Spring 1998
Center for Semiotic Research
Instructor: Rick Grush
Time: Alternate thursdays, 10:00 - 12:00, CFK Conference Room
Description:
Cognitive Linguistics seeks to explain human linguistic competence as the employment of a structured inventory of form-meaning pairings, where the 'meanings' are contentful internal representations of various sorts, without the mediation of an autonomous syntax. Though the successes of cognitive linguistics in shedding light on features of human language has been impressive, it has not, except in a few isolated cases, been applied to explaining so-called syntactic constraints, such as island constraints. Because of this, opponents of cognitive linguistics have felt justified in their dismissal of the program as a serious challenger to Chomskyan approaches. In this seminar we will
1) Examine the core syntactic phenomena to be accounted for, such as island constraints and antecedent binding in pronominal anaphora.
2) Look at the interplay between these phenomena and cognitive factors, such as attention and feature-binding.
3) Examine the neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for attention management and variable binding.
4) Examine the relationship between various components of Langacker's Cognitive Grammar framework, especially reference-point constructions, and these neurocognitive mechanisms.
If all goes well, we should be in a position to see how Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, supplemented with an account of the neurobiological mechanisms supporting attention management and variable binding, can explain the syntactic phenomena at issue. The upshot will be that the cognitive synthesis and analysis of complex semantic structures (as posited by Cognitive Grammar) is an attention-intensive process. Limits to attention, and constraints on attention management, have the effect of constraining the way this semantic synthesis and analysis can proceed. So-called syntactic constraints will thus be revealed to be no more than formal shadows cast by these cognitive/semantic constraints.