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Language, Geometry, and Choice

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The Geometry of Choice

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Abstract

This chapter offers reflections on the conceptual dimension of our everyday choices expressed through language. Thus, the chapter focuses on communicative aspects of choice manifested at the fundamental level, where verbal acts of discrimination or differentiation between entities are performed. It is argued that any verbal act of oral or written communication entails the selection of one particular meaningful element instead of another in a specific linear sequence. Linearity is inescapably related to a natural language. As speakers, we are constantly facing the problem of choice, whether at the level of lexis or grammar. The acts of choosing are as entrenched in our daily experience as other fundamental acts like breathing or hearing, except that they are volitional. choice is consistently seen in this chapter as a conceptual representation of our lexical instantiations of choices/decisions that we undertake as humans every day. The chapter closes by capturing the fundamental conceptual relations between cube, language, and choice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is worth noting at this point other research in the linguistic investigation of space, such as, for example, a discourse-focused Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins 2007; Whiteley, 2011). However, this approach is strictly beyond the scope of the present study because Text World Theory focuses on modelling discourse (context-of-use-oriented) communication. Its subject matter concerns, therefore, stylistics rather than modelling conceptual categories as abstract representations underlying our linguistic action. For more discussion on the cognitive-linguistics-based stylistics, see Canning (2017).

  2. 2.

    Certainly, the correspondences shown in Fig. 4.2 are greatly simplified and ignore a considerable complexity of the semiotic system developed by Peirce. For a comprehensive survey of Peirce’s contribution to contemporary semiotics, especially a cognitive-linguistic account of metaphor, see Szawerna (2017, pp. 57–67).

  3. 3.

    For more on the interplay between language and physics in regards to the applicability of the law of conservation of energy, see Kuźniak (2009).

  4. 4.

    https://books.google.pl/books/about/Space_in_Language_and_Cognition.html?id=rYynngEACAAJ, accessed on 21 June 2018

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  1. Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland

    Marek Kuźniak

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Kuźniak, M. (2021). Language, Geometry, and Choice. In: The Geometry of Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_4

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