The grounding predication: mood and tense
As we saw in the last section, Langacker divides the verb string into grounding predication and clausal head. Example (1) is repeated here as (10).
In the last section, we simplified this division by relying mainly on examples that contained modal verbs. Because the English modal is phonologically autonomous, examples like these provide a straightforward illustration of the different roles played by the grounding predication and the clausal head. Of course, not all sentences contain modal verbs, in which case the grounding predication is a tense morpheme, which is phonologically dependent and attaches to the first verb that makes up the clausal head. In many constructions, then, the distinction between grounding predication and clausal head is blurred by the fact that they may be morphologically bound together.
We first discussed the idea of a grounding predication in Chapter 16, where we saw that this idea forms the basis of the Cognitive Grammar account of the relationship between nouns and determiners. Nouns and verbs are widely recognised as the two universal linguistic categories, hence their central status in Cognitive Grammar. Furthermore, verbs head clauses, which represent a universal construction type. According to Langacker, what noun phrases and finite clauses share is the fact that they are grounded. As we have seen, each speech event involves a ground, which consists of place and time of speaking, the participants in the speech event and so on: grounding is the process whereby linguistic expressions are linked to the ground. Determiners ground nominal expressions by profiling an instance of a category (a rocket scientist), and by indicating information such as whether participants are already familiar with the referent (the rocket scientist), or whether the referent is present in the immediate physical context (this/that rocket scientist). This view explains why many determiners (in particular, demonstrative and possessive determiners) have deictic properties, which means that they rely upon aspects of the ground in order to be fully interpreted. As we saw in Chapter 16, grounding predications do not make up a distinct word class but are represented as schematic categories for the class that they interact with.
In the same way that nouns are grounded by determiners, finite clauses are grounded by tense and by modals which link the PROCESS designated by the clause to the specific usage event. As a deictic category, tense situates the PROCESS relative to the time of speaking, while the modal verbs establish the ‘reality’ status of the designated PROCESS from the speaker’s perspective. In the same way that a nominal grounding predication is represented in the network as a schematic nominal or THING, the clausal grounding predication is represented in the network as a schematic verb or PROCESS.
