Current Research Projects
Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Modern linguistics has been shaped by a desire to explain language in terms of the mind. Alternative accounts, connecting language directly to the body – including the brain, the nervous system, the organs of speech production and sense perception, and potentially such extensions as the blind person's white cane – have existed since antiquity and continue to be produced, yet such is the power that the mental holds over academic linguistics that these accounts have been marginalized, ignored and forgotten.
Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History delves into such accounts to assess which might have something to offer present-day models grounded in classic mentalism, extended mind, embodied cognition, and 'distributed' approaches in which my cognition extends not just through my body but to yours. The book also examines approaches that have had such lamentable historical consequences that it is worth recalling why a stake had to be driven through their heart.
The second aim is to probe into the problematic mind-body dichotomy itself. How mind is conceived has always been controversial and in flux. In restoring balance with the bodily, the point is not to patch up the dichotomy, but to reassess its power as a frame that encourages seeing language in a polarized way, as something produced by mind or body, shaped by nature or convention, approachable as an individual or a social phenomenon, historically or contemporaneously, innate or learned, arbitrary or motivated, and so on. That has been the direction taken by the rhetoric of linguistic thought, though beneath the surface of polarized concepts can be detected an endless flow of what Bruno Latour calls 'hybrids'.
The third aim is to reconceive some key problems of present-day theoretical and applied linguistics in hybrid rather than purified terms, breaking the mind-body dichotomy down rather than shoring it up. The hope is that this will help cut through long-standing impasses that have led linguists to imagine a single, monolithic paradigm of thought and analysis as offering the most direct path to progress. The penultimate chapter focuses on the distinction between 'concrete' and 'abstract', which relies heavily on the body-mind dichotomy, and although long mired in confusion continues to be treated as straightforward and fundamental, notably in language-based brain scanning research.
CONTENTS
- Chapter One Purification and Hybrids
- Language and 'mind'
- In here and out there
- Latour's hybrids
- Body and mind as hybrids
- Nature vs Subject/Society in the study of language
- The chapters which follow
- Chapter Two Language Incorporated
- Mind-aches
- Where is language?
- Mind, body, cognition
- Embodied, extended, distributed, situated
- Habitus
- Tongue-pains
- Language and the nervous system
- Chapter Three Language in Body and Mind: Antiquity
- Wind/Mind
- Logos and nous
- Plato's triple mind
- Embodying language: Aristotle
- Breathing ethnically: Epicurus
- Ancient medicine and pneuma
- Chapter Four Middle Ages
- Christian doctrine: Augustine
- Bodies and inner speech
- Mediaeval medicine and mind
- Angelic language and the illuminated vernacular
- Toward empirical knowledge
- Chapter Five Renaissance
- Continuity in medicine
- Answering Shylock
- Early modern medicine
- Descartes
- Neo-Epicureanism from Gassendi to Locke
- Chapter Six Eighteenth Century
- Hartley's vibrations
- Condillac and Rousseau
- Reflex, habit and swearing
- Reid and Scottish common sense
- National genius
- Disembodiment
- Chapter Seven Nineteenth Century
- Empire and Romanticism
- Brain localization
- Bain's nervous-muscular associationism
- Modern linguistics and the Nature vs Subject/Society polarization
- Egger and inner speech
- Saussure
- Native speakers and standard languages
- Chapter Eight The (we have never been) Modern Age
- Modernism
- Behaviourism
- Piaget and Vygotsky
- Jakobson
- Merleau-Ponty
- Chomsky and biolinguistics
- Embodied cognition
- Chapter Nine Abstract and Concrete Language
- 'A fool, a knave, a philosopher'
- From Homer to Plato and Aristotle
- Augustine and Aquinas
- Locke and Monboddo
- Semites and Indo-Europeans
- The twentieth century
- Schizophrenia
- Chapter Ten Conclusion
- Implications for linguistic theory
- Implications for applied linguistics
- Embracing hybridity