Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

354 | HOW THE MIND WORKSIdeas are gifts, communication is giving, the speaker is the sender, theaudience is the recipient, knowing is having.Location in space is one of the two fundamental metaphors in language,used for thousands of meanings. The other is force, agency, andcausation. Leonard Talmy points out that in each of the following pairs,the two sentences refer to the same event, but the events feel differentto us:The ball was rolling along the grass.The ball kept on rolling along the grass.John doesn't go out of the house.John can't go out of the house.Larry didn't close the door.Larry refrained from closing the door.Shirley is polite to him.Shirley is civil to him.Margie's got to go to the park.Margie gets to go to the park.The difference is that the second sentence makes us think of an agentexerting force to overcome resistance or overpower some other force.With the second ball-in-the-grass sentence, the force is literally a physicalforce. But with John, the force is a desire: a desire to go out whichhas been restrained. Similarly, the second Larry seems to house onepsychic force impelling him to close the door and another that overpowersit. For Shirley, those psychodynamics are conveyed by the merechoice of the adjective civil. In the first Margie sentence, she isimpelled to the park by an external force in spite of an internal resistance.In the second, she is propelled by an internal force that overcomesan external resistance.The metaphor of force and resistance is even more explicit in thisfamily of sentences:Fran forced the door to open.Fran forced Sally to go.Fran forced herself to go.