A Holistic, Socio-Cognitive Model of Language and Language Change: A Diachronic Semasiological Story of 'Bedlam' (1)

ABSTRACT This paper (2) presents a holistic, socio-cognitive model of describing language and explaining its change. The primary domain of the study is lexical semantics, both synchronic and diachronic. The object of the study are lexical expressions, which, like language as such, are contemplated on three dimensions--intersubjective, interactive and cognitive. The object is approached from three perspectives, namely theoretical, synchronic and diachronic. The latter two standpoints are not neatly detachable, because language in its perpetual change is history in the making. The panchronic perspective, in turn, is indispensable for the advancement of a holistic, socio-cognitive model of describing language and explaining its change, which is generated via a critically made synthesis of three investigative approaches, namely, cognitivism, Anlageteleologie, and invisible-hand theory. The authors to whom I am particularly indebted for engendering in my mind a fruitful capacity for wonder, resulting in the present model, are Adamska-Salaciak, Keller, Langacker, Itkonen, Lakoff and Johnson. The paper climaxes in a conjectural story unfolding the history of English 'bedlam', (3) thereby illustrating a practical application of the model. 1. A holistic, socio-cognitive model of language and meaning Before advancing the model of explaining and understanding the socio-cultural evolution of language in general and meaning in particular, it is essential that a theoretical delimitation of the object of study be proposed. From the vantage point of what might be called socio-cognitivism, language and, by implication, meaning are approached as dynamic, three-dimensional epiphenomena of human (re)cognition, specific communicative context, and historical socio-cultural context (cf. Keller 1994: 64, 87; Schonefeld 2001: 151). The three interdependent dimensions are dubbed cognitive or subjective, (4) interactive, and intersubjective. (5) In this construal, language is a historical, socio-cultural institution, a "phenomenon of the third kind" (Keller 1994: 57), (6) which acquires its functional potency via its embedment in a network of social relational acts performed by speakers, who connect this otherwise powerless abstract system of signs and formal rules to their experientially and interactively conceived conceptualizations, i.e., concepts grounded in neurolophysiologically determined conscious and unconscious cognition (e.g., Johnson and Lakoff 1997, 2002). The raison d'etre of language is to be found on the interactive level, and it is the exertion of influence, via verbalization of our conceptual experience, namely meaning (see Langacker 1988a: 6), upon our interlocutors (Keller 1994: 85). Meaning is therefore primarily the communicative means toward attaining the social goal of affecting one's addressee, and the product of what can be described as contextual semiosis, namely online meaning construction. The "contextual", "emergent" (Langacker 1987: 157) structure, negotiated in interaction, is meaning on the move--the first to break free from the conventional synchronic ranks, pulling the established structure to destinations unknown. 2. A dynamic construal of language and lexical meaning On the interactive dimension, language is tangibly a process. The inherent resilience and constant evolving of language, contingent upon micro-dimensional human action, provide for its optimal functionality and untrammeled subsistence--the super-goal striven for unconsciously and attained inadvertently and epiphenomenally in relevantly similar intersubjective behavior. (7) This is so because owing to its processualism, language can respond to the changing needs of its users, dictated by alterations in the world, as perceived by humans, and in conceptualizations thereof. And the existence of language is guaranteed as long as there are people who need the institutional framework of conventions and intuitive guidelines for innovative behavior, within which language operates and evolves, and which results from and reacts to what the attending users do, why and how they do it. …