Metaphoric extension, relational categories, and abstraction

ABSTRACT

We propose that concepts exist along a continuum of abstraction, from highly concrete to highly abstract, and we explore a critical kind of abstract category: relational abstractions. We argue that these relational categories emerge gradually from concrete concepts through a process of progressive analogical abstraction that renders their common structure more salient. This account is supported by recent findings in historical linguistics, language acquisition and neuroscience. We suggest that analogical abstraction provides a major route for the development of abstractions in language and cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Analogical abstraction
• progressive alignment
• career of metaphor
• concept development
• relational categories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As used in cognitive science, abstraction generally conveys not just any loss of specificity, but one that reveals important or enduring characteristics (Burgoon et al., 2013). However, not all abstractions – even relational abstraction – capture important information. For example, things smaller than Jupiter is highly abstract, yet we would not consider it particularly informative.

2 A distinction is often made between the terms concept (the intension of a word’s meaning) and category (the extension). However, their use in the current literature is mixed, and the term “relational categories” is generally used in work on nominal relational concepts.

3 Relational categories include temporally bound categories, such as passenger or bride, as well as enduring ones, such as carnivore or ratio.

4 We are not saying that relational concepts lack concrete features entirely. As discussed later, many relational concepts are derived historically through gradual abstraction from concrete concepts, resulting in a continuum of concreteness.

5 Indeed, some relational nouns are derived from verbs (e.g. robbery / rob) and preserve the argument structure of the verb (Barker & Dowty, 1993).

6 We use the term “conventional figurative” to mean a figurative expression for which the base term has a conventional metaphoric meaning. Thus the figurative “An X is (like) a Y,” would count as a conventional figurative as long as Y has an applicable associated abstraction, even if X is novel in combination with Y.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Office of Naval Research [award number N00014-16-1-2613], as well as by the National Science Foundation-Funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center [grant number SBE-1041707], to the first author.