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Conceptual Structuring System Model of Talmy

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C15-P514

2026-02-12

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Conceptual Structuring System Model of Talmy

We saw in the previous chapter that one of the claims that defines the cognitive model is that there is no principled distinction between the lexical (open-class) and grammatical (closed-class) subsystems. This was described in terms of a lexicon-grammar continuum. Nevertheless, Leonard Talmy has argued persuasively for a qualitative distinction between the lexical and grammatical subsystems, which is not incompatible with positing a lexicon grammar continuum. As we also saw in Chapter 14, each of these subsystems provides a different kind of meaning: rich meaning versus schematic meaning. From this perspective, the schematic meaning provided by the grammatical subsystem forms a ‘scaffold’ that structures the rich content meaning pro vided by the lexical subsystem. According to the cognitive perspective, there is no need to posit grammatical ‘rules’ because the schematic meaning encoded by closed-class elements entails constrains upon how the units of grammar can be combined within complex constructions. Thus these two kinds of meaning encode and externalise distinct but equally important aspects of a particular scene as it is represented in conceptual structure by what Talmy calls the cognitive representation (CR). This is illustrated in Figure 15.1.

Talmy’s research has primarily been concerned with examining the nature and the range of schematic or structural meaning encoded by the grammatical subsystem. We call Talmy’s model the ‘Conceptual Structuring System Model’ because he argues that the schematic structure encoded by closed-class elements can be divided into a series of different ‘systems’. In this section, we explore each of these systems and see how they are claimed to account for some of the grammatical properties of language. This section complements the introduction to Talmy’s model that we presented in Chapter 6, where we considered his claims from the perspective of cognitive semantics.