The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 62 ppsx

While Cognitive Linguistics rejects the idea that syntax is autonomous in the sense described above, it also does not endorse the view that syntactic organization can be reduced to matte

abilities makes the study of linguistic structure redundant or that language

is an epiphenomenal reflex of general cognitive processes As Langacker (1999: 25) put it, ‘‘Grammar does exist.’’

c Turning to linguistic structure itself, we can enquire whether the differ-ent levels of organization, such as syntax and morphology, are autono-mous To speak of the ‘‘autonomy of syntax’’ would mean that syntax

is organized in terms of elements and relations which are unique to this level of organization—elements such as ‘‘noun phrase’’ and ‘‘subject of (a clause)’’—and which cannot be reduced to, or fully explained in terms of, elements at other levels (such as semantics) While Cognitive Linguistics rejects the idea that syntax is autonomous in the sense described above,

it also does not endorse the view that syntactic organization can be reduced

to matters of conceptualization Rather, syntactic units and their pattern-ing are analyzed in terms of conventionalized associations between a (pos-sibly highly schematic) phonological structure and a (pos(pos-sibly highly schematic) semantic structure There is, to be sure, the expectation that syntactic structures will be motivated by their semantic aspects, and, as already noted, a major thrust of Cognitive Linguistics research has been to elucidate the nature and extent of this semantic motivation At the same time, the approach leaves open the possibility that some associations of form and meaning may be essentially arbitrary and purely a matter of convention This is most obviously the case with simplex morphemes There is no reason other than convention why the phonological form [kæt] should be paired with the conceptual unit [cat] The allocation of items to inflection classes may also, in many cases, lack conceptual motivation There is no conceptual motivation for the fact that the Italian noun casa

‘house’ patterns with the definite article la Langacker (1991: 180–89) has suggested how facts of this nature can be accommodated within Cognitive Grammar.

d Recall that in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar there are only three objects

of linguistic study: semantic structures, phonological structures, and sym-bolic associations While no special status attaches to syntax and mor-phology (these, as pointed out above, are analyzed in terms of assemblies of symbolic units), phonology does constitute a distinct level of organization, and to this extent it may be legitimate to regard phonology as an auton-omous level of linguistic structure (In this, of course, Cognitive Linguistics does not differ substantially from other linguistic theories.) It is evident that phonological units such as phoneme, syllable, and foot have no con-ceptual content in themselves and cannot therefore be reduced to matters

of conceptual structure and its symbolization This, no doubt, is one of the reasons why phonology has tended to be neglected by Cognitive Linguis-tics researchers This is not to say that phonology is not a cognitive phe-nomenon Sounds, classes of sounds, and schemas for the combination of

sounds are subject to much the same categorization principles as symbolic and conceptual units These issues are addressed in Nathan (this volume, chapter 23) and Taylor (2002).

While ‘‘autonomy’’ may be a convenient slogan for capturing some important points of contrast between Cognitive Linguistics and other approaches, a closer look at the concept suggests that a more differentiated account is called for It is certainly not the case that Cognitive Linguistics is compatible with a wholesale rejection of autonomy in all its various applications to linguistic study Phonological structure, for example, has to be accorded a degree of autonomy vis-a`-vis semantic structure and symbolic relations The crucial point of differentiation, I think, lies elsewhere, namely in the Cognitive Linguistics commitment to the study of lan-guage as a symbolic system It is this commitment which has determined not only the content but also the distinctive methodology of cognitive linguistic analyses.

7 C o n v e r g e n c e s ?

In recent years, practitioners from within the field of ‘‘autonomous linguistics’’—

in view of my above remarks on autonomy, the scare quotes around the expres-sion are in order—have addressed topics that have been of central concern to Cognitive Linguistics and have even proposed solutions that are converging on, or

at least which are not radically opposed to, positions espoused by Cognitive Lin-guistics.

7.1 Constraints and Rules

Generative Grammar, and indeed other formalist models, are popularly associated with algorithmic rules which perform specified operations over inputs Needless

to say, rules in this sense have no place in a theory which construes language knowledge as an inventory of units (semantic, phonological, and symbolic) which are available to speakers and hearers for the creation and interpretation of usage events Some recent developments in Generative Grammar have, however, shifted the focus from the rules which generate an output toward the constraints which a well-formed expression has to satisfy.

Optimality Theory is a case in point Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) was first developed in phonology in response to the observation that different rules of a language often seemed to ‘‘conspire’’ to generate outputs with certain characteristics, for example, to eliminate certain consonant clusters or to guarantee

CV syllables The idea was that competing surface forms were evaluated according

to whether they satisfied constraints on acceptability Since the satisfaction of one constraint might entail the violation of another constraint, the constraints needed

to be ranked with respect to their defeasibility Recently, attempts have been made to extend Optimality Theory principles to the study of syntactic structures (Dekkers, van der Leeuw, and van de Weijer 2000).

There are, to be sure, many aspects of Optimality Theory which are problem-atic from a cognitive linguistic perspective (see Nathan, this volume, chapter 23); critical voices have also been raised from other perspectives (McMahon 2000) One issue concerns the supposedly universal status of the constraints and their cogni-tive grounding; another concerns the processes by which the array of competing surface forms are generated and what the input to these processes might be Nevertheless, there is an obvious affinity between the Optimality Theory notion of constraints satisfaction and the Cognitive Grammar view that ‘‘an expression’s structural description resides in simultaneous categorization by numerous sym-bolic units, each interpretable as a constraint pertaining to some aspect of its organization’’ (Langacker 1991: 532) An exploration of these points of convergence,

as well as the points of controversy, will likely be an important field of research in the coming years.

7.2 Idioms

There has been a growing interest from linguists of many theoretical persuasions

in idioms and fixed expressions At least since the appearance of Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow (1994), Langacker’s (1987: 23–25) strictures on the treatment of idioms in mainstream linguistic theory have lost much of their polemical punch.

Jackendoff (1997), in particular, has emphasized the central role of idioms and formulaic expressions in the system of knowledge which constitutes a language Jackendoff’s approach needs to be understood against his critique of the syntac-tocentrism of mainstream Chomskyan theory Jackendoff accords a central role to lexical items, which are understood as combining a phonological, semantic, and a syntactic representation Words and morphemes combine in larger configurations through the integration of their properties at the three autonomous levels of pho-nology, syntax, and semantics The approach, it will be noted, differs from the cognitive linguistic approach largely in according a degree of autonomy to syntactic organization.

Interestingly, idioms are also assimilated to the lexicon as ‘‘phrasal lexical items’’ (Jackendoff 1997: 153) As Jackendoff (1997: 174) notes, his treatment of

‘‘constructional idioms’’ (such as the way-construction, exemplified by Bill belched his way out of the restaurant) has affinities with the treatment of these expressions

in Goldberg’s (1995) Construction Grammar Indeed, Jackendoff observes that the only real issue separating the two approaches concerns the treatment of ‘‘core’’ syntactic structures, such as the transitive clause Jackendoff prefers to account for core phrase structures in the syntax largely, it would seen, because these are not

associated with any specific semantic or lexical properties But he also admits that core structures might also be viewed as ‘‘maximally underspecified constructional idioms.’’ If this move were taken, the need for a level of autonomous syntax would evaporate To all intents and purposes, Jackendoff’s theory would converge on the Cognitive Linguistics position.

7.3 The Core and the Periphery

Mention must be made of a remarkable work by one of the protagonists of auton-omous linguistics, Peter Culicover Culicover (1999) offers a radical critique of Universal Grammar and the notion of acquisition through parameter setting He argues his case by pointing out that a very great deal in a language is ‘‘idiosyncratic’’ and can hardly be said to fall under general, universal principles In surveying the English determiners and quantifiers, for example, he notes that just about each of them has a unique distributional profile: ‘‘There seem to be almost as many patterns

as there are elements’’ (64) The only plausible classification is based in semantic categories, such as ‘‘universal quantifier’’ and ‘‘number expression.’’ Still, there are idiosyncrasies pertaining, for example, to partitive of: all (of) the men, both (of) the men, each *(of) the men, all three *(of) the men, and so on Culicover’s point is that the task of the language learner is to learn the facts as they are encountered; the learner cannot appeal to general principles of Universal Grammar: ‘‘Once the learner has identified the special properties and made the generalizations, the learner knows the relevant facts about the language in this domain, and we may say that the learner has ‘acquired’ this part of the language in some concrete sense’’ (67–68).

Culicover’s account presupposes a ‘‘conservative and attentive’’ learner who attends to all the relevant facts about the domain and who does not generalize be-yond what is justified by the facts The conclusion, I think, is not so radically dif-ferent from that reached, by a very difdif-ferent route, by Tomasello (2000).

Learning, in the traditional sense of the term being proposed by Culicover, was denounced by Chomsky as inadequate as a means for acquiring a language (Chomsky 1965: 54) But a traditional learning mechanism clearly must exist, given the extent of the idiosyncratic and the idiomatic in a language But if such a learning mechanism exists for the ‘‘periphery’’ (which might not be so peripheral, after all), the very same mechanism can surely handle the ‘‘core.’’ In this way, Culicover has driven a nail into some of the most central and cherished assumptions of ‘‘au-tonomous linguistics.’’

In view of these developments within the autonomous linguistics camp, many

of the old polemics which defined the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise in its earlier days are losing their actuality As Cognitive Linguistics enters the mainstream—the publication of the present Handbook is testimony to this—it will become increasingly anachronistic for Cognitive Linguistics to frame itself in terms of opposition to other approaches Dialogue—and dare I suggest, integration—with other approaches may well become the order of the day.

N O T E S

1 In the generative literature, the elimination of lists in favor to rules is often justified

by the need to remove redundancy from the grammar: what can be stated as a higher-order generalization does not need to be repeated in statements of specific facts For a repre-sentative statement of this position, see Radford (1988: 366–69)

2 Somewhat more contentiously, Lakoff (1990) distinguishes Cognitive Linguistics from Generative Linguistics in terms of the former’s ‘‘generalization commitment,’’ that is, a commitment ‘‘to characterizing the general principles governing all aspects of human lan-guage’’ (40); it is this commitment, Lakoff claims, which renders Cognitive Linguistics ‘‘a scientific endeavor.’’ The corollary, presumably, is that Generative Linguistics, because it is not committed to generalizations, is not a scientific endeavor This way of contrasting the two approaches is particularly unfortunate In fact, one of the characteristics of Cognitive Linguistics in practice has been, precisely, a recognition of the particular, the idiosyncratic, and the quirky, in contrast to Generative Linguistics, where the search for high-level gen-eralizations has tended to restrict the field of enquiry to ‘‘core’’ syntactic phenomena

3 For a survey of twentieth-century linguistics, see Sampson (1980) (now somewhat dated, but still worth reading) For Chomskyan linguistics and its critics, see Newmeyer (1980, 1986, 1998) and Harris (1993); see Radford (1988) for a textbook presentation of the 1980s model of Generative Grammar; Culicover (1997) is a more advanced text, incor-porating more recent developments

4 In order to avoid misunderstandings on this point, it should be emphasized that a commitment to cognitive realism does not entail that speakers necessarily have conscious access to mental representations Much of the mind’s contents may well be unavailable to introspection

5 The example is from Lakoff’s 1965 PhD dissertation, published as Lakoff (1970)

6 The spirit of Generative Semantics still lives on, however; see Seuren (1997) Consider also Sadock’s (1990) review of Baker (1988) In his monograph on incorporation, Baker (1988: 46) proposed that ‘‘identical thematic relations’’ between constituents, irre-spective of their surface manifestation, had to be derived from unique representations at the level of deep structure Sadock (himself a participant in the Generative Semantics movement) draws attention to the irony of the fact that this preeminently Generative Semantics notion is developed within the framework of orthodox Chomskyan linguistics

As Sadock (1990: 130) notes, Baker managed to write a book that ‘‘is actually more ‘gen-erative semantics’ than the Gen‘gen-erative Semantics of the late 60s and early 70s.’’

7 Langacker (1987: 4), however, disagrees: ‘‘Cognitive grammar is not in any signif-icant sense an outgrowth of generative semantics.’’

8 For ease of presentation, I describe the development of autonomous linguistics in terms of Chomsky’s publications, ignoring the numerous scholars who contributed sig-nificantly to the enterprise

9 It is interesting, however, to note that some of Chomsky’s very recent observations

on semantics touch on issues which have long been of interest in Cognitive Linguistics Noting the varying reference of the word house in expressions such paint the house brown,

be in the house, be near the house, and see the house, Chomsky (2000: 35–36) raised the question of what the concept might be that the word house designates It will be appreciated that the issues touched on by Chomsky pertain to the ‘‘active zone phenomenon,’’ familiar

to Cognitive Linguists since Langacker (1984)

10 Observe that I am using ‘‘symbol’’ to refer to an association of a sign with a conceptualization Earlier in this chapter, I used the word in a very different sense, to refer

to category labels such as ‘‘N’’ and ‘‘NP.’’

R E F E R E N C E S

Baker, Mark 1988 Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Bloomfield, Leonard 1933 Language New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Bresnan, Joan 1978 A realistic transformational grammar In Morris Halle, Joan Bresnan, and George A Miller, eds., Linguistic theory and psychological reality 1–59 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Brugman, Claudia 1981 Story of Over MA thesis, University of California at Berkeley (Published as The story of Over: Polysemy, semantics, and the structure of the lexicon New York: Garland, 1988)

Bybee, Joan L 1995 Regular morphology and the lexicon Language and Cognitive processes 10: 425–55

Bybee, Joan L 2001 Phonology and language use Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bybee, Joan L., and Paul Hopper, eds 2001 Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Chomsky, Noam 1957 Syntactic structures The Hague: Mouton

Chomsky, Noam 1965 Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Chomsky, Noam 1970 Remarks on nominalization In Roderick Jacobs and Peter Ro-senbaum, eds., Readings in English transformational grammar 184–221 Waltham, MA: Ginn

Chomsky, Noam 1981 Lectures on government and binding Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris Chomsky, Noam 1986 Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use New York: Praeger

Chomsky, Noam 1995 The minimalist program Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Chomsky, Noam 2000 New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Croft, William 1991 Syntactic categories and grammatical relations: The cognitive organi-zation of information Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Croft, William 1995 Autonomy and functionalist linguistics Language 71: 490–532 Croft, William 1999 Some contributions of typology to cognitive linguistics, and vice versa In Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker, eds., Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, scope, and methodology 61–93 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

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

Culicover, Peter 1997 Principles and parameters: An introduction to syntactic theory Oxford: Oxford University Press

Culicover, Peter 1999 Syntactic nuts: Hard cases, syntactic theory, and language acquisition Oxford: Oxford University Press

Deacon, Terrence 1997 The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the human brain New York: W W Norton

Deane, Paul D 1992 Grammar in mind and brain: Explorations in cognitive syntax Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Dekkers, Joost, Frank van der Leeuw, and Jeroen van de Weijer, eds 2000 Optimality Theory: Phonology, syntax, and acquisition Oxford: Oxford University Press Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum, and Ivan Sag 1985 Generalized phrase structure grammar Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Geeraerts, Dirk 1990 Editorial statement Cognitive Linguistics 1: 1–3

Givo´n, Talmy 1979 On understanding grammar New York: Academic Press

Givo´n, Talmy 1984 Syntax A functional-typological introduction Vol 1 Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Goldberg, Adele E 1995 Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Harnish, Robert 2002 Minds, brains, computers: An historical introduction to the founda-tions of cognitive science Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Harris, Randy A 1993 The linguistics wars Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hudson, Richard 1984 Word grammar Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Imai, Mutsumi, and Dedre Gentner 1997 A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence Cognition 62: 169–200

Jackendoff, Ray 1972 Semantic interpretation in generative grammar Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Jackendoff, Ray 1983 Semantics and cognition Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Jackendoff, Ray 1997 The architecture of the language faculty Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Lakoff, George 1970 Irregularity in syntax New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Lakoff, George 1977 Linguistic gestalts Chicago Linguistic Society 13: 236–87

Lakoff, George 1982 Categories: An essay in cognitive linguistics In Linguistic Society of Korea, ed., Linguistics in the morning calm 139–93 Seoul: Hanshin

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

Lakoff, George 1990 The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on image-schemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1: 39–74

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought New York: Basic Books

Lamb, Sydney M 1999 Pathways of the brain: The neurocognitive basis of language Am-sterdam: John Benjamins

Lambrecht, Knud 1990 ‘‘What, me worry?’’—‘‘Mad Magazine sentences’’ revisited Ber-keley Linguistics Society 16: 215–28

Langacker, Ronald W 1982 Space grammar, analysability, and the English passive Lan-guage 58: 22–80

Langacker, Ronald W 1984 Active zones Berkeley Linguistics Society 10: 172–88

Langacker, Ronald W 1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar Vol 1, Theoretical prereq-uisites Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

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

Langacker, Ronald W 1993 Clause structure in cognitive grammar Studi Italiani di Lin-guistica Teorica e Applicata 2: 465–508

Langacker, Ronald W 1995 Raising and transparency Language 71: 1–62

Langacker, Ronald W 1999 Assessing the cognitive linguistic enterprise In Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker, eds., Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, scope, and methodology 13–59 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Lieberman, Philip 1991 Uniquely human: The evolution of speech, thought, and selfless behavior Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Lindner, Susan 1981 A lexico-semantic analysis of English verb-particle constructions with OUT and UP PhD dissertation, University of California at San Diego (Also published as A lexico-semantic analysis of English verb-particle constructions LAUT Paper, no 101 Trier, Germany: Linguistic Agency of the University of Trier, 1983)

McMahon, April 2000 Change, chance, and optimality Oxford: Oxford University Press Newmeyer, Frederick 1980 Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar New York: Academic Press

Newmeyer, Frederick 1986 The politics of linguistics Chicago: University of Chicago Press Newmeyer, Frederick 1998 Language form and language function Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Noble, William, and Iain Davidson 1996 Human evolution, language and mind: A psycho-logical and archaeopsycho-logical inquiry Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan Sag, and Thomas Wasow 1994 Idioms Language 70: 491–538 Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky 1993 Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, Technical Report no 2 Available at http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-PRINCE-0-0.PDF

Radford, Andrew 1988 Transformational grammar: A first course Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Sadock, Jerrold 1990 Review of Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing,

by Mark Baker Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8: 129–41

Sampson, Geoffrey 1980 Schools of linguistics Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Saussure, Ferdinand de [1916] 1967 Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale Paris: Payot

Seuren, Pieter 1997 Semantic syntax Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Soja, Nancy, Susan Carey, and Elizabeth Spelke 1991 Ontological categories guide chil-dren’s inductions of word meaning Cognition 38: 179–211

Talmy, Leonard 1988 Force dynamics in language and cognition Cognitive Science 12: 49–100

Taylor, John R 1996 Possessives in English: An exploration in cognitive grammar Oxford: Oxford University Press

Taylor, John R 2002 Cognitive grammar Oxford: Oxford University Press

Taylor, John R 1989 Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory Oxford: Oxford University Press (2nd ed., 1995; 3rd ed., 2003)

Tomasello, Michael 1999 The cultural origins of human cognition Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Tomasello, Michael 2000 First steps toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition Cognitive Linguistics 11: 61–82

Tomasello, Michael, and Patricia Brooks 1998 Young children’s earliest transitive and intransitive constructions Cognitive Linguistics 9: 379–95

Tuggy, David 1996 The thing is is that people talk that way: The question is Why? In Eugene H Casad, ed., Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods 713–52 Berlin: Mouton

de Gruyter

Tuggy, David 2003 The Orizaba Nawatl verb kıˆsa: A case study in polysemy In Hubert Cuyckens, Rene´ Dirven, and John R Taylor, eds., Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

van Hoek, Karen 1997 Anaphora and conceptual structure Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Verspoor, Marjolijn, Dong Lee, and Eve Sweetser, eds 1997 Lexical and syntactical con-structions and the construction of meaning: Proceedings of the Bi-annual ICLA Meeting

in Albuquerque, July 1995 Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Wierzbicka, Anna 1986 What’s in a noun? (Or: how do nouns differ in meaning from adjectives?) Studies in Language 10: 353–89

C O G N I T I V E

L I N G U I S T I C S A N D

T H E H I S T O R Y

O F L I N G U I S T I C S

b r i g i t t e n e r l i c h a n d

d a v i d d c l a r k e

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

In 1908 Friedrich Ebbinghaus stated that psychology has a long past and a short his-tory (see Farr 1991: 371) Howard Gardener (1985: 9) has said of cognitive science that

it has a very long past but a relatively short history We have pointed out in vari-ous publications that semantics and pragmatics have short histories but long pasts (see Nerlich 1992; Nerlich and Clarke 1996) Cognitive Linguistics, too, can be said to have a long past and a short history (Nerlich and Clarke 2001) In this article, we will present a number of aspects of the long past of Cognitive Linguistics Specifically, we will try to point out that the understanding that Cognitive Linguistics has of its own past is not in all respects optimal: on the one hand, we will point to forerunners that have hardly been recognized as such; on the other, we will make clear that some of the theoreticians that served as a negative reference point for Cognitive Linguistics were actually closer to the cognitive approach than can be derived from the discussions.

We will not, however, try to give an exhaustive overview of all relevant his-torical sources—actual ones or neglected ones In particular, although the long past