Language @ Leeds Distinguished Speakers Series - Prof. John E. Joseph, University of Edinburgh

Language @ Leeds Distinguished Speakers Series

Prof. John E. Joseph, University of Edinburgh

 ‘Abstract and Concrete’

Linguists, philosophers and psychologists appear largely unaware of how inconsistently they deploy the term abstract and concrete, within each field as well as across them. Sometimes a core agreement can be detected, yet looking back in time we find that some of today’s prototypical concrete words or concepts were yesterday’s prototypical abstractions, and vice-versa. Today, the dichotomy remains fundamental to lexical analysis, and underlies much current work on distributed, embodied and extended cognition and language. Amongst neurolinguistic researchers, agreement on what is abstract and concrete remains elusive, and whilst fMRI scans reveal different patterns of cerebral activity in the processing of concrete and abstract words and expressions, they have not turned up the same results in terms of brain localisation. This paper delves into the history of the distinction, including its application in the diagnosis of schizophrenia, where for a good part of the 20th century it formed the purportedly objective basis for subjecting patients to lobotomy.