Grammatical morphemes and agreement
Langacker (2002: 301–2) suggests that one of the reasons why closed-class or grammatical elements are traditionally placed in a separate category from open-class or content elements is that grammatical elements often encode information that ‘overlaps’ with information already present elsewhere in the construction and are therefore viewed as ‘semantically empty’ because they do not contribute independent meaning to the construction. This observation relates to the issue of agreement. Recall from Chapter 14 that agreement relates features like person, number and gender. For example, if a noun is already marked as plural by the plural morpheme -s (for example, slipper-s), the presence of a plural demonstrative determiner that ‘agrees’ with the plural noun (for example, those cats) duplicates the same information. Equally, if the subject of a clause is marked for third person singular by the pronoun he, she or it, the presence of the third person singular suffix on the present tense verb form (for example, she love-s) also duplicates the same information.
Since agreement morphemes are (inflectional) grammatical morphemes, it follows from our discussion in this section that agreement morphemes are rep resented in Cognitive Grammar as independent symbolic units, which have independent but schematic meaning. Langacker (2002: 308) represents the agreement construction schema as follows:
The elements [A/a] and [B/b] represent the words that carry the agreement morphemes, and [X/x] and [X´/x´] represent the agreement morphemes themselves. Recall that the information on the left of the slash represents the semantic pole and the information on the right the phonological pole. The sub structures of this highly schematic schema can be instantiated by members of any word class. For example, in the plural noun phrase those slippers, [A/a] is instantiated by those and [B/b] is instantiated by slippers. [X/x] represents the plural feature of those. Observe that this is not a readily ‘detachable’ morpheme, because this word shows fusional morphology (this means that each of its features is not represented by a separate morpheme). [X´/x´] represents the plural morphology on slippers. The construction those slippers, an instance of the constructional schema in (6), is shown in (7):
The semantic pole of the determiner is represented as GROUND because the determiner is a grounding predication. Its plural morpheme is represented as Ø because the plural determiner shows fusional morphology.
