Abstract
Metaphorical thinking is when one entity or domain of experience is conceptualised in terms of another, as in TIME IS (LIKE) MONEY. Mythological thinking is when members of a cultural group e.g. refer to the earth as Mother, ascribe human qualities to it, and behave towards it accordingly. The litmus test for the distinction between the two interpretations can be sought in Charles Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and the notion of the final/ultimate interpretant. However, Peircean semiotics also helps us recognise a third kind of thinking: symbolic but neither metaphorical nor mythological. This is exemplified with Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015), a text that is profoundly cultural but is not tied to a specific language. When the Pope talks about the earth as our common home/unser gemeinsames Haus/nuestra casa común/nostra casa comune, etc., he is constructing a cultural model that is not only broader than that in any of the national languages, but qualitatively different from them (a cultural mindset). Although originating in Catholic tradition, it comes close to ecopoetic (i.e., home-making) discourse. The architecture of the cultural model is reconstructed in this study from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Through the Vatican website (http://w2.vatican.va/, accessed August 6, 2016), the encyclical is available in Arabic, two varieties of Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. One can assume that translations into other languages have been or are in the process of being produced.
- 3.
Gary Palmer (p.c.).
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This is an approach older than Lakoff’s and goes back to Wierzbicka’s (1971) explication of metaphor in metalinguistic-cum-negational terms: “you’d say that it is not X but Y”, e.g. “you’d say that they are not people but lions”. While I hesitate to endorse Wierzbicka’s (1971, 1986: 294) treatment of metaphor as “a linguistic device” that can only be used in “talking about” things (a view that runs counter to CMT), the call for a modal softening in the formulation of metaphor’s architecture (with the locutional you’d say or the comparative like) appears well-advised.
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Peirce’s terminology is difficult to harness: the author usually talks about either final or ultimate interpretants, but sometimes collapses the two into one, as at this point. Also, it is often far from clear whether by final interpretant Peirce means final logical interpretant, in the sense specified, or ultimate interpretant (where final = ultimate). These are fascinating questions but mainly relevant for the historian of semiotic thought and so need not worry us unduly here.
- 6.
Blount (2014: 283) notes that culture consists in sharing cultural models: it is the sharing that endows it with realness because “the consequences of sharing or not-sharing are socially real”. In Laudato Si’ the realness also has a biological, purely ecological dimension.
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In the case of the encyclical, the numbers refer not to pages but to its sections.
- 8.
Ecopoetics in this broad sense is related to (certainly etymologically), but distinct from, ecopoiesis, or the building of an ecosystem for humans to live in on a planet where there is none (Haynes 1990). (This is now usually referred to as terraforming or planetary engineering.)
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Palmer has pursued his set goal in subsequent publications, adding precision to the enterprise, filling its various gaps, and applying it to a variety of contexts, as in Palmer (2015), where he argues for the importance of ethnography (i.e. “descriptions of culture obtained by a variety of methods, both linguistic and non-linguistic”, p. 24) in inductive linguistic research.
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For reasons explained therein, Blount (2014) prefers to call them cultural cognitive models, a topic for another study.
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- 14.
The common origin of the English words home and homeland, as well as the conventionalised way of referring to one’s own country as home, provoke discussions on the relatedness of these notions. Several viewpoints on this subject with regard to a few other languages and from the translational point of view were presented at the 2015 “Translating Heimat, Home and Homeland” seminar at Rouen University, France (videos available through the Rouen Ethnolinguistic Project website, http://rep.univ-rouen.fr/content/homeland). Of these, Underhill (2015) focuses specifically on English.
- 15.
See also the journal Ecopoetics at https://ecopoetics.wordpress.com/ or the description of ecopoetics at the Poetry Foundation website http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/ecopoetics (accessed Jan 10, 2016).
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“Primitive man does not … know an inanimate world… [H]e does not ‘personify’ inanimate phenomena not does he fill an empty world with the ghosts of the dead, as ‘animism’ would have us believe. The world appears to primitive man neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life…” (Frankfort and Frankfort 1977 [1946]b: 5–6).
- 18.
The Pope himself uses the word myth in the everyday, common sense of ‘a worldview inaccurate with regard to what it purports to explain’: “the myths of a modernity grounded in a utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, competition, consumerism, the unregulated market)” (210).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Gary Palmer, Hubert Kowalewski, Julita Fiedorczuk-Glinecka, Grzegorz Czemiel, Sam Bennett and the anonymous reviewers for providing insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I have gratefully incorporated some of their suggestions into the text but—for better or for worse—decided to stand by my original ideas in some cases. Whatever the consequences of this move, the responsibility lies with me alone.
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Głaz, A. (2017). Beyond Metaphorisation and Myth-Making: Tertium Datur for Language and Culture. In: Sharifian, F. (eds) Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Cultural Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_13
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