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Languages as Entities, Substances, and Containers: The Ontological Foundations of Language Myths

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Demystifying Bilingualism

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Abstract

This chapter discusses ontological metaphors, that is, the conceptualization of abstract phenomena, such as language(s) in terms of objects, substances, or containers. It is argued that it is only because of these ontological reifications that psychologists can think of languages and language components as having some kind of concrete existence in the brain and as interacting with each other in different ways.

Understanding our experiences in terms of objects and substances allows us to pick out parts of our experience and treat them as discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind. Once we can identify our experience as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them, and quantify them—and, by this means, reason about them.

—Lakoff and Johnson (1980a: 25)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the following analyses, words highlighted in boldface in the quotations serve the purpose of emphasizing the most important passages. Boldface in the original quotations will be marked by “[boldface in original].”

  2. 2.

    Compare also Jäkel’s (1993: 6–7; 2003: 157–158) observations on the conceptual metaphor the mind is a container and understanding is taking idea-object s into the mind-container . Rephrasing Jäkel, we can identify a conceptual metaphor learning a language is taking language-substance (or: word-object s) into the mind-container . See also Bellin (1995: 167) about this metaphor in early twentieth-century psychological papers.

  3. 3.

    As a matter of fact, the present work is no exception to this.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Silke Jansen, Sonja Higuera del Moral, Jessica Stefanie Barzen, Pia Reimann & Markus Opolka

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Jansen, S., Higuera del Moral, S., Barzen, J.S., Reimann, P., Opolka, M. (2021). Languages as Entities, Substances, and Containers: The Ontological Foundations of Language Myths. In: Demystifying Bilingualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87063-8_4

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