page 3, “There was once a wealthy farmer”: N. J. Dawood, trans., Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973), p. 20.
page 7, C. S. Lewis on parable: See Louis MacNeice’s discussion of literary critical perspectives on parable in The Varieties of Parable [The Clark Lectures, 1963] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 5. C. S. Lewis’s observations appear in The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 44.
page 15, “after the fact”: After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2.
page 16, “How do we recognize objects, events, and stories?”: How we learn to partition a stimulus field into concrete objects and to categorize those concrete objects is a central problem of the cognitive sciences that has received only highly speculative answers. Gerald Edelman, in Neural Darwinism and The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, describes the central difficulty: “The world of stimuli available to a newborn animal does not exist in prior information simply to be manipulated according to a set of rules, similar to those followed by a computer executing a program. While the real stimulus world obviously obeys the laws of physics, it is not uniquely partitioned into ‘objects’ and ‘events.’ An organism must contain or create adaptive criteria to develop information allowing such a partition. Until a particular individual in a particular species categorizes it in an adaptive fashion, the world is an unlabeled place in which novelty is frequently encountered.” Gerald Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 41.
page 17, “Hanging his head down”: W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 50, lines 9–12.
page 18, “Abstract reasoning”: See Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chap. 3 and 7.
page 18, “William H. Calvin”: The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness (New York: Bantam, 1990).
page 19, “We recognize small spatial stories on the basis of partial information”: The possible mechanisms of such “pattern completion” are the essential subject of a highly influential two-volume work, Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, ed. David Rumelhart et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
page 21, “Recognizing objects … as having sensations”: Conceiving of the mechanisms of sensation also appears to depend upon parabolic projection of image schemas of movement. The most common of these parabolic projections conceives of sensation as the result of small objects moving and hitting the sensory apparatus of the actor, thus making an “impression” or “impinging” upon the sensory apparatus. In antiquity, that sensory apparatus might have been regarded as the soul. In contemporary science, it is more likely to be regarded as the retina, or taste buds, or cilia in the inner ear, or sensory neurons in the skin. The modern theory of taste is a case in which an ancient image-schematic notion of sensation has come to be regarded as literal: The sensory apparatus of taste consists of certain spatial docking stations that allow molecules of only certain shapes to dock. When a molecule of the right shape encounters a docking station that it fits, the result is the particular “taste” of that molecule.
page 21, “Aristotle surveys theories”: See the opening sections of book 1 of On the Soul.
page 23, “His model ‘rejects a single anatomical site’”: Antonio R. Damasio, “Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition,” Cognition 33 (1989), 25–62. Quotation from p. 26.
page 24, “How to Build a Baby”: Psychological Review 99:4 (1992), 587–604.
pages 26–27, “EVENTS ARE ACTIONS”: See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Turner, Reading Minds; George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphorand Thought, 2d ed., ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 202–51.
page 27, “Many were the men”: Homer, Odyssey, book 1, lines 3–9. Homeri Opera, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917), unpaginated.
page 29, “modal structure”: For a full analysis of the relation of force dynamics to modality, see Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
page 30, “The rain set early in to-night”: Robert Browning, Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 358.
page 33, “I feel a hand”: Euripides, Alcestis, lines 259–64, in Euripides IV (Cambridge: Harvard University Press [Loeb], 1912), pp. 426–28; translation by Philip Vellacott in Euripides, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1974), p. 51.
page 39, “George Lakoff and Mark Johnson”: Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
page 40, “Yet I do fear thy nature”: This example was provided by Donald C. Freeman.
page 42, Michael Reddy: “The Conduit Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 284–324.
page 44, “And now, I realized”: Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 206–16.
page 44, Saint John of the Cross: “En una noche oscura,” in Gerald Brenan, St. John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 144. The original poem includes the following phrases: “por el camino de la negacion,” “por la secreta escala,” “¡Oh noche, que guiaste,” “Quedéme,” and “dejando me cuidado.”
page 45, “ouverture”: Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, édition publiée sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988), vol. 1, pp. 3–9; Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols., trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 3–8. The original includes the following passages: “j’entourais complètement ma tête de mon oreiller avant de retourner dans le monde des rêves,” “ma pensée, s’efforçant pendant des heures de se disloquer, de s’étirer en hauteur…,” “Et avant même que ma pensée, qui hésitait au seuil des temps et des formes, eût identifié le logis en rapprochant les circonstances …”
page 45, “And even before my thought”: My translation.
page 47, Leonard Talmy: See “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition,” Cognitive Science 12 (1988): 49–100, and the references quoted there.
page 47, Eve Sweetser: From Etymology to Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
page 53, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
page 53, “constraints … on the projection of progeneration”: Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty, pp. 143–48.
page 55, “Its mother was a mainframe”: I am grateful to Eve Sweetser for this example.
page 56, “mother of all battles”: The expression quickly became a template for other versions: Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, a man not known for verbal flair, reported to the American Legion that the mother of all battles had become the mother of all retreats. ABC news anchor Peter Jennings observed that for Saddam the mother of battles had become the mother of corners. The Washington Post of February 28,1991, stated that the allied attack was the mother of all maneuvers and that General Norman Schwarzkopf’s remarkable report to the press was the mother of all briefings. The New York Times of March 1,1991, printed on its Op-Ed page the “Mother of All Columns.”
page 57, “nor did Alice think”: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (New York Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1960), pp. 25–26.
page 58, “Blending has been studied in detail”: See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces,” UCSD Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401 (San Diego: UCSD, April 1994); Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “Blending and Metaphor” (manuscript, 1996); Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression,” Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10, no. 3 (1995): 183–204; Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Blending as a Central Process of Grammar,” in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, ed. Adele Goldberg (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, in press); Mark Turner, “Conceptual Blending and Counter-factual Argument in the Social and Behavioral Sciences,” in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, ed. Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, in press); Seana Coulson, “Analogic and Metaphoric Mapping in Blended Spaces,” Center for Research in Language Newsletter 9, no. 1 (1995): 2–12; Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press); Nili Mandelblit, “Blending in Causative Structures” (manuscript, 1994); Nili Mandelblit, “The Theory of Blending as Part of the General Epistemological Developments in Cognitive Science” (manuscript, 1995); Todd Oakley, “Presence: The Conceptual Basis of Rhetorical Effect” (Diss., University of Maryland, 1996); Douglas Sun, “Thurber’s Fables for Our Time: A Case Study in Satirical Use of the Great Chain Metaphor,” Studies in American Humor, n.s. 3, no. 1 (1994), pp. 51–61.
page 61, “Perch’io parti’”: Inferno, canto 28, lines 139–42.
page 62, “In general, we understand proverbs”: George Lakoff and I have previously analyzed this kind of projection to a generic space in More than Cool Reason, pp. 162–66 (“Generic Is Specific”).
page 64, “So foul a sky”: William Shakespeare, King John, act 4, scene 2, lines 108—9 .
page 67, “As we went to press”: “Great America II,” Latitude 38 190 (April 1993): 100.
page 68: “It is even possible, as Seana Coulson has shown”: Coulson, “Analogic and Metaphoric Mapping,” pp. 2–12.
page 72, “A Buddhist monk”: Aversion of this riddle appears in Arthur Koesder, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 183–89.
page 74, “Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction”: 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), especially pp. 3–20 and 207–9.
page 74, “in general we keep the space of what is narrated”: There are in fact special cases of highly imaginative actual intrusion, as when the narrator magically enters the narrated story to interact as narrator with the characters.
page 75, “Before I introduce my Readers”: Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 207–8.
page 79, “Lakoff and I originally noticed a constraint on personification”: Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, p. 79.
page 81, “the plants at the end of their life cycle are harvested”: Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, p. 75.
page 85, “Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink”: I am grateful to Robert Keohane for this example.
page 87, “George Lakoff and I have given one argument”: Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, pp. 162–66 (“Generic Is Specific”).
page 91, “When one absorbs”: Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, p. 184. French original: Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, p. 691.
page 92, “For we talk of ‘Death’ for convenience”: Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, pp. 197–98. French original: Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, pp. 703–4.
page 93, “NIH has become a bit of the Beirut”: “NIH Chief Announces Plans to Resign,” Los Angeles Times, 27 February 1993, A18.
page 95, “artificial life”: See John Markoff, “Beyond Artificial Intelligence, a Search for Artificial Life,” The New York Times, 25 February 1990, Week in Review section, 5. Gilles Fauconnier alerted me to this article.
page 95, “‘artificial life’ will not belong to the category ‘life’”: A letter to the editor in U. S. News and World Report complains that only insane people could see category connection as arising out of the analogy between computer simulations and the evolution of living creatures. “People who begin to believe that electronic images, portrayed on a computer screen, are the same as living creatures need help.” 31 May 1993, BC-20.
page 98, “Cold War without End”: The New York Times Magazine, 22 August 1993,28–30, 45; illustration on 28.
page 99, “This inference can arise in the target space”: Actually, this inference arises in the target as understood through a different conceptual projection according to which the termination of something that is not a physical object—in this case, political control—is understood metaphorically as a physical object that disappears.
page 100 “An unexpected surge in wholesale prices”: Sylvia Nasar, “Prices at Wholesale Surge 0.6%, Fanning Worry about Inflation,” The New York Times, 13 May 1993, Al.
page 105, “In this way he acquired a vast hoard”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 393.
page 105, “technological bake sales”: “To keep research afloat, these institutions have had to pump in big sums of their own money. And they are raising it by holding technological bake sales.” Udayan Gupta, “Hungry for Funds, Universities Embrace Technology Transfer,” The Wall Street Journal, 1 July 1994,1.
page 110, “at the most basic levels of perception,… blending is fundamental”: For an introduction, see Barry E. Stein and M. Alex Meredith, The Merging of the Senses (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
page 110, “Objects and many of their properties are perceived as having a unitary appearance”: Edelman, The Remembered Present, p. 43.
page 110, “This is known in neuroscience as the ‘binding problem’”: See Antonio R. Damasio, “The Brain Binds Entities and Events by Multiregional Activation from Convergence Zones,” Neural Computation (1989): 123–32. For a popular journalistic sketch of the binding problem and of a proposal by Rodolfo Llinás to solve it, see Sandra Blakeslee, “How the Brain Might Work,” The New York Times, 21 March 1995, Science section, B5 and B7.
page 111, Antonio Damasio and convergence: Antonio R. Damasio, “Time-Locked Multiregional Retroactivation: A Systems-Level Proposal for the Neural Substrates of Recall and Recognition,” Cognition 33 (1989): 25–62. See also Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, “Cortical Systems for Retrieval of Concrete Knowledge: The Convergence Zone Framework,” in Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, ed. Cristof Koch and Joel L. Davis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 62–74; and Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’Error (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994).
page 111, “involves parallel sampling”: Edelman, The Remembered Present, p. 65.
page 111, “acts to coordinate inputs and resolve conflicts”: Edelman, The Remembered Present, p. 72.
page 112, “include functional correlations important to concept formation”: Edelman, The Remembered Present, p. 70.
page 116, “O Lord”: Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1961), book 1, section 13, p. 263.
page 120, focus and viewpoint in linguistics: See, for taxonomies of linguistic phenomena involving focus and viewpoint, and for surveys of scholarship on these issues, Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, Theoretical Prerequisites, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 122–26; Eve Sweetser and Gilles Fauconnier, “Cognitive Links and Domains,” chap. 1 in Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, ed. Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Fauconnier, chap. 3 in Mappings in Thought and Language. See also Ronald Langacker, “Reference-Point Constructions,” Cognitive Linguistics 4, no. 1 (1993): 1–38.
page 120, “Then the memory of a new position”: I provide in this translation an unidiomatic crib in English of the relevant sequence of tenses in the French original. An idiomatic translation can be found in the already-cited translation (Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor) of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, p. 7. French original: Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, pp. 6–7.
page 123, “counterpart in another space”: The foundation work on the use of a descriptor from one space for a counterpart in another space was done by Gilles Fauconnier in Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
page 132, “We may become engrossed, in Erving Goffman’s phrase”: “Breaking Frame,” chap. 10 in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), pp. 345–77.
page 132, “To be quite accurate”: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 2 vols., trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1934), vol. 1, pp. 708–9. (A quite different translation can be found in the 1981 three-volume Random House edition (translated by Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor), vol. 1, p. 1010.) French original: “Pour être exact, je devrais donner un nom différent à chacun des moi qui dans la suite pensa à Albertine; je devrais plus encore donner un nom différent à chacune de ces Albertine qui apparaissaient devant moi, jamais la même …” À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 2, p. 299.
page 133, “The Nature of Things”: See Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, pp. 169–70, and Turner, Reading Minds, pp. 168 and 183–89.
page 133, “Theophrastus’s Characters”: ed. and trans. Jeffrey Rusten (Cambridge: Harvard University Press [Loeb], 1993).
pages 133–34, “La Bruyère’s Les Caracteres”: ed. Robert Garapon (Paris: Gamier, 1962).
page 134, Jerome Bruner: Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 37.
page 134, “You see I don’t know any stories”: J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy, edited with an introduction by Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 96.
page 135, Wayne Booth: Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, chaps. 2–5, pp. 23–148.
page 138, “The moth thought [the star] was just caught”: James Thurber, Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (Harper and Row, 1939), p. 17; Sun, “Thurber’s Fablesfor Our Time” pp. 51–61.
page 140, “Linguistics is arguably the most hody contested property”: “Annals of Science: A Silent Childhood-I,” New Yorker, 13 April 1992, 48.
page 140, “The type of sentence in nature”: Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1936), p. 12.
page 145, “grammatical construction”: For introductions to the theory of grammatical constructions, see Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay, Construction Grammar (Stanford, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information, in press); and Adele Goldberg, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
page 149, Robert Binnick: Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. vii.
page 152, “past time reference is the basic meaning of the past tense”: Bernard Comrie, Tense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 20.
page 152, “As far as the present tense is concerned”: Comrie, Tense, p. 38.
page 152, Elements of Symbolic Logic: Hans Reichenbach, Elements of Symbolic Logic (New York: Free Press and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1947).
page 152, John Dinsmore: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of S.-Y. Kuroda, ed. Carol Georgopoulos and Roberta Ishihara (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), pp. 101–17. Quotation from p. 104.
page 152, Norbert Hornstein: As Time Goes By: Tense and Universal Grammar (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 11.
page 153, “A certain property (namely, going to work)”: Comrie, Tense, p. 39.
page 153, “Rather, it seems that such uses of the past”: Comrie, Tense, p. 20.
page 158, “the crucial actions those characters are part of”: Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, with two chaps, coauthored by Gregory Colomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 20–21.
page 160, “Edelman rejects on neurobiological grounds”: Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992), chap. 11.
page 161, Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay: Construction Grammar.
page 161, Adele Goldberg: Constructions.
page 161, “Indeed, although Langacker and Fauconnier”: Brief but seminal comments on tense, focus, and viewpoint appear on pp. 33 and 34 of Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces.
page 161, “Various of Fauconnier and Langacker’s graduate students and colleagues”: Gilles Fauconnier will give an overview of this work—by Michele Cutrer, John Dinsmore, Jeff Lansing, and Eve Sweetser—in a section tided “Time and Tense” in his forthcoming Mappings in Thought and Language.
page 162, “the infrastructure of language is specified at least as narrowly as Chomsky has claimed”: Derek Bickerton, “The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (1984): 173–188. Quotation from p. 173.
page 163, “Language is a topic like echolocation in bats”: Stephen Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990), pp. 707–27. Quotation from p. 707.
page 163, “Language is a complex system of many parts”: Pinker and Bloom, “Natural Language,” p. 713.
page 163, “Noun phrases are used to describe things”: Pinker and Bloom, “Natural Language,” p. 713.
page 164, “Any one of them could have been lifted”: Pinker and Bloom, “Natural Language,” p. 714.
page 166, “Geschwind, among others”: Pinker and Bloom, “Natural Language,” p. 722.
page 167, “As George C. Williams puts it”: Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges (New York: Oxford, 1992), p. 77.