The structure of constancy: Metaphor, language, and the chaos of Shakespeare's English

This dissertation presents a new model for language and literature based upon a synthesis of recent findings in each of three areas of research: metaphor studies, cognitive linguistics, and chaos theory. A review of metaphor studies shows that a breakdown has occurred in the traditional rhetorical and philosophical distinctions between literal and metaphorical language. Studies propose a new definition of metaphor based on its structural interactions, not just between discrete lexical items, but between multiple semantic categories contained within entire semantic domains. The thesis examines the interactive model of metaphor found in the area of cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes metaphor's cognitive functions as well as its linguistic functions. Cognitive linguistics provides literary studies a method for the close reading of texts based on the theory that metaphor is an embodied cognitive and linguistic process, a preconceptual and prepropositional mechanism whose characteristic structure is the holistic gestalt. An evaluation of this theory in light of recent findings in chaos theory reveals a profound similarity between the cognitive linguistic model and ongoing studies of nonlinear dynamic systems found in mathematics and in the physical and life sciences. The result of a synthesis between these areas is a conception of language, not as an abstract or transcendental system, but as a chaotic system that is material and embodied, having the capacity to organize itself at primary semantic levels into complex semantic, morphological, and syntactic structures subject to the same laws governing fractal geometries of scale. This concept is tested against two areas of historical scholarship in early modern English culture and language. The first is the early modern epistemological and cognitive framework of analogical reasoning, inherited through classical and medieval tradition and reinforced through Renaissance rhetoric and dialectic theory. The second is the nature of the Early Modern English language, in particular the English of Shakespeare's day, which is shown to have undergone unprecedented semantic change, a fact that supports the dissertation's proposed model of language formation and history.