The symbolic thesis
The first guiding assumption is the symbolic thesis, which holds that the fundamental unit of grammar is a form-meaning pairing or symbolic unit (called a ‘symbolic assembly’ in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar framework or a ‘con struction’ in construction grammar approaches). In Langacker’s terms, the symbolic unit has two poles: a semantic pole (its meaning) and a phonological pole (its sound). The idea that language has an essentially symbolic function and that the fundamental unit of grammar is the symbolic unit has its roots in Saussure’s theory of language. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is often described as the ‘father of modern linguistics’. Central to his theory was the view that language is a symbolic system in which the linguis tic expression (sign) consists of a mapping between a concept (signified) and an acoustic signal (signifier), where both signified and signifier are psychological entities. While there are important differences between the Saussurean model and the cognitive model, the cognitive model adopts the idea of the Saussurean symbol. In the cognitive model, the semantic pole corresponds to the ‘signified’ and the phonological pole to the ‘signifier’. These are both ‘psycho logical entities’ in the sense that they belong within the mental grammar (system of linguistic knowledge) in the mind of the speaker, which Langacker (1987: 57) describes as a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units. To illustrate, recall Figure 1.1 from Chapter 1 which is repeated here as Figure 14.1.
As we observed in Chapter 1, the visual image of the cat in the lower half of the figure represents the concept CAT, which is the semantic pole of a symbolic unit. The phonological pole of this symbolic unit is the speaker’s knowledge of the string of speech sounds that correspond to the concept CAT, represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols [kæt]. The symbolic unit is represented in Figure 14.2.
Of course, symbolic units can be expressed in different ways. In spoken language, the form is phonological: a string of speech sounds. However, language relies not only upon speech sounds but also upon written symbols, or manual gestures in the case of sign language. It follows that the idea of a symbolic unit does not relate solely to spoken language. The ‘phonological’ pole, in Langacker’s terms, might therefore be realised in different ways, depending on the medium of communication.
The adoption of the symbolic thesis has an important consequence for a model of grammar. Because the basic unit is the symbolic unit, meaning achieves central status in the cognitive model. In other words, if the basic grammatical unit is a symbolic unit, then form cannot be studied independently of meaning. This means that the study of grammar, from a cognitive perspective, is the study of the full range of units that make up a language, from the lexical to the grammatical. For example, cognitive linguists argue that the grammatical form of a sentence is paired with its own (schematic) meaning in the same way that words like cat represent pairings of form and (content) meaning. Compare examples (1) and (2).
In the English passive construction illustrated in (2), the entity that undergoes the action, which linguists call the PATIENT, is placed in subject position (before the verb). The sentence is also marked with a passive verb string, here was tickled. We can represent the generalised form of the passive construction as in (3).
According to cognitive linguists, this passive construction has its own schematic meaning that is independent of the specific words that ‘fill’ the construction. This meaning focuses attention on the PATIENT (e.g. what happened to George) rather than the AGENT (e.g. what Lily did). The idea that grammatical units are inherently meaningful is an important theme in cognitive approaches to grammar and gives rise to the idea of a lexicon–grammar continuum, in which content words like cat and grammatical constructions like the passive both count as symbolic units but differ in terms of the quality of the meaning associated with them. We return to this idea in more detail below (section 14.4), and it remains an important theme throughout Part III of the book.
