0:02 hello there and welcome back to a course in cognitive Linguistics in this episode we'll talk about a very difficult subject namely cognitive grammar cognitive grammar is one of the major approaches to structures and meanings of grammar in cognitive Linguistics and it has been developed by Ron laner first in his Landmark Publications foundations of cognitive grammar uh volume 1 1987 and volume 2 1991 there are more recent uh books available that you can check out but these are the classic references they're still widely cited and in them uh Ron laner explained how the theory works right um the fact that we're dealing with a theory that has been developed to a large extent by
0:49 a single individual makes cognitive grammar a little different from other approaches in cognitive Linguistics that I've talked about in earlier videos so essentially when you read lener you have to read him as a philosopher yeah you have to interpret what he says and you have to figure out what he means and it's not so unusual that at conferences you'll you'll hear people saying things like well if you read lenro carefully then yada y y and other people will you know scratch their chin and pretend that they understand and what I'm saying is it's difficult you have to get used to it you have to um yeah spend some time familiarizing yourself with the terminology that he
1:36 uses and what this video will do in part is to take some of the most important technical terms and go over them all right uh but let me start by first situating cognitive grammar in uh the context of usage based Linguistics in many ways cognitive grammar is how usage based Linguistics got started um usage based Linguistics I talked about this in an earlier video assumes that language use shapes linguistic knowledge that language use shapes language change that communicative functions shape language form and that language is grounded in general cognitive processes and all of these things actually go back to the work of Ron ler and especially the last
2:21 one here language is grounded in general cognitive processes is the the Cornerstone really of cognitive grammar so many ideas that originated with lanus cognitive grammar are now actually widely held and very important in cognitive Linguistics among them the idea that knowledge of language is knowledge of a network of symbolic units that pair sounds with meanings that's sort of the foundational idea of construction grammar as we now know it and laner has been arguing this for a very long time uh also the idea that lexicon and grammar are not distinct modules but instead form a Continuum from very concrete symbols like chair
3:07 and dog to very schematic symbols like subject and relative Clause that's lra yeah so the idea that subject it's not just an abstract grammatical category a matter of form no it's something that's meaningful uh it's a symbol that's something that laner has been arguing for a long time uh he also came up with the term usage based so uh the idea that knowledge of language results from language use and that speakers no symbolic units because they make abstractions over usage events that's cognitive grammar right in many ways however Lan project goes beyond vanilla usage based Linguistics so his project is a truly
3:55 cognitive grammar reducing all of grammar to cognitive things right let me spell this out um the first part of this is that all linguistic structures are meaningful so even very abstract grammatical categories like subject noun preposition relative Clause Progressive aspect the infinitive the past tense finiteness modal auxiliaries and so on and so forth all of this is supposed to be meaningful yeah um and a second part of that hypothesis is that the meanings of these structures should be fully described in cognitive and perceptual terms so all of these meanings should relate to these
4:41 basic domain General cognitive processes that I talked about in the usage based video okay uh laner analyses often um involve um visual representations of meaning little diagrams um and I've given you three little examples here first of all the preposition into I have a trajectory TR we'll get to that and LM that means landmark and into means that the trajectory enters the landmark in the middle we have a visualization of the present progressive I'm reading this interesting book right now uh which focuses on sort
5:27 of the the um middle part of a situation yeah so if I say I'm reading this great book right now um You can sort of infer that well my my reading process must have had a beginning phase and it will have an end phase but those phases are defocused right now we're focusing on the immediate scope as laner call it um what's going on right now the third example here uh the infinitive to walk as opposed to to the noun a walk uh shows you how the same meanings yes so both diagrams have the same components the same um elements to them but what's
6:13 different is which elements are in Focus yeah we'll talk about something that ler calls construal um that's very important here to walk invites you to focus on the small component parts of a walking Act action a walk invites you to think of the whole thing as a whole homogeneous thing right we'll talk about each of these aspects in more detail as we go along right um so the job of the cognitive grammarian would be to describe all grammatical structures in terms of their meanings and then to analyze those meanings in terms of General cognitive processes right
6:58 um the radicalness of cognitive grammar shows itself in the Simplicity of you know how simple grammar is really supposed to be so laner is very very strict in this uh and argues that grammar should really just consist of three things what he says is that the only unit permitted in the grammar of all language so your knowledge of language are first semantic chronological and symbolic structures that occur overtly in linguistic Expressions so in other words the words and structures that you have heard you no invisible stuff second uh structures that are schematic for those in one
7:44 generalizations that you make over the structures that you hear and third categorizing relationships involving the structures in one and two so analyzing something in terms of of a superordinate category right uh so you already see that the cognitive skills of schematization and categorization Loom large in cognitive grammar other perceptual mechanisms are also very important and we'll get to that in just a minute uh But first you know to make this a little more concrete uh let me rephrase this so the stuff grammars are made of are the following first sounds and structures like tree I don't know
8:29 could you pass the salt things like that second schemas on the basis of the sounds and structures so if you have a category noun that means that you know you've schematized uh words like tree and Cat and table and uh apple and so on and so forth same for sentence types like subject verb phrase or auxiliary subject verb phrase and then lastly there are categorizing relationships between one and two so that you um so of have links between tree as a linguistic expression and noun as a linguistic category all right let's attack the technical terms um I've got a bunch of them we'll go
9:16 through them and uh once we're through I think you're in a fairly good position to to read an actual text by laner and and figure it out on your own because that's what you need to do if you want to get anywhere with cognitive grammar so the first pair of terms are profile and base what ler says is that all expressions are characterized semantically by the imposition of a profile on a base what does that mean actually it refers well it relates very closely to things that I've been discussing in the last video on frame semantics so uh frame semantics as argued by Chuck Filmore um is that
10:01 linguistic Expressions evoke a frame some general recurrent situation or uh event or thing and highlight a part of that frame the evoked frame that's the base and the highlighted part of that frame is what laner calls the profile so profiling highlighting that is uh what LR means um I've given you three examp examples here from laner so the word hypotenuse would be uh evoking the frame of a right angle triangle and it profiles the longest edge of that right angle triangle uh the word tip evokes an elongated object and it
10:49 profiles the end part of that elongated object the word Uncle um evokes a kinship Network unless you know how kinship Works how how people are related in families the word Uncle doesn't have any meaning to you like if you don't know how soccer Works offsite doesn't mean anything to you and if you're from Mars and you know the Roman Calendar doesn't really mean anything to you if I tell you let's meet on Friday you'll be like all right Friday um okay so I guess you see what I'm saying uh profile and base they they match very closely the film morian idea of a frame okay um I've already talked about
11:34 trajectory and landmark and uh what ler says is the following a relational predication elevates one of its participants to the struct to the status of figure I refer to this participant as its trajectory other salian participants are referred to as landmarks so when we have um a frame or a situation that is evoked within that frame the most prominent thing is the trajectory and a less prominent participant is a landmark and you've already seen the uh visualization of the preposition into okay moving on to less straightforward things namely thing um
12:19 what's a thing well you and I use the word thing so it should be straightforward enough alas it is not um a thing in lr's terminology is a region in some domain of conceptual space I'll repeat that it's a region in some domain of conceptual space um okay it's probably not clear yet uh so let me try another lanica quote uh a noun is a symbolic structure that designates a thing okay that's something that sounds straightforward enough it is reminiscent of sort of uh semantic uh characterizations of parts of speech like when you a first grade teacher told you that okay there are thing words cat Apple table
13:07 chalk uh and there are do words like run and and of course in your introductory Linguistics class um your your instructor told you that look it doesn't really work that way there are things like explosion and there are things like paragraph and moment and be flat and electricity they're not things they're not physical objects okay um they're not um they're not physical objects they're regions in some domain of conceptual space there are things that you can conceptualize as sort of encapsuled different from the rest of the situation that you're talking about so a cube is a bounded region in
13:54 three-dimensional space that's straightforward enough a moment it's a bounded region in time okay um this was a moment um a paragraph is a portion of a written work with boundaries be flat it's already a little more difficult uh that's a pointlike region on the musical scale you have perfect pitch try to uh sing be flat um more difficult still electricity a bounded region in the space of physical characteristics now here I have to say I have no idea how electricity works and um to me it's kind of a coincidence that
14:41 we would as as speakers of English verbalize electricity as a noun um but hey to some people it made sense to think of electricity as a bounded region in the space of physical characteristics so those are things not physical objects but things that you can imagine being object like ler contrasts things with relations so here he says relational Expressions profile the interconnections among conceived entities so all parts of speech that invite you to think of stuff that is nonautonomous that you can think of as things uh for instance
15:29 prepositions adjectives adverbs or verbs they profile in LR terminology relations so for instance uh the preposition above is about the relation between two things which are um organized in space um the adjective red yeah you can think of redness as something that's autonomous but the adjective red is something that you know is either an attribute of something else or uh you you predicate this quality over something else so that's what it's all about it's a relation quickly is a characteristic of something else an action and run presupposes somebody
16:17 doing the action so again there's a relation going on and not a thing relational Expressions profile interconnections among conceived entities okay um lener shows you how he well in his let me start differently um laner uses these Notions of thing and relation in many of his analyses and so this is sort of the visual vocabulary of the um diagrams that you see in Laker's work and uh so a thing as we've just defined it is um visualized as a circle thing like
17:02 a cube a relation is a dotted line between two squares we'll get to what these squares mean one of them being a trajectory one a landmark like above um a complex atemporal relation like into into can be a temporal like the road into town um it's complex there are several different relations uh compressed into to one single word meaning and there are processes which are expressed by verbs yeah grow um different relations that change over time right um so what are
17:51 these squares right now the the circles are things okay but what are the uh squares the squares are entities and you may Wonder okay an entity is that different from a thing um well the horrible truth is that uh the term entity applies to anything that might be conceived of as or referred to in describing conceptual structure things relations quantities Sensations changes locations dimensions and so on and so forth so a square is something like an underspecified thing okay it could be a thing could be a relation it could be something entirely different right okay bear with me bear with me we're we're getting there so um
18:39 one important notion in cognitive grammar that has found applications even outside of cognitive grammar is constru uh lener defines it in the following way constru is our ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways every lexical and grammatical element in operates as an inherent aspect of its meaning a certain way of construing the conceptual content evoked so um your ability to take a perspective on things in the world that is constr and you you again see this is a very visual metaphor taking a perspective know uh seeing the world but really it
19:25 is at work in many different lingu IC domains so one manifestation of conru is for instance um the arrangement of trajectory and landmark if I say the table is under the lamp or the lamp is over the table I refer to the same state of affairs but crucially um what I'm saying is also different it's different in terms of how I construe the situation how I invite my hearer to think about the situation um and what's crucial here is the reversal of trajectory and landmark in the table is under the lamp I want you to think of the table as a trajectory yeah uh the more important
20:10 the more Salient thing whereas in the lamp is above the table now it's the same spatial Arrangement but I want you to think of the lamp as the trajectory the important salian thing constr um constru also um you know pertains to to profile and base so when I say the neighbors are away or the neighbors are gone uh again in terms of you know objective states of Affairs that's very much the same however um now you can look at these two diagrams of lris and um make out a difference between a way and gone and that is that gone is the end state
20:59 of a a temporal complex relation going um whereas away doesn't have that kind of Base okay so gone has a different base than away while both have the same profile both profile the same state of affairs right another example of constru um if I want to express the fact that um bill had in his possession a wall rust which he no longer wanted and um transferred to Joyce I I could say bill sent a wallrus to Joyce or I could say bill sent Joyce a walrus not my examples L linguist
21:46 sometimes they are crazy um or should I say sometimes they are sane um again the same base but different profiles so what is the base is that uh we have bill with a walrus at first and then without one and uh Joyce at first without a walrus sadly and then with walrus so that's the same across A and B but what's profiled is a little different uh so the prepositional dative the first example here bill sent a wallers to Joyce profiles the sending process so builds active Act of you know sending the thing the animal to Joyce and um what's profiled in the second um verbalization the ditransitive
22:34 is that Joyce is now in the lucky possession of a congratulations okay um another aspect of constru is schematicity you may verbalize a state of affairs applying different levels of schematicity so I might say the boy opened the door being maximally specific the boy did something a little less specific and then something happen maximally schematic and again also that is know uh something that's perceptual schematicity uh we can have pictures of faces that are very naturalistic and then um less naturalistic more more stylized and then uh iconic in the last
23:21 example here okay so constru your ability to um take different perspectives on the world manifest itself in very different ways um a last example is um the the alternate way of construing something as a process or as a thing so when I say I saw how the bridge collapsed and I saw the brid the collapse of the bridge again that's referring to the same states of Affairs but I present this idea differently as a process in the one case and as a thing in the other and you see that um you the bits and pieces of the situation are the same but what's different is the profile
24:09 yeah um in process I profile the individual parts and in the thing conrol I profile the whole thing as one homogeneous unit okay so this is uh this last example relates to a terminological distinction that lanr makes between sequential scanning versus summary scanning I thought I'd just tell you that um he describes that the same content can be construed as either a process or a nonprocess relationship depending on whether it's accessed via sequential scanning process or summary scanning thing all right linguistic units that's another
24:56 important term uh in cognitive grammar the term unit is employed in a technical sense to indicate a thoroughly mastered structure that is a cognitive routine and you've seen this picture of the tennis serve before a tennis serve consists of many many complex movements which however as a professional tennis player you have come to master as one single routine that's this linguistic unit with regard to you know sentence patterns complex words things like that um what ler says with regard to linguistic units is that uh only three basic types of units are posited semantic phological and symbolic so
25:43 sound meaning and the link between uh a symbolic unit is set to be bipolar consisting of a semantic unit defining one pole and a phological pole defining the other if this reminds you of cerian uh symbols then you're absolutely right that's what it is okay the kind of radical idea in this is that um laner tries to reduce grammar to sounds and meanings and to many people uh well many people are kind of baffled and and think all right what do we do with morphosyntax with structures and um well he has an answer I won't go into that right now but um that's something that you should look
26:29 out for okay um more on linguistic units um these units vary along the parameters of complexity and specificity so um there are more or less complex units so cat is a very simple monomorphemic unit Blackboard has some internal structure football coach has a more complex uh structure still so that's one uh dimension of variation complexity and schematicity is another such Dimension so tree is not very schematic it's very specific but if you compare tree to linguistic units like noun or verb yeah
27:16 grammatical categories that you have they are a lot more schematic so that for noun well they denote things which is very general notion and with regard to sound they're completely unspecified yeah um so here when you see those three dots that means Heaven only knows what you know what sound may be there um it's generally underspecified and the same for verb you know any sound whatsoever and this conceptual structure here that's supposed to be a verb yeah a relation between trajectory Tre and landmark that unfolds over time that's
28:02 what verbs mean in cognitive grammar okay that means that you can arrange the inventory of grammatical units in a grid like this one uh where you have two Dimensions symbolic complexity on the x-axis and schematicity on the Y AIS we have uh very simple things like like morphemes um down here they're symbolically simple and uh specific category schemas like noun and verbs they are U not complex but they're very schematic um heavy compounds like football coach seminar they are um symbolically complex but not very
28:49 schematic and of course the interesting stuff goes on here um where we have constructional schemas that are both complex and very very schematic yeah cleft sentences relative clauses complement Clauses questions that kind of thing right um another thing that I wanted to mention about linguistic unit is that uh they are conventionalized and the way that lener visualizes this in his diagrams is with um cornery Corners okay uh cornery Corners are representing conventional units and round corners denote novel Expressions so pencil sharpener is a conventionalized down
29:36 chalk sh sharpener is not okay so chalk sharpener is a a new thing that uh you probably just heard for the first time around corners um units can be combined yeah so as in uh ordinary approaches to syntax that you would be familiar with uh words can be combined into phrases phrases can be combined into sentences and there's something uh called constituency that I'll talk about in just a minute uh so here you see that there's a composite expression above the table we have um the preposition above we have the noun table and uh we have the non-conventional lied composite
30:21 expression above the table Yeah but of course the the scheme for the prepositional phrase that allows you to say things like above the table that is conventionalized yeah so there's a conventionalized schema that tells you you can combine a preposition and a noun into a prepositional phrase in this way bear with me just a lay right yeah okay um so I mentioned the term constituency um the way phrases are combined into larger units lener uh frames this as the order in which symbolic structures are progressively assembled into larger and larger composite Expressions to to him it's not
31:10 really just the tree like structure of a syntactic complex syntactic sentence your Linguistics int class probably has made you think that that's what constituency is all about and in many ways it is yeah but uh it's important to keep in mind lener to him it's all about meaning and the structural aspect sort of come along for the trip uh let me give you a little example here uh so this would be a complex sentence like the lamp is above the table uh and the constituency of this is uh so let's maybe start in the middle yeah we have the lamp so subject
31:57 of the sentence and then we have B above the table the verb phrase which consists of B and then um the expression above the table so first of all B and above the table are assembled into a constituent B above the table and uh lamp and B above the table are integrated into this complex unit um lab is above the table okay you can spend a few minutes with this diagram tracing all the dotted lines and see how they correspond um essentially what this is is a semantic account of constituency
32:46 that um reduces much of the syntactic trees that you've uh drawn in your intro class to semantic relations right another term that I want to introduce is elaboration here lener says uh it's typical in a construction for one component structure to contain a schematic sub substructure which the other component serves to elaborate that is characterize in finer grain detail and another quote is uh a schematic element elaborated by another component is called an elaboration site or eite for short now what does this mean um actually it's not rocket science it's that many linguistic
33:31 forms project other linguistic forms or you know a range of linguistic forms so if I tell you um well under yeah under projects a following idea yeah if if I tell you something is under you come to expect well under what under the table under the bed um under the ca where is it okay so under projects a slot for a noun yeah and the slot for a n that is what lener calls the elaboration site or E site so C would elaborate under um so uh in a bit more graphic
34:19 detail prepositions such as near occur with nominals that provide a more detailed description of the speaker's IDE idea so uh the door elaborates near so near here um uh the door corresponds to the landmark of this prepositional expression elaboration sites are those open slots in complex constructions if you're familiar with you know work in construction grammar you probably know all about constructions and their slots um so this may may be the nominal in a prepositional phrase near the door it may be the noun in a noun phrase with a determiner the door or it may be the
35:07 object nominal in a transitive verb phrase open the door so the crucial thing is that many linguistic Expressions work this way yeah they they raise the expectation of something else coming up and this raising the expectation now that's the open slot the eite in lr's terminology okay last term very important term and a very difficult term so if you're already tired maybe you know pause the video grab a cup of coffee and then come back I I sure could use a cup of coffee right now I'll make one in a minute um grounding grounding is proposed as a technical term in cognitive grammar to characterize grammatical predications that indicate the relationship of a
35:52 designated entity to the ground or situation of speech including the speech event itself its participants in their respective fears of knowledge oh I can I can hear you wincing um well um grounding predications are obligatory grammatical elements needed to turn nouns into full nominals and verbs into finite Clauses okay that gives us something grounding turns nouns into nominals and verbs into finite Clauses so grounding really is about um making nominals that are uh that belong to a certain speech situation and finite Clauses that make a clause more concrete
36:38 with regard to a certain speech situation let me um start with nominal grounding so grounding elements in the nominal domain are things like uh the this my his some many so markers that allow you to express the categories of definiteness or indefiniteness yeah is it a cat or is it the cat that makes a difference for our speech situation if I talk about the cat you know which cat in R speech situation that I'm talking about quantification yeah some cat many cats or dyes uh this that those those are elements that allow you as a hearer to figure out what kind of thing in the
37:24 situation I'm talking about so those are nominal grounding elements um if we compare that to verbal grounding elements here we have essentially the inflectional suffixes the inflectional verbal suffixes of English um yeah present tense s past tense Ed um ing but also auxiliaries yeah modal auxiliaries would and will uh and then other auxiliary constructions be verbing or have verbed things like that right um lener calls this clausal grounding so grounding in the verbal domain clausal grounding and it is mainly concerned with the status of
38:11 events with respect to their actual or potential occurrence so this means um verbal grounding tells you when did something take place are we sure that it took place how did it take place so essentially modality aspect intense that's what that's what's the job of verbal grounding elements so grounding in a way is a superordinate category that laner develops that includes finiteness definiteness and other know categories like dyes that um are there to link a certain expression to the speech
38:58 situation it's a complex idea I don't expect you to understand it right away but um know you'll come back to it and you'll eventually develop an understanding of it summing up um so cognitive grammar is best understood against the backdrop of usage based Linguistics in general it is largely responsible for the main assumptions that people make in usage based linguistics and the main thing to keep in mind about cognitive grammar is that it tries to reduce all of grammar to General cognitive processes tries to explain you know the meanings and structures of grammar in terms of General cognitive processes like figure ground perception
39:45 yeah seeing things and relations in terms like profile and base and trajectory and landmark that is now what that is hugely informed by figure ground perception categorization seeing a word like cat as a noun or um a question like could you pass me the salt as a question schematization seeing the similarities between he ate it and Mary baked the cake you know they're both instances of the transitive construction automatization yeah remembering pencil sharpener as a unit uh so from round corners to cornery Corners I actually would have liked the conventionalized units to be round because you know first
40:32 edges are sharp and then the were rough then they're around well ler has it the other way around and you know who am I to uh complain about that perspective taking constru adopting different mental points of view upon hearing the cat was chased away away versus uh the dog chased the cat away that is an important aspect of cognitive PR all right we come to an end here uh thanks for hearing me out um and I'll hopefully see you next time
