Grounding
We have already had a glimpse of Langacker’s account of determiners in Chapter 15 where these were briefly discussed in relation to the notion of grounding. Recall that each speech event involves a ground, which consists of place and time of speaking, the participants in the speech event and the shared knowledge between them. As we saw, grounding is the process whereby linguistic expressions are linked to the ground, and determiners are one example of a grammatical element that serves this function. According to Langacker, determiners ground nominal expressions by profiling an instance of a category (a cat) and by indicating information such as whether participants are already familiar with the referent (the cat) or whether the referent is present in the immediate physical context (that cat). This explains why many of the deter miner subcategories have deictic properties, particularly the demonstrative and possessive determiners, which encode spatial deixis and person deixis respectively. Like determiners, quantifiers also perform a grounding function by profiling the number or amount of the entity out of a larger mass. Expressions that perform a grounding function are called grounding predications, but these are not viewed as a distinct word class. Instead, grounding predications are seen as schematic categories for the class that they interact with. For example, Langacker (2002: 322) argues that ‘the grounding predication of a nominal profiles a thing and is thus itself a schematic nominal’. In other words, the determiner or quantifier is represented not as a distinct cate gory, but as a highly schematic noun phrase, inextricably linked to the category of nominal predications. This characterisation is consistent with the fact that the same determiner and quantifier forms can often function as pronouns, a common pattern cross-linguistically. This is illustrated by the examples in (40) and (41).
Langacker argues that the base of a grounding predication is a grounding relation, which is revealed by the fact that these expressions can be para phrased in terms of atemporal relations which also reveal the schematic meaning associated with these closed-class elements. This idea is illustrated by the examples in (42). Observe that these paraphrases reveal that the base of a grounding predication like my is a relation between the nominal (X) and the speaker (me).
Langacker (2002) argues that the difference between the determiner on the one hand and the atemporal relations that paraphrase it on the other is an issue of construal rather than conceptual content. While the atemporal relation makes explicit the ground, which makes the ground a matter of objective construal, the profile of the determiner is restricted to the grounded entity. In the latter case, then, the ground is implicit and a matter of subjective construal. Furthermore, although the base of a grounding predication is a relation, the grounding predication itself profiles a schematic grounded entity. When the grounding predication combines with a noun, the noun elaborates the grounded entity and contributes its content meaning to the NP. The schematic representation of a nominal grounding predication is shown in (43).
This schematic representation differs from the ones we have seen so far in its complexity. This is because it represents a schematic phrase rather than a schematic word. Of course, the question that arises at this point is how we can account in more detail for the nature of the relationships between words and phrases. This question is addressed in the next chapter.
