Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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The US linguist Ronald Langacker, one of the originators of cognitive linguistics (whose first
conference was organized in 1989), reacted against the prevailing view that
language is a self-contained system that can be studied in isolation. He
opposed the view that grammar was distinct from lexicon and semantics, and that
the meaning of a sentence could be expressed in mathematical logic. Langacker believed that language cannot
be separated from cognition, that semantics is about concepts, and that
semantic analysis is conceptual analysis. Ultimately, he believed that language
is psychology and neurology as much as it is linguistics. Noting that grammar is
simply a way to refer symbolically to concepts, i.e. that grammar is a symbolic
element connecting phonology (the sounds of speech) and concepts, Langacker recast grammar as an extension
of the lexicon. Grammar is an
inventory of symbolic resources. Grammatical units have a meaning, just like
the items of a lexicon have meaning. This meaning cannot be merely a truth
condition or a combination thereof, because that meaning is related to the
whole cognitive process of understanding/speaking language, i.e. to a cognitive
domain. For example, the class of
nouns refers to a kind of cognitive processing, and that is its meaning,
whereas the class of verbs refers to a different kind of cognitive processing,
and that is its meaning. And different classes of nouns (e.g., count nouns as
opposed to mass nouns) refer to different kinds of noun cognition. Any item in the lexicon (any
word) refers to a kind of cognitive processing, which is its meaning. Langacker admits only three kinds of
units: semantic (the concepts), symbolic (grammar, lexicon, morphology) and
phonological (the sounds). The symbolic units connect units of the other two
kinds. At the same time, the form
used to construct the concept is also meaningful. One can create a content
using many different forms of language. Langacker used the term imagery to refer to how content is
structured. By definition, a grammar already forces constraints on the images
that content can assume. Each grammar already limits the universe of imagery
that is available to the language user. Rather than sentences and
grammatical rules, Langackers grammar is built on image schemas, which are schemas of visual
scenes. Again, only a semantic and a
phonological component are necessary, mediated by a symbolic component. This
approach directly reflects the semiological function of language: to build
symbols for concepts (semantics) by means of sounds (phonology). Grammar reduces to these symbolic
relationships between semantic structures and phonological structures. A speaker's linguistic
knowledge is contained in a set of cognitive units, which are originated by a
process of reinforcement of recurring features (or schematization), or,
identically, by a process of patterns of neural activity. These units are,
therefore, grounded in daily experience and are employed by speakers in
automatic fashion: a unit is a whole that does not need to be broken down into
constituents to be used. Phonological units, for example, range from the basic
sounds of language (such as the "t" of the English language or the
"r" of the French language) to familiar phrases and proverbs. Units form a hierarchy, a
schema being instantiated in sub-schemas.
A linguistic category may be represented by a network of quite
dissimilar schemas, clustered around a prototype. A grammar is but an inventory of such units. Nouns and verbs are central
to grammatical structure because of the archetypal status of a cognitive model
whose elements are space, time, matter and energy. That is a world in which
discrete physical objects move around in space thanks to some form of energy,
in particular the one acquired through interactions with other objects. Matter
spreads over space and energetic interactions occur over time. Objects and
interactions are instantiated, respectively, in space and time. Objects and
interactions are held to be the prototypes, respectively, for the noun and verb
grammar categories. These categories differ primarily in the way they construe
a situation, i.e. their primary semantic value is "imagic", has to do
with the capability to construe situations. Langacker took issue with the Chomskyan
view that language is an infinite set of well-formed sentences or any other
algorithm-generated set. To him, a
language is a psychological phenomenon that eventually resides in neural
activity. Chomsky's generative grammar is
merely a platonic ideal. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Language: Minds Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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