30. Fillmore’s Construction Grammar

Fillmore et al.’s Construction Grammar In their 1988 paper (this volume), Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor argue in favour of a model in which, like the lexical item, the complex grammatical construction (the phrase or the clause), has semantic and pragmatic properties directly associated with it. To illustrate they examine formal idioms, complex expressions which have syntax that is unique to the complex construction of which it is part. In principle, the number of instances of a formal idiom constructions is infinitely large. Despite this, such constructions often have a clearly identifiable semantic value and pragmatic force. For this reason, formal idioms pose a particularly interesting challenge to the ‘words and rules’ model of grammar. They are productive and therefore rule-based, yet often defy the ‘usual’ rules of grammar. Fillmore et al. therefore took as their case study the idiomatic let alone construction.

In light of their findings concerning the let alone construction, Fillmore et al. argue against the ‘words and rules’ view (which they call the ‘atomistic’ view) of grammatical operations, where lexical items are assembled by phrase structure rules into complex units that are then assigned compositional meaning and only subsequently subjected to pragmatic processing. In other words, they argue against a modular view of the language system. Instead of a model in which syntactic, semantic, phonological and pragmatic knowledge is represented in encapsulated subsystems, the constructional model proposes that all this information is represented in a single unified representation, which is the construction.

In later work, for example Kay and Fillmore (1999), Fillmore, Kay and their collaborators develop their theory of Construction Grammar further. This model is monostratal: containing only one level of syntactic representation rather than a sequence of structures linked by transformations, a feature that characterizes transformational generative models like Principles and Parameters Theory. Furthermore, the representations in Construction Grammar contain not only syntactic information but also semantic information relating to argument structure as well as pragmatic information.

31. The object of cognitive semantics

As a field, semantics is interested in three big questions: what does it mean for units of language, called lexemes, to have "meaning"? What does it mean for sentences to have meaning? Finally, how is it that meaningful units fit together to compose complete sentences? These are the main points of inquiry behind studies into lexical semantics, structural semantics, and theories of compositionality (respectively). In each category, traditional theories seem to be at odds with those accounts provided by cognitive semanticists.

Classic theories in semantics (in the tradition of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson) have tended to explain the meaning of parts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, sentences in terms of truth-conditions, and composition in terms of propositional functions. Each of these positions is tightly related to the others. According to these traditional theories, the meaning of a particular sentence may be understood as the conditions under which the proposition conveyed by the sentence hold true. For instance, the expression "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is, in fact, white. Lexical units can be understood as holding meaning either by virtue of set of things they may apply to (called the "extension" of the word), or in terms of the common properties that hold between these things (called its "intension"). The intension provides an interlocutor with the necessary and sufficient conditions that let a thing qualify as a member of some lexical unit's extension. Roughly, propositional functions are those abstract instructions that guide the interpreter in taking the free variables in an open sentence and filling them in, resulting in a correct understanding of the sentence as a whole.

Meanwhile, cognitive semantic theories are typically built on the argument that lexical meaning is conceptual. That is, meaning is not necessarily reference to the entity or relation in some real or possible world. Instead, meaning corresponds with a concept held in the mind based on personal understanding. As a result, semantic facts like "All bachelors are unmarried males" are not treated as special facts about our language practices; rather, these facts are not distinct from encyclopaedic knowledge. In treating linguistic knowledge as being a piece with everyday knowledge, the question is raised: how can cognitive semantics explain paradigmatically semantic phenomena, like category structure? Set to the challenge, researchers have drawn upon theories from related fields, like cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology. One proposal is to treat in order to explain category structure in terms of nodes in a knowledge network. One example of a theory from cognitive science that has made its way into the cognitive semantic mainstream is the theory of prototypes, which cognitive semanticists generally argue is the cause of polysemy.