The conceptual profile of the lexeme home
Résumé
Despite the descriptive power of the Idealised Cognitive Model (Lakoff 1987), the analytical framework faces two inherent problems. First, Idealised Cognitive Models treat language-culture to be a homogenous object study, producing ‘idealised’ results that do not readily account for social variation or change. Second, they produce results that are not systematically falsifiable, an essential tenet of scientific method. In a diachronic study of the American concept of HOME, this study seeks to develop analytical tools for the empirical description of conceptualisation that produces results sensitive to social variation and that can be falsified. Employing the profile-based usage-feature method (Geeraerts et al. 1994, Gries 2003), the study examines samples taken from texts by three 19C American writers (James Cooper, David Thoreau and Fredrick Turner) and two 20C lyricists (Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen). The aim is to determine whether usage-feature analysis is capable of capturing the kind of conceptual structure typical of studies on Idealised Cognitive Models. The analysis focuses on a set of metaphoric source concepts and a range of usage-features chosen as indices of conceptual structure. Using multivariate statistics, it investigates the relationship between the different metaphors relative to their usage over the course of two centuries. The study demonstrates the proof-of-principle that socially sensitive and falsifiable descriptive studies of culturally determined conceptual structure are possible.
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