Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

34 Chapter 2
Metaphor, metonymy [part-whole metaphors], irony and other tropes [figures
of speech] are not linguistic distortions of literal mental thought but constitute
basic schemes by which people conceptualize (p. 1).
Metaphor is a fundamental mental capacity by which people understand
themselves and the world through the conceptual mapping of knowledge from
one domain onto another (p. 207).
Clearly, in so far as we are engaged in verbal communication more complex
than asking directions to the nearest bus stop, the understanding of language
requires the contributions of both literal understanding, on the one hand, and
metaphoric/connotative/affective processes, on the other. Since linguistic and
paralinguistic information must be brought together to obtain the benefits of
both literal and non-literal modes, the question of “integration” is an important
issue still facing cognitive psychology. This general problem has been understood
for many years, and felt acutely by researchers in artificial intelligence
who have been able to implement a variety of literal language-understanding
processes and supra-human logical inference mechanisms, but have utterly
failed to build intelligent machines. Given the nature of psychological research
and the underlying assumptions of a scientific methodology,itisinevitable
that definition of the identifiable components of cognition should precede discussion
of the integration of those components, but the gap between robotic
language-processing and the level of normal human metaphoric language use is
as great as ever. From a neuropsychological perspective, the bridging of the gap
between the realm of literal language and that of non-literal language means
addressing questions of the relationship between the language functions of the
LH and RH.
B. The effects of callosal damage
The results concerning the language specializations listed in Figure 2-2 have
come predominantly from patients with unilateral damage to the cerebral cortex,
but a remarkable fact is that callosal damage alone can produce effects similar
to those following RH damage (e.g., the loss of affective intonation [Klouda
et al. 1988; Ross et al. 1997] and infrequent use of affect-related words following
callosal section [TenHouten et al. 1985]). In general, the language abnormalities
of the split-brain patients are mild when tested in a non-lateralized
fashion, but already in the earliest discussions of these patients, Sperry (1968;
Sperry et al. 1969) noted that their spontaneous speech was affectively flat
or inappropriate, and unusually concrete with a tendency toward literalism.