LANCASTER UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES THE EMERGENT PATTERNS OF ITALIAN IDIOMS: A DYNAMIC-SYSTEMS APPROACH by ENRICO TORRE A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics December, 2014 In loving memory of Auntie Silvana … meaning itself is action in the context of our history, our common experience. As the culture in all its manifestations infuses our everyday life, meaning is suffused with the shared aspects of that culture. Meaning is activity in context in a system with a dynamic history, and thus meaning comes with interpretive values, beliefs, and tendencies shared by the culture and the family within it. There are no logical structures abstracted from these meanings, as each cognitive act creates its own meaning. (Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith) Only together, as a complementary pair, do apparently contrasting phenomena, such as individual- collective, integration-segregation, local-global, attraction-repulsion, convergence-divergence, dwell- escape, and so on, exhaust the knowledge necessary for understanding. (J.A. Scott Kelso) Contents Declarations i Acknowledgments ii Abstract iv List of figures and tables v Abbreviations vi 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Epistemological grounding of the present study 2 1.2. Idioms as a salient target phenomenon 6 1.3. Research Questions 10 1.4. Organization and structure of the rest of the study 14 Part I. Theoretical background: language, cognition, and dynamic systems 19 2. From Cognitive Linguistics to a more distributed perspective 20 2.1. The cognitive-linguistic background 20 2.1.1. Origins and principles of Cognitive Linguistics 21 2.1.2. Metaphor, blending, metonymy and grammar 25 2.2. Langlotz's (2006a) study of idioms 37 2.2.1. Background: two ground-breaking studies on idiomaticity 37 2.2.2. A summary of Langlotz's contribution 41 2.2.3. A brief critical assessment 53 2.3. Situating language in its global ecology 59 2.3.1. Language, organism, and environment 64 2.3.2. The role of lived temporality 70 2.4. Concluding remarks 73 3. Dynamic Systems Theory 74 3.1. DST: nature and basic terminology 75 3.2. Living downstream: the dynamic challenge in cognitive science 81 3.3. Empirical evidence and theoretical implications 85 3.4. A DST approach to the scientific study of language 91 3.5. How do idioms fit in this picture? 97 3.6. A fractal architecture for language 102 3.7. Concluding remarks 106 Part II. Empirical analysis: a case-study on Italian idiomatic constructions 108 4. The self-organizing structure of Italian idioms 109 4.1. Data and methodology 110 4.1.1. Selection criterion 1: source domains 110 4.1.2. Selection criterion 2: target domains 113 4.1.3. Selection criterion 3: questioning the corpus 116 4.2. A typology of Italian idioms 121 4.2.1. Building the typology 121 4.2.2. A close look at the idiom patterns 123 4.2.3. Taking stock of the situation 136 4.3. Soft-assembling idiomatic networks 141 4.3.1. Idioms in a dynamic construction-network 141 4.3.2. Interconnected networks of idioms 144 4.3.3. The emergence and self-organization of idiomatic networks 153 4.4. Concluding remarks 159 4.4.1. Addressing Research Question 1 159 4.4.2. Addressing Research Question 2 160 4.4.3. Looking back, looking ahead 161 5. Levels of stability and variation in use 164 5.1. Data and methodology 165 5.1.1. The data-selection process 166 5.1.2. Methodological refinements of Langlotz's model 168 5.2. Analysis of the real occurrences 177 5.2.1. Defining the idiomatic clusters 178 5.2.2. An illustration of variation patterns 192 5.2.3. Statistical associations 210 5.3. Discussion 218 5.3.1. Self-organization, nonlinearity, causal circularity, and metastability 219 5.3.2. Multiple time-scales and levels of granularity 226 5.4. Concluding remarks 229 5.4.1. Addressing Research Question 3 230 5.4.2. Addressing Research Question 4 231 5.4.3. Language ontology in a nutshell 233 6. Conclusion 237 6.1. A dynamic-systems model of idiomatic constructions 237 6.2. Implications for a plausible theory of language 241 6.3. Limitations and methodological issues 245 6.4. Open questions and (possible) future directions 249 References 255 Enrico Torre Declarations Declarations Declaration of statement I, Enrico Torre, hereby declare that the work on which this thesis is based is my original work (except where acknowledgments indicate otherwise) and that neither the whole work nor any part of it has been, is being, or is to be submitted for another degree in this or any other university. Copyright declaration The copyright in this thesis is owned by the author. Any quotation from the thesis or use of any of the information contained in it must acknowledge this thesis as the source of the quotation or information. i The Emergent Patterns of Italian Idioms Enrico Torre Acknowledgments Since a PhD is a long, painstaking process, there are several people whose help and support I am pleased to acknowledge. First of all, I want to sincerely thank Elena Semino (Lancaster University), for accepting to be my supervisor and supporting me over these three years. I am especially grateful to her for letting me develop my own work independently, without nonetheless failing to provide me with her constructive criticism and valuable advice. Moreover, I want to thank Elena for giving me the opportunity to take part as a research assistant in the project Pain: Speaking the Threshold, which she is carrying out with Joanna Zakrzewska and her colleagues at University College London. I would also like to acknowledge my confirmation reader Silke Brandt, and my pre- and post-confirmation panelists, Willem Hollmann and Daniël Van Olmen (Lancaster University), for their comments on my work “in progress”. Furthermore, I am grateful to David Lucy (Lancaster University) and especially my awesome friend Fotis Polydoros (University of Liverpool) for their help with statistical tests. In addition, I would like to say, “Cheers!” to Yevhen Suprunenko (University of Liverpool) for our nice informal chats on dynamic systems. Finally, I am pleased to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for covering my tuition fees (AHRC Training Grant AH/K5053083/1). During these three years, I also had the chance to gain more professional experience. Since I have been working as a research assistant in the Department of History, I want to truly thank Ian Gregory (Lancaster University) and David Cooper (Manchester Metropolitan University) for offering me the opportunity to be part of the Spatial Humanities team. In addition, I am grateful to Willem, the course convenor of the grammar part of the LING203 undergraduate module, for supervising my work as a seminar tutor, and to Dana Gablasova (Lancaster University), who shared the teaching task with me. And of course, I would also like to thank all the students who attended my seminars. These experiences were very important for my professional growth. “Lancaster times” aside, I will always be deeply indebted to Cristiano Broccias (Università degli Studi di Genova), who has been supporting me and providing me with his advice over the years, since I was an undergraduate student. I also owe a great deal to Sonia Cristofaro (Università degli Studi di Pavia), whose lessons and supervision taught me a lot about the philosophy of linguistics (I hope I got her teachings right). Moreover, I will surely never be able to thank enough my guide and good friend Emanuele Bardone (Tartu Ülikool) for our (rigorously written) chats about topics relevant to human cognition, phenomenology, epistemology, chance-seeking, language, everyday life etc. via Skype, during the last few years. Finally, I want to thank Stephen J. Cowley (Syddansk Universitet) and the rest of fellow ISSILC and DLG members for the insightful exchanges of ideas we had when we met at conferences (and, with some of them, also via e-mail). Thankfully, work is not everything in life, and in these years I experienced an amazing process of personal growth which is still very much in progress. There were ii Enrico Torre Acknowledgments good times and bad times, both of which I was lucky enough to share with very special people, whom I want to thank with all my heart. First of all, my family, who never failed to provide me with their help and support whenever I needed, as well as celebrating the good moments with me. Whenever I speak about my family, along with my father Bernardo Torre, my mother Bruna Magliano, and my elder sister Marina Torre, I obviously include the adoptive younger sister I found in Maria Monaco (Universidade da Coruña), with whom I could both open my heart and have great fun, in A Coruña as well as in Lancaster (we're so close, no matter how far). Moreover, I want to heartily thank Emanuele and my great pals Giorgio Caviglia (Stanford University) and Riccardo Mazzocco (Lancaster University), whose friendship is simply unvaluable, for being on my side all the time. Dad, Mom, Marina, Maria, Giorgio, Riccardo, Emanuele, Fotis, Georgia, Massimo, Luca, Mirco, Cristian, and all my friends, together with all the metal and punk bands whose tunes resound in my heart everyday since I was an early teen (and F.C. Genoa 1893, of course!), represent my distributed tribe: without them, I would be a different person, arguably less creative and original. iii The Emergent Patterns of Italian Idioms Enrico Torre Abstract In traditional generative linguistic theories, idiomatic constructions are seen as a sort of “anomaly”, and dismissed as non-decomposable items of non-literal language, uninteresting and “peripheral”.