The empirical study of idioms, proverbs, and related speech formulas in Cogni-tive Linguistics and psycholinguistics provides considerable evidence against the idea that idioms are fixed
Trang 1what they do is an unreliable way of examining the conceptual foundations for figurative meaning This is clearly an issue that will be debated in the future One more important example of the conceptual basis of formulaic language is shown by cognitive linguists’ studies of proverbs The main suggestion here is that various generic-level metaphors help motivate why proverbs mean what they do (Lakoff and Turner 1989) The generic is specific metaphor, specifically, provides
a general cognitive mechanism for understanding the general in terms of the spe-cific, one of the key features of proverbs Once again, the mapping of source domain knowledge onto dissimilar target domains of experience preserves the cognitive structure, or topology, of the source domain Imagine a scenario, for example, where
a student is warned not to expose some cheating scandal in his/her class by the expression It’s better to let sleeping dogs lie (Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs and Beitel 1995) The ‘‘generic-level metaphor’’ specifies that the knowledge structures used
in comprehending the case of the cheating scandal share certain things with the knowledge structures used in comprehending the literal interpretation of let sleeping dogs lie To start, the generic-level schema for the source domain of It’s better to let sleeping dogs lie has the following characteristics:
there is an animal that is not active;
animals can sometimes act fiercely if provoked;
therefore, it is better to let the animal remain as it is rather than risk disturbing it and having to deal with its potential ferocity
This information constitutes a generic-level schema There are a variety of ways that such a schema can be instantiated For instance, consider the following:
there is an unpleasant situation that is dormant;
such situations can prove difficult to handle if brought to people’s attention;
therefore, it is better to let the situation remain dormant than to risk having to deal with its negative consequences
This very general schema characterizes an open-ended category of situations We can think of it as a variable template that can be filled in different ways In the case where someone utters It’s better to let sleeping dogs lie in the context of a cheating scandal, we end up with the following specific-level metaphorical understanding of the situation:
the dormant animal corresponds to the unpleasant situation;
disturbing the dog corresponds to bringing the cheating scandal to peo-ple’s attention;
therefore, it is better to leave the cheating scandal left unnoticed just as it
is better to sometimes let sleeping dogs remain sleeping
These correspondences define the metaphorical interpretation of the proverb as applied to the student dealing with the cheating scandal Moreover, the class of possible ways of filling in the slots of the generic-level schema of the problem cor-responds to the class of possible interpretations for the proverb
Trang 211 C o n c l u s i o n
The empirical study of idioms, proverbs, and related speech formulas in Cogni-tive Linguistics and psycholinguistics provides considerable evidence against the idea that idioms are fixed expressions or ‘‘dead’’ metaphors Many aspects of idiomatic language exhibit tremendous lexical, syntactic, and semantic flexibility, each of which are results of these phrases being, at the very least, partly analyzable
or decomposable At the same time, cognitive linguistic work suggests that many aspects of idiomaticity may be characterized in terms of broader linguistic/con-ceptual patterns, such as idiom schemes or grammatical constructions Moreover, people’s preexisting metaphorical understanding of many basic concepts provides part of the motivation for why people see idioms and proverbs as having the fig-urative meanings they do In this way, the study of idioms and related speech for-mulas reveals important elements of human conceptual structures
My review of the cognitive linguistic work on idiomaticity and the related research from psychology clearly shows that idioms and other speech formulas are not peripheral aspects of language Many aspects of idiomaticity are closely tied to more productive grammatical patterns and enduring schemes of human thought One reason why Cognitive Linguistics has succeeded in painting this new vision of idiomaticity is because scholars embracing this approach have explicitly looked for connections between idioms and more typical grammatical structures and between idioms and pervasive patterns of metaphorical thought Contrary to the traditional view that ignores these possible links, Cognitive Linguistics adopts the significant methodological premise of seeking correspondences between mind and language, and not assuming that certain aspects of language are more revealing of grammatical and semantic structures than are others The study of idioms turns out to be an ideal place to understand the rich, flexible nature of natural language and human thought
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Trang 7R E L A T I O N A L
C O N S T R U C T I O N S
I N C O G N I T I V E
L I N G U I S T I C S
s o t e r i a s v o r o u
The topic of adpositions is one of the most important when considering the history
of Cognitive Linguistics Some of the foundational studies of Cognitive Linguistics involved the semantics of adpositions (Talmy 1972, 1975, 1978, 1983, 1985; H Clark 1973; E Clark 1978; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Brugman 1981, 1983; Lindner 1981; Herskovits 1982, 1985, 1986; Casad 1982; Casad and Langacker 1985; Hawkins 1984, 1986; Radden 1985; Lakoff 1987) These studies brought forth the experiential basis
of the semantics of adpositions, accounted for their polysemous nature in terms of prototype structure and radial categories, and highlighted the metaphorical nature
of their extension from the prototype In the decades that followed, this research path proved fruitful, yielding numerous studies that strengthened some of the original findings, revising others, and it has contributed to our understanding of this aspect of language
The term ‘‘adposition’’ has been used in linguistics to name free morphological forms that appear in languages primarily in a construction with noun phrases, either preposed (prepositions) or postposed (postpositions) to indicate case and case-like functions such as space, time, causality, or instrument Such forms are also
Trang 8found to follow verbs, without a noun phrase Within Cognitive Linguistics, many studies have focused on the analysis of adpositions within Indo-European lan-guages, mainly the languages of Europe, thus exhibiting a bias toward prepositions, which represent the predominant word order pattern found in the languages of Europe
To write about adpositions one would have to accept, first, that ‘‘adposition’’ is
a well-defined grammatical category and, second, that this structurally defined category allows us to form hypotheses about universals of language that would account for the relationship between form and meaning (or conceptual structure) Both of these assumptions have been shown by functional and cognitive linguistic research to be problematic:
a Accepting ‘‘adposition’’ as a well-defined universal category would entail ignoring facts about the nature of this category that refute its absolute universality and its clarity Terms functionally equivalent to ‘‘adposition’’ such as ‘‘co-verb’’ and ‘‘verbid’’ have been proposed for Sino-Tibetan languages (Li and Thompson 1973, 1974; DeLancey 1997) as well as terms such as ‘‘relational noun’’ for many African languages (Heine and Reh 1984) to capture the ambivalent nature of certain grammatical forms that
do not quite fulfill all the requirements for an adposition but do partici-pate in constructions where they play the role of an adposition Such terms reflect the developmental history of these grammatical forms, with co-verbs and verbids developing from verbs in verbal constructions and relational nouns from nouns in nominal constructions The functional equivalence of these forms across languages forces us to adopt a view of
‘‘adposition’’ as a grammatical category according to which membership in the category is a matter of degree partially determined by the develop-mental stage of the ever-evolving form In this view, the term ‘‘adposition’’ describes an evolutionary stage, a state which a grammatical form can be in for a period of time, rather than denoting a timeless category, one among many predetermined categories that are available for languages to ‘‘choose’’ and for children to ‘‘tune in’’ in their Language Acquisition Device This view is in line with Givo´n’s (1979) view of language as ever changing The view of ‘‘adposition’’ as a stage may not always be obvious or even rele-vant to the analyst, especially in studies of such grammatical forms within
a certain language at a particular synchronic point It nevertheless becomes painfully obvious to anyone who attempts a comparison of languages with diverse genetic affiliations Functionally equivalent grammatical forms may be called ‘‘co-verb,’’ ‘‘verbid,’’ ‘‘relational noun,’’ ‘‘preposition,’’
or ‘‘postposition,’’ but transcending scholarly traditions and language families is the recognition that such forms are involved in nominal (or verbal transitive) constructions where they indicate a relation of the noun
to the situation expressed by the clause in which this construction is em-bedded
Trang 9b Early on in the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise, it became apparent that defining an area of study by setting selection criteria only based on re-strictions of form, and not function, would present a fragmented picture of the expression of meaning within and especially across languages Lan-guages like Finnish, which has prepositions in addition to an elaborate system of nominal inflections, use both free and bound grammatical forms, that is, closed-class items (Talmy 1985) such as adpositions and nominal affixes, to express aspects of a semantic domain such as space or time,
in addition to lexical forms, that is, open-class items such as verbs and nouns Since Cognitive Semantics was the springboard of Cognitive Lin-guistics, studies were framed around semantic/functional domains and not only structural domains Cross-language comparison proved this view productive Since languages express similar notions, such as space, time, causality, instrument, and such, using either free (adpositions) or bound (affixes) grammatical forms, studying only free or only bound forms would yield an incomplete picture of the linguistic spectrum Rather, a more valid distinction seemed initially to be that between open-class lexical forms versus closed-class grammatical forms Even this distinction, however,
is being challenged by scholars studying specific semantic/cognitive do-mains, such as space, as, for example, Stephen Levinson and the Language and Cognition Group (Levinson 2003; Levinson, Meria, and the Lan-guage and Cognition Group 2003)
To capture this similarity in function without yielding to the structural charac-teristics of the form, scholars have chosen to either provide a descriptive name of the domain such as ‘‘NP-based adverbial markers of time’’ (Haspelmath 1997) or propose terms such as ‘‘relator’’ and ‘‘gram’’ (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Svorou 1994) Here, I adopt the term ‘‘relational gram’’ to refer to grammatical material that ex-presses a relation in a nominal construction
The nature of the relational construction and the cross-linguistic variation is discussed first in section 2 Section 3 deals with issues arising from synchronic ac-counts of relational grams, which are mostly semantic Section 4 covers issues aris-ing in the diachronic dimension of relational grams The chapter concludes with an overview of future areas of inquiry
Relational grams do not operate in a vacuum; rather, they are part of a relational construction Relational constructions have different functions within clauses: they may provide spatial or temporal information or indicate thematic relations such as instrument, recipient, agent, cause, beneficiary, and so on In terms of dependencies,
Trang 10they may complement the verb, thus being an argument of the verb, or they may provide additional information involving the whole event represented by a clause
On the semantic level, a relational construction consists of a ‘‘landmark,’’ a rela-tional gram, and a ‘‘trajector.’’ The landmark is a unit that profiles information against which the trajector is evaluated The terms ‘‘landmark’’ and ‘‘trajector’’ were proposed by Langacker (1987) and are equivalent to Talmy’s (1975) ‘‘Figure’’ and
‘‘Ground,’’ respectively The relational gram specifies a relation that exists between the landmark and the trajector To illustrate the elements of the relational con-struction, consider the following examples:
(1) The magazine is in the drawer
(2) They went to the Circle du Soleil performance on January 17
(3) The board gained control by means of extortion
(4) By trusting the people, he gained in popularity
In (1), the magazine is the trajector, and it is in a locative relation of spatial containment—represented by the relational gram in—to the landmark, the drawer
In (2), the trajector is not simply a noun phrase as in (1), but rather a whole clause, They went to the Circle du Soleil performance; the landmark is January 17; and the relation is that of temporal contiguity as specified by the relational gram on In (3), the landmark extortion profiles the instrument or means—as specified by the gram
by means of—with which the trajector The board gained control is to be viewed as accomplished In this example, the relational gram is complex and polymorphemic,
as compared to the grams in (1) and (2) In (4), the landmark, trusting the people, is a verb phrase and the trajector, he gained in popularity, is a clause, while the relational gram by also indicates the means with which the trajector clause was accomplished Whereas the trajector may be a noun phrase or a clause, the landmark is most commonly a noun phrase These units, together with the relational gram, form the relational construction In constituent-structure-based analyses, the relational gram and the landmark are said to form a syntactic constituent The minor var-iation in the form of expression of the relational gram is a mere hint of the variation that exists within and across languages as to the morphosyntactic char-acter of relational constructions This variation is due to general typological dif-ferences in languages, but also to semantic difdif-ferences among relational grams, as well as differences in the degree of grammaticalization of various constructions
2.1 Variation of Relational Constructions
Intralinguistic and cross-linguistic variation is observed in both the morphosyntax and the semantics of relational constructions
The dimensions of morphosyntactic variation are:
a The order of relational gram and landmark In the languages of the world,
in accordance with the Greenbergian word order correlations, relational grams either consistently precede or follow the landmark noun in the