of non-members. Various social processes (including competi-
tion and conflict) influence what relationships emerge between various
and causal elements would probably fall under his concept of total history, a
project which he regards as impossible (ibid.).
10 In discussing the history of the discourse of tolerance, at one point she makes
it explicit that the use of the actual word is not required: Not named tolerance
but tolerance it was, Brown (2006:57): in other words, if it instantiates the
concept as she has defined it, it qualifies as a discourse the way she uses the
term.
groups of us and them. Among those processes are collective cultural

and communicative processes. Because meaning arises as joint property,
however, discursive exchanges that take the form of discourse struggles
are deviant cases, and analysing these calls for an answer to the question:
what are the conditions that have made the discourse struggle arise rather
than co-operative communication? While physical struggle requires no
presupposed we, discourse struggle as a real social process can only be
understood in terms of two clashing wes.
(7) Discourses are historical lineages and are therefore susceptible to func-
tional feedback mechanisms
In other words: reality strikes back! Where an individual usage event can
conceivably be divorced from all discernible relations with anything else
in the world, discourses cannot both be historical objects and be under-
stood as exempt from the forces of differential selection that apply to all
other phenomena in social space. If discourses are part of the fray, they
must be subject to impact from it; and that impact, including functional
relations, is part of the full account of discourses.11
Although feedback includes many other factors, for representational
speech acts one source of potential feedback is the reality that is the target
of discursive construction (as in the case of experimental evidence). In
that case, factual grounding may shape successive representations in ways
that bring about gradually improved correlations between predicted and
actual experience with the object of representation.
Viewing social reality solely as a flow unchecked by constraints in the
environment is equally damaging in the understanding of language and in
the understanding of other social processes. Pretting (2009) shows how
closely poststructural thinking in terms of floating signifiers matches
thinking in the financial sector before the crash in 2008. Just as there is no
hors-texte foundation for endless ongoing successions of meaning con-
structions (to the Derrida-inspired sorcerers apprentice), there is no
external foundation for the endless repackaging of debts in successive lev-
eraging operations (to the young financial wizard). The dynamics of
unconstrained flow is extremely interesting, just as Derrida suggested
11 Hull (1988) shows in detail what selection pressures present-day biological

discourses, analogous to the historical predecessors described by Foucault
(1969), are under in the modern scientific community.
Final remarks 451
but this is not least because it is part of the way the world works, and at
some point (the rest of) reality strikes back.
Even if or rather, especially if the chief analytic purpose is critical,
functional relations are crucial: if you want to enter into a discourse strug-
gle, it is practical to know whether the opponent discourse is bullshit with
a track record of defective factual grounding, a utopian project with
unknown viability, or a hegemonic discourse grounded in well-entrenched
habitus.
(8) An analysis of discourse as a medium of social power needs to include

the interplay between agentive and non-agentive forces.
The anti-humanist perspective focuses on factors operating behind the

back of human subjects and abstracts from agentive features but since
language depends on agency and intersubjective (participant) awareness,
the anti-humanist perspective is only a partial analysis.
It may appear as if that analysis brings out precisely the features that
are relevant if you want to understand language as a medium of power
but that only holds true to the extent power is regarded as a natural law
like gravity (in which case it does not make sense to talk about who is to
blame or what can be done about it). If the critical analyst believes that it
is possible to interfere with the course of power, he thereby implicitly rec-
ognizes the potential role of agency and it would therefore be irrational
to exclude the role of agency from the analysis itself.12
In a perspective that includes agency, the Foucauldian hidden hand
can be reanalysed (and demystified13) by differentiating between the
12 The lure of this kind of irrationality, however is one of the great paradoxes of
intellectual history. It was pointed out by Kierkegaard in relation to Hegel,
who he said described the world as a vast palace only to place himself in a dog
kennel outside it. In actual events it was even more strikingly exemplified by
Marx, whose deterministic analysis of the progress of history was driven by a
strong indignation and unleashed the greatest agentive attack in history on
class-based power. Foucauldian analysis of impersonal power typically reflects
the same indignation.
13 Foucaults precise position is famously elusive when it comes to ontological
commitments, and this includes the precise ontological status of the forces that
are behind the (deceptive) appearances that he analyses. In two interviews in
Rabinow 1984 (pp. 376 and 384), Foucault answers questions about his posi-
tion by referring (with some complacency) to the fact that he has been placed
practically everywhere in the philosophical landscape. This elusive quality is a
logical consequence of his central descriptive strategy, i. e. not to ask how
invisible hand (communicative lineages shaped by impersonal forces of

differential replication), the visible hand (where there is an overt agentive
influence on replication), and the concealed hand (covert agentive influ-
ence on replication, as when President Nixon orchestrated the sending of
letters of support to the White House).
Where it does not make sense to blame the invisible hand, the visible
hand can be called to account, and the concealed hands deception can be
unmasked. The hermeneutics of suspicion rationally presupposes such
an analysis: in a world without covert agency, there can be no suspects.
I am now going to take up two examples with clear elements of power
and marginalization involved to illustrate what I see as the benefits of the
integrated approach that has been presented in my book. The first exam-
ple, an analysis of containment, is mostly oriented towards illustrating
the extended social-cognitive framework. The second example is a debate
on gay marriage on The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and Mike Huck-
abee, and is mostly designed to illustrate the interplay between conflictive
and co-operative features of communication in a situation where two
positions are in confrontation. The first time a technical term is used in the
analysis of containment, it appears in bold face as a way of illustrating
how the extended framework can be used to capture the different aspects
of a social cognitive issue.
Starting in the conceptual territory of classic CL, the root content of the
notion takes us back to the image schema (cf. the discussion in chapter 1),
consisting simply of a container with an inside and an outside, and an
object that is contained. This schema is on the one hand an abstraction
from concrete instantiations (the result of schematic abstraction), but it
also has bodily grounding in early experience of being inside a crib or pen
and not being able to get out. In both cases, it goes naturally with a simi-
larly embodied experience of a force dynamic scenario in which the human
agent is the agonist while the container is a potentially superior antagonist.
In its simplest form, the container schema is encoded in the preposition
in. In the verb contain it has a temporal dimension: the state is now con-
ceived as going on in an unbounded fashion, as in the bottle contains water.
An additional dimension may arise if it the trajector slot has an agentive
filler it is not in itself coercive, since even agents have non-agentive
insides, but adverbials may complete the coercion, in which case the con-
objects of description are constituted (their nature), but what historical

mechanisms of enablement and control are behind them. The reconstruction I
propose is not necessarily in conflict with the points Foucault is concerned to
make but it is against the spirit of Foucaults form of enquiry.
Final remarks 453
tainer actively exerts force on the contained object an early OED quote
speaks of containing the people in good order (which is necessarily agen-
tive). The exertion of agentive force makes the state-of-affairs more
dynamic and raises the possibility of a termination (if the force-dynamic
balance shifts).
This case is the main (most salient) sense associated with the nomi-
nalization containment, which therefore designates the reified process of
keeping something from crossing the restraining barrier of the container.
This involves the beginnings of a metaphorical mapping from the pure
domain of spatial relations to the domain of agentive activity.
These aspects are all within the territory of classic CL. In order to
understand the term as applied to security issues, however, we need to
include its causal history in the social world. The term can be traced back
to seminal discursive constructions: its use in the so-called long telegram
and later the X article (The Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs,
July 1947) by the State Department official George F. Kennan (cf. Patter-
son 1973: 24). He used it to describe how the US should respond to Rus-
sian expansionist tendencies in areas of vital interest. It did not take long,
however, for these discursive constructions of the state of US interna-
tional relations to give rise to a causally anchored social construction in
the form of an American foreign policy. It was implemented by Harry Tru-
man and continued with variations all through the cold war, and its basic
logic was that the US must ensure that the Soviet government was not
allowed to extend its area of influence anywhere in the world. As such, it
demonstrated the efficacy of a very visible-hand type of social trajectory.
This social construction had a reality of its own whose sociocultural
grounding included an efficacy dimension in the form of American mili-
tary power and a acceptance dimension in the form of widespread and
hegemonic belief among Americans and westerners in general that this
was the role of the US in the world. The need to distinguish the discursive
construction from the ensuing social construction as well as from Ken-
nans own mental construction can be seen from the fact that Kennan
criticized the policy that was based on his discursive construction, and
eventually left the State Department (cf. Patterson 1973: 210211 and the
detailed study of containment and the cold war in Chilton 1996, Part
Two14). The central point of disagreement was the question of whether a
14 I wrote this exemplification before I became aware of Chiltons in-depth study

of the political and conceptual trajectory of containment. Since the example in
my book is purely illustrative, I decided not to attempt to make it reflect the
containment policy had to be understood as a rigid military doctrine, or it

was to be understood more flexibly and with an element of negotiated
settlements.
The conceptual semantics that was sketched above is part of the com-
munity langue and thus has a normative status in relation to the discrep-
ancy between Kennans own construction and the socially constructed
reality of cold war containment policy. As a niche concept, it subsumed an
aspect of the way the world was socially constructed during the cold war,
and this concept was important both with respect to the belief dimension
(the world picture) and as a contituent of the operational whole. The core
and non-contested content described above is compatible with both the
hard-line understanding that emerged and Kennans own understanding,
but different usage instantiations reflect a variational spectrum shaped by
feedback from both conceptual and political aspects of the actual context.
The description of the concept as used in particular texts is therefore a
matter of meaning construction.
The context includes the issue of conflict as opposed to collaboration
also in interpretation. The original articulation of the construction
occurred at a time when the Soviets were recent allies in the war against
Nazi Germany, and the American administration was trying to understand
why the Soviets did not live up to agreements. In that context it implied a
shift in construction from allied to adversarial relations, from moving with
the Soviets towards moving against them. This shift in direction was a
more salient meaning element than the alternative forms that the contain-
ment might take. When China became communist in 1950, and conflict
was escalated, the dynamics of polarization automatically drove the con-
structions towards more radical and conflictive end of the spectrum, as
articulated by the National Security Council report (NSC-68) that defined
the issue as involving a world-wide military power struggle.
The policy was adjusted under successive American presidents from
Truman to Reagan. These constituted a discourse in the sense defined in
this book (in continuation of Foucaults original insight): a succession of
articulations dispersed in social space but defining (while it lasted) a space
of possible and impossible ways of understanding the field of Soviet-
American relations. As stressed by Foucault, discourses are historical
objects (~ lineages) and this particular historical discourse died at the
fall of the wall.
level of subtlety of Chiltons analysis, but simply refer the reader to Chiltons
account.
Final remarks 455
In contrast to the position according to which there is no access to any

shared reality behind discourses, however, in terms of the position of this
book it makes sense to ask about factual grounding: on the one hand there
was the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and on the other hand Stalin
kept his promise to Churchill and did not support the Greek commu-
nists and facts like these can meaningfully be discussed in relation to the
isssue of how to conceptualize and causally implement the need for con-
tainment.
We have thus moved all the way from conceptualization grounded in
individual experience to aggregate, in fact worldwide power politics. The
whole spectrum, however, must be understood as being simultaneously
relevant at all points. The world-scale social construction retains its ground-
ing in embodied experience, even while it acquires a grounding in the cau-
sality of world politics and in the beliefs of the community. In Kennans
original long telegram from Moscow, which laid the seeds of the new
policy, the underlying motivation for Soviet expansionism was described
as a deep-seated insecurity. This relation was matched on the American
side, when Truman decided that in order to gain support for retaining
American international military presence, he would have to scare the hell
out of the American people in which he succeeded so well that it gave
rise to McCarthyism. Embodied insecurity and world-level security poli-
tics remain parts of the same overall object of description.
McCarthyism illustrates the real causal power also of acceptance-
heavy social constructions, when they are promoted by a (countable) dis-
course which succeeds in imposing a particular construction on a range of
political and cultural activities. The discourse of McCarthyism also illus-
trates the distinction between agentive and emergent discourses, as well
as the distinction between factual and sociocultural grounding. Famously,
Eisenhower in his first campaign (on the advice of his political staff)
refrained from criticizing McCarthy, recognizing the sociocultural efficacy
of McCarthyism; and what brought McCarthy down was not the lack of
factual grounding in his position, but his attack on an institution whose
sociocultural entrenchment in the community turned out to be more pow-
erful than McCarthys own, namely the US army.
There were several lineages involved throughout this complex course
of events. The discourses (i. e. the purely linguistic articulations of contain-
ment) were lineages, as discussed above, allied with but not identical to
containment as a lineage of operational social constructions of super-
power politics. While both these lineages died out with the fall of the wall,
the linguistic competency concept of containment persisted. This concept
has proved its viability by being used for constructing lesser conflicts. In
the case of Saddam Hussein and the war against Iraq, containment was
understood not as an alternative to an alliance, but as the alternative to
war. Thus in New York Times, an article on February 2, 2003, a month
before the attack, described containment as the preferable option,
under the headline Keeping Saddam Hussein in a Box evoking the basic
spatial scenario as basis for a full-fledged metaphor.
The development illustrates how exemplars of containment (words,
discursive constructions, discourses and operational social constructions)
gradually filter into word meaning, and also how these contribute to the
persistence and proliferation of the word itself as a panchronic lineage.
The noun containment was described as rare in the 1933 edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary (and in one example has a sense that is close
to contents); but after the cold war it has become a household word (253
records in the British National Corpus, as opposed to 12 for containable,
which was not said to be rare in 1933). It has also entered into new social
constructions in the form of foreign policies such as those applied to North
Korea after disillusion with the Iraq intervention set in, cf. Containment is
challenging, but better than using force.15
In order to understand containment in the context of international
security, it is clear that you have to understand all dimensions at the same
time: at the macro-level, the causal (including military) power of Ameri-
can politics and its alignment with the concept; at the other end, the con-
ceptualization and its grounding in elementary experience. Security and
insecurity are linked; causal and conceptual links have to be studied as
part of the same overall enterprise; concepts, discursive and social con-
structions, discourses and feedback patterns all have to be kept distinct
and ultimately related in an integrated understanding.
The final example is an analysis of a TV debate (on The Daily Show,
December 8, 2008) between Jon Stewart and Gov. Mike Huckabee on gay
marriage. The debate ran as follows: 16
JS: I want to talk to you about social conservatism. This is really about you
wanting the Republican Party to get back to those basics. And respectfully
speaking, the one thing I guess I dont understand about social conservatism
is I get pro-life and I think thats probably the No 1 issue, its very easy for me
to understand it () the gay marriage issue and why conservatives are against
15 San Jose Mercury News, January 19, 2006 by Daniel C. Sneider (http://aparc.
stanford.edu/news/, accessed May 9, 2009).
16 The transcription makes no claims to anything else than reasonably accurate
representation of the words prosodic, proxemic, gestural, and I blush to think
how many other dimensions are totally absent, for which I apologize.
Final remarks 457
it. You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society why would you not
want more couples to buy into the stability of marriage? Why would you want
that precluded for an entire group of people?
MH: Well, marriage still means one man one woman, life relationship. I think
people have a right to live any way they want to, but even anatomically, lets
face it, the only way that we can create the next generation is through a male-
female relationship For 5000 years of recorded human history thats what
marriage has meant 30 states have had it on the ballot and all 30 states its
passed, even in states like California that nobody would suggest are social con-
servatives
JS: 30 states had Mike Huckabee on the ballot, and they went with McCain
Listen, you cant trust the voters the voters dont know
MH: In those states, Jon, an average of 68 % across America have affirmed tra-
ditional marriage. Its not that they try to say theyre gonna ban something as
much as theyre going to affirm what has always been
JS () I guess my question is: reaffirming the traditional marriage of 5000
years, which takes us back to the Old Testament where polygamy was the norm,
not a heterosexual marriage between two couples that choose each other
marriage has evolved greatly over those 5000 years from a property arrange-
ment polygamy, weve redefined it constantly. It used to be that people of dif-
ferent races could not marry. It strikes me as very convenient to go back to the
Bible and say, hey, man, we gotta look at the way they . define marriage
not the way they did slavery
MH: If we change the definition, then we really do have to change it to accom-
modate all lifestyles .well have to say to the guy in West Texas who had 27
wives, thats okay and Im not sure that I hear a lot of people arguing that that
is a great idea
JS. I dont know why polygamy has the issue here it seems like a funda-
mental human right you write in your book that all people are created equal
and yet for gay people you believe that it is corrosive to society to allow them to
have the privileges that all humans enjoy
MH: Well theres a difference between the equality of each individual and the
equality of what we do, and the sameness of what we do. I mean the fact is mar-
riage is under our law is a privilege, not a basic
JS: So what do you make it that the Hispanics cant vote
MH: I am not sure thats a really good idea I am not sure we should do that
JS: So why cant gay people get married?
MH: Because marriage still means a male and female relationship
JS I disagree you know, segregation used to be the law until the courts
intervened
MH: Theres a big difference between a person being black and a person prac-
ticing a lifestyle and engaging in a marital relationship
JS: Actually this is helpful, this gets to the crux of it. I think it is the difference
between what you believe gay people are and what I do I live in NYC so Im
just gonna make the supposition that I have more experience being around
them and Ill tell you this: Religion is far more of a choice than homosexual-
ity and the protections that we have for religion we protect religion and
talk about a lifestyle choice that is absolutely a choice gay people dont
choose to be gay at what age did you choose to not be gay?
MH: Jon, religious people dont have the right to burn others at the stake, they
dont have the right do anything they wish to do
JS: Youre not being asked to marry a guy theyre asking to marry the person
they love
MH: Theyre asking to redefine the word and frankly were probably not going
to come to terms but if the American people are not convinced that we
should overturn the definition of marriage then I would say that those who
support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the
rest of us, and as I said, 68 % of the American population have made that deci-
sion
JS: You know you talk about the pro-life movement being one of the great
shames of our nation. I think if you want No 2, I think its that I think its an
absolute Its a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to
have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights
MH: I disagree with that, I really do and one of the things I want to make sure
that people understand that if a person does not necessarily support the idea of
changing the definition of marriage, it does not mean that they are a homo-
phobe it does not means that theyre filled with hate and animosity
JS I was in no way suggesting that
MH No you were not saying that, but I think there some people would like to
throw the epithets at people, whether theyre like me or someone else
JS () The question is WHY? You keep telling us: jeez It would be redefining a
word and it feels like semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity
and especially someone such as yourself who is I think an empathetic person
who is someone who seeks to get to the heart of problems . this idea that
jeez I dont know, Jon, definitions in society I mean, marriage was not even
a sacrament until the 1200s
MH: Words do matter, definitions matter and I think we have to be very
thoughtful and careful before we say that were going to undo an entire social
structure. I mean lets face it the basic purpose of a marriage is not just to cre-
ate the next generation but its to train a replacement and its in the context of
Final remarks 459
23 male and 23 female chromosomes coming together to form a conception to

create the next human life
JS. I think youre looking at sexuality () and its odd because the conservative
mantra is meritocracy. What youre suggesting is the fact that being gay parents
makes you not as good as others, and I would suggest that a loving gay family
with a secure financial background beats the hell out of Britney Spears and
Kevin Federline on any day of the week
MH: Im not going to defend Britney and Kevin, for sure
JS. I appreciate were having a conversation its just its just wild
MH: But Jon Im not going to marry you under any circumstances, Im just not
This debate is meant for the public and is designed to highlight a disagree-
ment between two positions and the groups that identify with them, and
thus fits into the type of context I have suggested as typical of discourse
struggles. It would in fact lend itself fairly easily to an analysis in terms of
discourse struggle, with Jon Stewart representing a human rights dis-
course, and Mike Huckabee a traditional marriage discourse. Such an
analysis would capture the fact that both parties have a nodal point in
the sense of Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 112), associated with an ideology
and also that while Jon Stewart may be judged to score more points, the
discussion does not change the positions held by the two speakers. In the
following I am going to try to illustrate how questions highlighted by the
framework of this book, while leaving room for the element of discourse
struggle, can cover important elements of what goes on here that would be
left out by an analysis that focuses on the discursive conflict alone.
Among those are the features due to collaborative, understanding-ori-
ented aspects of communication. Strikingly, appeals to shared values and
common ground pervade the interview. In the introduction, Jon Stewart
talks about the pro-life movement as a case where he can understand
Huckabees stance, thus establishing partially common ground as the basis
on which he is going to address the crucial difference. Other appeals to
common ground involve issues such as empathy, human rights, the stabil-
ity of marriage, not equating defence of traditions with being a homo-
phobe, etc.
Agency is part of collaboration: I think it is obvious that Jon Stewart is
making a determined agentive effort to reach out as part of the attempt
to make his own focal point as strongly as possible: if we can agree on all
these other points, how can a nice man like you rob gay people of the right
to get married?
He also plays by the rules of co-operative Habermasian communica-

tion in presenting arguments that explicitly address the ground that Huck-
abee has chosen to stand on: if we take the Old Testament as a precedent
(as you suggest), then we have to accept polygamy; if we make a distinc-
tion between the right to be who you are and the right to choose certain
practices (as you suggest), then you have to treat homosexuality as part of
the way people are, while religion is a cultural practice that you can choose.
Although Huckabee does not come to terms, he recognizes the dis-
preferred status of such an outcome by the attitudinal adverb frankly. He
also plays by the rules by gradually retreating from positions that Jon
Stewart shows to have doubtful factual grounding. This is where a social
cognitive framework can come in also with respect to the substance of the
argument. Huckabee started out by invoking foundationalist positions,
trying to defend traditional marriage in terms of an eternal essence
founded in biological nature, but had to tone them down in the face of Jon
Stewarts arguments. In his account of marriage as evolving from Old
Testament polygamy onwards, Stewart makes a point that is consonant
with this book: social constructions are lineages that change along with
social conditions and attitudes. Stewart invites Huckabee to join in a social
reconstruction of marriage in conformity with shared core beliefs, or at
least beliefs that Stewart is willing to adopt as a shared platform where
marriage is the bedrock of society, and individuals have the right to live in
accordance with the way they were created.
By retreating as described above, Huckabee is left with an argument in
terms of the definition of marriage and at this point Jon Stewart might
be excused for feeling that he has won the argument, also on Huckabees
own terms. However, that is not entirely true. The crucial part of the inter-
view is:
Jon Stewart:
The question is WHY? You keep telling us, jeez, It would be redefining a word
and it feels like semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity and espe-
cially someone such as yourself who is I think an empathetic person ()
Mike Huckabee:
words do matter, definitions matter I think we have to be very thoughtful and
careful before we say that were going to undo an entire social structure
Here, Huckabee almost stumbles on to the point on which his position

actually makes sense in social cognitive terms: what matters is the social
structure (= construction) that this definition underpins and it does
indeed matter what social structures we undo. While Stewart is right in
pointing out that the (invisible hand of the) voters cannot be trusted on
Final remarks 461
values, Huckebee is also right in saying that popular acceptance is an

important part of the foundation of operational social construction. Per-
suading the American people is in fact an important part of the job that
Stewart is trying to get done
The interest in this analysis is that by recognizing the specific role of
meaning in society, we can see what the real issue is. Marriage understood
as involving a heterosexual couple is part of the normative, sociocultural
niche that Huckabee inhabits and as we know all the way back from
Durkheim, it is anxiety-provoking when the normative foundations that
people identify with are dismantled. Hence, it is not just semantics, i. e. a
question of meaning in language, although Huckabee himself makes it
sound that way. Meaning that is entrenched in the niche is not detachable
from reality in an old-fashioned dualist way, but is part of the whole way
of life. It is in fact entirely rational, if we take Damasios position seriously
and let ourselves by guided by emotions in our decision-making, for Huck-
ebee to resist attempts to dismantle the normative foundations of his
world. The dilemma is real, and both positions are rationally understand-
able as well as solidly grounded in embodied emotional experience and
well-entrenched sociocultural norms.
Rationally understandable and solidly grounded?!, I hear you cry.
How can anyone who knows anything possibly describe Huckebees posi-
tion like that? But the point is not what I think. The point is that niche
concepts such as marriage with their normative foundation are part of the
way the world works. If you want to understand them, you need to under-
stand the way they are grounded in the sociocultural niches people live in.
There are all sorts of reasons why Huckabee cannot come to terms on
the Daily Show. Building a platform with Jon Stewart might well cost him
his own political platform, for instance. But if we take discursive construc-
tion seriously as the potential beginning of social (re)construction, the
interview has a potential for change. Jon Stewart brought out a conflict
between Huckabees internalized values and the marginalized position in
which a narrowly constructed institution of marriage leaves gay people a
discrepancy that is in principle analogous to the situation Myrdal found
with respect to racial equality. (If Huckabee were a homophobe, there
would be less of a divergence!).
On the sociocultural side, this may be correlated with adaptive pres-
sure: since gays have actually come out of the closet anyway and are part
of the landscape, the question is how much Huckabee and 68 % of the
American population would lose in their own terms by allowing marriage
to evolve to admit same-sex couples, compared with what they would gain
in terms of perceived public conformity with fundamental Christian val-
ues and human rights. There is a whiff of gender-inclusive discourse in

Huckebees plural agreement between a person and they; suggesting that
even religious defenders of traditional marriage adapt. The first of the two
positions (choosing inclusion over the same-sex ban) might in the end win
out also for Huckabee and the non-homophobe part of his constituency.
You can choose not to want to understand that and settle for (dis-
course) war instead. I am not by any means a discourse pacifist if you let
your opponents shout you down, youve only yourself to blame. But dis-
course wars are like other wars: as Colin Powell said when he expressed
his differences over the way the Iraq war was conducted, the way to win
wars is to go in with overwhelming force. Ethnically divisive discourse did
not get much of a break in the socially reconstructed landscape after WW
II, but even the most complete victory can be eroded away if those who
hold the moral high ground ignore feedback from changing social reality.
In the absence of overwhelming force, allowing your opponents the status
of fellow subjects might be a better strategy so full marks to Jon Stewart
for doing that.
Also, criticizing the all-too-easy, complacent rejection of Huckabees
position does not mean I support a relativism where all positions are
equally valid as long as they are solidly founded in community norms.
What it means is that those who feel they can see a better alternative to
the niche they presently inhabit ought to find a way to start building that
new niche. Merely pointing out that others have got the wrong values is
not a royal road to a better future. Whatever else may be necessary, I
believe grass roots platform building is an essential element of all sustain-
able change. Here, too, the flow of usage is basic.
Whether in relation to the academic or the civic purpose, I see as the
main advantage of the framework proposed here the fact that it forces
you to ask questions that go beyond the competing fragments of the pic-
ture. It can therefore help to get beyond the cross-fire between warring
half-truths: the one-sided analyses in terms of language, cognitive models,
social determination, etc. The book has tried to recognize the validity of
competing frameworks as parts of the picture, with individual conceptu-
alization on the one hand and Foucaults hidden hand on the other as the
two major points of departure and has tried to show how they leave
unanswered questions that can be addressed a social cognitive framework.
Answering those questions is going to require large-scale co-operation
between analyses based on participant awareness and quantitative empir-
ical investigation, as well as interdisciplinary co-operation between social
and cognitive sciences. I regard that as a point in favour of the proposal:
there are lots of interesting things that need to be done.
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Index 1
Abstraction (see also schema) 31, Allwood, Jens 190

3942, 5152, 61n, 81, 83, 212, 217, Althusser, Louis 62
271275, 292, 296, 375, 452 Andersen, Henning 9, 157158, 206,
Accentuation 289, 425 392, 422
Acceptance 106, 304306, 310, Anderson, Benedict 331
313314, 326335, 337, 339, 342, Anderson, Lloyd B. 92
346, 352, 358, 374, 377, 381, 384, Anomie 141, 170, 434, 439
395, 400, 402, 404, 406, 410, 448, Anti-humanism 63, 104, 109, 111,
453, 460 190, 440, 451
Acceptance-heavy 12, 326, 342, 409, Anything goes 108, 190191,
455 333334, 389,
Access (mental, conscious access) 7, Austin, John L. 105, 124, 193, 308
15, 32, 45, 82, 110, 146, 154, 156 Autonomy 1, 9, 50, 79, 141, 201n, 229,
157, 160, 197208, 220, 290, 335, 271, 344, 367, 373, 443
352, 356360, 446, 454, Conceptual autonomy 52, 54, 255,
Participant access 172, 181, 189, 257,
205n, 296, 357, 359360, 361n, 380 Partial autonomy 4, 178, 224, 238,
Accessibility 68, 275 242, 245, 321n, 348, 448
Acquisition 51, 58, 7278, 82, 153,
202, 203, 204n, 225, 265268, 282, Bache, Carl 130, 133, 135, 240
362, 449 Bakker, Dik 260
Adaptation 910, 71, 90, 81, 107, 145, Barcelona, Antonio 56, 100
148, 150, 15458, 173, 200, 203, 207, Barlow, Michael 58
244, 268, 282, 286, 290, 295, 304, Barrier (schematic) 217, 256, 426,
306, 311, 314, 322, 330, 335, 340, 453
361, 373, 384, 392, 429, 438 Bartsch, Renate 278, 280, 287
Pin-prick adaptation 203, 290, Basic level categories 1920,
360, 440, 446 214215, 320, 346
Affordances 1011, 75, 80, 146149, Bateson, Gregory 6
173175, 268, 295, 298, 324, 359, 449
Agent deletion 127, 134
1 $WWKHVXJJHVWLRQRI0RXWRQGH*UX\WHU,KDYHRSWHGIRUDFRPELQHGLQGH[LQ
ZKLFKRQO\DXWKRUVWKDWPD\EHYLHZHGDVVXEMHFWVKDYHEHHQOLVWHGZKHUHDV
DXWKRUV WKDW IURP WKH SRLQW RI YLHZ RI WKLV ERRN DUH HVVHQWLDOO\ UHIHUHQFHV
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506 Index
Beliefs 45, 60, 93, 107, 109, 115, 141, 181, 185186, 196, 206221, 234,
170, 306, 32630, 332333, 335336, 236, 239, 254, 257, 259, 269274,
337, 409, 411, 414, 420, 455, 460 278, 288289, 309310, 318326,
Berger, Peter 105 337338, 346354, 355, 361, 367,
Berlin, Brent 177 383, 386388, 406407, 415,
Bernardez, Enrique 316 418420, 436, 445, 447449
Billiard-ball model 29, 5152, 86, 255, Aristotelian (classical) categories
257, 261, 264, 17, 23, 29, 39, 50, 74, 215, 220, 350,
Billig, Michael 317, 365 362, 367, 386, 447
Blame (= the blaming game) 124 Linguistic or structural categories
126, 309, 334335, 342, 426, 435, 24, 41, 5152, 55, 78, 9293, 129
441442 132, 134135, 177, 206, 212, 213,
Blank slate 33, 74, 108, 124 229, 234, 236, 239242, 245, 246,
Blending 42, 9599, 431, 436 254, 257, 269274, 292, 299,
Blommaert, Jan 118119, 409, Causality (causal power, causal
412414, 420, 439 structure) 4, 7, 9, 29, 3233, 45, 78,
Bloomfield, Leonard 269 8891, 104105, 108, 110, 122,
Bourdieu, Pierre 83, 109111, 130, 125126, 138, 141178, 199201,
137, 207208, 221, 315318, 329, 204205, 244, 268, 274, 277,
331, 338, 428, 440 289315, 318345, 352, 359.
Boye, Kasper 231, 238, 267 361362, 369384, 400403, 405,
Bottom-up vs. top-down 11, 34, 38, 407408, 410, 413, 421, 429, 432,
4851, 54, 8586, 130, 211, 224227, 440449, 453455
230232, 237, 240242, 245247, Knee-jerk causality (=one-way
250268, 298, 307, 318, 349, 376, causality) 161, 164, 168, 177, 244,
416, 429432, 436, 439 324, 335, 445
Bhler, Karl 71, 82, 86, 88, 306, 354 See-saw causality (=influence-
Bullshit 339345, 348, 438, 450 and-be-influenced by) 143, 152,
Butler, Christopher 127, 129, 133, 168, 178, 314, 328, 392
136, 230, 254, 263 CDA see Critical Discourse Analysis
Butler, Judith 386 Charteris-Black, Jonathan 391
Bybee, Joan 88, 230, 234, 335 Chilton, Paul 2, 63, 362, 373, 391,
401403, 437, 442, 453
Canonical viewing arrangement 86 Chomsky, Noam 18, 48, 51, 7374, 77,
Capital (= financial capital; see also 127, 148, 174, 198, 201, 208, 220,
symbolic capital) 11, 121, 338, 399 227, 235236, 240, 282, 375
Carnap, Rudolph 223 Civic purpose 13, 114, 305, 354,
Category, categorization 12, 1730, 400409, 421, 438442
39, 4142, 5052, 5556, 65, 72, 74n, CL (=cognitive linguistics, passim)
80, 9293, 101, 104, 108, 122, 125, Clark, Andy 153, 320, 437
129132, 134135, 142143, 177,
References 507
Clark, Herbert 10, 9394, 155156, 294295, 298, 302, 310, 315, 321,
159, 165, 171, 174, 176, 184, 195, 323325, 334, 338, 343, 34647, 358,
257, 281, 293294, 308, 310, 431 386387, 403, 405, 444, 446447, 455
Coercion 22, 245251, 260261, 367, Component-based/unit-based struc-
401402, 452 ture 224, 226227, 230, 232,
Cognitivism 5, 5863, 66, 84, 144, 304, 235236, 240241, 246247, 259,
313, 326, 348, 391394, 397, 298
401404, 440, 445 Concept 7, 12, 1522, 2529, 32,
Collaboration 118, 257, 287, 295, 305, 3940, 56, 60, 64, 67, 73, 101, 182,
346, 362, 364, 380, 383, 409 185187, 189, 212219, 221, 306,
Collaborative agency (see also visible 310, 314, 318326, 331, 346357,
hand) 306, 362, 364, 380, 383, 400, 382, 393395, 397, 400, 446447,
404, 429442 454456
Collins, Harry 389 Competency concept 12, 325, 346,
Colour categories 1719, 92, 177 403, 405, 423, 425, 447449, 455
178, 446 Niche concept 12, 73, 318326,
Common ground 87, 94, 155, 287, 346354, 368, 372374, 382, 387,
293, 312, 356357, 364, 429430, 393395, 403, 405, 417, 427,
439, 459 447449, 454, 461
Communication Conceptual engineering 348349,
Human communication 75, 148, 398
362, 364, 368, 404 Conduit metaphor 95, 183, 293
Animal communication 75, 81, Confirmation bias 276, 424
148n, 150151, 244 Conflict vs. collaboration 9, 287288,
Community 1012, 42, 70, 76, 79, 362366, 418421, 436442
8384, 87, 9495, 105106, 109, Connectionism 74, 176
115116, 138, 148156, 165, Constitutive role of meaning 7, 82,
171175, 178, 180181, 190192, 86, 164172, 193, 331, 340, 374, 385
219220, 228, 244, 269302, Construal 2122, 47, 87, 94, 100, 127,
303462 189, 209, 296297, 307309, 343,
Community of practice 94, 416 346, 350, 380, 426
Interpretive community 190192, Construction, see Discursive construc-
333 tion, Meaning construction, Social
Scientific community 105106, construction, Syntactic construc-
336, 380, 450 tion
Speech community 1012, 42, 70, Construction Grammar 34, 88, 92,
148156, 159, 165166, 180181, 99, 176, 211, 224258
193, 219220, 222, 228, 244, 269302 Container (schema) 12, 21, 29, 31,
Competency 1012, 103n, 174175, 6162, 66, 72, 87, 185186, 206n,
179222, 224, 226, 228, 236, 216218, 221, 257, 274, 320,
247248, 252, 258, 282285, 287, 322325, 331, 352, 387, 452453
508 Index
Containment 452456 Derrida, Jacques 113, 137, 333, 339,

Content syntax 247, 253254, 266 365, 368, 370371, 450
Content substance 93 Detachment (from direct grounding)
Contested concepts 425427, 454 3, 36, 81, 150, 159160, 304, 353, 446
Continuity assumption 268 Determination (genetic, physical or
Convention, conventional meaning social) 71, 109112, 117118,
10, 22, 42, 49, 54, 61, 81, 83, 91, 93, 125126, 136, 138, 150, 154, 164,
162163, 171, 182, 185187, 194, 170, 324n, 346, 373, 462
202, 206207, 232, 251, 278, 285, Determinism 21, 164, 173, 244
292297, 335, 337338, 341, 430, 446 Discourse (non-count) 4446, 91,
Convergence vs. divergence (between 9394, 115116, 119, 128, 134, 160,
different levels) 12, 31, 33, 112, 218, 231, 242, 249, 262, 308309,
154, 168, 185, 209, 317, 348, 383 317, 322, 340, 355, 358, 391,
390, 405, 422, 444445, 461 Discourse(s) (definition, 355) 2, 3,
Conversation analysis 116, 124, 180, 89, 11, 13, 103126, 128, 134, 136,
230, 364 137, 287, 305306, 326, 345,
Convict code 320323 354383, 388, 391
Coulson, Seana 98 Emergent vs. orchestrated dis-
Critical Discourse Analysis (=CDA) courses 360, 393, 455
119, 134136, 355, 366367, 369n, Discourse(s) analysis 114, 119, 121,
391, 400402, 442 128, 306, 354368, 391, 399, 436442
Croft, William A. 6, 9, 11, 2127, 56, Discourse struggle 356357, 362363,
8894, 100101, 158, 160, 162, 166, 367, 383385, 399, 409, 415,
175, 187, 209214, 226, 228, 233, 421427, 431441, 449450, 459
242, 245, 249, 250, 255, 260, 262, Discursive construction 307, 309,
266, 270, 272, 290297, 303, 322, 336, 345, 350, 353, 384, 389,
311312, 323, 340, 349, 358, 382, 414, 415, 435, 437, 450, 453, 455, 461
386, 392, 443 Domestication 147, 149, 151152, 212
Cultural learning 7078, 95, 154, Doxa 315316, 331332, 362363
309n, 416 Dunbar, Robin 331, 376, 416
Cultural script 417 Durkheim, mile 78, 84, 110,
140142, 170, 175, 277, 311, 312,
Dabrowska, Ewa 283 321, 322, 434, 461
Damasio, Antonio 31, 80, 81, 461
Davidoff, Jules 177 Eckert, Penelope 116, 274, 337339
Davidson, Donald 192, 217 Economics 33, 109110, 115, 117,
Dawkins, Richard 93, 107 121, 137, 140, 156160, 286, 329
Deacon, Terrence 147151, 210, 324 Edwards, Derek 180, 365
de Beaugrande, Robert 8, 109, 135 Efficacy 12, 169, 199, 295, 304306,
Deconstruction 3, 124, 327, 331332, 310314, 326332, 339, 342, 358,
365, 386, 388, 407, 416, 434, 446
References 509
377, 402403, 406, 409410, 440, Fairclough, Norman 119122,

448, 453, 455 136137, 355, 372, 401, 437
Efficacy-heavy 12, 326, 393, 409, 455 Family resemblance 40, 42, 213216,
Ekman, Paul 389390 230,
Embodied construction grammar 34, Fauconnier, Gilles 4245, 95, 9799,
99, 176 184185, 192, 401
Embodiment (see also grounding, Feldman, Jerome 3234, 99, 147, 176,
bodily) 15, 2935, 3738, 58, 74, 199, 200
80, 83, 8788, 90, 137, 153, 203, 207, Fillmore, Charles 17, 2224, 56, 187,
317, 389 233, 398, 403
Emergence 156, 163, 232, 256, 277, Fink, Hans 139, 124, 314, 349
307, 318, Fish, Stanley 190191, 333
Emergent effects 9697, 172, 407, Floating signifier 112, 122, 144, 167,
431, 436 170, 220, 286, 405, 450
Emperors new clothes 313, 328, 331, Flow 89, 11, 57, 112, 115, 139, 168,
413 172175, 178220, 223, 228,
Encyclopaedic meaning 41, 55, 94, 230232, 239, 247, 249, 252, 277,
123, 185, 229 292, 297299, 302, 306307,
Enlightenment 68, 69n, 116, 140, 279, 309310, 321, 332339, 355, 358,
368, 394399, 447 365, 372374, 382, 385386, 429,
Epigenetic 72, 80, 154, 335, 449 444, 446447, 450, 462
Equilibrium 162, 163, 167171, 178, Fluctuation 269276, 286, 292, 382,
303, 314, 324, 330, 333, 381, 390, 445
444445 Force dynamics 3031, 34, 452
Essences 9092, 101, 126, 210, 271, Form (or way) of life 4, 20, 37, 76,
296, 382, 413414, 460 121, 179, 315316, 323, 432, 461
Ethnomethodology 124, 320, Foucauldian (or post-Foucauldian)
333334 114, 117119, 137, 287, 355,
Evans, Vyvyan 18, 19, 26, 37, 4041, 359362, 371372, 379, 381, 399,
189190 402, 404, 414, 427, 432, 435, 451
Evolutionary biology 88, 145146, Foucault, Michel 109, 111114,
148 117123, 126, 136137, 287, 325,
Evolutionary dynamics 9, 90, 95, 138, 347, 354365, 367, 370, 373, 375,
154, 158, 161163, 173, 178, 306, 379, 404, 406, 408, 414, 450452,
310, 314317, 337, 352, 403 454, 462
Exemplar 214, 216, 234, 269, 346, 352, Frame, framing 5, 2229, 33, 39, 46,
358, 382, 425, 455 48, 5657, 5960, 63, 186189,
196197, 218219, 221, 223, 310,
Face-to-face community 94, 345, 317, 335, 343, 350353, 357, 381,
416417, 430, 440 397399, 402403, 417, 423427,
Factual grounding, see grounding 447
510 Index
Frank, Roslyn 93, 178 Grice, Paul 38, 76, 100101, 184, 247,
Frankfurt, Harry 339345 251, 257, 389, 398,
Function (see also status function) Grondelaers, Stefan 6668, 274, 275
15, 911, 2829, 46, 56, 160170, Grounding 3, 5, 10, 12, 15, 2021,
175179, 185186, 193, 204206, 3032, 5760, 7988, 94, 110, 151,
213216, 218220, 222227, 153154, 176177, 254, 257, 263,
236462 306, 308, 316, 326, 332, 336, 339
Function-based structure 226227, 349, 354, 358, 366, 374383,
234235, 236268, 298, 373, 382, 388390, 397, 399, 402, 404405,
Functional Discourse Grammar 225, 408410, 413415, 419422, 427,
259 438, 442, 446, 450456, 460
Functional Grammar 265 Bodily grounding (see also
Functionalism 73, 92, 135, 160, 179, embodiment) 3, 15, 30, 53, 83,
227, 230, 242, 243 110, 153, 176, 306, 316, 332, 340,
Functional relations 2, 4, 9, 12, 138, 353354, 383, 405, 420, 446, 452
160164, 167169, 171, 178, 204, Factual grounding 12, 306,
225226, 237, 243, 244245, 303, 339346, 348, 379383, 388389,
308, 314, 336, 376, 379, 404, 438450 402, 404405, 408, 410, 415, 419,
422, 438, 441, 450, 454455, 460
Gallie, W. 425, 427 Intersubjective grounding 86, 94,
Grdenfors, Peter 6, 26, 216, 226, 287, 308, 354,
358 Sociocultural grounding 306, 332,
Geeraerts, Dirk 3, 14, 19, 41, 6369, 340, 342, 346, 348, 354, 358, 380,
72, 100, 116, 210, 215, 230, 274, 275, 397, 399, 404, 413, 427, 446, 453, 455
279, 287, 301, 417 Subjective grounding 86, 389
Gender (gender roles) 103, 112, 117, Gumperz, John 415
227, 262, 274, 323, 328, 337, 352,
357, 385386, 395, 417, 441, 461 Habermas, Jrgen 78, 281, 364365,
Generative linguistics 14, 29, 4850, 396, 399, 431
7374, 198202, 224229, 233236, Habitus 108, 110, 137, 207208, 219,
254, 260, 264268 221, 306, 314318, 322, 332, 334,
Gergen, Kenneth 123, 124 353, 361, 378, 389, 403, 447, 451
Gesture 75, 8182, 148, 208 Hall, Edward T. 420, 430
Gibbs, Raymond 61, 62, 100 Halliday, Michael A. K. 126136, 194
Givn, T. 240 Hansen, Lene 122, 370, 372, 373,
Goldberg, Adele 216, 233234, 245, 378379
258, 267 Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
Gould, Stephen Jay 146, 240, 349 187189
Grady, Joseph 36, 37, 385 Hart, Christopher 355, 391, 400
Gramsci, Antonio 109 Hawkins, Bruce 6163
Hawkins, John A. 272
References 511
Hegemony 74n, 109, 115, 281, 323, 257, 269272, 291292, 320325,
333, 371, 387, 408, 421, 423424, 346355, 375, 386387, 394395,
428, 451, 453 407, 425, 445, 449
Hengeveld, Kees 254255, 259 Instructions (instructional semantics)
Hermeneutics of suspicion 113, 136, 182194, 209, 212, 251, 254, 256,
171, 356357, 365, 452 262,
Hilpert, Martin 35 Intersubjectivity (see also grounding,
Historical linguistics 88, 167 intersubjective) 2, 10, 58, 70, 72,
Hjelmslev, Louis 18, 9293, 177 7988, 94, 101, 128, 152, 174, 242,
Hobbes, Thomas 175, 374 277, 280, 308, 354, 364, 404, 431,
Holophrase 151, 212, 237, 240241, 443, 451
252, 266267 Intertextuality 112, 120
Honey, John 284 Intrinsic (=observer-independent)
Hopper, Paul 176, 230, 234, 286, 335 features 138146, 164, 166, 201
Hull, David 8990, 108, 163, 272, 323, Invisible hand 138, 140, 154163, 172,
336337, 380, 450 244, 277, 286287, 293, 305306,
Hutchins, Edwin 59, 8485, 276, 295, 329330, 335, 339, 343, 352,
320, 424 359361, 380, 386, 390, 396, 404,
422, 432, 439, 441, 444, 451452, 460
ICM, see idealized conceptual model Itkonen, Esa 69, 78, 277
Idealized conceptual model 2729,
46, 56, 112, 218219, 289, 307, 317, Jackendoff, Ray 318
351, 353, 381, 397, 423, Jespersen, Otto 240, 302
Identity (identity construction) 69, Johnson, Mark 3, 3031, 3537, 80,
112, 116117, 142, 274, 288289, 96, 124, 137, 165, 198, 202, 206, 315
304, 331, 334, 337338, 351, Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 183, 206,
373378, 385388, 413, 415, 420, 215, 308
437, 449 Joint action or activity 7, 10, 78, 93,
Ideology 6063, 98, 109, 115, 121, 101, 155158, 165, 172, 174, 281,
135136, 280281, 328, 356357, 365, 343, 357, 360, 365, 385, 416
369, 413, 459 418, 429, 439, 441
Image schema 3035, 42, 57, 83, 87, Joint attention 7, 10, 7079, 82, 93,
317, 452 101, 151153, 155, 165, 174, 277,
Imagined community 331332, 376 296, 308309, 315, 364, 384, 404,
Implicature 100101, 247 416, 425, 429, 431, 443
Individual level 89, 154159, 293,
311, 393394, 436 Kay, Paul 177, 218, 233
Individual instance vs. collective or Keller, Rudi 157158, 277
general category 6, 12, 17, 19, 23, Kemmer, Suzanne 58
28, 29, 31, 40, 49, 65, 129, 130, Klinge, Alex 235
185186, 213219, 225, 249250,
512 Index
Knowledge (see also procedural 408, 411, 414, 418421, 434435,

knowledge and tacit knowledge) 452, 461
15, 26, 27, 2931, 3637, 41, 75, Marx, Karl 71, 108109, 356, 368
8485, 94, 104108, 115, 129, 172, 369, 408, 451
197, 200203, 220, 284285, 294, 397 Matched guise 273, 274, 279
Koselleck, Reinhart 447448 Material anchor 62n, 8587, 318,
Kristiansen, Gitte 2, 70, 144, 282, 320323
288289, 339, 417, 425 Meaning 4, 76, 80; (passim)
Kuhn, Thomas 64, 105, 111, 363 Linguistic meaning 3942,
179197, 212221, 251259, 303
Labov, William 269270, 292, 329 Meaning construction 11, 58, 95101,
Lakoff, George 2, 1822, 2731, 113114, 126, 135137, 182194,
3540, 56, 5963, 66, 74, 80, 87, 96, 209211, 217, 219221, 247247,
137, 165, 185, 192, 196, 198, 202, 251, 308310, 346, 353, 382, 401,
206, 219, 223, 315, 317, 330, 335, 426, 450, 454
343, 352353, 368, 374, 381, 390, Meme 93
393400, 406, 423, 425426 Mental vs. non-mental features 7, 12,
Langacker, Ronald W. 16, 2122, 199, 303304, 444
2526, 3942, 4755, 58, 63, 8687, Mental spaces 4247, 5657, 9596,
93, 100, 174, 179, 186, 201202, 210, 218219, 310, 350351, 353, 357,
212, 214, 227, 229, 231232, 236, 401, 431,
240, 251, 253265, 351 Metaphor 30, 3240, 42, 5964, 66,
Language game 80, 104, 113, 137, 70, 73, 79, 93, 9697, 99, 127, 134,
339340, 357, 426, 442 137, 191193, 251, 315317, 343,
Langue 1011, 175, 180, 227228, 360, 383, 385, 391, 406407, 427,
249, 271, 275, 278, 282, 294303, 437, 453, 455
338, 372, 444, 453 Primary metaphor 37, 60, 317,
Lineage 8990, 94, 166, 171, 213, 292, 385
303, 311, 323, 327, 335, 340, 349, Metonymy 35, 38, 99101, 246247,
352, 358359, 371, 374, 382, 392, 289
408409, 428, 444446, 450451, Michaelis, Laura 246
454456, 460 Milroy, James and Leslie 280281,
Luke, Dominik 355, 366, 367, 391, 284
400, 441 Morgan, Pamela 170, 392
Multidimensional scaling 312
Mackenzie, Lachlan 254255, 259 Multi-ethnolect 116
MacWhinney, Brian 73, 264, 265 Musolff, Andreas 392
Mandler, Jean 3031
Marginalized vs. mainstream 108, Nave functionalism 160, 243
112113, 117118, 150, 170, 375, Necef, Mehmet 421, 422, 427
Nerlich, Brigitte 63, 64, 391, 403
References 513
Newmeyer, Frederick 201, 245 400406, 410, 413, 418419, 449,

Newspeak 348 454455, 460
Niche 12, 138, 146156, 171, 173175, Orientalism 123, 359, 408
180, 190191, 297, 213, 216,
221227, 229, 247249, 271277, Panchronic 11, 95, 152, 161162, 167,
282290, 295, 298303, 306311, 178, 291, 299, 303, 333334, 346,
315, 318325, 332341, 346, 349, 359, 382, 392, 443446, 456
351352, 358, 362, 365366, 368, Panther, Klaus-Uwe 99100
372387, 393, 395, 397, 403, 405, Partee, Barbara H. 246
414, 417, 421, 427, 429438, Perception 16, 18, 31, 53, 8283, 106,
443444, 446448, 454455, 177, 186, 203, 216, 224
461462 Physical symbols 32, 74
Niche concept, see concept Physics envy 88
Niche construction 146155, 173, Piaget, Jean 30, 71, 83, 111, 216
311, 321, 325, 368, 374375 Pierrehumbert, Janet 358
Nodal point 356357, 371, 459 Pinker, Steven 74, 78, 108, 124, 235,
Normativity 9, 32, 78, 124, 141, 171, 265
174175, 215, 277286, 320323, Pin-prick 200, see also adaptation
328, 335, 348, 353, 364365, Pivot grammar 266
387390, 397406 Platform building 415, 420, 429436,
Nuyts, Jan 230 439, 460462
Plato 139, 192
Objectivism 26, 3536, 4546, 67, 103, Platonic 8, 1112, 92, 112, 138139,
103, 121, 138, 141, 144, 173, 321, 180181, 190, 218219, 222223,
328, 348, 370 298, 303, 306, 318326, 333, 367,
Observer-independent, see intrinsic 393, 397, 403, 419, 446
Observer-relative 139, 142143 Pointing 78, 82, 151
Offline vs. online 89, 11, 22, 27, Polarization 73, 112, 230, 270,
95101, 115, 123126, 134 180, 181, 424427, 454
187, 189, 193, 218222, 227228, Poole, Keith 270, 312, 396, 422
277, 290291, 298, 307, 309, Population level 8990, 94, 101, 153,
321322, 332338, 355, 358, 373, 157, 304, 311, 327, 396, 400, 439
385, 438, 444, 447 Poststructuralism 104, 108, 112, 116,
OHalloran, Kieran 121, 134135 122, 306, 345, 354355, 365,
Ontology 6, 2627, 43, 45, 51, 96, 113, 370381, 399400, 404, 436, 450
126, 145146, 160, 163, 174178, Potter, Jonathan 123126, 334,
232, 239, 268, 271, 310, 372, 383, 336337, 365, 368, 426
388, 451 Power (= social power) 3, 57, 103,
Operational social constructions 170, 105, 108118, 123, 136, 169172,
310, 312314, 318319, 325327, 273, 281, 287, 306, 356362,
331, 333, 336, 343344, 380386, 364368, 371, 373, 387, 390,
514 Index
399404, 408409, 415, 419, 440, Representation (= mental representa-

451456 tion) 7, 1520, 29, 4446, 5859,
See also causal power 7071, 8085, 88, 110112, 115116,
Pre-conceptual 3435, 110, 310, 315, 122124, 134, 141144, 156,
334, 446 164172, 182185, 193, 199205,
Procedural (=operational) knowl- 208209, 220, 252, 289290, 295,
edge/ability 182183, 197209, 303, 306309, 313318, 326332,
219220, 224, 252, 290, 315, 374, 446 335337, 340341, 345, 354, 378,
Procedural semantics 182183, 189, 401403, 450
193 Ricoeur, Paul 113
Process vs. product 182193 see also Rohrer, Timothy 7980
flow and online Rosch, Eleanor 1719, 21, 177, 214
Prototype 1720, 2728, 37, 4042, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 140
52, 57, 6467, 213218, 230, 289,
323, 347, 352, 387, Salience 18, 6568, 210, 274, 411, 452
Prototype effects 19, 28, 214, 289, Satisfice, satisficing 163, 174, 189,
323 198, 205, 215, 243, 433434
Prompt (see also instruction) 100, Schegloff, Emanuel 114, 116, 180,
187, 189, 200, 202 441
Putnam, Hilary 12, 103, 119, 287, 350, Schein, Edgar H. 316, 360
365, 434 Schema (see also abstraction and
Putnam, Robert D. 378, 434 image schema) 2935, 4142, 71,
8283, 87, 99, 214, 232, 266, 317,
QLVL group (= Quantitative Lexicol- 403, 452
ogy and Variational Linguistics) Searle, John R. 6, 8, 16, 44, 105, 113,
68, 228, 273, 445 138, 142, 145, 152, 165, 168169,
Quine, Willard V. O. 41 193, 198, 199, 200, 204, 207, 217,
252, 255, 278, 327, 364, 429
Radical Construction Grammar 88, SFL, see Systemic-Functional Linguis-
92, 211, 245, 249 tics
Ratchet effect 76, 152153, 159 Selection pressure (=adaptive pres-
Rationalism 18, 6869 sure) 1112, 149150, 153, 159,
Rationality 3032, 108, 120, 171, 334, 161, 174, 214, 243244, 268, 277,
343, 353, 396400, 425427, 451, 461 282, 290, 295, 299, 303304,
Realism 88, 328, 333, 370373 311312, 319, 325, 332, 334335,
Reconceptualization 346354 337338, 341, 344, 358, 360, 363,
Reductionism 70, 80, 109, 125, 138, 381n, 395397, 400, 404, 441, 444,
145, 163, 176, 181, 446 447, 450, 461
Regier, Terry 33, 177 Semiosis 8, 73, 103104, 112113,
Relativism 71, 138, 190, 346, 462 339, 368, 371
Siewierska, Anna 255, 260
References 515
Sinclair, John 234, 248 Survival of the fittest 147, 157

Sinha, Chris 3, 4, 10, 7072, 8288, 94, Survival value 164, 344
154155, 174, 308, 316, 323324 Sustain, sustainability 86, 281, 301,
Social cohesion 300301, 376377, 312, 314, 316, 321323, 330,
434435 375378, 382, 384, 388, 416, 432,
Social construction 1112, 73, 94, 439, 441, 444, 462
103126, 139178, 281, 295, Sweetser, Eve 21, 37, 187
301462 Symbolic capital 111, 137, 338339,
Social constructionism 103111, 122, 344
126, 139, 142144, 146, 163, 167, Symbolic meaning 16, 8182,
170171, 190, 304, 313, 326335, 150151, 210, 241,
344348, 366, 368, 388, 390, 400, Syntactic construction 54, 67, 91, 99,
404, 408, 412413, 416, 420, 440441 228252, 256267, 271, 291, 298
Society (see also community) 112, Syntax, syntactic structure 24, 4854,
57, 5960, 8485, 95, 108, 110, 114, 67, 7374, 78, 79, 9192, 99, 151,
125, 141, 163172, 199, 273, 277, 199, 217, 224, 226, 228268,
283, 285, 297, 300301, 303307, 271272, 290291, 298
315316, 330, 345346, 354, 380, Systemic-Functional Linguistics
397, 413, 417, 425, 433, 440, 442 126137, 263, 309
448, 456460
Sociolinguistics 6770, 116117, Tacit knowledge 197201, 375
271291, 301, 337, 341, 415 Tajfel, Henri 288289
Sokal, Alan 107, 345 Talmy, Leonard 18, 30, 53, 59, 60, 217
Spin 2, 343, 348 Target domain override 38, 192, 251,
Standard language 6869, 116, 273, 406, 427
277285, 287, 301, 428 Taylor, John 209211, 217, 231
Status assignment 168170, 264, Territory (conceptual territory) 42,
318320, 326327, 344, 354, 360, 92, 177, 217
386387, Theory of science 64, 111, 190, 337
Status function (count as) 46, 85, Thompson, Sandra 230, 231, 232
126, 165170, 17578, 314, 319, 417, Tolerance 279281, 408, 412, 414, 449
433, 439 Tomasello, Michael 78, 10, 70,
Stjernfelt, Frederik 99, 212 7379, 86, 88, 148, 151155, 165,
Structuralism 93, 112, 175, 177, 227, 174, 203, 225, 232, 265268, 281, 364
243, 245, 270271, 372, 374375 Top-down, see bottom-up
Structure (see also component-based Traffic jams 6, 101, 137, 166, 294,
structure and function-based 327, 422, 426,
structure) 8, 11, 14, 3031, 34, Triadic relations 82, 88, 152, 165
4751, 74, 9192, 127, 135, 148, 177, Trudgill, Peter 284285
180, 219, 222303, 334, 367, Trust 319, 378, 434
372377, 382
516 Index
Turner, Mark 36, 42, 9599, 192, Verschueren, Jef 118119, 409,
288289 412414, 420, 439
Viability 295, 312, 319, 323, 330, 345,
Universal humanism 409, 412413, 352, 359, 363, 389, 451, 455
415416, 421, 423, 430431, 435, 439 Visible hand 9, 156159, 172, 286,
Usage based linguistics 58, 6364, 66, 305, 328, 343, 346, 352, 359, 360,
7374, 90, 101, 116, 148, 180181, 379380, 386, 388, 390, 400, 404,
212, 219, 222223, 227228, 230, 419, 425, 432, 439441, 444,
235, 260, 265, 269, 273, 292, 335, 451453, 460
341, 400 Vygotsky, Lev 7172, 103, 324
Usage fundamentalism 8, 181, 210,
212, 228, 337, 346 We (as a social construction) 7, 77,
Usage based structure 235 152153, 310, 315, 363, 416417,
Us vs. them 112, 408, 415421, 429431, 437, 449450
424426, 429, 432, 435438, 449 Weber, Max 317, 329, 445
Whorf, Benjamin Lee 73
Validity 107, 132, 134135, 402, Widdowson, Henry 134135
van Dijk, Teun A. 369, 409, 411 Wieder, Lawrence 320322, 419
Variation (variability) 1011, 40, 42, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 40, 80, 83, 98,
58, 6469, 92, 9495, 98, 101, 104, 107, 124, 136, 171, 179, 207,
116117, 137, 162, 167, 171, 175, 350, 357
190, 205, 216, 221, 222302, 312, Wray, Alison 247249, 258
323, 329330, 346353, 362, 372, Wver, Ole 125, 370382, 448
381382, 385386, 389, 417, 423,
425, 427428, 443445, 447, Ziegeler, Debra 245247
453454. Zlatev, Jordan 4, 10, 77, 8083, 174,
Verhagen, Arie 10, 8688, 94, 193, 198, 308
204, 231, 271, 308, 354

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Meaning in Mind and Society

Cognitive Linguistics Research

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York

Chapter 1. The heartland of Cognitive Linguistics

Chapter 2. From conceptual representations to social processes:

6. Language as a population of utterances: an evolutionary

Chapter 3: Social constructions and discourses

Chapter 4. The foundations of a socio-cognitive synthesis:

Chapter 5. Meaning and flow: the relation

Chapter 6. Structure, function and variation

Chapter 7. Meaning and social reality

3.2. The interface between niche and flow in social

Chapter 8. Multi-ethnic societies:

Chapter 9: Summary and perspectives 443

1. What this book tries to do

of pattern in which feedback from the environment helps to shape, pro-

1 This is a continuation of the agenda of Harder (1999) and Sinha (1999).

tional moorings. Where exactly between these extremes the description

The functional dimension of meaning-in-society constitutes the basis

2. A summary of the argument

2.1. There is no such thing as conceptual frames (But theres a whole

(c) An account of meaning in society involves the causal interplay between

2.2. On-line vs. off-line features

An adequate account of meaning in a social perspective needs to provide

In relation to point (b), it is significant that interest in the product side of

2.3. Social cognitive linguistics vs. analysis in terms of discourses

The book argues that a social cognitive linguistics is more adequate

(a) Non-agentive and conflictive aspects of meaning-in-society cannot

(c) An analysis that combines cooperation with impersonal causal

2.4. Functional relations and adaptation

(a) Functional patterning constitutes an extra descriptive dimension

(b) Functional patterns resulting from adaptation in the individual can

Affordance is a term borrowed from Gibson (1979) to cover factors that

3. The progression of the book

tionary stages in sign use and Crofts application of evolutionary mecha-

construction process also involve other factors than meaning including

2 In terms of the philosophical dilemma of internalism vs. externalism, this posi-

social cognitive framework proposed avoids the potentially damaging

2. Conceptualization and concepts

CL understands meaning as conceptualization, understood broadly as the

it represents. In combination they constitute the representational capacity

Geeraerts (1989). As pointed out by Geeraerts, prototypes are not all

of generality are abstract superordinate categories like furniture or vehi-

3. Frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models

When classic checklists were phased out, CL changed the direction in

7 Construal also includes the operations of conceptual coercion and conver-

Ruppenhofer et al (2006: 15) give an example of what counts as the same

as a basic domain. Langacker discusses, without attempting to settle the

12 A mathematical modelling can be set up whereby concepts can be described

theories, but they function meaningfully and usefully in categorizing the

tied exclusively to the specific idea (the prototype prototype, as it were)

highlighting it detach it from its background (whereas frames constitute

4. Embodiment and image schemas. From conceptual to neural

Just as frames and domains reverse the direction of approach to concepts,

based on abstract structures understands itself as reflecting Cartesian

The final step to language is made through the apparatus of embodied

carried over to inferences appropriate to the abstract domain, such as eco-

different from adding an external adornment to a cognitive essence. The

egory of primary metaphors consisting of those that have a basic experi-

ent domain and achieving new understanding. Therefore metonymies

6. Linguistic meaning: Polysemy, ambiguity, and abstraction