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Aleksander Szwedek
– Relations, expressed mostly by verbs and adjectives, are abstract, and can
be conceptualized as objects;
– Objects are not subject to further metaphorical conceptualization and thus
constitute the ultimate source domain.
5. Language acquisition
Gentner (1982) and Gentner and Boroditsky (2001) convincingly argue that
nouns are acquired before verbs. They offer an analysis of language data, as
well as a cognitive explanation. Gentner and Boroditsky call upon earlier experimental
research (discussed in the work of Gentner 1982) that showed that
nouns predominate in early production and comprehension and children learn
object reference readily. What, however, is most interesting for the purposes of
the present paper is Gentner’s (1982) explanation in terms of natural partitioning
and relational relativity.
Referring to natural partitioning, Gentner (1982: 324) wrote that “there are
in the experimental flow certain highly cohesive collections of percepts that are
universally conceptualized as objects, and … these tend to be lexicalized as
nouns across languages. Children learning language have already isolated these
cohesive packages – the concrete objects and individuals – from their surroundings”.
Furthermore, on relational relativity he argued that “when we conceptualize
the perceptual world, the assignment of relational terms is more variable
crosslinguistically than that of nominal terms … Predicates show a more variable
mapping from concepts to words” (Gentner 1982: 323–325).
6. Final conclusions
All of these phenomena indicate the primacy of nouns over verbs, but there
is a difference between their role in selectional restrictions, objectification, and
language acquisition, on the one hand, and in FSP on the other hand. The former
three are based on the cognition of objects in the material world, following
the sharp distinction between the material and phenomenological worlds. The
latter is a context sensitive phenomenon affecting concrete and abstract nouns
alike. I would like to suggest that the FSP behavior is a later development in the
history of the language following a primeval distinction between physical and
abstract entities, the latter’s conceptualization as physical objects, and then
both, physical and abstract entities being represented by nouns. Thus, the reference
of abstract nouns is an extension of the reference of the concrete nouns.