Anna Calonge Cases

About Anna’s Research:

The emergence of abstract concepts (‘democracy’, ‘infinity’) is intriguing: unlike concrete concepts, they lack perceivable referents, meaning they are not as easily learnt from “mere” exposure to the world. Recent research emphasises language’s role in the acquisition of these abstract concepts. However, little work has addressed how linguistic mechanisms contribute to the historical development of abstract concepts.
I hypothesise that there are at least three crucial mechanisms driving the development of abstract ideas: (i) the ability to compositionally create new meaning by combining preexisting meanings at a morphological level (count+less > ‘countless’); (ii) the linguistic representation of logical operators, such as negation and universal quantification, in morphemes (‘im-mortal’); and (iii) the linguistic representation of space within morphemes (‘per-spective’), which enables spatial metaphoric mappings.
Combining corpus-based and experimental methods, my proposal focuses on the power of the morphological unit to compositionally create complex ideas due to the cognitive advantages of ‘labelling’: labels unify sparse experiences, aiding categorisation, especially for abstract concept development. The theoretical framework for this project also builds on embodied cognitive theories, including Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which posits that metaphoric thought is central to conceptualisation and that abstract concepts are grounded via these metaphoric mappings in more concrete experiences.
This project aims to expand the research focusing on abstract concept development in the cognitive field, and to contribute to the language-and-thought debate by rethinking the role of language in the history of ideas.