A Cognitive Approach to Berber-Tamazight Sociocultural Reality: the Bioconceptual Organization of Izri Poetics by Tarifit-Speaking Riffian Women
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!"#$%&'(')*"!++,$!#-"($".*,.*,/(!0!1'%-("2$#'$#34(3,!4",*!4'(56"" """"""""""""""""""""""""""""(-*".'$#$&#*+(3!4"$,%!&'1!('$&"$7"'1,'"+$*('#2".5",'77'!&"8$0*&" !! ! ! A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO BERBER-TAMAZIGHT SOCIOCULTURAL REALITY: THE BIOCONCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION OF IZRI POETICS BY TARIFIT-SPEAKING RIFFIAN WOMEN To all Riffian women that like Fatima have preserved the essence of our forgotten culture; to Maria del Carmen my beloved wife and mother of my girl Fadila; to Dr. Juani Guerra, scholar, lady and an all round good person. PhD Work by AMAR EL-ARBAOUI JELOULI Supervisor: Juana Teresa Guerra de la Torre Department of Modern Languages ULPGC, 2012 "# !"!#$%&!#'!()*$+%&()&*$ ! ACKNOLEDGMENTS Thanks to all Riffian women who taught me how to sing and dance with freedom and taught me about their pains, their joy, their desire for freedom, their perception of time, their silent revolution. Thanks to the people I have met on this long journey, all people that have made possible the achievement of this thesis. First of all I would like to acknowledge my very great appreciation for my teacher and supervisor Professor Guerra for her help, her valuable and constructive suggestions, her guidance and enthusiastic encouragement during the planning and the development of this dissertation since the beginning of my graduate studies in Cognition and Language at ULPGC in 2003. Her willingness to give her time so generously is here thoroughly appreciated. I am indebted to all those people that initiated me in the field of Cognition and Language. I cannot mention all their names because I would not have enough space for them all, but I have a special place for all them in my heart and mind. My special thanks to Professor Bernárdez, who taught me how to understand the relations between Language, Mind and Culture; and Professor Ruiz de Mendoza with whom I learned methods and models. I also want to thank my friends and research fellows in our Postgraduate Program for their constant academic and moral support: Michal Góral, Linda Henriksson, Victor Manteiga, Adán Martín, Mayté Morales, Graciela de la Nuez, Marta Silvera, Virginia Verdú. I am very greatful to Mario Bernal, his family and all the staff at my work place. Without their generosity I could not have had any possibility to carry out this long and difficult work. My deepest gratitude goes to my beloved family. To my wife Maria del Carmen, my son Said and my daughter Fadila, for their understanding and endless love throughout all these demanding years, which was felt with much sorrow by them; I here apologize for I stole from their happiness much of the time I spent on this work. Last but not least I would like to grant here my endless respect for all the women of the world that, like Amazight women, make human beings nobler and human cultural constructions better. This initial work is a gift to all these women. In Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, September 2012 !"#$%&'(')*"!++,$!#-"($".*,.*,/(!0!1'%-("2$#'$#34(3,!4",*!4'(56"" """"""""""""""""""""""""""""(-*".'$#$&#*+(3!4"$,%!&'1!('$&"$7"'1,'"+$*('#2".5",'77'!&"8$0*&" $! ! INDEX 3 0. PREFACE 0.1. Sociocultural Berber network 8 0.2. The complex diversity of Berber 13 0.3. Our choice to use Izran as sociocognitive data 16 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. The social position of the Riffian women 20 1.2. Geography and social situation 25 1.3. Compositional aspects of Izran 30 1.4. Variety of Izran subjects 36 1.4.1. Romantic Izri 36 1.4.2. Historic Izri 39 1.4.3. Political Izri 41 1.4.4. Sarcastic Izri 45 1.4.5. Izri from the domain of witchcraft 46 1.4.6. Izri with four lines in the form of two couplets 48 1.5. The way Izran are produced 51 1.6. Izran as enacted social criticism 55 2. SELECTING AND APPLYING A CORPUS OF IZRAN 2.1. Why Izran 60 %# !"!#$%&!#'!()*$+%&()&*$ ! 2.2. What is an Izri? 62 2.3. Taqsais versus Izran. A case 68 2.4. Storage and transmission of Izran 73 2.5. Tarifit: The language of Izran 78 2.6. The way history is narrated as Izran 87 3. GEOGRAPHICAL AND LINGUISTIC SITUATION OF THE TARIFIT VARIETY 3.1. Geography of Tarifit language 90 3.2. Social context of Tarifit language 91 3.3. Naming Tamazight as “Berber” 94 3.4. Imazighen speakers and Tamazight language 95 3.5. A brief historical review of Tamazight 97 3.6. The complex origins of Tamazight 98 4. FUNDAMENTAL OBJECTIVES AND COGNITIVE METHODOLOGY 4.1. Introduction to the way we (re)search 102 4.2. Objectives of this research 104 4.3. Principles, methods and models: Cognitive Poetics and Cognitive Linguistics 105 5. A GENERAL VISION OF THE COGNITIVE THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 5.1. Introduction to the theoretical background 108 !"#$%&'(')*"!++,$!#-"($".*,.*,/(!0!1'%-("2$#'$#34(3,!4",*!4'(56"" """"""""""""""""""""""""""""(-*".'$#$&#*+(3!4"$,%!&'1!('$&"$7"'1,'"+$*('#2".5",'77'!&"8$0*&" &! ! 5.2. Foregrounding paradigm: from Objectivism to Experientialism 110 5.3. Meaning construction and knowledge of the World construction (structures and processes) 114 5.4. Dictionary meaning versus encyclopedic meaning 117 5.5. Cognitive schematizations. Image Schemas as responding to specific environmental perceptual stimuli 121 6. THOUGHT, LANGUAGE AND MEANING 6.1. Cognitive dynamics of oral language 123 6.2. Language and Thought. Poetics and Linguistics 126 6.3. Meaning out of context 129 6.4. Con/figuring literal and figurative language 143 6.5. Realism revisited. Embodiment and situated cognition 146 6.6. The social basis of Tamazightt cultural life: Collective and Individual cognition 148 7. IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS (ICMs): METAPHOR, METONYMY, AND IMAGE SCHEMA AS BASIC COGNITIVE MECHANISMS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION. 7.1. Metaphor and the cognitive act 151 7.2. Conceptual metaphor 158 7.2.1. Types of conceptual metaphors 160 7.2.1.1. Structural metaphors 161 '# !"!#$%&!#'!()*$+%&()&*$ ! 7.2.1.2. Ontological metaphors 161 7.2.1.3. Orientational metaphors 162 7.3. Image schema metaphors 162 7.4. Metonymy 163 7.5. Classifying metonymies 164 7.6. Interaction between metaphor and metonymy 166 7.7. Izran Figurative language understanding 167 7.8. Emotion expression in Izran 169 7.9.The social and cognitive character of an emotion 174 8. APPLYING COGNITIVE MODELS TO IZRAN CONCEPTUAL DYNAMICS 8.1. Using Conceptual Metaphor models: Foregrounding Blending models as patterns of higher complexity in cognitive process 177 8.2. Analysis of an Izri 189 8.3. The Izri cognitive architecture: Conceptual Metaphor Model (CMM) and Conceptual Integration Model (CIM) 196 8.4. Counterfactuality as conceptual elaboration 204 8.5. Enunciation Blends 208 9. INITIAL SCHEMATIC CONDITIONS OF TARIFIT-SPECIFIC CONCEPTUAL CONSTRUCTION OF DAY/NIGHT FROM ITS USE IN AN IZRI: THE NEED FOR MORE COMPLEX CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION MODELS 212 9.1. Social and historical context of irzan in general !"#$%&'(')*"!++,$!#-"($".*,.*,/(!0!1'%-("2$#'$#34(3,!4",*!4'(56"" """"""""""""""""""""""""""""(-*".'$#$&#*+(3!4"$,%!&'1!('$&"$7"'1,'"+$*('#2".5",'77'!&"8$0*&" (! ! and of one selected izri in particular 214 9.2. Differences and similarities between metaphor and blending as focal points of our analysis 216 9.3. Difference between “swass/day” and “djirth/night” and the culture-specific concepts linked to the meaning of each entity 220 9.4. Cyclic “day & night” blend 230 9.5 Checking the common features between source and target so as to define the intended meaning 232 9.6. Conceptual blending and semiotic spaces as a model to uncover the biocultural mechanisms in the construction of meaning in a performed Tarifit izri 235 9.7. Tarifit-Berber meaning as conceptualization 236 9.8. Tamazigh context is part of the Tarifit-Berber meaning 241 10. CONCLUSIONS 248 11. BIBLIOGRAPHY 257 12. APPENDIX Collected Izran. Tarifit originals and Translations into English and Spanish 277 13. RESUMEN EN ESPAÑOL (DOCTORADO EUROPEO) 317 )# !"!#$%&!#'!()*$+%&()&*$ ! 0. PREFACE 0.1. Sociocultural Berber network Due to the complexity of the linguistic and cultural synergies that have designed its evolution throughout millennia, the world uniformly known as Berber is shaped in a unique heterogeneous way. “Berber”, in the Tamazight milieu, is a term coined by other cultures with different philological and ontological history; it entered the Tarifit lexical form, ‘Berber’, from the Arabic language; originally it had come into this language from previous parallel constructions in Greek. In Arabic, the adjective means barbarous and uncivilized. In this Thesis we explore Berber as a sociocultural system within a biological frame of human cognitive evolution for the first time. Moreover, this is the first international academic study on Izran as significant Berber data in the African history. Regarding human cognition as human action, we set off from the contemporary strong sociocultural need to open new spaces of interdisciplinary research on the way Berber’s diversity construct knowledge, qualitatively and quantitatively. In a technical way, we regard Berber here as higher-level concept (Turner & Fauconnier 2002), of higher value (Dennet 1989, 1992) and of higher emotion (Damasio 1994); this complex construal refers to a cognitive organization of knowledge on a conceptual-linguistic basis. Our Thesis stems from a cognitive situation where Berber biocultural knowledge is enacted (Varela 1992) everyday by a human macrogroup of more than thirty million people distributed in about three hundred linguistic varieties as spoken in Africa. These !"#$%&'(')*"!++,$!#-"($".*,.*,/(!0!1'%-("2$#'$#34(3,!4",*!4'(56"" """"""""""""""""""""""""""""(-*".'$#$&#*+(3!4"$,%!&'1!('$&"$7"'1,'"+$*('#2".5",'77'!&"8$0*&"