Hello, and welcome to episode 103 of Structured Visions. Structured Visions is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about language, selfhood, and social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and I'm very grateful that you are listening today. You are very welcome here.
I always start with a few words about myself just in case you are new to me. I am a senior lecturer in linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, and I'm also a fiction writer who writes fiction about linguistics, and you can find some of that stuff on JodyClark.com or grammarfordreamers.com. And this podcast comes out monthly and it's my chance to share my unique take on human language, some of my more out there ideas. And some of them include things like the idea that language is designed to reduce consciousness.
And the way it does that is to reduce consciousness into this discrete notion of selfhood. So it organizes the world, human language organizes the world so that it's experienced in terms of individual selves. And this is a way of limiting experience of the world's outside of language. It sort of shuts down access to the world's outside of human language.
But that experience of limitation can offer us new ideas if we're prepared to do something a little bit unusual, which is to inhabit language. And today we're going to be talking a lot about this idea of inhabiting language. So I thought I would just tell you what some of the out there ideas are, because that way if you don't want to explore them, you can simply leave now no harm, no foul. So if you're still with me, thank you.
I just went to, there's a whole lot of stuff going on at the moment that I'd love to tell you about if you're looking for opportunities to hang out with me more than just in this podcast. And I need to tell you about them now because they're not going to last forever. So first of all, I've got two courses that I run and they're both available all the time. One of them is called Refreshing Grammar and the other's called the Grammar of Show Don't Tell.
And these are both very really easy going grammar courses. Refreshing Grammar is about letting you know everything that you already know about the structure of language, everything you already know about grammar, giving you access to it by allowing you to access your linguistic intuition. So Refreshing Grammar has a free version. So there's a paid for version which you can access all the time and there's a free version and the free version is happening now and it will happen until November 12th.
So if you want to sign up for that free version, get onto that straight away. The other thing about both of the courses, the Grammar of Show Don't Tell is sort of like Refreshing Grammar only it's oriented towards specific challenges and writing and this is how do you write emotions that resonate. So in this we use particular grammatical principles that are really easy to learn and we look at a set of emotions, fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage and each module on that course or each topic is oriented to one of those emotions and also one grammatical principle. And what we do is we do these sort of close language analyses of everyday texts, so things like TripAdvisor or NHS texts or things like that.
And then we also look at literary works like Athello, my Shakespeare, Second Sight of Zachary Cloud's Leap by Sean Lusk, like Water for Chocolate by Laresquivel and the English Patient by Michael Andachi and Finally the Blue's Eye by Tony Morrison. So we're looking at sort of both everyday, ordinary texts if you like and then what we would think of as literary texts and we explore how these emotions are made. And so anyway that is also available all the time and refreshing grammar is available all the time but during the period that the free version of Refreshing Grammar runs which is up until November the 12th I'm offering both the Show Don't Tell and Refreshing Grammar each of those is available for 40 pounds which is a huge discount because ordinarily they're 93 pounds so that's 57% off if you do the math. So if you want to check out those courses and if you want to sort of get them while they're at the reduced price you need to do that by November 12th and if you're not sure about it just sign up to the free version of Refreshing Grammar and see if you like the way I teach stuff and that'll just give you a flavor.
The paid for version of Refreshing Grammar is the same course as you get to have access to it all the time. And if you've got any questions about that you can just head on over to my website JADYCLARK.com and if you can't find the answer there you can just send me a little message and I'll respond to you as quickly as I can and I'll also put all of the links for all of those things up on the show notes. Now there's more. So I'm also participating in the Chef of Literary Festival called Off the Shelf and I'm doing an online event so you're welcome to come to that if your time zone permits.
It's on Friday the 11th of October from 6.30 to 8 PM London time. It is completely free. It's open to everyone and the event is called the impossibility of words, a linguist's cure for writer's block and so that's available to you as well. I think that's all the events for now, all of the things that are happening but like I said they're kind of time sensitive so I just want you to sort out those down.
I'll put all the links in the show notes and if you've got any questions about that just head on over to JADYCLARK.com and drop me a note. Okay, on to the business of today. I like to start every episode with a couple of questions to get you thinking and to get you sort of situated in your own ideas about language or about other things and the two questions are the first one is what do you think is the most challenging thing about the English language? So you can be reflecting on that while I ramble on and the second one is what does it mean to express yourself through language?
First of all is that something that's possible? Is it something that you do? Is it something that everybody does? What does it actually mean to express yourself through language?
So those are the two questions and we'll unravel why those two questions are even there. Okay, so just we'll get to the first one straight away. What's the most challenging thing about the English language? Now if it were me and I were interpreting that question I would think in terms of what's the most challenging about learning the language and I would also think specifically in terms of if you were, if your first language wasn't English.
Now if your first language is English and you haven't had a lot of experience with say TESOL which is teaching English to speakers of other languages then maybe you're orienting to what's challenging about for native speakers as a first language speakers of English. So you might maybe have got kids who might be learning to read and you might be thinking about things like how English is spelled and how that doesn't always correspond with what it sounds like and that type of thing. I'd be curious to know if you thought about that question in terms of anything other than how to acquire English or English literacy or how to learn English. I'd be really curious about that in terms of being challenging.
But in any case I was orienting mostly to learning English if English isn't your first language and the reason that pops up for me is because I did actually teach English to French speakers when years and years back I moved to Paris and worked as a language assistant in Paris University and I didn't actually have any training in TESOL so everything was just new and interesting and this is where I first really genuinely got the idea that I should be studying linguistics because when you're teaching English to people who are teaching your own language and people who don't know it you suddenly realize all of the things that you thought just came on quote-unquote naturally they're intuitive for you are completely foreign to people who are learning it as a foreign language what a surprise maybe for other people that's not such a big deal but for me it was pretty interesting and there's things that you don't even know about your own language and one of those is something called phrasal verbs and if you are a learner of English or someone who for English isn't your first language you might know perfectly well exactly what I'm talking about in terms of phrasal verbs. I mean I had no idea what they were I was about 25 when I was teaching English in Paris and so a whole quarter of a century where I had no idea what a phrasal verb was but in English what we have are verbs that are followed up by either prepositions or adverbs or both and they're an integral part of the verb meaning that the verb changes meaning if they're not there so some examples might be look for so you just like I'm looking for an answer to this problem and that's different than just simply look but you could also have an example something like look up you know so I'm you can imagine looking up to me look up at the sky that's not a phrasal verb but look up the answer on Google or look up the answer in the inside video back in the day they're up and look combined to mean something like search and the some other examples might be back up you know so back up is different from back out for instance you can have something like give in or give up or fall out or fall in and another might be find out so these are all examples of phrasal verbs and one thing about phrasal verbs is that you can often replace them with a single word synonyms so for instance if I said I'm gonna back up the car you could say you could replace that with reverse I'm gonna reverse the car right so interestingly often the the synonym is a word that derives from Latin like reverse derives from Latin whereas back and up derive from old English and which is a Germanic language anyway all that to all that to just give you a little bit extra information something like give in if you were to think of a single word synonym forgive in what would you come up with maybe something like relent or surrender perhaps fall out we had a conversation and we fell out over who should who's doing the most work and if you were thinking of a single word synonym for fall out you might say disagree or argue perhaps and another might be find out what would be your single word synonym for find out and that might be something like discover so the hard thing about actually learning these is that if how is how are you supposed to cope with the fact that look up means something entirely different from look for or give in means something entirely different from give out and the and when you're dealing with these it's like well how do you actually learn them because the meanings of the words at first glance don't seem to have much to do with the word give or much to do with the word in so you could learn those words separately but those knowing that the meanings of those words separately don't help you understand what the phrasal verb means so they're idiomatic and if you've ever learned another language the idioms are the hardest thing and English has a ton of these words it's got so many phrasal verbs that it's like you've got it's almost like you've got to increase your under see it's like your vocabulary words or just you don't just have to learn give you don't just have to learn take your to their take take up take out take away you've learned all of them and so it can be really really tricky now the good news is I recently read a blog post by an expert in English language teaching and teacher training and also senior editor at Cambridge University Press her name is Elaine Hodgson and I'll put a link to she's got a really great blog on how to teach phrasal verbs and she's something called conceptual metaphor theory to do that it's really cool this blog is really clear really well written so I'm gonna put a link to that the show notes if you're interested in teaching phrasal verbs but I am and I'm also going to talk about what she says in a minute but I'm actually going to make you listen to the story I wrote about phrasal verbs first which is not very good at helping you to teach phrasal verbs not really that good at helping you understand them either but it's fiction it has a different purpose okay so anyway the piece is called the Museum of Language and it's flash fiction it's quite short I'll read it to you now if you'd like to have a look at it on your own it's on grammar for dreamers.com and I'll have a link in the show notes the Museum of Language when celebrated linguist Dr. Sophia Lindstrom dies her soul is brought to the Museum of Language which displays everything she's ever said written or thought in her life the exhibits are set out like concordances each entry displayed in a different room. The first room showcases give and it's phrasal verb variants give up give in give out give over.
The words have a power Sophia did not recognize when she was alive a stream of fluid light flows from her she is quite literally drained. The take exhibit is similarly exhausting take in take over take up take on take down take after take back a somber burden has been placed upon Sophia's ethereal shoulders of tyrants, epilepsy. She pulls herself from the room only to find the other exhibits have been cordoned off the implication that her life has been nothing more than give and take is too distressing to contemplate. A benevolent docent appears and leads Sophia to a quiet spacious room empty but for one word inhabit.
The inn sits more stably as prefixed to Latin derived verbs Sophia observes than as particle in the old English equivalent dwell in. She does not dwell on the implications that phrasal verbs may contribute to the growing segmentalization of analytic languages. Instead she settles herself gently into the armchair that may have always been in this room and now allows her newly dead self the exquisite pleasure of inhabiting the language of her life. So thank you for allowing me to read that to you.
I'm just going to give you a little bit of background on this story and how it almost didn't come into the and also to give you a little bit of an idea of why I write these stories in the first place. The real reason is that I am a want to be novelist and so I spend most of my time in fact the last four years I spent writing a novel which I just finished the first draft of and I've just had the feedback back from my kindest most harshest best beta reader. It was my husband by the way and so I I've been busy with this work and it's just like a flash pieces it is an exploration of language in this case it's a historical novel and it's specifically about how to show me languages and their relationships to the land and how to show me if you're not familiar are the six nations of North America they've also been called the Iroquois and the nations of Seneca Mohawk and Idaho and Daga Kuyu and Tesco Aurora and the novel also focuses a little bit on Algonquian languages and the thing that I'm most fascinated by is that a lot of Native American languages including Algonquian and Anishone languages are something called polysynthetic and English is highly analytic so there's a distinction between analytic languages and synthetic languages and a lot of Native American languages and other indigenous languages are polysynthetic. Okay I'm not going to go into too much detail on that because I'm going to discuss it a little bit in the off the shelf event but it's just that there's this part of language that I've been exploring in the novel that kind of snuck through in the Museum of Language so that bit where it says that phrasal verbs may contribute to the growing segmentalization of analytic languages, analytic languages are languages where you've got you've got a high word to morphine ratio which means that there's a lot more words separate distinct segmented words whereas with a synthetic language if you had one word to translate it into English it might take the English sort of three different words or four or five and a polysynthetic language is one where a word has lots and lots of meaningful morphemes in it but it's still only one word and then to translate that into English you'd have to have lots of different words anyway so I'm fascinated by this and the but the reason I actually I try to publish two flesh fiction pieces a month and I think I've been successful at this since I began the project and the reason for that is that when you're writing a novel if any of you out there are novel writers and if you don't have a novel written already and published then it can feel very lonely and you can start stop feeling like you are actually a writer and so I wanted to sort of challenge myself to put fiction out there for people to read and that's a way of kind of keeping myself accountable I am writing it makes me think in terms of an audience there are people reading it and it's but they're small pieces and also the small pieces allow me to kind of explore a little bit of language without going down a rabbit hole sometimes I end up going down a rabbit hole anyway but you know with the novel I'm kind of focusing on one or two or three different aspects of language where as my mind always wants to explore a million different things in terms of language and I want to explore in fiction such as these really quick ones with the idea that I can always go back later and write another novel about any one of those and then of course I've got the podcast to sort of talk a little bit more about the stuff that I'm writing and it gives me a chance to talk about something that I've written without having to reveal what my novel is about because the novel isn't ready to go out until it's ready to go out so in any case this has been a particularly challenging sort of couple of weeks because I was on a mad dash to finish my draft of the novel before uni started in September because I knew when university started I've got the new teaching to do and I want to get excited about that and I want to put my energy into that and then I also knew that there's going to be these courses that were going to launch and I was going to have an office shelf event so I thought okay let's just get the novel let's get the draft done I'll give it to my husband who's my best beta reader and then he'll take a long time with it and that'll give me plenty of space to do all the other things with promise he got it done really quickly like he read the novel he came up with this really amazing harsh but very pointed and very kindly delivered feedback which I'm very excited to start applying and so I want to get on that and yet I want to do all these other things so I was like how do I have time to write flash fiction but there's always time to write more fiction so so this particular piece sort of has a bunch of things in there that I haven't really explored in much detail specifically that thing about the phrasal verbs may contribute to the growing segmentalization of analytic languages so this is something that a linguist named Elizabeth Trelgart looks at the development of the evolution of languages and the idea is that analytic languages are least English as it changes and involves it as actually becoming more analytic so it's kind of segmentalizing even more phrasal verbs are an example of that anyway I didn't have time to really explore that in great depth even though I'm absolutely fascinated by it and so I just plopped it in and I apologize and I might discuss a little bit in the office shelf event but otherwise that's that and it might show up in another flash fiction piece but in any case what we're going to talk about today are these phrasal verbs and something called conceptual metaphor theory now conceptual metaphor theory is the method that Elaine Hodgson who I mentioned before she uses conceptual metaphor theory to teach phrasal verbs to learners of English so conceptual metaphor theory was sort of developed in a book called Metaphor we live by George Likoff and Mark Johnson back in 1980 and the principle of it the basic premise is that you can't really speak a language without constantly using metaphors metaphors are not just the stuff of quote literary language so if in what they're effectively saying is we actually think metaphorically we're always thinking in language in in metaphors it's not a surprise that our language would be riddled with metaphor everyday language not just literary language so as an example if we take something that seems like a literary metaphor all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players from Shakespeare's as you like it so we've we've got that kind of idea that the metaphor image is the stage or the theater or the play and the people who are moving through the world are actually actors on a stage so we're comparing two things one thing is not the other thing but they're similar in some way and the task of the listener or the reader or the viewer is to make the association between those two things now that's something that if you do do creative writing you're probably very well versed in how to use metaphor and you might be thinking a lot about how you use metaphor but we do use metaphor all the time you can't really speak or write or use language at all without using metaphor so if we just take that business of life as a play you could see how like just ordinary language shows how we often think of life as being a play for instance I'm just trying to do my part right so I know things are really tough right now how can I do my part and the word part you know is a metaphor is a metaphor word that comes from the conceptual domain of plays and theater right what's your part another is oh I'm pretty preoccupied at work right now I'm taking on a new role right so role once again is from the conceptual domain of the theater of the play and when you're taking on a role taking on is actually a different metaphor but when you're taking on a role when you're playing a role that's you're drawing upon that concept of it's like being in a play so this is when you read Lake off in Johnson's work what you'll realize is that you know almost every domain conceptual domain can be thought of and is thought of regularly metaphorically so just as an example and the way they set it up is they sort of give you all of the different examples so it's be like argument is war ideas are food love the self is a container that type of thing life is a journey sickness is a battle that type of thing and so we say if we say argument is war and you look for examples of where we're conceiving of argument as war you might say something like she attacked every weak point in his argument and so that notion of attack and weak point being just like a battleground or someone's actually attacking something well she's not literally attacking anything but instead she's treating argument as if you're going to war also we often think of ideas as being food so I've consumed a lot of information so consuming means like you're eating it right or that thought leaves a bad taste in my mouth right so again you're drawing upon that that domain of food and things tasting a certain way those ideas are half baked I'll let that simmer for a while and come back to it so letting it simmer we're thinking in terms of an idea letting it simmer as if it were on a pot on a stove so the so what what conceptual metaphor theory does is kind of map out various domains of human experience and shows how they how the kind of abstract is linked onto the concrete so I just thought I'd have a quick look at my flesh fiction piece and see if I could find where the conceptual metaphors were there now the conceptual metaphors kind of blend in together with the literary metaphors you can see a sense in which I'm sort of meta orienting to the metaphoric callity or the metaphoricity of the language I'm using so just as an example a stream of fluid light flows from her she is quite literally drained so I use the words quite literally on purpose even though I didn't know I was going to be talking about conceptual metaphor theory when I wrote this piece that I used quite literally because I wanted the reader to see that as an image genuine image because she's dead and this is the soul and so I wanted to sort of see the soul as a thing and I wanted to see this the soul is literally fluid light and the idea that light could be fluid so is light water well the idea is that there's an an acuity there where we're seeing light as but in any case the idea that somebody would be drained is also a conceptual metaphor which is the notion that life is a container or the self is a container and that your life force can drain out of you right in the way that water can drain out of a leaky cup.
There's another one there which I'm not so conscious about which or wasn't so conscious about when I say the take exhibit is similarly exhausting so exhausting which is a similar metaphor from draining which is that this notion of something leaving something else as if through an exhaust pipe right so this notion of exit egress right so to say somebody is exhausted is again to think of your life force as being contained and that it's coming out of the container and potentially needing to be replenished. Another conceptual metaphor is life is a transaction so from that I said the implication that her life has been nothing more than give and take is too distressing to contemplate so the idea of give and takes the idea that you sort of move through your life constantly engaging in transactions and that's why I focused on those notions of give and take to orient to the kind of oppressively transactional way that life can be sometimes or that we can see it that way sometimes. And another metaphor which is kind of an overt sort of more literary type metaphor where I said a somber burden has been placed upon Sophia's ethereal shoulders are tyrants effulets so the somber burden that the shoulders which don't even exist because they're a theory because she doesn't have a body anymore and then I'm comparing them to effulets so a tyrant who might be a military general he's wearing up a let's and that the conceptual metaphor there is that problems or responsibilities are burdened so something like I can't take one more thing and of course this is me talking about the take exhibit meaning I can't carry I can't load it up with one more thing so this idea that problems and responsibilities are burdens. Okay so how can you use conceptual metaphor to teach phrasal verbs so again this is what I got from Elaine Hodgson who's an expert in teaching English a second to speak his other languages and what she says is that if you use conceptual metaphor theory when you're teaching your phrasal verbs it makes the phrasal verbs meaning seem less arbitrary less idiomatic less illogical and also it invites students to explore the multiple metaphorical meanings of the particles with the adverbs of the prepositions so for something like up so it's like drink up spit up take up shut up give up you know all of that you can think of all the phrasal verbs that include the word up it's one thing if you think of up as just meaning high on a vertical axis right if you think that's all up means but if you think of it in terms of its metaphorical meanings its conceptual metaphoric meanings up can mean increase it can mean complete it can mean approach it can mean reject it can mean collect etc and she's explaining all the different metaphorical meanings of these particles so down can mean decrease it can mean stop it could mean defeat it could mean fail it could mean eat and drink etc get that down you etc so she goes through with things like up down on offer out and she gives all of the not necessarily all but many more conceptual meanings of these prepositions and other particles so what she does is she gets an example with up so what she does is she she starts with the simple ones with her learners so she starts with like go up hang up hang up hang up sit up and stand up and she says okay well those actually all orient to the verticality of up so I want to go up the stairs I found my back was hurting Howard's hanging up his scarf and he picked up the books he stooped down to pick up the books that were on the floor so these examples are with a visual of actually taking picking something up so moving it from below to high from low to high so it's all about that vertical dimension you know I would go up the stairs so that kind of gets everybody sort of oriented towards the kind of most basic meaning but then she moves on to more idiomatic ones so she'll take the message the conceptual metaphor she'll say okay well more is up so up can mean that you have more rather than less of something so then when you have the verb go up you can say profits are about to go up what profits are predicted to go up and you say oh okay in this case go up up means more so go up means to increase and another example might be completion is up so that means that up means that you're done you finished it so tear up she is tearing up all of her documents she has torn up all of her documents that means she's finished she's done she's there once she's when she's torn them up they no longer exist right that's complete and so an example is shut up which means complete stop you're talking now it's done the talking is done another one might be happy is up so here you might have cheer up you know so if you think in terms of happy being up then cheer up means to make yourself happy you know friends try to cheer her up so that's another one social status is up so you can say okay look up her friends look up to her I mean they see her as on a higher social status so you can't really understand those unless the up in all of those phrasal verbs that go up to her up look up unless you have a clearer you can sort of memorize them but if you have sort of a better understanding of what the conceptual metaphors are behind them then you can sort of work it out even if even if you haven't even if the verbal the phrasal verb is new to you so it makes a little bit less illogical so I think that's a brilliant way of teaching phrasal verbs I don't have the occasion to actually try it out because I don't do any T-sol at the moment but if you're doing any T-sol I'd love for you to have a look at her blog post and see if that actually works when you're teaching your learners but what it gave me a chance to do as well is to sort of think about these conceptual metaphors a little bit more and to sort of rethink it if you like and to sort of rethink it through the lens through which I see language so which won't be of any use if you're using it for T-sol by the way so stick with the language I'm still using it for T-sol but if we think in terms of the conceptual metaphor theory idea about metaphor in I mean it's called CMT for now so in CMT a metaphor is a relationship between at least two conceptual domains so it's a way of thinking about one thing in relation to another thing right I think that's pretty straightforward and they think of it in terms of your source domain and your target domain and so your source domain would be like like if we were to say happy is up okay so what if we say so happy is up we could look at a sort of wider conceptual metaphor there which is states of mind are positions on the vertical axis so positions on a vertical axis are the source domain so that's supposedly like the real world embodied concept like if you wanted to embody up you would take your finger and you'd point to the sky or the ceiling and if you wanted to embody down you'd take your finger one you might do a different way but you'd take your finger and you'd point to the floor or the earth that you're standing on and by the way I did just do those two things even though I know you can't see me so this is notion that it is embodied so you've got this source domain so that is kind of where you're taking the that's what that's where you're taking the imagery from the target domain is usually something that's quite abstract like a state of mind is abstract so a state of mind is actually you know potentially a little harder to conceptualize or if you thought about something like argument is war argument is a lot more abstract than a war on a battlefield right so the war is supposed to be the sort of source domain where the imagery comes from and the target domain is the abstract thing we're trying to get our heads around so again the source domain is embodied is a soil concrete and the target domain is abstract concepts and so what you're doing when we're using metaphor and we're thinking in terms of metaphor we're connecting abstract concepts to embodied experiences and that helps us understand them a little bit better or a lot better now the assumption there is that those two different types of concepts exist so that there are abstract concepts or targets and that they're embodied experiences or sources so target domains are abstract concepts and embodied experiences are source domains and those two things the assumption is of course that those two things exist and those two things are separate the problem is if you look at it too closely or certainly if I look at it too closely it's like it's like it's all metaphor like it's metaphor all the way down like I can't I'm sort of stumbling a little even as I'm speaking because I feel here sense myself everything is a metaphor it's a bit dizzying dizzying is a metaphor is a metaphor it's all metaphors everything in other words nothing refers to an actual other reality everything that I say like creates its own reality and because even just with the example like up it's like okay well there is an actual physical experience of up but not really because up first of all up is entirely relevant based upon where somebody is right where the self experiences itself right so and also what there's got to be a vantage point there's got to be a vantage point for an up so even though I'm I personally right now I'm sitting in a room and I can put it down and up you know my husband's downstairs he could point to the up which is my down but if we looked at it from a wider perspective and we went out and we even left the earth my up like from somebody else's vantage point look like I'm pointing sort of down in space but that in space there isn't necessarily an upper down you know so instead it looks like I'm pointing out from the earth if you see what I mean it's all relative and what is it relevant to it's relevant to the experience of a point of view what's often called a deictic center or a self so without the self there is no there is well I was not safe without the self there is no language but without the self there is no language created world but really what I want to say is that it's language that creates the self and it's constantly self referential so I think we sort of think about it in terms of metaphors a ways of describing the world but metaphors don't and all of language we think of all of language in terms of describing the world and I don't actually think language describes the world I don't think it's possible for language to describe a world outside of language language can only point to itself language can only point to the self language describes the self and here I'm using another metaphor which is to say it doesn't it does describe the self in other words it does sort of talk about the self but describe can also mean if you sort of describe a shape you know that means that you're maybe taking your finger and drawing the shape you're drawing a circle meaning you're drawing the circle with your shape or with your finger or with your pencil or whatever describe the outline of the person and I believe that's what language does it is describing or drawing a circle around something empty space really and that description is the self so human language is not referring to one thing by comparing it to another thing it's a means of reducing consciousness to one dimension so that really all that we can experience is experienced as self as this one dimensional language created self let's try it as just as an experiment so if we take the conceptual metaphor happiness is up so happiness is the target domain up is the source domain and we maybe have a specific example of that where we say I'm on top of the world so if we understand I'm on top of the world to mean I am happy and we realize this draws upon the conceptual metaphor that happiness is up and so our source domain is this notion of verticality right and if we look at every segment of the expression I'm on top of the world we'll see that every single element of that is not referring to the world but it's referring to a changing notion of the self so we start with I and I said I'm so we'll treat it as a one word the I am and we know that am has to go with I those two morphemes have to go together and can't go with any other subject pronoun it can only go with I and we know that I does not exist in the world it only exists in language because it's the first person singular is grammatical personhood and refers to the person who is the author of the language speaker or the writer or the textor or the purported speaker writer or text of the language so the first person does not exist outside of language right so I am does not exist outside of language and then we take something like on top of the world well the world is a fuzzy concept the word the is the direct the direct article which is called direct determination which means I'm assuming that you and I are sharing an idea about what the world is and that the world exists so even to simply use the definite article the direct determiner the even to use that is to make an assumption about self and other and making that assumption also brings it into being it brings the self into being and then we are drawing upon this sort of shared notion of the world and then we have this idea of being on top of which is a which is relative to where the self is and where the world is and the experience of it so pretty much everything that we say that was only one example but everything that we say every use of language is a reiteration of the self language is a one dimensional mechanism and all it does is selfhood and all it refers to is itself and all it refers to is the self it's a reduction of consciousness to just selfhood and so if you're willing to entertain that possibility when we ask the question can we use language to express ourselves remember that was the top that was the top top question at the beginning of this podcast can we use language to express ourselves and you think well is it we we can use language to describe the self but language is the self language is constantly shifting and changing and redefining the self but to actually express something beyond the self requires moving outside of language and we've just said that language reduces consciousness to one dimension so how do you move out of one dimension in order to express something beyond the self and the secret there is to imagine the one dimension is a line and then to imagine the two ends of that line going up to meet each other right so this is language trying to describe something outside of language as it goes up and it just meets itself and informs a circle because all it can do is refer to itself it can't refer to a world outside of language it's one dimensional it can't refer to a world outside of language so it refers to itself and when it does that it's like about chasing its tail or it's like an aurobares which is a snake swelling its tail and there you have a circle and when the language creates this circle and when the self is that circle then what you have there is a space and what you can do with that space as you kind of circling this selfhood is you can have the experience of actually going within that space so before the language there was no space the language circumscribes a space it describes the self and in describing the self it creates this space and if you go inside then you if you kind of get up just right then you can begin to experience the dimensions that are beyond the dimension of language the dimensions that are beyond that one-dimensional consciousness so you've got human language it draws a circle it says this is you it creates a space you can look inside and what you find inside that space is not the you that's created by language but instead the part of all the worlds that's uniquely designated by that self circle if we stay on the one-dimension and we assume that language is talking about the world then we never get the opportunity to see beyond language and the way we see beyond language is to go within to go within that space that the self creates and that notion of going in is what I mean when I say that when we inhabit language we allow ourselves to be transformed or when we inhabit language transformation is possible and that's what I was trying to talk about in that flash fiction piece the Museum of Language here is Sophia and she's walking through this museum that has all of the language that she's ever expressed if you like in her life all of the language of her life and it's it's uh it's distressing because it's reductive and you're looking at this and thinking is this all I ever was everything I ever said is that all is that all there was to me but what happens is she goes into a room in the room is inhabit and she settles I'm just reading she settles herself gently into the armchair that may have always been in this room and allows her newly dead self the exquisite pleasure of inhabiting the language of her life so for me what I think it means to actually inhabit language rather than to speak language or to write language or command language or acquire language or to learn language or to perfect language to inhabit it is to inhabit the language created self which means to see what there is inside to see the other to experience the other dimensions the non-unidimensional dimensions the multi-dimensionality of life that language normally restricts us from and what it does is it gives us a very unique perspective separate from all of consciousness which is to say just this just now just me just here all of those deictic markers it creates this unique separate space whereas if you whereby you can take a moment and explore the multi-dimensionality of that unique space so that is a fun thing to play with and hopefully that idea of inhabiting language and experiencing the multi-dimensionality of consciousness beyond language might be a fun thing to play with as you're navigating your world which is probably even busier than mine it's probably remarkably busier than mine so I hope you have the chance to experience that feeling of going inward and going to the multi-dimensionality of the language and I also really appreciate you taking the time to listen to me today to join me today and then just a little bit of a reminder if you want to connect with me even further time sensitive so you can sign up to my courses refreshing grammar which is free until the 12th of November you can have unlimited access to refreshing grammar for the low low price of 40 quid 40 pounds which is available until the 12th of November and then you can have the grammar of show don't tell for the low low price of 40 pounds which is available until the 12th of November and there's also the online event with off the shelf which is called the impossibility of words a linguist's cure for writers block that's on Friday the 11th of October at 6 30 p.m.
London time and I will post links for all of those in the show notes if you have questions go to jodycluck.com and click on the contact link and also make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you like what you're here thanks so much talk to you next time