Nominal grounding predications
Book: Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
Author: Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
Page: C16-571
The earlier parts of this chapter have focused mainly on the major categories or open word classes, although we have also seen how Langacker’s model accounts for adpositions, which represent a closed class. It might be argued that adpositions represent a ‘special’ type of closed class. The closed classes are typically characterised not only by their relative resistance to change, but also by their lack of independent semantic content. As we saw in Chapter 14, for example, while it is relatively straightforward to draw a picture of cat or happy or jump, most people would struggle to draw a picture of if or the. Ofcourse, this ‘draw a picture’ test vastly oversimplifies the conceptual content of linguistic expressions, but it serves to illustrate the distinction traditionally drawn between the open and closed classes. Against this background, prepositions present a striking case. While undeniably a closed class, many prepositions do have readily accessible semantic content. It would not be particularly difficult to draw a picture of above, behind or under (see Tyler and Evans 2003, for instance, where the proto-scenes relating to these prepositions are diagrammed), although cases like of present more of a challenge. From this point of view, it is unsurprising that prepositions fit rather well into Langacker’s model of word classes, where word classes are characterised in terms of schematic meaning.
The question that naturally arises at this juncture is how Langacker accounts for some of the other much less ‘contentful’ closed word classes. In particular, the question is whether these categories can be integrated into the existing categories or whether they receive a ‘special’ account. Given that the cognitive model views grammatical elements as part of the same continuum as the open class elements, we might expect an integrated account, and this is the basis of Langacker’s approach. Indeed, we have already seen that adpositions receive the same characterisation as open-class words like adjectives and adverbs in Langacker’s model. In this section, we explore Langacker’s account of determiners and quantifiers.
