George Lakoff

“Language and Emotion” (2016) showed a number of nonobvious ways in which the nature of emotion can be studied via the way that emotions are expressed, mostly unconsciously, in language. The results given there have come mostly from cognitive linguistics, structured neural computation, and embodied cognition taken together. The references given, survey those results and their empirical basis. The commentators have each made contributions to our ultimate understanding of emotion, each from a different field with a different set of assumptions and research techniques. But they are not up on contemporary embodied cognitive linguistics. As a result, most missed points made in the article. The good news is that each got a chance to introduce their own research to our readership.

Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns.