The specific point that interests me concerns the verb "to meander." Here's what Lakoff says; he's talking about work done by Teenie Matlock:
What she pointed out, experimentally, was that if you take the difference between the road runs through the valley and the road meanders through the valley it takes longer to understand meander. Because you're tracing it in your mind, you're tracing the path, eventhough the road is just sitting there, right? You're understanding it in terms of motion.Why does that interest me? "Kubla Khan", what else?
ll. 3-7, look at the verbs:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns meaureless to man Down to a sunless sea.So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round:ll. 25-26
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,There, in line 25, we have meandering, one of the verbs Lakoff mentioned. I'm not sure of the significance except that THAT part of the poem is set in a conceptual space that is structured by time while the earlier lines, which also mention the rive, is set in a conceptual space that is structured by space.
Finally, I do have a quibble with this FORM IS MOTION business. It is this, when researching Beethoven's Anvil I looked at some of the literature on navigation and found that, contrary to my intuitions, that navigation by landmarks is a secondary method, not primary. The primary method is dead-reckoning. In dead-reckoning distance traversed is a function of elapsed time and speed. If you walk for three hours (on one heading) at the rate of four miles per hour you will have traversed 12 miles.
What's interesting is that speed conflates/combines time AND space. And it seems to be primitive here. Whatever the nervous system is doing, it's NOT noting distance and then dividing by time to come up with speed. Why not? Because you can't do that until the traverse is complete. Rather, it's got an ongoing estimate of speed and that's what it uses.
I've not read their latest stuff on this, on the one hand, nor have I really tried to think this through, on the other hand. So maybe they've got it all worked out. But at the moment I'm thinking they don't.
Also, THIS has to be differentiated from judging form relative to eye movements used to trace form, which Lakoff and Turner alluded to in More Than Cool Reason. These are two different mechanisms, eye tracing and navigation. They may both involve time and space, but they're neurally and functionally different. How does THAT difference show up in language?
Note: As of this posting I've not listened to the lecture beyond this point, but I will do so, at least for awhile, as I assume there's some interesting stuff coming up.
