Comparing Construction Grammar with Cognitive Grammar
In this section, we compare Kay and Fillmore’s Construction Grammar with Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. It will already be clear that the two theories share a number of important assumptions. Firstly, both approaches agree that idiomatic expressions should have central rather than peripheral status in a model of grammar. Secondly, both approaches agree that the most explanatory model of language is one that assumes constructions. In other words, both approaches favour a unified representation that links together syntactic, semantic, pragmatic (and phonological) information rather than representing these as properties of distinct components of the grammar, as in a ‘words and rules’ generative model. This means that both approaches subscribe to the symbolic thesis as construed by cognitive linguists. Of course, all theories of language adopt some version of the symbolic thesis in the sense that words are widely recognised as form-meaning pairings. As we have seen throughout Part III of this book, the cognitive model extends this idea to complex constructions, and furthermore accords the symbolic unit a central status by rejecting syntactic rules. From this perspective, we can describe Cognitive Grammar as a type of construction grammar. Thirdly, as we saw in Chapter 14, an important similarity between Cognitive Grammar and construction grammars is that they take an inventory approach to the psychological representation of grammar. This type of approach assumes that the language system does not work predominantly by building structure, but by storing it in a complex network of inter linked constructions.
Despite these important points of agreement, however, there is an important difference between the two approaches. As we have seen, the Construction Grammar model developed by Kay and Fillmore rests upon broadly generative assumptions and therefore assumes Universal Grammar as a working hypothesis. In other words, Construction Grammar sets out to develop a set of statements, albeit stated in terms of constructions, which underlie competence or knowledge of language in the Chomskyan sense. In contrast, Cognitive Grammar is a usage-based theory, a feature that unites the cognitively oriented constructional approaches that we discuss in the next chapter. As we saw in Chapter 4, and throughout Part III of the book, usage-based models of language reject the Universal Grammar hypothesis, and argue instead that knowledge of language emerges from language use. Finally, as we have seen in previous chapters, Langacker’s emphasis is on mapping out the cognitive principles and mechanisms that give rise to the units of language and to the relationships that hold between these units. In contrast, the Construction Grammar approach developed by Kay and Fillmore focuses directly upon the formal properties of the constructions that make up the structured inventory assumed by both approaches.
