In the dog house (with cognitive soup)
Tuesday, May 1st, 2001 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerWell, I may be physically in the office, but I'm metaphorically in the dog house. I was supposed to go to the bank and change some of our hard-earned sterling into Turkish Lira so that my wife can pay for an exhaust emission test for the car tomorrow, and of course I forgot. As Julia Roberts says in Pretty Woman,"Big mistake. Big." My brain just isn't working properly at the moment, due at least in part to correcting dozens of term papers - I have a theory that prolonged exposure to grammatically incorrect language causes your X-bar syntax to turn into a Y-bar and cause wide-ranging neural failures, since as we now know from the cognitive linguistics "revolution", there's no independent Chomskyan "language faculty", it's all mixed up in a general cognitive soup.
"Cognitive soup"? Yup, my brain really isn't on top form today. Here I am in the dog house, and instead of thinking about how I am going to get myself out of said kennel, my mind is going off on tracks about cognitive science and metaphor, and how in Lojban, "dog house" (gerku zdani) is used as an example of how far you are permitted to take metaphor: gerku zdani can mean a house for dogs, a house made by a dog (since zdani also means den, lair, nest etc.) or even a house shaped like a dog, but not the "dog house" of English slang, which is banned as "culture-specific metaphor". Lojban is supposed to be as culturally neutral as is humanly possible, so this kind of rule makes sense, but I'm not sure at what point metaphor becomes impermissable. Obviously you can't eliminate metaphor from language altogether, as the result would be simply unworkable, so how do we determine what kinds of metaphor are culture-specific and which are an essential part of any language? Is it even meaningful to ask this question, which rests on the questionable presupposition that there is some core of language which could in theory be separated from culture?
Anyway, I should stop worrying my little head (is that metaphor or metonymy?) with questions like this and start addressing the serious questions of the moment:
1. How am I going to pacify my speni [Lojban: x1 is married to x2; x1 is a spouse of x2 under law/custom/system/tradition/convention x3]?
2. How am I going to get all this marking done?
"Cognitive soup"? Yup, my brain really isn't on top form today. Here I am in the dog house, and instead of thinking about how I am going to get myself out of said kennel, my mind is going off on tracks about cognitive science and metaphor, and how in Lojban, "dog house" (gerku zdani) is used as an example of how far you are permitted to take metaphor: gerku zdani can mean a house for dogs, a house made by a dog (since zdani also means den, lair, nest etc.) or even a house shaped like a dog, but not the "dog house" of English slang, which is banned as "culture-specific metaphor". Lojban is supposed to be as culturally neutral as is humanly possible, so this kind of rule makes sense, but I'm not sure at what point metaphor becomes impermissable. Obviously you can't eliminate metaphor from language altogether, as the result would be simply unworkable, so how do we determine what kinds of metaphor are culture-specific and which are an essential part of any language? Is it even meaningful to ask this question, which rests on the questionable presupposition that there is some core of language which could in theory be separated from culture?
Anyway, I should stop worrying my little head (is that metaphor or metonymy?) with questions like this and start addressing the serious questions of the moment:
1. How am I going to pacify my speni [Lojban: x1 is married to x2; x1 is a spouse of x2 under law/custom/system/tradition/convention x3]?
2. How am I going to get all this marking done?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Totally, dude.
Date: 2001-05-06 07:34 pm (UTC)(I'm working on an assignment in which I have to say whether "Japan opposes an expanded U.S. miltary presence in the Western Pacific" is metaphor or metonymy. HOW EXCITING! *sleep*)