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Яшя Ш^вска УДк 81'23
диалог на языке тела и психосоматическая фразеология*
Исходной точкой доклада является один из основных принципов когнитивной лингвистики - взаимосвязь психических, физических и речевых процессов. Данная взаимосвязь выражается в языке посредством психосоматической фразеологии, которая раскрывает семантику языка тела и психических процессов. В настоящей статье приводятся примеры психосоматических фразеологизмов, почерпнутых из двух разных источников: во-первых, используя т.н. методику диалога с внутренним партнером и, во-вторых, из базы данных новостей и публицистических передач Аудиоархива Чешского радио. Приведенные примеры подтвердили исходный тезис и представили доказательства взаимосвязи языка тела, психики и плана языкового выражения.
Ключевые слова: когнитивная лингвистика, язык тела, психические процессы, концептуальные схемы, ориентационные метафоры, психосоматическая фразеология, диалогические действия, аудиоархив новостей.
Jasna Pacovska
dialogue in the body language
AND psychosomatic phraseology
The starting point of this paper is one of the main principles of cognitive linguistics - the interconnection of mental, physical and speech processes. In language, this interconnection is explicitly expressed by psychosomatic phraseology which reveals the semantics ofbody movements, mental states and processes. The article demonstrates certain examples of psychosomatic idioms which have been drawn from two different sources: first, from the so-called Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner; second, from the database of news and journalistic programmes from the Archive of spoken programmes of the Czech Radio. These examples confirm the starting thesis and provide the evidence about body language, psyche and linguistic expression.
Key words: cognitive linguistics, body language, physical processes, conceptual schemes, orientation metaphors, psychosomatic phraseology, dialogical acting, Archive of spoken news programmes.
* This work was supported by project no. DF11P010VV013 provided by Czech Ministry of culture in research program NAKI.
Motto:
If the world is what we see, and if I see (if I perceive) the world through my body, then my physicality alone represents the most fundamental human experience with oneself
and with the world. Blanka Cinatlova: The Story of the Body
As follows from the motto, people get to know the world through their bodies. It is what the author of the monograph about manners of depiction and usage of human body in literature and culture has found out. Also linguistics, namely cognitive, has come to the conclusion that body and corporeality represent the base of language and speech. This paper aims to illustrate this finding on examples from authentic communication of Czech native speakers.1 Thus we are going to reveal concrete manifestations of body anchoring of language and speech. As introduction, the starting thesis is illustrated by an example from real communication: A moment before public performance, the speaker shares his feelings in the following words:
svira se mi zaludek I have a knot in my stomach. beha mi mraz po zadech A shiver runs down my spine. hlavu vzhuru a do toho! Keep your chin up! Cheer up! Immediately after successful performance, the speaker says:
spadl mi kamen se srdce that's a load off my mind... His verbal speech is simultaneously accompanied with non-verbal means: gestures, facial expressions and posturing, which add convincingness to the message. By his communication - talking, using his voice and body - the above mentioned speaker expressed a few somatic or better to say psychosomatic idioms that are the main topic of our paper.
The starting point of this paper is one
of the main principles of cognitive linguistics - the interconnection of mental, physical and speech processes, the expressions of which are orientation metaphors and conceptual (image) schemes [e.g. Johnson 1987, Lakoff -Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987]. In language and our activities, we can find concrete demonstrations of these conceptualizations in psychosomatic phraseology. The term somatism is used in linguistics for vocabulary describing parts of human body. That vocabulary is often used in connection with conceptualization of human characteristics, activities, psyche, its language expressions being somatic idioms [Mrhacova 2000]. We introduce the term psychosomatic idioms in this paper because physical and mental components of communication represent a relational unit for us.2
we will demonstrate concrete examples of the interdependence of body language and linguistic expressions. Using these examples, we try to illustrate the important thesis by one of the representatives of American cognitive linguistics M. Johnson: speech comes from our body [Johnson 1987]. Especially orientation metaphors and conceptual schemes unveil the role which our body and its anchoring in space play in recognition of the world. In this paper, we profess works that emphasize crucial role of body in human cognition (see e.g. experience of living body - concept from philosophical work by Merlau-Ponty: Visible and Invisible, [Merlau-Ponty 1968].
Examples that should prove fundamental themes of cognitive linguistics have been drawn from two sources. The first is the so-called Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner - a psychosomatic discipline developed at the Department of Authorial creativity and Pedagogy at The Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), the second is the database of news and journalistic programmes from the archive of spoken programmes of the czech
1 In our text, we present Czech examples first, then their English equivalents.
2 Links of psychic and body expressions are obvious especially in communication situation the significant parts of which are non-verbal means.
Radio which are elaborated by the methods of computer transcription of speech. These two sources have been chosen both because of their genre character and method of recording so that we could prove that somatic phraseology accompanies us in a broad spectrum of communication situations and that it is evident not only from speech but also from our body manifestation.
Description of sources
1. dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner
Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner is based on the connection of mental processes with somatic experience. The essence of dialogical action is "the dialogue with an inner partner", in which a person acts (by movement, voice, speech) with him or herself. People act and reflect their own actions spontaneously. They listen to the impulses of their body and mind and react to them. They react to them by movement and different body expressions, and by speech. The obvious interconnection of all those modalities captures the cognitive linguist's attention. They are never manifested separately but they create a united communicating whole. We find the evidence of about this psychosomatic condition in psychosomatic phraseology. Those speeches were recorded as the direct participants of seminars on dialogue talks on one hand, and we used video recordings from those seminars on the other hand [cf. Musilovâ 2011].
2. Transcript of news and journalistic programmes from the archive of spoken programmes of the czech radio
The Archive of spoken programmes of the Czech Radio is an unique database which makes a big part of cultural heritage of the Czech Republic open for public. It collects records of spoken Czech holding hundreds of thousands of recordings unique by their content as they obtain everyday commentaries on domestic and international events remarkable also by its time span since they cover more than 80 years of continuous broadcasting. With respect to the size of our paper, by far we cannot use all the potential offered by the Archive but we analyse only its part.
Theoretical basis
1. Theory of orientation metaphors and conceptual schemes
Language expressions of orientation metaphors and conceptual schemes prove that language and speech are products of human experience, and this experience is mediated by the body. That thesis can be illustrated by many examples:
a) orientation metaphors (above / below, in front of / behind, on the right / on the left: it lifted my mood up, I am in elated mood, my self-confidence grew, I was jumping with joy, I have come up to the top of my efforts vs. my mood decreased, it goes down the hill with me, I am unable (to pull myself together)/ to raise myself... = verticality; it drives me forward vs. I have to go back to the start... = horizontality)
b) conceptual schemes (CONTAINER, PATH, LINK, PART-WHOLE, CENTER AND PERIPHERY: my head is full with it, I have it up to my throat (I am fed up), my knees buckled, stretched/given hand, to hit the nail on the head, to find the joint of something (to come to the bottom of something) and sayings, e.g.: You give him a finger and he grabs the whole hand; What is not in the head must be in the legs; Through one ear in, through the other out; Eye for eye, tooth for tooth
2. D. McNeill's theory
The metaphors of body movements and their expression in the psychosomatic idioms are the main topic of the research performed by psychologist D. McNeill, cf. McNeill's work: Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought [McNeill 1992). According to McNeill gestures (hand forms) are an integral part of speech; speech and gesture form a unified system. He focuses exclusively on gestures that a speaker produces spontaneously. Gesture mean movement during speech, which is synchronized with speech, and it is parallel with the units of language in semantic and pragmatic functions.
McNeill is followed by A. cienki in his publication Metaphoric Gestures and Some of Their Relations to Verbal Metaphoric Expressions [McNeill 1998]. He showed on
numerous examples that some metaphors occur in gesture expression, when we think or talk about abstract phenomena as in speech. we have come to the same conclusions in our own research that was based on both, direct observation of participants in Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner, and analysis of videorecords.3
Examples of psychosomatic idioms based on observation of dialogical acting with an Inner Partner
I need to put myself up (I need to cheer up) while she quickly straightens up and raises her arms.
Participant expresses his negative emotional state of mind, silently pronouncing: I am despondent, it goes down the hill with me and he lies himself in slow motion down to the floor.
I feel like crawling into the corner. - in the situation of fear from embarrassing actions, uncertainty
I must go on (further)! - encouragement for further actions
It's not coming out of me. - reflection of problems with speech (voice and speech do not go out of the body)
It gets out of me as from a furry blanket. - reflecting the slow pace of speech (speech comes from the body slowly)
Examples of Psychosomatic idioms or figurative expressions from the archive of spoken programmes of the czech Radio4
The left column shows idioms and figurative expressions from the years 1969 -1973, the right column idioms and figurative expressions from the years 2001 - 2005,
in which a lexeme noha occurs in singular. The order of lines corresponds to the order of grammatical cases in czech. Singular is followed by plural in the chart. No example was found with some cases. Examples are given first in Czech, then in English. If there are no exact translations there, semantic equivalents are offered. The chart shows that some examples are totally equivalent in the both time periods, some preserve their meanings but differ in lexical expression and others occur only in one of the both time periods.
The examples from radio programmes show that psychosomatic idioms or figurative expressions based on names of a concrete part of the human body, in our case leg, are used very often in journalism, especially in news (see Graph 1). Frequently, there are used metonymic expressions where a word leg represents a man. Our material shows at the same time that the period of the 1970's and the beginning of the new millennium does not differ as far as the frequency of using somatisms is concerned; the span of forty years has not revealed any significant changes (see Graph 2). It has also turned out in both cases that numbers of examples are different for different grammatical cases and that depending on individual cases the lexeme noha occurs in several forms different in their case ending (-a, -e, -ou, -am, -y, -ou / colloquial -ach, -ama) and in alternation of root sounds (noha, noze). It is given by a highly developed inflection in Czech. Big/small frequency of example occurrence in individual cases is given by verbal valence in particular idiom, therefore it is a syntactic phenomenon (see Graphs 3, 4).5
3 In this paper, we present only several examples of psychosomatic idioms because behaviour of the majority of participants showed distinctive motoric activity, the description of which would be considerably inaccurate. We are aware of the fact that we would have reached higher utterance value would we had completed description with schematic illustrations, similarly to A. Cienki [Cienki 1998, 2008]. We will try to modify that method for needs of our research in further work.
4 We have used only a separate part of the archive for our research. We have analysed written recordings from the years 1969-1973, from the oldest archived records, and from the years 2001-2005, from the newest archived records so far. Out of a number of psychosomatic idioms or figurative expressions based on names of a concrete part of the human body, we have concentrate on one part only - on foot.
5 Numbers 1-7 are grammatical cases.
1969-1973 2001-2005
singular
1 noha (leg) • lidska noha stanula na mesici (a man set foot on the Moon) • stat, kteremu chybi jedna noha (the state without one leg / the state missing one leg) • Vaclav Noha, Frantisek Noha -surname noha (leg) • lidska noha nestanula 2x (man did not set feet on) • noha vkrocila (set foot in) • neni ani noha (not a living soul) • diktatura jako zlomena noha (dictatorship as a broken leg) • Leos Noha, Vaclav Noha, Noha, romsky aktivista (Noha, Romany activist) - surname
2
3
4
5
6 (na) noze (leg) • na volne noze 2x (free-lance = work free, not in the occupation) • na vysoke noze 2x (live beyond one's means/live in style/ live high off the hog) (na) noze (leg) • na volne noze (free-lance) • stat na noze od rana do sesti (be on one's feet from the morning till six) • na valecne noze (be on a war footing with sb)
7 nohou (by leg) • dostat se suchou nohou (reach by a dry foot) • byt uz jednou nohou 2x (be halfway almost somewhere/in the some process) nohou (by leg) • trhnete si nohou (get stuffed, up yours) • vykroceni pravou nohou (starting off on the right foot)
Table 1. Examples of Psychosomatic idioms from Czech Radio - singular
1969-1973 2001-2005
Plural
1
2 nohou (legs) • mit more u nohou (have a sea nearby) • koncepce byla u nohou (conception was nearby)
3 nohám (legs) • k mym nohám (to my feet)
Table 2. Examples of Psychosomatic idioms from Czech Radio - plural
Figurative meaning
Graph 1. Relation of occurence of basic vs. figurative meaning 50 вопросы психолингвистики
4 nohy (legs) • postavili nekoho na nohy 2x (they put back sb on his feet) • postavit na nohy mezinarodni kongres (put an international congress right) • vedeni statu se postavilo na vlastni nohy (the government stood on its own feet) • ekonomiku nikdo na zdrave nohy nezvedne (nobody will put economy right) • panove mohou podrazit nohy republice (gentlemen can pull the carpet from under the republic) • chysta se podrazit nohy (he is about to trip sb up) • hazet klacky pod nohy 2x (keep trying to trip sb) • hazet pod nohy jeden klacek za druhym (keep trying to trip sb repeatedly) • byt hozen pod nohy (reject st in affect and turn it back immediately) • kulhali jsme na obe nohy (we were half-baked) • lez ma kratke nohy (lies have short legs) • kniha novel Hodiny pro bose nohy (book of novels Clock for Bare Feet) nohy (legs) • postavit (nekoho) na (vlastni) nohy 5x (stand on one's own two feet) • dostat na nohy (put st right) • podrazit nohy 2x (pull the carpet from under sb) • hazet klacky pod nohy 6x (trying to trip sb) • dopadnout na nohy 2x (fall to feet) • lez ma kratke nohy (lies have short legs) • lez ma dlouhe nohy (lies have long legs) • dat si nohu pres nohu (cross legs, have a rest) • Josefa Nohy - surname
5
6 (na) nohou/nohach (legs) • nebyt na nohou (be not up) • balancovat na nohach 2x (balance on feet) • na vratkych nohach (st is uncertain) • na hlinenych nohach (on feet of clay) v/na nohou/nohach (legs) • v jeho nohach (in his feet) • neudrzel se na nohach (he did not keep upright) • na hlinenych nohach (on feet of clay) • mit pet kilaku v nohou (finished five kilometres walking)
7 nohama (legs) • bere pudu pod nohama 7x (he loses certainty) • obratit vzhuru nohama 2x (turn st upside down) • skocit obema nohama do neznama (jump into the unknown both feet) • skocit obema nohama do zni (jump into harvest both feet) • vratit se nohama na zem (return both feet on the ground) • je nohama tam, kde je domovem (his feet are where his home is) nohama (legs) • mit pevnou pudu pod nohama 3x (footing/ foothold) • vzhuru nohama 4x (upside down ) • rukama nohama (his palms are well oiled) • obema nohama na zemi (both feet on the ground) • spadnout do neceho rovnyma nohama (fall to st feet first)
Examples in which lexeme noha occurs in its elementary meaning are not included in the chart, the graphic presentation however shows in which relations to the figurative meanings they are used in the archive.
Studying Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner as specific human activity brings
Graph 2. Relation of occurence in time periods
further evidence of the interconnection of body language and linguistic expressions. Psychosomatic phraseology, which reveals the semantics of body movements and mental states and processes, gives evidence of the interconnection of these two modalities. we came to the same conclusions also using analysis of radio news.
we are aware that we did not work with statistically sufficient number of examples. our point was first of all to introduce concrete occurrences of idioms, to illustrate examples that we searched for in two types of communication situations.
we have tried to show in our paper that Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner and news as well as cognitive linguistics emphasize body anchoring of our speech, metaphoric nature of our conceptual system and that they offer a different view of communication by body that exceeds traditional approach to nonverbal communication.
Graph 3. Influence of morfological structure 1969-1973
graph 4. influence of morfological structure 2001-2005
References
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Cienki Alan. Why study metaphor and gesture? In A. Cienki, C. Müller (Eds.), Metaphor and gesture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Copany, 2008. -P. 5-25.
Cinätlovä Blanka. Pribeh tela. Pribram: Pistorius & Olsanska, 2009.
Johnson Mark. The Body in the Mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lakoff George, Johnson Mark. Methaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lakoff Georgie. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
McNeill David. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Merlau-Ponty Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Mrhacovä Eva. Nazvy casti lidskeho tela v ceske frazeologii a idiomatice: (tematicky frazeologicky slovnik II). Ostrava: Ostravska univerzita, Filozoficka fakulta, 2000.
MusiloväMartina. Gesto a dialogicke jednani. In Theatralia, 14, 2, 2011. -P. 89-107.
