Abstract
This chapter narrows the discussion introduced in Chap. 4 to discussing the cubic effects in language. The chapter explores the image-schematic bedrock of cube in our communicative activities to understand better how our verbal choices/decisions are performed in view of the constraints underlain by the governing metaphor of choice cube. Then the cubic properties of choice are checked against the British National Corpus to see how language users talk about their choices/decisions in practice, if at all. Where positive answers are found, correspondences are drawn between choice cube and the usage of choice/decision as lexical word forms. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Square–Cube Law in language and a set of implications for further study.
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Notes
- 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube, accessed on 25 May 2018.
- 2.
The data cited herein were extracted from the British National Corpus, which is distributed by the University of Oxford on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the cited texts are reserved. The emphasis in the examples is added by the author to better illustrate the discussed cases.
- 3.
The study is corpus-assisted rather than corpus-based, which means that the data retrieved serve an accessory rather than a determinative role for the main argument. Given this corpus-assisted perspective, the data are not intended to yield any ‘hard’ conclusion in favour of the claim about the reality of choice cube or against it. If we take an expert metaphorical status of choice cube, the goal behind the BNC search is to establish whether there is any ‘soft’ or ‘indirect’ linguistic evidence that suggests that our discussion about choice is geometrised in any way. For that purpose, a full list of concordances with choice and decision have been analysed to identify spatial meanings encoded by the use of choice/decision in context. This rather ensures representativeness of corpus datasets, especially if we take into account a corpus-assisted methodological rigour of the study.
- 4.
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Kuźniak, M. (2021). Cube Effects in Language. In: The Geometry of Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_5
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