Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Human Learning and Cognition

Fall 2003

A Eulogy for Ratey, Terry, and Fauconnier

The basic idea behind this eulogy is to try to draw closure to this course, but more importantly to the material presented in these three actually very different books. In this class we've often talked about the death of different textbook authors. This of course is a metaphorical extension of the term 'death'. What we mean when we say this is that we have in effect finished our focus of the material in the class. It's important however to remember that just because we have killed a certain amount of material and different types of material that is not the death of that material. The beauty of metaphorical death is that it is not the end. When it comes to ideas, death is just the beginning. And really this is how much you think about this course in general and the work of these three people in particular.

As Fauconnier explains in his final chapter all thought is based on mapping. We map concepts on top of each other to form new types of concepts. You should hopefully have figured out by now that this is exactly what we would try to do in this course. We took three seemingly unrelated areas (Ratey's general brain functions, Terry's memory studies, and Fauconnier's study of cognitive linguistic discourse) and studied them in succession and to a certain extent separately. What remains to be done is to take these three ideas and link them together. In other words, we want to map them onto each other. That is really what science and learning is all about. It is very important that you try to see how it these different theories/materials are related to each other. The order of operations we undertook in the class was from more general to more specific and we took one fairly large leap in the transition from Terry to Fauconnier. Still, however, the links should be clear. Terry and the information he supplied on basic memory systems is central to the process. Any system of memory that we have has to be supported by brain structure and by what we know about how the brain works. Therefore, what we read in Ratey needs to be used to support or refute what was said in Terry. Likewise, a system like the one described in Fauconnier for language has to be supported not only by memory systems as discussed in Terry but also by basic brain structure as discussed in Ratey. That's what it all comes down to. Any theory of language has to be supported by brain structure. It is a theory in cognitive linguistics called embodiment. If the functioning of the brain does not seem to support a certain theory of language linguistics or language learning for that matter then that theory must be called into question. This is ultimately the purpose of this course.

At the center of all this is the still unclear theory I introduced called clutter theory. Clutter theory can be seen as a very large blanket theory which takes all three of these different approaches and blends and together into one giant theory of language as viewed through the process of language acquisition and use in general and second or subsequent language learning in particular. Is important to remember that clutter theory in its present underdeveloped form is both very basic and very extensive. If we can form an analogy here in which a theory is like a building, then clutter theory is like the roof of the building. The roof really decides the shape of the building and what will be inside the building, but at the same time the roof is useless without strong support. We support theories by focussing on small points which are chosen based on the structure and form of the theory itself. This is how science works. No scientist can actually prove one gigantic theory in one fell swoop. Even though the researcher might have one big theory in mind is not possible to prove that immediately. A series of smaller steps used to support the theory must be undertaken.

Moving backwards and taking Fauconnier as the most specific model in our system (and as such the one which must be supported) we can begin to describe a new cognitive type of linguistic system. Central to Fauconnier`s model is the idea of frames. These frames are based both on scenarios or schemas and prototypes. In order for this to be true there must, then be a system in the brain which allows people to store this information. This of course would be the memory and the several distinctions in memory discussed in Terry (explicit-implicit, declarative-procedural, semantic-episodic) all relate to this directly. Since the system described in Fauconnier is also context dependent there have to be interfaces with language and all kinds of extra-linguistic types of data. This is where Ratey comes in providing us with a model of general brain functioning so we can determine some of the possible points of interface and how this might be supposed to happen. This is a huge endeavor and it is not expected that you as students would have a clear fix on it yet, but the purpose of this class and of using those three now dead authors is to get you started.