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Converging evidence

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C1P17

2025-11-24

674

Converging evidence

How do cognitive linguists evaluate the adequacy of their models? One way is to consider converging evidence (Langacker 1999a). This means that a model must not only explain linguistic knowledge, but must also be consistent with what cognitive scientists know about other areas of cognition, reflecting the view that linguistic structure and organisation are a relatively imprecise but nevertheless indicative reflection of cognitive structure and organisation. By way of illustration, consider the scene in Figure 1.5.

How might we use language to describe a scene like this? Most English speakers will agree that (13a) is an appropriate description but that (13b) is ‘odd’:

Why should (13b) be ‘odd’? It’s a perfectly grammatical English sentence. From what psychology has revealed about how the human mind works, we know that we have a tendency to focus our attention on certain aspects of a visual scene. The aspect we focus on is something about which we can make certain predictions. For example, in Figure 1.5 we focus on the cat rather than the chair, because our knowledge of the world tells us that the cat is more likely than the chair to move, to make a noise or to perform some other act. We call this prominent entity the figure and the remainder of the scene the ground, which is another way of saying ‘background’ (see Chapter 3). Notice that this fact about human psychology provides us with an explanation for why language ‘packages’ information in certain ways. In (13a) the cat has a prominent position in the sentence; any theory of language will tell you that sentence initial position is a ‘special’ position in many of the world’s languages. This accords with the prominence of the corresponding entity in the visual scene. This explanation, based on the figure-ground distinction, also provides us with an explanation for why (13b) is ‘odd’. This is an example of how converging evidence works to strengthen or confirm theories of language. Can you think of a situation in which (13b) would not be odd?