The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 15 ppsx

in particular, a number of other seminal and widely utilized concepts within Cognitive Linguistics, such as image schemas this volume, chapter 9, constructions this volume, chapter 18, b

two ships sailing from San Francisco to Boston a century and a half apart are blended into a race between one ship and the ghost of the other.35Figure 4.14c gives

an example of an inadvertent phrasal blend, and figure 4.14d (adapted from Kemmer 2003, which gives an excellent discussion of schemas as tools for analyzing lexical blends) represents the graphicophonological pole of a purposeful lexical blend In each case, the blend clearly fits the pattern (schema) of 4.14a, which is itself composed of schemas.

Sweetser (1999) and others (e.g., Fauconnier 1999) have stressed that the mecha-nisms of blending must often be invoked for the analysis even of such everyday grammatical structures as Adjective-Noun constructions Having these structures already analyzed in terms of schematicity relationships among components and composite structure makes this sort of proposal much more natural and obviously right than it would be under other theoretical models.

It is probably feasible to claim that all cases of blends consist of appropriately configured arrays of schematic and partially schematic relationships among cog-nitive structures, elaborating or differing in various ways from the prototype char-acterized in figure 4.14a Such a claim does not, of course, obviate the necessity of specifying more fully what kinds of correspondences (figure 4.1c) are involved in the partially schematic mappings which are so important to the blending or of ex-plicating what kinds of emergent structures show up in the blended spaces and how they do so But at the very least, it seems clear that schematicity relationships are crucially involved in the mechanism of blending.

Figure 4.14 Blends

5 S u m m a r y

The foregoing discussion is far from exhaustive: there are other ways schematicity relations function in language and many other subtleties in the functions I have discussed It should be clear, however, that:

a relationships of schematicity are pervasive in language;

b recognition of them is crucial, at least under the Cognitive Grammar model, to understanding many of the most central kinds of structures which constitute the grammars of languages;

c in particular, a number of other seminal and widely utilized concepts within Cognitive Linguistics, such as image schemas (this volume, chapter 9), constructions (this volume, chapter 18), blends (this volume, chapter 15), metaphor (this volume, chapter 8), and (perhaps) frames, ICMs, do-mains, and mental spaces (this volume, chapters 7, 14), are usefully seen

as particular kinds (subcases) or arrangements of schemas;

d by recognizing schematicity in these different areas, the Cognitive Gram-mar model achieves significant conceptual unification and appropriate simplification of the theoretical machinery;

e our understanding of certain long-standing problems for linguistic analysis

is considerably aided by adopting this perspective.

N O T E S

1 The etymologically correct plural schemata is also used I here follow the usage of Langacker (1987a, 1991) and Lakoff (1987) in preferring schemas

2 Dictionary definitions of the term are close to the Langackerian meaning we will use

in this chapter; e.g., ‘‘a summarized or diagrammatic representation of something, an outline’’ (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1978) The term’s use

in Cognitive Linguistics traces back, at least in part, to Rumelhart’s (1975) work with computational schemas; see also this volume, chapter 9, section 2 for a fuller discussion and references

3 The other relationships mentioned in this regard are component-composite rela-tionships, symbolization relationships between phonological and semantic structures, and syntagmatic relationships between co-occurring forms Of these, the component-composite and syntagmatic relationships in their turn depend heavily on schematicity for their characterization (sections 4.9, 4.10, and 4.11; Langacker 1987a: 73–75)

4 Although this point is relevant to the question of whether there exist linguistic

‘‘primitives’’ or ‘‘atoms’’ (e.g., Wierzbicka 1996), it is not exactly the same issue For instance, Wierzbickan-style primitives, while they are to be understood as being both cognitively and linguistically universal, make no pretense of being cognitively, but only linguistically, atomic (They have a lot in common with Lakoffian ‘‘basic-level’’ and

‘‘image-schematic’’ concepts; see section 2.3.) A true conceptual (cognitive) atom would

probably be something like a single neuron firing or (if we admit a slightly higher neurological level) a message to contract a single muscle or the perception that a particular single point of the skin has been touched But it is improbable that such cognitive structures are ever the meanings of any linguistic structures Rather, it is much higher-level patterns of such cognitive events that we are conscious of and use in our communications Such patterns are, by definition, schemas

5 Although Langacker used italics instead of small caps, he clearly is talking about the relationships between the concepts, the meanings which constitute the semantic poles of the lexical items in question I am following the tradition of representing such purely semantic constructs in small caps

6 It does not follow that there can be no difference between a mediated schematic relationship A ? B ? C and a direct one A ? C For instance, in figure 4.9a, an arrow is represented directly from Small.Item-collector to butterfly-collector besides a relationship mediated through insect-collector This reflects my judgment that whether or not a speaker activates the Insect-collector schema on a given occasion (or even has such

a schema), butterfly-collector is likely to be coactivated and compared directly with Small.Item-collector and to be strongly sanctioned by it

7 In particular, unless there is some special factor at work, casual comparisons which yield few or no similarities are highly unlikely to ever become cognitively entrenched in the first place, much less conventionalized among a group of speakers

8 In Figure 4.1, A might be dog and B hyena; C would be a schema which we might call dog-like carnivore, which would tend to become established by the mental activity

of construing hyenas as a (deviant) kind of dogs

9 Figure 4.1c does not indicate, as 4.1a and 4.1b do, the direction of comparison; i.e., it represents a comparison A3 - B as much as A -"B

10 In figure 4.2a, A and B might be man and woman, C featherless biped, D

while the other identifications remain constant

11 Figure 4.3 might represent meanings of the English word baby as follows:

12 Pinker (1994: 106), for one, holds that ‘‘a noun, for instance, is simply a word that does nouny things; it is the kind of word that comes after an article, can have an ’s stuck onto it, and so on.’’ The major problem with this statement for a cognitive grammarian is the word ‘‘simply.’’ Pinker’s summary statement is that ‘‘a part of speech, then, is not a kind of meaning; it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules.’’ My argument here is that obeying such rules should be counted as a kind of meaning, but I also follow Lan-gacker in contending, below, that there is other semantic material in the overall schema for the category, and certainly in its prototypical subschemas

13 Many cite Saussure’s ([1916] 1996) seminal notion of ‘‘oppositions’’ in this regard: a category is defined not by what it includes but by what it contrasts with, and thus excludes Some substantive characterizations are also selective to the point of near vacuity For

instance, the often-cited choice of bipedality and featherlessness as the criterial features for defining humanity involves ignoring many substantive qualities of humans which are intuitively more central, such as cognitive and particularly linguistic abilities, manual dexterity and technological skill, facial appearance and general bodily shape, complex social behaviors (again including language), and so on

14 A type of phonological class which deserves special mention is that of phonemes They are usefully modeled as near-classical categories in which less salient elaborate structures (allophones) are largely subsumed under highly prototypical schemas with little overlap Traditionally problematic issues, such as aberrant allophones, contextual neu-tralizations, and ‘‘archiphonemes,’’ can be naturally and insightfully modeled in schematic hierarchies including such structures Similarly, phonological features can be modeled as schemas, and their behavior, including those aspects that have been problematic for other theories, fits the model well (Langacker 1987a: 388–94; this volume, chapter 17, section 5; Nathan, this volume, chapter 23)

15 Note that to be true schemas for the lexical item Hilary Rodham Clinton, these structures must be bipolar symbolic structures, with a signifie´/signifiant structure; that

is, a complete representation would have something like [Hilary Rodham Clinton / 'hil@ri rA :d@m klintn"] / [woman’s name / X] / [name / X] / [thing / X] We will use bolded lettering with initial capitals (e.g., Woman’s Name) to indicate structures of this sort: too schematic to be lexical, but neither solely semantic nor solely phono-logical

16 thing may be thought of as the meaning of thing in contexts such as anything

at all

17 The differences between the schemas thing, relation, and process, in Lan-gacker’s view, are thus matters of construal (see this volume, chapter 3) rather than necessarily of identity of the entities referred to The verb or adjective parallel (both relations, one processual and the other not) and the noun parallel(s) (a thing) can thus be used of the same pair of lines; the differences are not differences of truth values or of what situation is referred to, but are, nonetheless, semantic distinctions Nominal/verbal pairs denoting events or other processes (e.g., the noun love and the verb love, or the noun distribution and the verb distribute) are handled similarly; the differences in meaning consist of different construals imposed on a set of interconnected entities, designating either the set as a whole or the interconnections (evolving over time) which help constitute

it as a set

18 As usual, it is difficult to discuss these matters without recourse to the ‘‘content metaphor.’’ We could perhaps reword this statement to say ‘‘the structures involved are linked to definite cognitive routines which constitute their semantic poles.’’

19 ‘‘Spell-out rules’’ would be an exception: Cognitive Grammar holds that the re-lationship between a meaning and the phonological structure associated with it is not one

of schematicity but of a different, associative rather than comparative, linkage Not co-incidentally, spell-out rules are one case where what is called a ‘‘rule’’ is not a general-ization, but rather an idiosyncratic fact about a single lexical item

20 NP, VP, and the like are of course shorthand for more substantive characteriza-tions of the sort required under Cognitive Grammar, with the definition of an NP centered

on that of an N (i.e., it will have the schema thing as its semantic pole) and that of

VP centered on that of a V (i.e., the schema process as its semantic pole) Similar substantive characterizations would be necessary for Aux, the uninflected verb represented

as be, the past-participial inflection represented as -en, the Determiner, the Locative element schema, and so forth

21 In figure 4.6 and later diagrams, we follow the convention of using boxes with dotted-dashed lines and rounded corners to indicate structures which are novel or near-novel, that is, not yet established in their own right even though, as in this case, they may be grammatical in the sense of being sanctioned—see section 4.5—by established schemas

22 In figure 4.8, and not elsewhere in this chapter, an attempt has been made to render the parameter of cognitive distance by physical distance between represented en-tities: thus, in 4.8a the schema is much closer to its elaborations and they to each other than

in 4.8e

23 The parenthesized perhaps is meant to indicate that there may well be a good many speakers for whom the structures in question are not well established in their own right To the extent that any of them is established, it contributes its bit of legitimacy to beetle-collector; if it is not, the lack of its sanction does not mean the novel structure is therefore ill formed The sanction from bug-collector is very nearly direct, since beetles are a proto-typical kind of bugs; it is only the phonological specifications of bug and beetle that conflict

24 Presumably, this involved analogy with words like water-jet or air-jet An analysis similar to the one given in the text below would apply to the case of inkjet as well The sanction received from such high-techy words as ram jet, turbojet, Lear Jet, etc., or from schemas derived from them, will not be further mentioned but is certainly a real factor in the discussion that follows

25 DeskJet, LaserJet, CopyJet, OfficeJet, PaintJet, QuietJet, ScanJet, and ThinkJet are all trademarks of the Hewlett-Packard Company Deskjet, and to a lesser extent laserjet, seem

to have achieved the marketing nirvana of being common nouns for the type of product as well as specific names for the brand

26 The historical order of these coinages is an interesting but nondeterminative question If the (historical) order was different from the one presented here, this order can

be taken as representing the experience of a hearer like me who first learned the terms in the order given

27 I will not pursue further the issue of whether a schema can consist of a disjunctive

‘‘either-or’’ structure or the closely related question of whether a list of alternatives may function in certain ways as a schema would I have argued elsewhere (Tuggy 1992: 254–55) that the answer to the second question, in certain instances at least, is yes

28 ‘‘In practice, we are more likely to call a semantic structure a domain if there are a substantial number of concepts profiled relative to that structure The term ‘domain’ implies a degree of cognitive independence not found in a dimension’’ (Croft 1993: 340)

29 Lakoff and Turner (1989: 103) appear to use the words ‘‘domain’’ and ‘‘schema’’ interchangeably in discussing metaphor and metonymy: ‘‘In metaphor there are two conceptual domains, and one is understood in terms of the other Metonymy involves only one conceptual domain A metonymic mapping occurs within a single domain, not across domains via metonymy one can refer to one entity in a schema by referring

to another entity in the same schema one entity is taken as standing for one other entity in the same schema, or for the schema as a whole.’’

30 Since John Wayne is a human being, there is in the encyclopedic semantic structure attached to his name a strong, though not particularly salient, expectation that he eats food (and engages in other typical human activities) The toast, in contrast, contains

a clear and salient expectation that the designatum was produced in order to be eaten These specifications function as e-sites to which ate corresponds However, (i) neither

is as salient within or central to John Wayne and the toast as ate’s e-sites are to it, and (ii) there is little elaborative distance between them and ate Thus, the dependence of the

noun phrases on the verb is much less than the verb’s dependence on them These rela-tively subtle points are not represented in figure 4.12

31 Although it is typical for standard transitive clauses in English to combine the verb with its object, forming a verbal phrase constituent, before combining that phrase with the subject, it is not necessary under Cognitive Grammar (and certainly not defini-tional for subjecthood vs objecthood, as in some other theories) Combination of the verb with its subject first, as implied in figures 4.12b and 4.12c, will produce the same composite structure and will in fact be favored in some syntactic environments This particular constituency is chosen here in the interest of expository clarity

32 Where there is a great disparity between a highly schematic profile determinant (typically an affix) and a highly elaborate nonprofile determinant (stem), linguists tend to dispute whether headship should be accorded to the lightweight affix or to the semantically heavier stem Thus, it may be mooted whether assign or ment is the ‘‘head’’ of

kind of semantic weight, and the prototypical head is both profile determinant and se-mantically heavier than its syntagmatic partners It becomes a matter of definition which is

‘‘head’’ when the profile determinance and overall semantic weight do not line up

33 If transitivity is a need for further specification of the nature of the object (land-mark) of a process, the elaborative link from the food specification to the toast ful-fills that need, and further elaboration is likely to be unneeded, perhaps even problematic Yet another language, or even certain dialects of English, might well allow or require an object nonetheless, giving something like the toast John Wayne ate it

34 Most speakers will agree that English and horn are components of English horn, and that eaves and drop are components of eavesdrop; that is, the participation of these words in the construction is clear even though the nature of their participation is not In other cases, the participation itself is not clear: for instance, few speakers think of halter as saliently composed of halt and -er, and fewer still would recognize the morphemes rue and -th in the ruth of ruthless Space precludes full discussion of such cases here, but analyzing compositionality in terms of schematicity relationships automatically provides for such variations in analyzability, allowing them to fit with perfect ease within the gamut

of constructional types (Langacker 1987a: 457–66)

35 The solidness of the boxes around the two input spaces and the generic space in figure 4.14b is accurate only in the particular context in which the blend arose, where those concepts were established in the minds of the author and most readers They are not widely established structures of English

R E F E R E N C E S

Adams, Marilyn Jager, and Allan Collins 1979 A schema-theoretic view of reading In Roy

O Freedle, ed., New directions in discourse processing 1–22 Norwood, NJ: Ablex Aitchison, Jean 1990 Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon Oxford: Basil Blackwell (2nd ed., 1994; 3rd ed., 2003)

Chafe, Wallace L 1987 Cognitive constraints on information flow In Russell S Tomlin, ed., Coherence and grounding in discourse 21–51 Amsterdam: John Benjamins Chomsky, Noam 1957 Syntactic structures The Hague: Mouton

Coulson, Seana, and Todd Oakley 2000 Blending basics Cognitive Linguistics 11: 175–96

Croft, William 1993 The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphors and me-tonymies Cognitive Linguistics 4: 335–70

Croft, William 2001 Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological per-spective Oxford: Oxford University Press

Fauconnier, Gilles 1997 Mappings in thought and language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Fauconnier, Gilles 1999 Methods and generalizations In Theo Janssen and Gisela Re-deker, eds., Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, scope, and methodology 95–127 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Fillmore, Charles J 1975 An alternative to checklist theories of meaning Berkeley Lin-guistics Society 1: 123–31

Kemmer, Suzanne 2003 Schemas and lexical blends In Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, Rene´ Dirven, and Klaus-Uwe Panther, eds., Motivation in language: Studies in honor

Lakoff, George 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner 1989 More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Langacker, Ronald W 1987a Foundations of cognitive grammar Vol 1, Theoretical pre-requisites Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Langacker, Ronald W 1987b Nouns and verbs Language 63: 53–94

Langacker, Ronald W 1991 Foundations of cognitive grammar Vol 2, Descriptive appli-cation Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Pinker, Steven 1994 The language instinct: How the mind creates language New York: William Morrow

Rumelhart, David 1975 Notes on a schema for stories In Daniel G Bobrow and Allan M Collins, eds., Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science 211–36 New York: Academic Press

Saussure, Ferdinand de [1916] 1996 Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale Ed Eisuke Komatsu Trans George Wolf Oxford: Pergamon

Schank, Roger C., and Robert P Abelson 1977 Scripts, plans, goals and understanding Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum

Sweetser, Eve 1999 Compositionality and blending: Semantic composition in a cognitively realistic framework In Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker, eds., Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, scope, and methodology 129–62 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Taylor, John R 1995 Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory 2nd ed Oxford: Clarendon Press (3rd ed., 2003)

Tuggy, David 1992 The affix-stem distinction: A cognitive grammar analysis of data from Orizaba Nahuatl Cognitive Linguistics 3: 237–300

Tuggy, David 1993 Ambiguity, polysemy, and vagueness Cognitive Linguistics 4: 273–90 Wierzbicka, Anna 1996 Semantics: Primes and universals Oxford: Oxford University Press

E N T R E N C H M E N T ,

S A L I E N C E , A N D

B A S I C L E V E L S

h a n s - j o ¨ r g s c h m i d

1 I n t r o d u c t i o n

One of the basic tenets of Cognitive Linguistics is that the human capacity to process language is closely linked with, perhaps even determined by, other fun-damental cognitive abilities This chapter is concerned with possible manifestations

of such abilities—most notably among them perception, memory, and attention allocation—in linguistic competence and use It deals with mechanisms that in-fluence the storage of concepts and constructions in long-term memory and with factors involved in the retrieval and activation of concepts and constructions from memory during ongoing language processing.

This chapter falls into seven sections Following this introduction, section 2 illustrates the use of the notions of entrenchment and salience in Cognitive Lin-guistics and provides initial definitions Section 3 deals with the role of entrench-ment in the emergence, sanctioning, and blocking of linguistic units More specific linguistic effects of entrenchment and salience in the lexicon are discussed in sec-tion 4 Secsec-tion 5 reviews an attempt to measure the relative entrenchment of cate-gories in lexical taxonomies Section 6 deals with effects of entrenchment and sa-lience in the area of syntax, and section 7 offers an outlook on future research in this area.

2 T h e N o t i o n s o f E n t r e n c h m e n t

a n d S a l i e n c e i n

C o g n i t i v e L i n g u i s t i c s

2.1 Entrenchment

When speakers encode their conceptualizations in words and sentences, they uti-lize their competence, that is, the linguistic knowledge of phonological, semantic, grammatical, and collocational properties of words and syntactic structures This knowledge is stored in their long-term memory It is fairly unlikely, however, that speech processing is always carried out in a creative, generative fashion in the sense that language users always have to actively, or even consciously, search their mem-ory for means of encoding what they have in mind or decoding what they hear or read Presumably, a lot of what speakers say is available in memory in some kind of prepackaged, ready-made format Convincing evidence for this claim are the words

of a language, since these represent nothing else than conceptualizations that have been fossilized by convention in a speech community We hardly ever stop to think what language would be like without prepackaged concepts readily encodable by words To refer to a dog that we see running across a meadow, there is no need to consciously construe an appropriate conceptual unit from scratch, because words like dog or poodle are readily available The question of how to name this entity will not reach a level of conscious awareness, and the activation of concepts matching our experience of the dog will hardly require cognitive effort The reason is that familiar concepts like ‘dog’ or ‘poodle’ are deeply entrenched in our memory so that their activation has become a highly automated routine.

When we are faced with a more exotic animal, say a tapir in a zoo, the situation will be different, because the cognitive processes relating the perceptual input that determines the target conceptualization to the corresponding phono-logical unit are less well entrenched We are likely to need more time to identify and categorize the animal by considering some of its most prominent attri-butes before we can even begin to search our mental lexicon for a word matching this cognitive category Clearly, then, the conceptual unit ‘tapir’, which is rep-resented by this cluster of attributes, is less well entrenched than the cognitive unit ‘dog’.

Cognitive units come to be entrenched and their activation automated to the extent that they have been used before According to Langacker (1987: 59), there is a continuous scale of entrenchment in cognitive organization Every use of a

structure has a positive impact on its degree of entrenchment, whereas

ex-tended periods of disuse have a negative impact With repeated use, a novel

structure becomes progressively entrenched, to the point of becoming a unit; moreover, units are variably entrenched depending on the frequency of their occurrence

Langacker conceives of entrenchment as being fostered by repetitions of cog-nitive events, that is, by ‘‘cogcog-nitive occurrences of any degree of complexity, be it the firing of a single neuron or a massive happening of intricate structure and large-scale architecture’’ (1987: 100) As a result, the degree of entrenchment of a cognitive

or linguistic unit correlates with its frequency of use Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema (1994) argue for a more refined version of this idea (see section 5) On their account, it is not frequency of use as such that determines entrenchment, but fre-quency of use with regard to a specific meaning or function in comparison with al-ternative expressions of that meaning or function.

Entrenchment of concepts or constructions not only depends on the frequency

of activation by individual speakers (and in that sense is not a completely private matter), but it also applies to languages as such and whole speech communities, because the frequency of occurrence of concepts or constructions in a speech com-munity has an effect on the frequency with which its members are exposed to them The (tacit rather than explicit) implication is that this results in some kind of collective automatization effect, which makes it possible to talk of the degree of entrenchment of a concept or construction in a given language.

In short, the notion of entrenchment is thus used in Cognitive Linguistics— and especially in Langacker’s influential framework of Cognitive Grammar (1987, 1991; this volume, chapter 17)—to refer to the degree to which the formation and activation of a cognitive unit is routinized and automated.

2.2 Salience

The notion of salience is employed in Cognitive Linguistics in two closely related ways, yet distinct enough to call for differentiation.

The first usage, called ‘‘cognitive salience,’’ concerns the activation of concepts

in actual speech events Cognitive units must be activated when they are required for speech processing, and this may result from either one of two mental processes: the activation of a concept may be controlled by a conscious selection mechanism, whereby the concept enters a person’s focus of attention and is being processed in current working memory (Anderson 1983: 118–20; Deane 1992: 35); alternatively, a concept may be activated through spreading activation, which occurs when the activation of one concept (e.g., ‘dog’) facilitates the activation of others (e.g., ‘bark’,

‘tail wagging’, ‘fur’, ‘poodle’, ‘alsatian’, ‘collie’, etc.) (see Collins and Quillian 1969; Collins and Loftus 1975; Anderson 1983: 86–125; and Deane 1992: 34) Irrespective of how a cognitive unit has been activated, it is said to be salient if it has been loaded,

as it were, into current working memory and has thus become part of a person’s center of attention Since the use of concepts that are already activated requires minimal cognitive effort, a high degree of cognitive salience correlates with ease of activation and little or no processing cost Currently inactive concepts, on the other hand, are nonsalient.