What it means to know a language
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C1P18
2025-11-24
45
What it means to know a language
Let’s look more closely now at some of the claims made by cognitive linguists about how language is represented in the mind. We have established that the linguist’s task is to uncover the systematicity behind and within language. What kinds of systems might there be within language? We’ll begin to answer this question by introducing one fundamental distinction based on the foundational work of pioneering cognitive linguist Leonard Talmy. Talmy suggests that the cognitive representation provided by language can be divided into lexical and grammatical subsystems. Consider the following example:
Notice that certain parts of the sentence in (14) – either whole words (free mor phemes), or meaningful subparts of words (bound morphemes) – have been marked in bold type. What happens when we alter those parts of the sentence?
All the sentences in (15) are still about some kind of tracking event involving one or more hunter(s) and one or more tiger(s). What happens when we change the ‘little’ words like a, the and those and the bound morphemes like -ed or -s is that we then interpret the event in different ways, relating to information about number (how many hunters or tigers are/were there?), tense (did this event happen before now or is it happening now?), old/new information (does the hearer know which hunters or tigers we’re talking about?) and whether the sentence should be interpreted as a statement or a question.
These linguistic elements and morphemes are known as closed-class elements and relate to the grammatical subsystem. The term closed-class refers to the fact that it is typically more difficult for a language to add new members to this set of elements. This contrasts with the non-boldtype ‘lexical’ words which are referred to as open-class. These relate to the lexical subsystem. The term open-class refers to the fact that languages typically find it much easier to add new elements to this subsystem and do so on a regular basis.
In terms of the meaning contributed by each of these two subsystems, while ‘lexical’ words provide ‘rich’ meaning and thus have a content function, ‘grammatical’ elements perform a structuring function in the sentence. They contribute to the interpretation in important but rather more subtle ways, providing a kind of ‘scaffolding’ which supports and structures the rich content provided by open-class elements. In other words, the elements associated with the grammatical subsystem are constructions that contribute schematic meaning rather than rich contentful meaning. This becomes clearer when we alter the other parts of the sentence. Compare (14) with (16):
What all the sentences in (16) have in common with (14) is the ‘grammatical’ elements. In other words, the grammatical structure of all the sentences in (16) is identical to that of (15). We know that both participants in the event can easily be identified by the hearer. We know that the event took place before now. We know that there’s only one movie star/sunbeam/textbook, but more than one director/rooftop/student. Notice that the sentences differ in rather a dramatic way, though. They no longer describe the same kind of event at all. This is because the ‘lexical’ elements prompt for certain kinds of concepts that are richer and less schematic in nature than those prompted for by ‘grammatical’ elements. The lexical subsystem relates to things, people, places, events, properties of things and so on. The grammatical subsystem on the other hand relates to concepts having to do with number, time reference, whether a piece of information is old or new, whether the speaker is providing information or requesting information, and so on.
A further important distinction between these two subsystems concerns the way that language changes over time. The elements that comprise the lexical (open-class) subsystem make up a large and constantly changing set in any given human language;over a period of time, words that are no longer ‘needed’ disappear and new ones appear. The ‘grammatical’ (closed-class) elements that make up the grammatical subsystem, on the other hand, constitute a smaller set, relatively speaking, and are much more stable. Consequently, they tend to be more resistant to change. However, even ‘grammatical’ elements do change over time. This is a subject we’ll come back to in more detail later in the book when we discuss the process known as grammaticalisation (see Chapter 21).
Table 1.1 provides a summary of these important differences between the lexical and grammatical subsystems. Together, these two subsystems allow language to present a cognitive representation, encoding and externalising thoughts and ideas.
Having provided a sketch of what it means to know a language from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, we will now begin to examine the cognitive linguistics enterprise in more detail. In particular, we must consider the assumptions and commitments that underlie the cognitive linguistics enterprise, and begin to examine this approach to language in terms of its perspective, assumptions, the cognitive and linguistic phenomena it considers, its methodologies and its approach to theory construction. We turn to these issues in the next chapter.
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