Fleshing out an interdisciplinary bridge: Cognitive neuroscience meets systemic-functional linguistics

GARCÍA, ADOLFO M.

Udine

Otro; Lecture Series of the Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature, Comunicazione, Formazione e Società Università degli Studi di Udine; 2016

Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature, Comunicazione, Formazione e Società Università degli Studi di Udine

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has long been characterized by its permeability to interdisciplinary contributions. However, it has remained virtually uninformed by neuroscience. Such a disconnection has become all the more unfortunate since SFL ventured into the cognitive domain (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Opening a new avenue of disciplinary interaction for SFL, this paper reviews experimental studies on the embodiment of processes and verbs of doing (i.e., semantic and lexical representations of action verbs), highlighting their theoretical implications for cognitive modeling within SFL. Available data corroborates the SFL assumptions that these processes and verbs are (i) conceptually different from the participants and nouns they implicate, (ii) functionally distinguishable from other process and verb types, and (iii) non-arbitrarily related to each other. Moreover, the evidence shows that (at least some of) the conceptual distinctions within semantics are naturally grounded in lower-level (motor and perceptual) neurocognitive distinctions. This, we propose, calls for an elaboration of the stratified SFL model via the inclusion of a sensorimotor stratum. More generally, the article seeks to foster an empirically sound and theoretically relevant dialogue between SFL and embodied approaches within cognitive neuroscience.