Formulaic creativity: Oral poetics and cognitive grammar

This paper proposes to rethink the study of oral performativity in the context of modern cognitive science. To that end, we list a number of so-far unrecognized parallels between the Parry-Lord theory of composition in performance and what has come to be known as “usage-based” approaches to grammar and language acquisition in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. We develop these connections into an integrated whole, opening up the way for a research program in the new field of “cognitive oral poetics”, and relating it to a number of very topical questions in present-day cognitive science (creativity, language acquisition, multimodality). The conclusion vouches for a closer collaboration of literary theorists, linguists, and cognitive scientists in the establishment of cognitive oral poetics

Like the Machete the Snake: Integration of Topic and Vehicle in Poetry Comprehension Reveals Meaning Construction Processes

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake drawings, their snakes showed central characteristics of timelines: they were straight and oriented towards the right. These results suggest that figurative language understanding, and possibly all language understanding, is an integrative and creative process of the kind proposed by Blending Theory. The results also suggest that entrenched, conventional patterns for mapping and integrating conceptual structures, such as the timeline, can play a central role in the meaning of highly creative figurative language

Quantifying the speech-gesture relation with massive multimodal datasets: informativity in time expressions

The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a lim- ited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of them showing communicative behavior that was not elicited in a lab, to quantify speech-gesture co-occur- rence frequency for a subset of linguistic expressions in American English. First, we objec- tively establish a systematic relationship in the high degree of co-occurrence between gesture and speech in our subset of expressions, which consists of temporal phrases. Sec- ond, we show that there is a systematic alignment between the informativity of co-speech gestures and that of the verbal expressions with which they co-occur. By exposing deep, systematic relations between the modalities of gesture and speech, our results pave the way for the data-driven integration of multimodal behavior into our understanding of human communication

Formulaic creativity: Oral poetics and cognitive grammar

This paper proposes to rethink the study of oral performativity in the context of modern cognitive science. To that end, we list a number of so-far unrecognized parallels between the Parry-Lord theory of composition in performance and what has come to be known as “usage-based” approaches to grammar and language acquisition in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. We develop these connections into an integrated whole, opening up the way for a research program in the new field of “cognitive oral poetics”, and relating it to a number of very topical questions in present-day cognitive science (creativity, language acquisition, multimodality). The conclusion vouches for a closer collaboration of literary theorists, linguists, and cognitive scientists in the establishment of cognitive oral poetics

Like the Machete the Snake: Integration of Topic and Vehicle in Poetry Comprehension Reveals Meaning Construction Processes

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake drawings, their snakes showed central characteristics of timelines: they were straight and oriented towards the right. These results suggest that figurative language understanding, and possibly all language understanding, is an integrative and creative process of the kind proposed by Blending Theory. The results also suggest that entrenched, conventional patterns for mapping and integrating conceptual structures, such as the timeline, can play a central role in the meaning of highly creative figurative language

Quantifying the speech-gesture relation with massive multimodal datasets: informativity in time expressions

The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a lim- ited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of them showing communicative behavior that was not elicited in a lab, to quantify speech-gesture co-occur- rence frequency for a subset of linguistic expressions in American English. First, we objec- tively establish a systematic relationship in the high degree of co-occurrence between gesture and speech in our subset of expressions, which consists of temporal phrases. Sec- ond, we show that there is a systematic alignment between the informativity of co-speech gestures and that of the verbal expressions with which they co-occur. By exposing deep, systematic relations between the modalities of gesture and speech, our results pave the way for the data-driven integration of multimodal behavior into our understanding of human communication