Evidence for a system
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C1P12
2025-11-23
24
Evidence for a system
A symbolic assembly is a conventional linguistic unit, which means that it is a piece of language that speakers recognise and ‘agree’ about in terms of what it means and how it is used. As we will see later in the book, particularly in Part III, one of the prominent concerns in cognitive approaches to grammar is how to model the inventory of linguistic units that make up a language. For example, speakers of Modern English ‘agree’ that the form cat is used to refer to a certain kind of meaning which we illustrated in Figure 1.2. A conventional unit can be a meaningful sub part of a word, which linguists call a morpheme (anti-dis-establish . . .), a whole word, a string of words that ‘belong’ together (a phrase) or a whole sentence. Now let’s consider another example:
This utterance consists of a sentence that has an idiomatic meaning in English. That is, its meaning is not predictable from the integrated meanings of the individual words. A non-native speaker of English who has not learnt the ‘special’ idiomatic meaning will only be able to interpret example (6) literally. Native speakers of English, on the other hand, while also being able to interpret the sentence literally, often cannot avoid the idiomatic meaning ‘he died’. Of course, whether a literal versus an idiomatic interpretation is accessed depends on the situation or context in which the utterance occurs.
Focusing for now on the idiomatic interpretation, we can view this utterance as a unit that has a particular meaning associated with it. Therefore, it counts as a symbolic assembly. Another term for symbolic assembly that is employed by some cognitive linguists is construction (e.g. Goldberg 1995). We will look in detail at the notion of symbolic assemblies and constructions in Part III of the book.
When we change certain aspects of the sentence in (6), the meaning is affected. For example, if we change the object (the thing being kicked), as in (7), we lose the idiomatic meaning and are left with a literal utterance:
For many cognitive linguists, what makes example (7) ‘literal’ is that this sentence ‘as a whole’ does not represent a construction. Instead, the meaning of (7) is interpreted by unifying the smaller units, the words. In contrast, example (6) is interpreted as a whole single unit: a construction. One way of expressing this idea in more intuitive terms is to use the metaphor of ‘storage’: suppose we store our knowledge of words, phrases and complex constructions in a mental ‘box’. The behaviour of larger constructions, like kick the bucket, suggests that these are stored as ‘chunks’ or single units, just like words. The meanings of sentences like (7) on the other hand are ‘built’ by unifying the individual words that make them up.
Now consider another example. If we change the structure of example (6) in the following way, we also lose the idiomatic meaning:
This example shows that, in addition to meaning, constructions (form meaning pairings) have particular formal grammatical patterns associated with them. In other words, the properties of the construction relate not only to the individual words that make it up, as in (6), but also to the grammatical form, or word order. The passive construction in (8), in which the bucket is placed in subject position, fails to provide the idiomatic meaning associated with the sentence in (6). We can conclude from this that the linear arrangement of the words in the sentence constitutes part of an individual’s knowledge of idiomatic constructions like (6).
This point is also illustrated by an ungrammatical sentence, a sentence that does not correspond to any of the formal patterns associated with the con structions of English, as in (9), and consequently does not have a conventional meaning associated with it. Ungrammaticality is indicated by an asterisk:
As we noted above, the sentence in (6) qualifies as a construction because it con sists of particular words arranged in a particular order, and these words are conventionally associated with a particular (idiomatic) meaning. However, we have suggested that constructions can also give rise to ‘literal’ meanings. To illustrate this, we will examine another sentence that has both idiomatic and literal meanings. For instance, consider the following linguistic joke:
This joke turns on the ambiguity between the regular interrogative construction, in which a speaker is enquiring after the intention or purpose of some thing or someone (What’s that seagull doing on the roof? What’s that woman doing over there?), and the ‘What’s X doing Y construction’, studied in detail by cognitive linguists Paul Kay and Charles Fillmore (1999), in which the speaker is indicating that a particular situation is incongruous or unacceptable (What are you doing wearing those bunny ears? What are those clothes doing on the floor?). Notice that each of these interpretations requires a different kind of response. For the regular interrogative construction, the response should consist minimally of a piece of information corresponding to the question word (building a nest; waiting for a bus). For the ‘what’s X doing Y’ construction, on the other hand, the expected response is typically an explanation, excuse or apology (I’m going to a fancy-dress party; I’ve been busy).
Crucially, for example (10), these two very different meanings are conventionally associated with exactly the same words arranged in the same sequence. The humorous effect of the waiter’s reply rests on the fact that he has chosen to respond to the ‘wrong’ interpretation. While the diner is employing the ‘what’s X doing Y’ construction, the waiter prefers to respond to the interrogative construction.
The examples in this section illustrate the fact that there is a systematic relationship between words, their meanings and how they are arranged in conventional patterns. In other words, language has a systematic structure.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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