Abstract

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    Phenomenological linguistics is as diverse a genre of study as culture in general. Some researchers would suggest to understand cultural phenomena, the culture’s language and linguistic underpinnings are an essential aspect to their methodologies of practice (Zhu 2017; Heidegger 1959). In this paper, I discuss the basic underpinnings of this subfield of phenomenology, the practice of embodiment through linguistic principals, and its progress as a paradigm from a post-modern branch of philosophy into a potential “hard science” (Pedroso and Feltes 2010) model with evidence provided through linguistic neurophenomenology (Thang 2009; Tillman et al. 2012; Mackey 2014). Along with the discussion about the complexities of this subfield of phenomenology, I introduce in this paper how linguistic phenomenology became recognized as a theoretical paradigm, provide several theories that have been implemented within diverse studies or research projects, methodologies practiced, issues and bias represented in the studies, and where this paradigm may lead further studies in the future. 

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What is Phenomenology and Linguistic Embodiment?

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    The study of phenomena can be found in a variety of scientific studies and theoretical underpinnings from ancient philosophical time periods to modern day research. Though the definition of phenomenology has been and still is debated (Smith 2003), the general scientific perception of phenomenology is recognized as a complex theoretical paradigm that studies and observes the conscious phenomena or experiences of a subject via their first-person perspective (Smith 2003; Gallagher 2012). Phenomenologists and linguists have taken this paradigm further to create a new branch of phenomenology referred to as linguistic phenomenology. The main concepts behind linguistic phenomenology are that culture and people may be studied via their language and linguistic rules to better understand their experiences and perceptions ethnographically with a goal of diminishing most (if not all) third-party bias (Heidegger 1959; Pedroso and Feltes 2010; Gallagher 2012; Zhu 2017). Linguistic phenomenology as a paradigm, then, can be described by Robert Arrington as, “a technique for grasping non-verbal, real distinctions by reflecting on verbal ones” (Arrington 1975). Since its implementation as a sub-paradigm introduced by Marcel Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, researchers have taken linguistic phenomenology and molded the paradigm into their works on various genres of science. Molding the paradigm has shifted its universal definition to fit their practice (Zhu 2017). Some examples of this would include Heidegger’s interpretation on the nature of being through language, Marcel Merleau-Ponty’s questions on unconscious experiences through phonological (units of sound) methodologies (van Manen 2011), and George Lakoff’s cognitive studies of language embodiment (Pedroso and Feltes 2010). Philosopher Jacques Derrida claimed linguistic phenomenology “resides in language and the text rather than in the subject, in consciousness or even in the lived experience” (van Manen 2011). Today and in combination with the field of cognitive linguistics, we see new practices of analysis, which include equipment and technologies from both the medical and linguistic environments.

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The Introduction of Linguistics to Phenomenology

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    Since its official introduction as a theoretical paradigm in the early 1900s by Edmund Husserl (Gallagher 2012; Beyer 2003; Smith 2003), phenomenology has become a foundation for new theoretical sub-paradigms. One such sub-paradigm, as described previously in this paper, is linguistic phenomenology. Upon recognizing the importance of language and the understanding of culture and personhood through language, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger introduced linguistic studies to the field of phenomenology by the mid-1900s (Wheeler 2011; Toadvine 2016; Zhu 2017). Though Hussrel, begged the questions: “how to describe the experience when no word for the experience exists?”, and “what  the relationship between consciousness and meaning is?”, initially (Rodemeyer 2008); Heidegger officially introduced the field of language into phenomenology in the 1950s by studying and interpreting the nature of language with a special reference to Wilhelm von Humbold’s essay The Nature of Language. Heidegger stressed the realization a person can have to understanding their experiences through language in his book, “On the way to Language”, published in 1959. In his book, he emphasized the perception of being (existing) can be expressed by means of language communication and comprehension and can be studied by undergoing experiences (Heidegger 1959).

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    Heidegger broke down his methodologies of studying being through language by stating first that undergoing an experience needed to be interpreted. He stated in general that, “to undergo an experience with something- be it a thing, a person, or a god- means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us” (Heidegger 1959). According to Heidegger, we understand language through our experiences, and that language in return explains our perceptions of the said experience. Generally setting the parameters of understanding what it means to experience something, allowed Heidegger to apply theoretical underpinnings to his claims. He continued his methods by defining the phrase “undergoing an experience”(Heidegger 1959), which means that it is an event that must occur without the knowledge of it occurring and accept the idea that it is happening and its results. By clustering these parameters of the act of experiencing, “to undergo an experience with language, then, means to let ourselves be properly concerned by the claim of language by entering into and submitting to it”(Heidegger 1959). These principal components of studying language and being led to the conclusion that “language itself brings itself to language” (Heidegger 1959). Furthermore, the act of being for language is experienced through speech (Heidegger 1959). According to Heidegger, then, “language has being” (Heidegger 1959).

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    These concepts of language directing experience to understanding what it means to exist or be, led the foundations for language principals to be used in the field of phenomenology. However, Heidegger’s interpretations of this theory are littered with issues. One such issue, Heidegger stated himself and claimed that the idea that “language has being”(Heidegger 1959; Zhu 2017) via the claims of Humboldt’s essay The Nature of Language, does not express the language’s “linguistic nature” (Heidegger 1959). Additionally, he maintained the accusation regarding the lack of linguistic evidence and stated the phonetic, or individual units of sound, did not “know the experience of their origin”(Heidegger 1959; van Manen 2011; Zhu 2017).

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    Unlike Heidegger who’s work in linguistic phenomenology primarily focused on the perspective of being, Merleau-Ponty introduced a practice of study involving a scale of individual linguistic properties to understand perception (Zhu 2017). He took it beyond language and brought in methods of studying perspective as it relates to individual units of sound (Toadvine 2016). His focus, according to Lei Zhu, was the study of these individual sound units and how they are perceived, processed, and experienced (Zhu 2017). Along with his application of linguistic properties, Merleau-Ponty applied his studies to the fields of neurology and psychology. He developed his schema for perception through phonemes by building from the Gestalt Theory of Psychology and designated the smallest linguistic unit he could study as his building blocks for successfully identifying perception in his book, “Phenomenology of Perception”, published in 1944 (Toadvine 2016). Issues also arose in Merlau-Ponty’s research but with the connection between the sound units and the particular classifying of the individual perception of said units. The issues of Merleau-Ponty’s lack of connection and Heidegger’s lack of linguistic influence, present certain ambiguities in the paradigm’s underpinnings. However, they also lacked modern cognitive technology and non-post-modern perspective of study to successfully compose their research and claims and move beyond non-confirmable results.

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    Additional sub-paradigms developed within phenomenology in the following decades after the foundation of linguistic phenomenology was established. With the rise of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s by George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker; neurophenomenology in the 1990s; and a rapid increase in technologies for both neurological and linguistic sciences, linguistic phenomenology took on a whole new reputation. Though no tangible evidence has been presented thus far, the founding underpinnings of linguistic phenomenology paved the path for potential definitive evidence through cognitive linguistic embodiment.

Neuroscience, Linguistics, and Embodiment with the development of cognitive linguistics, fMRIs, and other neurological monitoring instruments, researchers such as Lakoff, Fodor, and others were able to develop processes for attempting to establish tangent evidence to support the relationship of perceptive phenomena through cognitive linguistic properties. In a recent article titled, From Head to Toe: Embodiment through Statistical Linguistic Frequencies by Richard Tillmen et al. used semantic methodologies to discuss the complex relations that cognition is embodied and claimed that “our minds co-evolved with our bodies, especially the sensory motor system, and that cognitive processes therefore heavily rely on perceptual simulations” (Tillman et al. 2012; Zwaan and Yaxley 2003). Tilmen et al. suggested that language interprets embodied knowledge via the physical anatomy of the self and the body (Tillman et al. 2012).

 

    The researchers supported their claim by offering an example of one study involving words and their physical placement on a digital screen. The example they presented place the words, for instance “bird” and “fish”, at the top of the screen and again at the bottom of the screen at separate intervals. Their results concluded that the response time to the words were faster when the term was associated with the natural environment the word is habitually experienced in (Zwaan and Yaxley 2003; Tillman et al. 2012). In other words, the responses of the participants were faster when the word “bird” was located in the upper areas of the screen and the word “fish” was located near the bottom of the screen to represent their natural surroundings of a bird being in the air and a fish being in the water. This study and others conducted by Rolf A. Zwann and Richard H. Yaxley from Florida State University has led to an knowledge that association of meanings could come in pairs (i.e. the fish with water and the bird with air) via the position of the cultural vernacular and its semantics (Tillman et al. 2012) define semantics. As these results relate to embodiment, however, Tilman et al. stated further studies similar to Zwaan and Yaxley’s have “demonstrated that the vertical configuration of words on the screen and the meaning of those words can be extended to concepts we literally embody, such as body parts” (Tillman et al. 2012). Embodiment, according to Thomas Csordas’ interpretation, is “a methodological perspective rather than a route to any distinct theory” (McDonald 2018), and offered solutions to the perspectives of cultural experiences through means of incorporating the physical body. On these parameters of embodiment, Tilmen et al, supplied the question, “to what extent the relation between body semantics and spatial body representations can only be explained by an embodied cognition account?” (Tillman et al. 2012).

 

    One such methodological approach to Tillmen and colliuges’ question was through the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis, which asserts that language comprehension is intrinsically linguistic and perceptive (Tillman et al. 2012). To visually display the processes of this hypothesis, Tillmen et al. included embodiment structures of semantic linguistic and perceptual principals by Jacobowitz, in their report.

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       Figure 1:Body Part Ratings (Tillman et al. 2012:2436)

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    The structures above represent the relationship between the survey of semantic embodiment and the physical body. The two structures depict the results of perceptions from adult participants (A) and child participants (B). Their overall goal of the report was to analyze specific studies via semantic practices and implementation of the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis with regards to embodiment. Based on their analysis of the studied experiments, Tilman et al. claimed that language naturally contains bodily anatomical information similar to the ways in which it also relates geographic, spatial, and social data linguistically, and concluded that cognition is embodied (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Tillman et al. 2012). Issues in this research include a lack of definitive results that involve linguistically cognitive declarations of perception through semantic properties. Though the findings express definitive response times with positive results, the bias of third-party observation and interpretation is present.

   

    Present day research has lead other cognitive scientists such as, Lakoff and Pedroso to publish methods in attempts to eliminate this third-party bias through means of neuroscience by using tools such as fMRIs and expressing relationships between perception and linguistic principals by recording neurobiological stimuli (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Pedroso and Feltes 2010). One of the methodologies presented in Pedroso’s article, Embodiment in Cognitive Linguistics, is the use of the Neural Theory of Language (NTL), which breaks down the principals of computing perception within the mind. NTL uses three tools, according the Pedrosos, to develop models and practices to reduce the linguistic properties of language to biological entities. The tools are as follows:

(1) Converging constraints: We draw on ideas from computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology.

(2) Cognitive modeling: We build models of cognitive phenomena, including simu lations of language and learning.

(3) Reductionist requirement: Theories and models must have biologically plausible interpretations.

                                                                                                              (Pedroso and Feltes 2010)

These models describe a strategy for studying the neurological components of linguistic embodiment by dissecting the processes and experimental results into 5 levels; (i)“cognitive science and cognitive linguistics”, (ii) “neutrally reducible conventional computational models”, (iii) Structured Connectionist Model, (iv) “computational neuroscience”, and (v) “neuroscience” (Pedroso and Feltes 2010).

 

    These levels in the NTL denote a bottom up schema within the cognitive linguistic embodiment paradigm beginning with the broader foundations of breaking down how language is perceived through experience on the linguistic level, and ending with tangible evidence provided through the cellular level, known as neurons (Pedroso and Feltes 2010). This specific method suggests, then, that embodiment is a combination of neural processes which generate “patterns of cognitive and behavioral actions” (Pedroso and Feltes 2010). To perform such research, equipment including fMRIs are used to register brain activity of a participant who is undergoing both cognitive and linguistic stimuli. Though evidence has been presented for recognizing linguistic phenomena in the brain, no such evidence has yet been collected to comprehending or interpreting the relationship of perceptions of the participant’s brain scans. If these obstacles could be overcome, this along with other complex theoretical methods could provide tangible evidence to individual perception of experiences through linguistic phenomenology and potential aid in the development of artificial intelligence with other branches of science (Pedroso and Feltes 2010).

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Why Linguistic Complexities and Ambiguities Pose as Phenomenological Challenges.

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    In 1961, John Austin published an essay attempting to explain the connection between language and meaning via a study on excuses. Austin claimed, in order to understand perception, one method was to study why and in what situations excuses were made (Austin 1961; Arrington 1975). He suggested the what, when, and why we say things as a response to something and what is meant by the response should be examined (Arrington 1975). Austin’s methodologies required a study of, “an appeal to how excuses are described and determined” (Arrington 1975) and the implementation of a dictionary. He attempted to perform his studies by classifying actions, responses, and their explanations.

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    According to Robert Arrington who published a response to Austin’s essay in 1975, “A plea for Excuses” was contradictory. Arrington stated that Austin’s two main questions were inconsistent by claiming to understand the world, (i) one needed to study language, and (ii) one needed to strip the language from its linguist rules and study the language as it occurs naturally in the world (Arrington 1975). It is difficult to observe the world, as Arrington stated by both “through language”, and “independently of language”(Arrington 1975). Additionally, the oversimplification Austin asserts on language to strip it of its linguistic guidelines, is grossly bias to the research content and would lead to large ambiguity in the results of the study.

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    To understand cultural phenomena through language in general, means to study the intricacies of the language including its linguistic properties. This relationship between culture and language can be sufficiently described by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that the mind and perception of an individual physically and mentally changes causing a sociocultural understanding to occur (Sidkey 2004). This experience occurs only when the language has truly been perceived and learned fluently. Reports have shown fluency occurs more efficiently and successfully when the participants are fully immersed in the language culture than simply learning the language via an academic atmosphere (Mackey 2015). This changes the perception.

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    Examples in native Japanese and Vietnamize languages have expressed the underpinnings of this hypothesis, provided a basis for embodiment practices through language, and displayed the issues within recognizing perception and phenomena neurologically via linguistic methodologies. The first example can be found in an article published by Alison Mackey titled, What Happens in the Brain when you Learn a Language? By using MRI technology to sense brain activity that is undergoing a language learning task, Mackey claimed the distinction between specific phonemes, [r] and [l] in English to adult native Japanese speakers is not easily perceptible (Mackey). For the purpose of this test, Mackey used the example between “river” and “liver”. To an adult native Japanese speaker, the two sounds could appear the same, causing some confusion of the meaning between the speaker and the receiver. In Japanese, the [r] and [l] phonemes are pronounced and represented as a single unit of sound- or phoneme. (Makey 2015)

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    Because of the MRI capabilities, professionals were able to deduce that the hardwiring between a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker were wired differently on a phonemic level (Mackey 2015). For native Japanese speakers to learn the difference between the two English phonemes, they were physically required to rewire their brains. By significantly exaggerating the individual phonemes, surveys have proven that after roughly three 20-minute sessions of study, the native Japanese speakers had the ability to distinguish between the two English phonemes. (Mackey 2015)

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    This example demonstrates some of the issues found within recognizing minute details of perception via language. One such issues could reside within the physical and literal translation of the phonemes, meaning since the Japanese language has only one phoneme for our English two phonemes, does the sound and the meaning associated with those sounds translate exactly? Or, is there some cultural diversity which renders the literal translation corrupt or unequal to the true meaning?

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    The second example is explained by Nguyen Tat Thang in the article, Language and Embodiment. In this essay, Thang claimed that language could not be researched in an isolated form. He began his argument by declaring that embodied linguistics denotes “the meanings of language are embodied” (Thang 2009). He concludes that evidence exists to confirm that “language conveys meaning through objects and experiences” (Thang 2009) and incorporates the bodily awareness during experience. Since all experiences are perceived uniquely by the experiencer, “each person has his/her own way(s) of looking at the world, which is fundamentally based on his/her own bodily experience” (Thang 2009)

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    These declarations support Thang’s main argument that linguistic embodiment relating to the physical body and its features is displayed through some language’s metaphorical structures. In English, then, to bend someone’s ear is not experienced as a literal action, but a metaphorical plea for oversharing information to a listener. Similar to Tilman’s and colleagues research, Thang explained, in order to truly understand the differences between diverse native speakers of language from their perceived experience, the definition and significance of the language’s words must be known, which can be achieved through semantic methodological framework known as Frame Semantic Theory* (FST) established by Charles Fillmore.

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    In Vietnamize, however, the embodiment of experience through semantics is slightly different than English and is directly associated with physical events. Thang provided the example of the native Vietnamize phrase,

 Con mà không học hành đàng hoàng thì chỉ có đi cuốc đất mà sống –‘ You - if not - study well - then - only digging - soil - to earn your living’ (Thang 2009:253).

He described how the significance of this phrase could only be truly understood between social classes including both hierarchy and generations and claimed a distinct difference between generations has shown a loss in semantic value due to political economic factors. When the above saying is spoken by a member of an older generation who may not have owned their land, but leased the rights to work and farm it, it was perceived that by studying hard, their work could attribute to more economic value outside of farming. However, to younger generations who may not have experienced the economic hardships of simply leasing to work the land and not owning to work the land have changed the perception of this phrase rendering it less meaningful to the generation who have the rights to own their property rather than to lease it. Thus, their economic value would be the rights to profit from selling the land rather than working it. This shows the impact of sociocultural knowledge can have on understanding the embodied underpinnings of experience through language. (Thang 2009)

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Final Thoughts

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    Overall, the study of linguistic phenomenology has been practiced by many genres of science and philosophy. The cognitive achievements thus far with regards to the cognitive practices of the paradigm produce rapid development with the increasing demand for technological advancement to further achieve their goals of understanding what it truly means to be human. Much research and study is still needed in this field of phenomenology to achieve the goals of those who aspire to understand the human cognition. However, it may not be in our so distant future, we could instead be needing to ask the questions concerning morality over the intellectual and systematic.

 

 

References

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