The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory

Peter Meineck, William Michael Short, Jennifer Devereaux, Peter Meineck, William Michael Short, Jennifer Devereaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317429982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world.

Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.

This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.

Part I

Cognitive linguistics

1

Cognitive-functional grammar and the complexity of early Greek epic diction

Ahuvia Kahane

Avant propos

Formal patterns and repetition are prominent features of the diction of Homer’s poetry and, in varying degrees, of early Greek epic and other Homerica.¹ In the last hundred years, students of oral-formulaic theory have argued that such repetition, structured by formal rules of composition, comprises the essential ‘grammar’ of Homeric verse and of oral poetry.² Whether we accept this view or not,³ it shares basic methodological premises with many general approaches to language such as the standard, paradigmatic frameworks of Greek and Latin grammar, de Saussure’s views of langue and parole, Chomskyan generative grammar and other transformational grammars. These are all ‘principles and parameters’ approaches to language which place heavy emphasis on linguistic form and on “a unified set of algebraic rules” that are largely “meaningless themselves and insensitive to the meaning of the elements they algorithmically combine”.⁴ Most approaches of this type view systems of rules as the core of language and many consider lexicon, idioms, conceptual frameworks, irregular constructions, pragmatic aspects of language and usage in general as peripheral.⁵ Oral-formulaic theory approaches epic diction along similar lines. It stresses the importance of formal rules – its key term is the ‘formula’ – while playing down the idea of contingent lexical, semantic and context-sensitive usage. Singers use an “extensive” but “economical” system of pre-fabricated, traditional formulaic elements which are combined by means of formal ‘algorithmic’ rules in order to compose well-formed hexameters in performance.⁶ To take the familiar example, speech-introductory verses beginning with Τὸν/Τὴν δ᾽ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη [//→hepth.] are regularly used in conjunction with several name+epithet formulae such as πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς, πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς, κρείων Ἀγαμέμνων, κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ, or νεφεληγερέτα Ζεύς, that fill the slot from the hepthemimeral caesura to the verse-end [hepth.→//] to express a general “essential idea” such as “X spoke to him in a certain tone or with a certain gesture” or simply “X [Odysseus; Achilleus; etc.] spoke to him”.⁷ As with other systematic approaches to grammar, oral-formulaic arguments grasp diction that does not follow the rule as exceptional and anomalous. This view played up to a polarized conception of form vs. meaning and of traditional vs. individual diction.⁸

Of course, oral-formulaic arguments drew strong opposition from a wide range of scholars who were interested in nuanced, context-specific sense, theme, allusion, intertextuality and other aspects of content and meaning.⁹ Many scholars also emphasized non-formulaic elements in epic verse as well as inconsistencies and gaps in the formal system of diction in epic.¹⁰ Nevertheless, such opposing views also tended to uphold the methodological polarities of rule and anomaly and of tradition and originality.¹¹

Cognitive-functional linguistics

Over the years, there have been various attempts to reconcile form and meaning in epic diction.¹² Some of the more recent of these have incorporated cognitive-functional approaches and what is sometimes known as usage-based grammar. These approaches hold particular promise, above all since they challenge the obdurate dichotomy of form and content at root. Cognitive linguistics argue for a continuum of grammar and lexicon driven by communicative practice.¹³ As developmental psychologist and linguist Michael Tomasello, for example, says,¹⁴

Usage-based theories hold that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, with grammar being derivative.

Verbal communication, argue usage-based linguists, does not depend on an innate, unique, pre-existing linguistic apparatus but on general cognitive skills, which include the ability to share attention with others and to redirect it, the ability to learn the “intentional actions” of others, to recognize, imitate and adapt patterns and to form categories of similar objects and events on the basis of such recognition (hence such patterns are “derivative” rather than pre-existing or primary). As Tomasello points out:¹⁵

When human beings use symbols to communicate with one another, stringing them together into sequences, patterns of use emerge and become consolidated into grammatical construction.

We tend to form sensory schemas, patterns of sound, words and phrases, or “constructions”, which, as Adelle Goldberg, for example, defines them, are “learned pairings of form with semantic or discourse functions”.¹⁶ Such constructions are present at all levels of grammatical analysis including “morphemes or words, idioms, partially lexically filled and fully general phrasal patterns”.¹⁷ Through comparison and analogy, usage evolves to create new expressions based on similarities within two or more complex wholes (e.g., in the case of Homer, between the formula πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς and πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς – these are different, but analogous expressions).¹⁸ Here, then, is the crucial innovation within usage-based grammars:¹⁹

As opposed to conceiving linguistic rules as algebraic procedures for combining words and morphemes that do not themselves contribute to meaning, this approach conceives linguistic constructions as themselves meaningful linguistic symbols – since they are nothing other than the patterns in which meaningful linguistic symbols are used in communication.

From a usage-based perspective, grammar is an epiphenomenon.²⁰ Thus, every formal pattern and element of structure can as a matter of principle embody “semantic or discursive” values. This idea, if it can be shown to work in epic diction, offers the prospect of cutting through old critical Gordian knots. It can pave the way to new, less problematic and more meaningful reading of the densely patterned diction of Homeric verse and other early Greek epic.

Homeric scholarship and usage-based analysis

Direct applications of cognitive-functional and usage-based approaches to the grammar and semantics of epic diction are relatively recent, but recognition of the meaning of form and of the importance of usage is evident even in early work within the oral-formulaic scholarly tradition. Albert Lord, for instance, pointed out that:²¹

When we speak a language, our native language, we do not repeat words and phrases that we have memorized consciously, but the words and sentences emerge from habitual usage. This is true of the singer of tales working in his specialized grammar.

Other Homer scholars, for example T. G. Rosenmeyer, had recognized that “the bard regards his poetic phrase as indistinguishable from poetic substance”.²² Views of this type were also often embedded in studies of individual expressions, formulae and formulaic patterns.²³ Consider, for example, Anne Amory Parry’s well-known 1973 book Blameless Aegisthus which set out to explain the meaning of the epithet ἀμύμων, “blameless” and of other traditional epithets. Ἀμύμων was often thought to be a semantically ‘empty’ metrical element since in the Odyssey (1.29), for example, it describes Aegisthus, who is not “blameless” but famously blamed for his wicked treachery.²⁴ Looking closely at all the contexts of this epithet’s use and at similar epithets such as κρατερός, ἀγλαός and ἄλκιμός, Amory Parry concluded that in Homer Ἀμύμων had no moral connotations. Rather, she argued, it described a heroic quality: its primary connotation was simply “handsome”.²⁵ As might have been expected, among more orthodox exponents of oral-formulaic views, this argument was resisted. In a review of Blameless Aegisthus, J. B. Hainsworth, for example, suggested that, “Whatever its emo...