Nominal predications: nouns
Book: Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
Author: Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
Page: C16-556
The challenge for a semantic account of the noun class is to provide a characterisation of a category that includes a very wide range of concept types. Consider the underlined nouns in the following examples.
While some nouns (like letter and car) are objects, others (like lover) encode a relation between two people or things. The noun noise expresses a physical sensation, while a noun like alphabet refers to a group of interconnected yet discrete entities. The noun height expresses a scalar concept, while the noun explosion describes an event. The noun love encodes an emotion, while the noun Tuesday refers to a point in time. As this small set of examples illustrates, the content meanings of members of the noun class is extremely disparate, and it is unlikely that a semantic account of the noun class that rests upon content meaning is an achievable goal. However, Langacker argues that a semantic account is not impossible. Recall that Langacker views meaning in terms of a continuum ranging from the highly specific to the highly schematic. If we move along the scale towards schematicity, it appears that a schematic semantic characterisation of the noun class is possible. Langacker states his schematic characterisation of the noun class as follows (Langacker 2002: 63):
In our discussion in the previous chapter we very briefly exemplified this claim with respect to basic domains like TIME and SPACE. For example, count nouns that designate a region in the domain of TIME include moment and period, and count nouns that designate a region in the domain of SPACE include line, triangle and circle. However, some nouns evoke a combination of domains. For example, flash profiles a region in the domains TIME, COLOUR and VISION.As Langacker observes, flash is bounded in TIME but not in VISION. In other words, a flash must be very brief in terms of time, but can expand to take up our whole visual field, so bounding need only apply in one of the domains evoked by the expression. Langacker also points out that count nouns like second, hour, week, month and year do not evoke the basic domain of TIME directly, but evoke abstract domains that humans have constructed in order to ‘measure’ time. We might refer to these domains as CLOCK (in the case of seconds, minutes and hours), or CALENDAR (in the case of days, weeks, months and years), although the two are not necessarily distinct.
