Frequency vs. iconicity in explaininggrammatical asymmetries

MARTIN HASPELMATH*

Abstract

This paper argues that three widely accepted motivating factors subsumed

under the broad heading of iconicity, namely iconicity of quantity, iconicity

of complexity and iconicity of cohesion, in fact have no role in explaining

grammatical asymmetries and should be discarded. The iconicity accounts

of the relevant phenomena have been proposed by authorities like Jakobson,

Haiman and Givon, but I argue that these linguists did not su‰ciently con-

sider alternative usage-based explanations in terms of frequency of use. A

closer look shows that the well-known Zipfian e¤ects of frequency of use

(leading to shortness and fusion) can be made responsible for all of the al-

leged iconicity e¤ects, and initial corpus data for a range of phenomena

confirm the correctness of the approach.

Keywords: frequency; iconicity; markedness; economic motivation

1. Introduction

The notion of iconicity has become very popular in the last 25 yearsamong functional and cognitive linguists. In Croft’s (2003: 102) words,

‘‘the intuition behind iconicity is that the structure of language reflects in

some way the structure of experience’’. Iconicity is thus a very broad no-

tion, and it has been understood and applied in a great variety of ways

(see Newmeyer 1992: §§2–3 for an attempt at a survey). In this paper,

I will examine just the three sub-types of (diagrammatic)1 iconicity in

(1)–(3), which have played an important role in discussions of gram-

matical asymmetries. I will argue that in fact none of these is relevantfor explaining grammatical asymmetries, and that the phenomena in

question should instead be explained by asymmetries of frequency of

occurrence.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 1–33

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.001

0936–5907/08/0019–0001

6 Walter de Gruyter

(1) Iconicity of quantity

‘‘Greater quantities in meaning are expressed by greater quantities

of form.’’

Example: In Latin adjective inflection, the comparative and super-

lative denote increasingly higher degrees and are coded by increas-

ingly longer su‰xes (e.g., long(-us) ‘long’, long-ior ‘longer’, long-

issim(-us) ‘longest’).

(2) Iconicity of complexity

‘‘More complex meanings are expressed by more complex forms.’’

Example: Causatives are more complex semantically than the corre-sponding non-causatives, so they are coded by more complex forms,

e.g., Turkish dus(-mek) ‘fall’, causative dus-ur(-mek) ‘make fall,

drop’.

(3) Iconicity of cohesion‘‘Meanings that belong together more closely semantically are ex-

pressed by more cohesive forms.’’

Example: In possessive noun phrases with body-part terms, the

possessum and the possessor are conceptually inseparable. This is

mirrored in greater cohesion of coding in many languages, e.g., Mal-

tese id ‘hand’, id-i ‘my hand’, contrasting with siggu ‘chair’, is-siggu

tieg�h-i [the-chair of-me] ‘my chair’ (*sigg(u)-i).

While iconicity of quantity is mentioned rarely, iconicity of complexity

and iconicity of cohesion are often invoked in the functional and cogni-

tive literature (and recently to some extent also in the generative litera-

ture; see §4.5). Both have been applied to a wide range of grammatical

phenomena by many di¤erent authors.

I argue in this paper that these three types of iconicity play no role

in explaining grammatical asymmetries of the type long(-us)/long-ior,

dus(-mek)/dus-ur(-mek), id-i/siggu tieg�h-i. Instead, such formal asym-metries can and should be explained by frequency asymmetries: In all

these cases, the shorter and more cohesive expression types occur signifi-

cantly more frequently than the longer and less cohesive expression types,

and this su‰ces to explain their formal properties. No appeal to iconicity

is necessary. Worse, iconicity often makes wrong predictions, whereas fre-

quency consistently makes the correct predictions.

I want to emphasize that I make no claims about other types of iconic-

ity, such as– iconicity of paradigmatic isomorphism (one form, one meaning in the

system, i.e., synonymy and homonymy are avoided; Haiman 1980; Croft

1990a: 165, 2003: 105);

2 M. Haspelmath

– iconicity of syntagmatic isomorphism (one form, one meaning in the

string, i.e., empty, zero and portmanteau morphs are avoided; Croft

1990a: 165, 2003: 103);2

– iconicity of sequence (sequence of forms matches sequence of experi-

ences; e.g., Greenberg 1963 [1966: 103]);

– iconicity of contiguity (forms that belong together semantically occur

next to each other; this is similar to iconicity of cohesion, but di¤erent incrucial ways, cf. §5);

– iconicity of repetition (repeated forms signal repetition in experience,

as when reduplication expresses plurality or distribution).

For most of these iconicity types, frequency is clearly not a relevant

factor, and I have no reason to doubt the conventional view that the

relevant phenomena are motivated by functional factors that can be con-

veniently subsumed under the label iconicity. Whether these functional

factors can be reduced to a general preference for iconic over noniconicpatterns is a separate question that I will not pursue here.

I also need to emphasize that I am interested in explanation of gram-

matical structures, perhaps more so than many other authors that have

discussed iconicity. That is, I want to know why language structure is

the way it is, whereas some authors seem to be content with observing

that language structure is sometimes iconic:

The traditional view of language is that most relationships between linguistic units

and the corresponding meanings are arbitrary . . . But the cognitive claim is that

the degree of iconicity in language is much higher than has traditionally been

thought to be the case. (Lee 2001: 77)

As long as one merely observes that cases like long(-us)/long-ior and

dus(-mek)/dus-ur(-mek) can be regarded as iconic in some way, I have

no problem. What I am denying is that iconicity plays a motivating role

and should be invoked in explaining why the patterns are the way they are.What I observed while reading the literature on iconicity is that a num-

ber of authors (e.g., Hockett 1958: 577–578; Givon 1985, 1991) seem to

use the term ‘‘iconicity’’ as a kind of antonym of ‘‘arbitrariness’’, so that

almost anything about language structure that is not arbitrary falls under

iconicity. I am in broad sympathy with Givon’s general account of the

relation between arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness in language, but I

would insist on the need to identify the relevant factors as precisely as

possible and to make testable predictions. It is quite possible that the dis-agreements about the role of frequency vs. iconicity will eventually turn

out to be less severe than it may seem at the beginning, but in any event

this paper should help to clarify the issues.

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 3

Iconicity and the frequency asymmetries discussed here are universal

explanatory factors, so their e¤ects should be universal. This means that

in principle confirming data could come from any language, and ideally

the data should come from a large representative sample of languages.

Such data are still not very widely available, so this paper will continue

the practice of Haiman (1983) (and much other work) of making claims

about universal asymmetries that are not fully backed up by confirmingdata, but that nevertheless seem very plausible because of the apparent

absence of counterevidence. Likewise, disconfirming data could come

from any language, but of course isolated counterexamples are not su‰-

cient to show that no systematic coding asymmetry exists. Many of the

generalizations cited here are known to be merely strong tendencies, not

absolute universals.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: §2 discusses icon-

icity of quantity, §§3–4 discuss iconicity of complexity, and §§5–6 discussiconicity of cohesion. For each subtype of iconicity, I will first cite au-

thors who have advocated it and mention examples of phenomena that

are allegedly motivated by iconicity, before presenting my arguments for

a frequency-based explanation of the phenomena. The final §7 presents

the conclusions.

2. Iconicity of quantity

2.1. Advocates and examples

Iconicity of quantity was defined in §1 as follows:

(4) Greater quantities in meaning are expressed by greater quantities of

form.

It seems that the first author to mention this motivating principle was

Jakobson (1965[1971: 352]) and (1971). Jakobson cited three examples:(i) In many languages, ‘‘the positive, comparative and superlative de-

grees of adjectives show a gradual increase in the number of phonemes,

e.g., high-higher-highest, [Latin] altus, altior, altissimus. In this way, the

signantia reflect the gradation gamut of the signata’’ (1965[1971: 352]).

The higher the degree, the longer the adjective.

(ii) ‘‘The signans of the plural tends to echo the meaning of a numeral

increment by an increased length of the form’’ (1965[1971: 352]). The

more referents, the more phonemes (e.g., singular book, plural books,French singular je finis ‘I finish’, plural nous finissons ‘we finish’).

(iii) In Russian, the perfective aspect expresses ‘‘a limitation in the

extent of the narrated event’’, and it is expressed by a more limited (i.e.,

4 M. Haspelmath

a smaller) number of phonemes (e.g., perfective zamoroz-it, imperfective

zamoraz-ivat ‘freeze’) (Jakobson 1971).

Iconicity of quantity is mentioned approvingly in Plank (1979: 123),

Haiman (1980: 528–529, 1985: 5), Anttila (1989: 17), in Taylor’s (2002:

46) Cognitive Grammar textbook, and in Itkonen (2004: 28); see also

Lako¤ and Johnson (1980: 127).

2.2. Frequency-based explanation

Any e‰cient sign system in which costs correlate with signal length will

follow the following economy principle:3

(5) The more predictable a sign is, the shorter it is.

Since frequency implies predictability, we also get the following predic-

tion for e‰cient sign systems:

(6) The more frequent a sign is, the shorter it is.

These principles have been well known at least since Horn’s (1921) and

Zipf ’s (1935) work, but somehow under the influence of the structuralist

movements many linguists lost sight of them for a few decades. However,

more recently cognitively oriented linguists have begun to appreciate the

importance of frequency again (e.g., Bybee and Hopper 2001, among

many others). I do not claim to have original insights about the way inwhich frequency influences grammatical structures, but I want to argue

that iconicity turns out to be less important as an explanatory concept if

one gives frequency the explanatory role that it deserves.

Principle (6) straightforwardly explains Jakobson’s observations about

adjectival degree marking and singular/plural asymmetries, because uni-

versally comparative and superlative forms are significantly rarer than

positive forms of adjectives, and plural forms are significantly rarer than

singular forms (see Greenberg 1966: 34–37, 40–41). It is not possible tomake such a universal statement about perfective and imperfective aspect,

and the frequency of these aspectual categories depends much more on

the lexical meaning of the individual verb. But for Russian, Fenk-Oczlon

(1990) has shown that there is a strong correlation between length and

frequency of a verb form: in general, the more frequent member of a Rus-

sian aspectual pair is also shorter.

This frequency-based explanation is not only su‰cient to account

for the phenomena cited by Jakobson, but also necessary, because theprinciple of iconicity of quantity makes many wrong predictions (as

was also observed by Haiman 2000: 287). For example, it predicts that

plurals should generally be longer than duals, that augmentatives should

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 5

generally be longer than diminutives, that words for ‘ten’ should be

longer than words for ‘seven’, or even that words for ‘long’ should

be longer than words for ‘short’, or that words for ‘elephant’ should be

longer than words for ‘mouse’. None of these predictions are generally

correct (except perhaps for the last prediction, but note that mouse is

about twice as frequent as elephant in English).4

Iconicity of quantity has never been considered particularly important,and its refutation here is only a prelude to the refutation of the other two

kinds of iconicity in §§3–6.

3. Iconicity of complexity: Advocates and examples

Iconicity of complexity was defined in §1 as follows:

(7) More complex meanings are expressed by more complex forms.

Here are some quotations from the literature that describe this principle

and refer to it as ‘‘isomorphic’’ or ‘‘iconic’’.

– Lehmann (1974: 111): ‘‘Je komplexer die semantische Reprasentation

eines Zeichens, desto komplexer seine phonologische Reprasenta-

tion.’’ (‘The more complex the semantic representation of a sign is,

the more complex is its phonological representation.’)

– Mayerthaler (1981: 25): ‘‘Was semantisch ‘‘mehr’’ ist, sollte auch kon-

struktionell ‘‘mehr’’ sein.’’ (‘What is ‘‘more’’ semantically should alsobe ‘‘more’’ constructionally.’)

– Givon (1991: §2.2): ‘‘A larger chunk of information will be given a

larger chunk of code.’’

– Haiman (2000: 283): ‘‘The more abstract the concept, the more re-

duced its morphological expression will tend to be. Morphological

bulk corresponds directly and iconically to conceptual intension.’’

– Langacker (2000: 77): ‘‘[I]t is worth noting an iconicity between of ’s

phonological value and the meaning ascribed to it (cf. Haiman 1983).Of all the English prepositions, of is phonologically the weakest by

any reasonable criterion. . . . Now as one facet of its iconicity, of is

arguably the most tenuous of the English prepositions from the se-

mantic standpoint as well . . .’’

In Lehmann’s (1974) approach, semantic complexity is measured by

counting the number of features needed to describe the meaning of an ex-

pression. A contrast between presence and absence of a semantic feature

is often called ‘‘semantic markedness’’, and very often iconicity of com-

plexity is described as a kind of ‘‘iconicity of markedness matching’’:

(8) Marked meanings are expressed by marked forms.

6 M. Haspelmath

This principle was already formulated by Jakobson (1963[1966: 270]),

and repeated many times in the later literature, e.g.,

– Plank (1979: 139): ‘‘Die formale Markiertheitsopposition bildet die

konzeptuell-semantische Markiertheitsopposition d[iagrammatisch]-

ikonisch ab.’’ (‘The formal markedness opposition mirrors the

conceptual-semantic markedness opposition in a diagrammatically

iconic way.’)

– Haiman (1980: 528): ‘‘Categories that are marked morphologically

and syntactically are also marked semantically.’’

– Mayerthaler (1987: 48–9): ‘‘If (and only if ) a semantically moremarked category Cj is encoded as more featured [¼ formally complex]

than a less marked category Ci, the encoding of Cj is said to be

iconic.’’

– Givon (1991: 106, 1995: 58): ‘‘The meta-iconic markedness principle:

Categories that are cognitively marked—i.e., complex—tend also to

be structurally marked.’’

– Aissen (2003: 449): ‘‘Iconicity favors the morphological marking of

syntactically marked configurations.’’

For similar statements, see also Zwicky (1978: 137), Matthews (1991:

236), Newmeyer (1992: 763), and Levinson (2000: 136–137).

By ‘‘formally marked’’, these authors generally mean ‘‘expressed

overtly’’. Typical examples of such markedness matching are given in(9).

(9) less marked/unmarked (more) marked

number singular (tree-Ø) plural (tree-s)case subject (Latin homo-Ø) object (homin-em)

tense present ( play-Ø) past ( play-ed )

person third (Spanish canta-Ø)5second (canta-s)

gender masculine ( petit-Ø) feminine ( petit-e)

causation non-causative

(Turkish dus-Ø-mek ‘fall’)

causative

(dus-ur-mek ‘fell, drop’)

object inanimate animate

(Spanish Veo la casa Veo a la nina.‘I see the house’ ‘I see the girl.’)

That there are universal formal asymmetries in these (and many other)

categories has been known since Greenberg (1966), and Jakobson

(1963[1966]) and (1965[1971]) explicitly refers to Greenberg’s cross-linguistic work. However, Greenberg did not invoke iconicity to explain

the formal asymmetries of the kind illustrated in (9). He had good rea-

sons, as we will see in the next section.

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 7

4. Iconicity of complexity: frequency-based explanation

4.1. Complex/‘‘marked’’ expressions are rarer

Greenberg’s (1966) explanation was in terms of the frequency asymme-

tries in the use of the grammatical forms. He noted that ‘‘less marked’’

forms are more frequent, and ‘‘more marked’’ forms are less frequent

across languages. Thus, the economy principles in (5)–(6) are su‰cientto explain the asymmetries in (9) (see also Croft 2003: 110–117). The

English preposition of is not only the most ‘‘semantically tenuous’’

(Langacker 2000: 77), but also the most frequent of all the English prep-

ositions. Singulars are more frequent than plurals, nominatives are more

frequent than accusatives, the present tense is more frequent than the

past tense, the third person is more frequent than other persons, and

the masculine is more frequent than the feminine. All of this was docu-

mented by Greenberg (1966) for a few selected languages, and the hy-pothesis that it holds universally has not been challenged. That causa-

tives are generally less frequent than the corresponding non-causatives

is also clear; I discuss this case in more detail below (§4.4). And among

objects, inanimate referents are much more frequent than animate refer-

ents (§4.5).

This frequency-based explanation is not only su‰cient to account for

the relevant phenomena, but also necessary, because iconicity of com-

plexity makes some wrong predictions. In (10), I list cases that go in theopposite direction of the patterns in (9).

(10) less marked/unmarked (more) marked

number plural singular

Welsh plu ‘feathers’ plu-en ‘feather’

case object case subject case

Godoberi mak 0i ‘child’ mak 0i-di (ergative)

person second p. imperative third p. imperative

Latin canta-Ø ‘sing!’ canta-to ‘let her sing’

gender female male

English widow-Ø widow-er

causation causative noncausative

German o¤nen sich o¤nen

In all these cases, frequency makes the right predictions. Plurals like

Welsh plu ‘feathers’ are more frequent than singulars (Tiersma 1982), in

the imperative mood the second person is more frequent than the thirdperson, the word widow is more frequent than the word widower, and

with verbs like ‘open’, the causative is more frequent than the noncausa-

tive (see §4.4).

8 M. Haspelmath

These exceptions have long been known in the literature, but linguists

have often described them in terms of markedness reversal. The idea is

that markedness values can be di¤erent in di¤erent contexts, so that, for

example, third person is not absolutely unmarked with respect to second

person, but in certain contexts second person can be unmarked and first

person can be marked (e.g., Waugh 1982; Tiersma 1982; Witkowski and

Brown 1983; Haiman 1985: 148–149; Croft 1990a: 66). But in order toreconcile the cases in (10) with iconicity of complexity, one would have

to show that not only the formal coding, but also the semantic/functional

markedness value has changed. This is much more di‰cult, and it has

not been shown that it is generally true that in cases of markedness rever-

sal, the formally unmarked term of the opposition is also semantically or

functionally unmarked. For example, Tiersma’s (1982) main additional

evidence that ‘‘locally unmarked plurals’’ like Welsh plu ‘feathers’ are

generally unmarked (i.e., do not merely show reversed formal coding) isthat in analogical leveling, the plural survives. But analogical leveling is

of course just another symptom of frequency of occurrence (cf. Bybee

1985: Ch. 3).

To make matters even more complex, some authors seem to mean fre-

quency when they say (functional) unmarkedness: Marked means ‘rare’,

and unmarked means ‘frequent’. For example, in a discussion of un-

marked plurals, Haiman writes:

. . . what is fundamentally at issue is markedness. Where plurality is the norm, it

is the plural which is unmarked, and a derived marked singulative is employed

to signal oneness: thus, essentially, wheat vs. grain of wheat. (Haiman 2000:

287)

The ‘‘norm’’ is of course the same as the more frequent situation, so what

is fundamentally at issue is frequency. Linguists are of course free to

define their terms in whatever way they wish, but claiming not only thatformally marked elements tend to be ‘‘functionally marked’’ (in the sense

of being less frequent), but also that this a surprising instance of ‘‘mark-

edness matching’’ (or iconicity), is not helpful. The much simpler obser-

vation is that formally marked elements tend to be less frequent, and

this observation is straightforwardly explained by the economy princi-

ples in (5)–(6). Neither ‘‘iconicity’’ nor ‘‘markedness’’ are relevant con-

cepts in stating and explaining these facts (see Haspelmath 2006 for

detailed argumentation that a notion of markedness is superfluous inlinguistics).

The contrasts in (9) show zero expression vs. overt expression, but

some authors such as Lehmann (1974) and Haiman (2000) also talk

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 9

about length di¤erences between di¤erent types of morphemes. In partic-

ular, both authors note that grammatical morphemes are universally

shorter than lexical morphemes, and they claim that this iconically mir-

rors their more abstract or less complex meaning. But again frequency

and economy account for the same facts. Iconicity makes the wrong

prediction that lexical items with highly abstract or simple meanings

should be consistently shorter than items with more concrete or complexmeanings (as noted by Ronneberger-Sibold 1980: 239). It predicts, for ex-

ample, that entity should be shorter than thing or action, that animal

should be shorter than cat, that perceive should be shorter than see, and

so on.6

4.2. Relative frequency and absolute frequency

It is important to recognize that the relevant type of frequency for thepurposes of this paper is relative frequency, not absolute frequency (cf.

Corbett et al. 2001 for some discussion of this contrast). That is, what I

am looking at here is the relation between the frequency of one category

and the frequency of another category (within a class of lexemes or a

construction): e.g., the relation between the frequency of singulars and

the frequency of plurals (in nouns), the relation between the frequency of

positive forms and the frequency of comparative forms (in adjectives), the

relation between the frequency of inanimate objects and the frequency ofinanimate objects (in transitive verb phrases), and so on.

I am not looking at the absolute frequencies of individual lexemes with

a particular category. The absolute frequency of English books, the plural

of book, is 131 (occurrences per million words, Leech et al. 2001), while

the singular of notebook occurs only 8 times. But the singular and the

plural should not be compared across di¤erent lexemes. The relative fre-

quencies are as expected: book 243, books 131, notebook 8, notebooks 3.

Likewise for positives and comparatives: the comparative lower occurs111 times, and the positive bright occurs only 54 times. But the propor-

tions (i.e., relative frequencies) are as expected: low 158, lower 111, bright

54, brighter 5.

What is crucial is that the items whose frequency and formal expression

is compared are paradigmatic alternatives, i.e., that in some sense they

must occur in the same slot. It is in such slots that expectations arise, so

that more frequent items can make do with shorter coding because of

their greater predictability. If two items are not paradigmatically related,it does not make so much sense to compare their frequency.

Another question is how big the frequency di¤erence should be to be

reflected in grammar. The answer is: significant. Perhaps one would see

10 M. Haspelmath

bigger di¤erences in form where the frequency di¤erences are bigger, but

this is an issue that I do not pursue in this paper.

4.3. Adjectives and abstract nouns: Resolving an iconicity paradox

Croft and Cruse (2004: 175) observe ‘‘a curious iconicity paradox’’ in

connection with adjectives such as those in (11) and the corresponding

abstract nouns:

(11) long leng-th

deep dep-th

high heigh-t

thick thick-ness

They note that definitions of such adjectives presuppose a scale of length,

depth, height, or thickness that is expressed by an abstract noun. Thus,

long means something like ‘noteworthy in terms of length’ (cf. also

Mel’cuk 1967). This abstract noun is thus conceptually simpler than the

adjective, and yet it tends to be morphologically more complex across

languages. The situation in (11) thus ‘‘appears to run counter to the prin-

ciple that morphological complexity mirrors cognitive complexity’’ (Croft

and Cruse 2004: 175).Croft and Cruse try to solve the paradox, but do not seem to be very

confident in their solution:

One possible explanation is that, in applying the iconic principle, we should

distinguish between structural complexity (in terms of the number of elementary

components and their interconnections) and processing complexity (in terms of

the cognitive e¤ort involved). Perhaps they are acquired first of all in an unanal-

yzed, primitive, ‘Gestalt’ sense, which is basically relative. Maybe in order to

develop the full adult system, analysis and restructuring are necessary. Some of

the results of the analysis may well be conceptually simpler in some sense than

the analysand, but the extra e¤ort that has gone into them is mirrored by the mor-

phological complexity. (Croft and Cruse 2004: 175)

But in fact, no solution to the paradox is required, because it is a

pseudo-paradox: There is no ‘‘principle that morphological complexity

mirrors cognitive complexity’’. As we saw, morphological complexity

(in the sense of length) mirrors rarity of use. It is easy to determine that

adjectives are significantly more frequent than the corresponding abstract

nouns. In (12), frequency figures from Leech et al. 2001 are given (thefigures again indicate occurrences per million words). The example of

beautiful/beauty shows that isolated exceptions to the coding regularity

are possible.7

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 11

(12) long 392 leng-th 85

deep 97 dep-th 41

high 547 heigh-t 47

thick 51 thick-ness <10

beautiful 87 beauty 44

4.4. The inchoative-causative alternation: Economy instead of iconicity

In §3 and §4.1, we saw that pairs of noncausative (inchoative) and caus-

ative verbs are not uniformly coded: Sometimes the causative is coded

overtly, based on the inchoative (e.g., Turkish dus-Ø-mek ‘fall’, dus-ur-

mek ‘fell, drop’), and sometimes the inchoative is coded overtly, based

on the semantically causative verb. Such cases are called anticausatives

(e.g., German o¤nen ‘open (tr.)’, sich o¤nen ‘open (intr.)’; Russian otkry-

vat 0-sja ‘open (tr.)’, otkryvat 0-sja ‘open (intr.)’).On the natural assumption that causatives have an additional meaning

element (i.e. Russian otkryvat 0sja means ‘become open’, and otkryvat 0

means ‘cause to become open’), anticausative coding would be counter-

iconic (as was observed by Mel’cuk 1967). This was seen as a problem

by Haspelmath (1993), who assumed the iconicity-of-complexity principle

(as well as markedness matching). However, Haspelmath found in a

cross-linguistic study that di¤erent verb pairs tend to behave di¤erently

with respect to which member of the pair (the inchoative or the causative)tends to be coded overtly (cf. also Croft 1990b). Some verb meanings

(which for convenience will be called automatic) tend to be coded as caus-

atives (e.g., ‘freeze’, ‘dry’, ‘sink’, ‘go out’, ‘melt’), whereas others (which

for convenience will be called costly) are preferably coded as anticaus-

atives (e.g., ‘split’, ‘break’, ‘close’, ‘open’, ‘gather’). The idea behind the

terms automatic and costly is that the automatic events do not often

require input from an agent to occur, whereas the costly events tend not

to occur spontaneously but must be instigated by an agent. While the au-tomatic events conform to iconicity, it is especially the costly events that

do not. Haspelmath tried to save the iconicity hypothesis by suggesting

that in some way the frequency of occurrence of a particular event de-

scription is reflected in the way its meaning is treated by speakers:

Iconicity in language is based [not on objective meaning but] on conceptual

meaning . . . Events that are more likely to occur spontaneously will be associated

with a conceptual stereotype (or prototype) of a spontaneous event, and this will

be expressed in a structurally unmarked way. (Haspelmath 1993: 106–107)

This move is reminiscent of Lehmann’s suggestion that rarity results in

a high informational value and therefore somehow in high semantic

12 M. Haspelmath

complexity (cf. note 6), and of the desperate attempt by Croft and Cruse

to solve their iconicity paradox.

Fortunately, a much simpler explanation is available in which iconicity

of complexity plays no role, and the coding preferences are explained

in terms of economy: Automatic verb meanings tend to occur more fre-

quently as inchoatives than costly verb meanings, which tend to occur

more frequently as causatives. Due to economic motivation, the rarer ele-ments tend to be overtly coded. Wright (2001: 127–128) presents some

preliminary corpus evidence from English, as shown in Table 1:

Thus, inchoatives and causatives behave in much the same way as singu-

lars and plurals: Whichever member of the pair occurs more frequentlytends to be zero-coded, while the rarer (and hence less expected) member

tends to be overtly coded. Language-particular di¤erences often obscure

this picture (e.g., languages that never have overtly coded singulars, or

languages lacking overtly coded causatives), which emerges fully only

once a typological perspective is adopted.

4.5. Di¤erential object marking: Economy instead of iconicity

It has long been observed (e.g., Blansitt 1973; Comrie 1989; Bossong

1985, 1998) that the overt coding of a direct object often depends on

its animacy, and that such variation in object-marking can be subsumed

under a general rule:

(13) The higher a (direct) object is on the animacy scale, the more likely

it is to be overtly coded (i.e., accusative-marked).

According to Comrie, this is because animate objects are not as ‘‘natural’’

as inanimate objects:

. . . the most natural kind of transitive construction is one where the A[gent] is

high in animacy and definiteness and the P[atient] is lower in animacy and

Table 1. Percentage of transitive (¼ causative) occurrences of some English inchoative-

causative verb pairs

verb pair % transitive

freeze 62% more causatives

dry 61%

melt 72%

burn 76%

open 80%

break 90%

A

B

more anticausatives

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 13

definiteness; and any deviation from this pattern leads to a more marked construc-

tion. (Comrie 1989: 128)

In an interesting paper that tries to integrate insights from thefunctional-typological literature into an Optimality Theory (OT) frame-

work, Aissen (2003: §3) proposes an account that appeals to a fixed

constraint subhierarchy involving local conjunction of a markedness hier-

archy of relation/animacy constraints (cf. 14) with a constraint against

non-coding (*ØCase):

(14) markedness subhierarchy:

*Obj/Humg *Obj/Animg *Obj/Inan

The resulting fixed constraint subhierarchy is shown in (15). Roughly this

can be read as follows: Structures with zero-coded human objects are

worse than structures with zero-coded animate objects, and these in turn

are worse than structures with zero-coded inanimate objects.

(15) *Obj/Hum & *ØCase g *Obj/Anim & *ØCase g *Obj/Inan &

*ØCase

Aissen motivates these constraints by appealing to markedness matchingand iconicity:

The e¤ect of local conjunction here is to link markedness of content (expressed by

the markedness subhierarchy) to markedness of expression (expressed by *Ø).

That content and expression are linked in this way is a fundamental idea of mark-

edness theory (Jakobson 1939; Greenberg 1966). In the domain of Di¤erential

Object Marking, this is expressed formally through the constraints [in (15)]. Thus

they are iconicity constraints: they favor morphological marks for marked

configurations. (Aissen 2003: 449)

Combined with economy constraints (*Struc), these constraints allow

Aissen to describe all and only the attested language types in her

framework.

However, a much more straightforward explanation of the Di¤erential

Object Marking universal is available: Inanimate NPs occur more fre-

quently as objects, whereas animate NPs occur more frequently as sub-

jects. Due to economic motivation, the rarer elements tend to be overtly

coded. This explanation has in fact long been known (Filimonova 2005cites antecedents in the 19th century), though actual frequency evidence

has been cited only more recently (see Jager 2004).8

Thus, no appeal to markedness matching or iconicity is needed, nor is

Aissen’s elaborate machinery of OT constraints needed to explain Di¤er-

ential Object Marking.

14 M. Haspelmath

5. Iconicity of cohesion: Advocates and examples

Iconicity of cohesion was defined in §1 as follows:

(16) Meanings that belong together more closely are expressed by more

cohesive forms.

Iconicity of cohesion is discussed in detail by Haiman (1983) under the

label ‘‘iconic expression of conceptual distance’’ (‘‘The linguistic distancebetween expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between

them’’, Haiman 1983: 782).9 What he means by linguistic distance is

made clear by the scale in (17), where (a)–(d) show diminishing linguistic

distance (in my terms, increasing cohesion).

(17) Haiman’s (1983: 782) cohesion scale

a. X word Y (function-word expression)

b. X Y ( juxtaposition)

c. X–Y (bound expression)

d. Z (portmanteau expression)

I prefer the term cohesion to distance for this scale, because (b) and (c) do

not literally di¤er in distance, and distance is not really applicable to (d).

Moreover, I want to distinguish strictly between cohesion and contigu-

ity. That there is a functionally motivated preference for contiguity, i.e.,for elements that belong together semantically to occur next to each

other in speech, is beyond question (see also Hawkins 2004: Ch. 5).

Newmeyer’s (1992: 761–762) discussion of ‘‘iconicity of distance’’ (and

similarly Givon’s (1985: 202, 1991: 89) ‘‘proximity principle’’) conflate

cohesion and contiguity. I only argue against an iconicity-based explana-

tion of phenomena related to cohesion.

The following four examples of iconicity of cohesion are the most im-

portant cases cited in the literature:(i) Possessive constructions: Inalienable possession shows at least the

same degree of cohesion as alienable possession, because in inalienable

possession (i.e., possession of kinship and body part terms) the possessor

and the possessum belong together more closely semantically (Haiman

1983: 793–795, 1985: 130–136; see also Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1996). An

example:

(18) Abun (West Papuan; Berry and Berry 1999: 77–82)

a. ji bi nggwe

I of garden

‘my garden’b. ji syim

I arm

‘my arm’

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 15

(ii) Causative constructions: Causative constructions showing a greater

degree of cohesion tend to express direct causation (where cause and

result belong together more closely), whereas causative constructions

showing less cohesion tend to express indirect causation (Haiman 1983:

783–787; cf. also Comrie 1989: 172–173; Dixon 2000: 74–78). The fol-

lowing example is cited by Dixon (2000: 69):

(19) Buru (Austronesian; Indonesia; Grimes 1991: 211)a. Da puna ringe gosa.

3sg.A cause 3sg.O be.good

‘He (did something which, indirectly,) made her well.’

b. Da pe-gosa ringe.

3sg.A caus-be.good 3sg.O

‘He healed her (directly, with spiritual power).’

A similar Japanese example is provided by Horie (1993: 26):

(20) a. John-wa Mary-ni huku-o ki-se-ta.John-top Mary-dat clothes-acc wear-caus-past

‘John put clothes on Mary.’

b. John-wa Mary-ni huku-o ki sase-ta.

John-top Mary-dat clothes-acc wear cause-past

‘John made Mary wear clothes.’

The much-discussed English distinction between kill and cause to die is of

course also an instance of this contrast (e.g., Lako¤ and Johnson 1980:131).

(iii) Coordinating constructions: Many languages distinguish between

loose coordination and tight coordination (i.e., less vs. more cohesive pat-

terns), where the first expresses greater conceptual distance and the latter

expresses less conceptual distance (Haiman 1983: 788–790, 1985: 111–

124). Haiman discusses coordination of clauses and cites the two exam-

ples in (21) and (22), where the greater cohesion is manifested by the

absence of a coordinator. In (21a), the greater conceptual distance lies inthe temporal non-connectedness, while in (22a), the greater conceptual

distance lies in the lack of subject identity.

(21) Fe’fe’ (Bantoid; Cameroon; Hyman 1971: 43)

a. a ka gen ntee nı njwen lwa 0

he past go market and buy yams

‘He went to the market and also (at some later date) bought

yams.’b. a ka gen ntee njwen lwa 0

he past go market buy yams

‘He went to the market and bought yams (there).’

16 M. Haspelmath

(22) Aghem (Bantoid; Cameroon; Anderson 1979: 114)

a. O nam k�b�� gha� �yıa z�she cook fufu we.excl and eat

‘She cooked fufu and we ate it.’

b. O m�� z˙��m mam k�b��

she past sing cook fufu

‘She sang and cooked fufu.’

Walchli (2005: Ch. 3) also discusses noun phrase coordination and cites

contrasts such as (23). He calls the semantic distinction between them

‘‘accidental coordination’’ vs. ‘‘natural coordination’’, and claims that

the formal contrast between loose coordination in (23a) and tight coordi-

nation in (23b) iconically reflects this semantic contrast (2005: 13).

(23) Georgiana. gveli da k 0ac 0i

snake and man

‘the snake and the man’

b. da-dzma

sister-brother

‘brother and sister’

(iv) Complement clause constructions: Haiman (1985: 124–130) also

discusses complement-clause constructions in terms of iconicity of cohe-

sion mirroring conceptual closeness. He observes that in the contrast in

(24), the ‘‘reduced or contracted version signals conceptual closeness

(same subject), while a non-reduced version signals conceptual distance

(di¤erent subject)’’ (1985: 126).

(24) a. Who do you wanna succeed? (who¼patient; same subject)

b. Who do you want to succeed? (who¼agent possible; di¤.

subject possible)

But much better known is Givon’s work on iconic form-function cor-

respondences in complement clauses (1980, 1990: Ch. 13, 2001: Ch. 12;see also 1985: 199–202, 1991: 95–96), which posits a scale of ‘‘event

integration’’ (called ‘‘binding hierarchy’’ in earlier versions) that corre-

sponds to a scale of formal integration. In the most recent version of

this, Givon posits an iconic principle of ‘‘event integration and clause

union’’:

The stronger is the semantic bond between the two events, the more extensive will

be the syntactic integration of the two clauses into a single though complex clause

(Givon 2001: 40)

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 17

Among his examples are contrasts such as the following, where in each

case the first example exhibits greater event integration and greater syn-

tactic integration (non-finiteness and/or absence of a complementizer):

(25) a. John made Mary quit her job. (2001: 45)

b. John caused Mary to quit her job.

(26) a. She wanted him to leave. (2001: 47)b. She wished that he would leave.

(27) a. She told him to leave. (2001: 48)

b. She insisted that he must leave.

(28) a. She saw him coming out of the theatre. (2001: 50)

b. She saw that he came out of the theatre.

6. Iconicity of cohesion: frequency-based explanation

My claim here is that Haiman’s cohesion scale in (17) does not reflect one

single underlying cause. It should be taken apart into three di¤erent

distinctions: (i) overt coding vs. lack of coding (X word Y vs. X Y), (ii)

juxtaposition vs. bound expression (X Y vs. X-Y), and (iii) portmanteau

expression (Z). All three are related to frequency, but not in the same

way. This is clearest in the case of portmanteau expression (or supple-

tion), which only occurs when the combination of the two elements has ahigh absolute frequency. For instance, in the domain of causative con-

structions, English has the bound causatives sadd-en ‘make sad’, wid-en

‘make wide’, hard-en ‘make hard’, but it is only for high-frequency adjec-

tives like good and small that it has suppletive causatives (improve ‘make

good’, reduce ‘make small’). Similarly, a few cases of suppletion in posses-

sive constructions are attested, but these all come from high-frequency

nouns such as ‘mother’ (e.g., Ju|’hoan taqe ‘mother’, aıa ‘my mother’,

Dickens 2005: 35). The reason why high absolute frequency favourssuppletion (and irregularity more generally) has long been known: High

frequency elements are easy to store and retrieve from memory, so

there is little need for regularity (cf. Ostho¤ 1899, Ronneberger-Sibold

1988).

However, the overt-covert contrast (X word Y vs. X Y) and the free-

bound contrast (X Y vs. X-Y) are due to frequency-induced predictabil-

ity, as seen earlier for contrasts that others have explained by iconicity of

quantity (§2) and by iconicity of complexity (§3–4). Predictability leads toshortness of coding by economy, and shortness of coding itself leads

to bound expression, because short (and unstressed) elements do not

have enough bulk to stand on their own. The phenomena that Haiman

18 M. Haspelmath

explains through iconicity of cohesion actually all instantiate only the

overt-covert contrast and/or the free-bound contrast, so what matters

for them is again relative frequency.

Let us now examine the four main construction types with alleged ef-

fects of iconicity of cohesion to see how their properties can be explained

in terms of relative frequency.

6.1. Possessive constructions

With inalienably possessed nouns, possessive constructions are of course

much more frequent than with alienably possessed nouns (cf. Nichols1988: 579). This can be easily demonstrated with corpus figures. Table 2

shows frequencies of three (hopefully representative) sets of nouns in

spoken English and spoken Spanish.

We see that alienable nouns occur as possessed nouns in a possessive

construction only relatively rarely (12% and 7% of the time, respectively),

Table 2. Frequencies of selected kinship terms, body part terms and alienable nouns

English kinship termsa body part termsb alienable nounsc

total 16235 100% 11038 100% 24991 100%

possessed 7797 48% 4940 45% 2967 12%

nonpossessed 8434 52% 6098 55% 22024 88%

Source: British National Corpus, spoken part

a ¼ mother, father, brother(s), sister(s), wife, husband, son(s), daughter(s), mum, dad,

grandfather, grandmother, aunt, uncle

b ¼ head, hand(s), face, finger(s), knee(s), ear(s), leg(s), wrist, hair, nose, neck, belly,

skin, elbow, chest

c ¼ car, dinner, health, tree, knife, bed, community, meat, money, bike, suitcase, tools,

book(s), room, bedroom, kitchen

Spanish kinship termsd body part termse alienable nounsf

total 18391 100% 8863 100% 10913 100%

possessed 7362 40% 1297 15% 776 7%

nonpossessed 11029 60% 7566 85% 10137 93%

Source: Corpus del Espanol, spoken part

d ¼ madre, padre(s), hermano(s), hermana(s), esposa, marido, hijo(s), hija(s), mama, papa,

abuelo(s), abuela, tıa, tıo

e ¼ cabeza, mano(s), cara, dedo(s), rodilla(s), oıdo(s), pierna(s), muneca, pelo, nariz,

cuello, vientre, piel, codo, pecho, hombro(s)

f ¼ coche, cena, salud, arbol, cuchillo, cama, comunidad, pueblo, carne, dinero, bicicleta,

maleta, herramientas, libro(s), habitacion, dormitorio, cocina

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 19

while it is very common for kinship terms and body part terms to occur

as possessed nouns. (The fact that the figure for Spanish body part terms

is relatively low here is due to the omissibility of overt possessors in body-

part constructions like levanta la mano ‘raise your hand’; strictly speak-

ing, all notional possessors would have to be counted, but this is im-

possible to do automatically.)

As we saw in §4.2, what counts is relative frequencies, not absolute fre-quencies. Since frequent alienable nouns like ‘house’ or ‘show’ are much

more frequent than rare inalienable nouns like ‘kidney’ or ‘great niece’ in

most cultural contexts, the alienable nouns may well occur in a possessive

construction more often than the inalienable nouns. However, the per-

centage of possessed occurrences of inalienable nouns will always be sig-

nificantly higher than the corresponding percentage of alienable nouns.

Thus, upon encountering an inalienable noun, it will be much easier to

predict that it occurs in a possessive construction, and the possessivemarking is therefore relatively redundant. Since languages are e‰cient

systems, they tend to show less overt coding with inalienable nouns.

Moreover, since pronominal possessors are more predictable, they show

a greater tendency to become a‰xed, thus accounting for the contrast be-

tween juxtaposition and bound expression.

Crucially, the economy account given here makes somewhat di¤erent

predictions from Haiman’s (1983) iconicity account. The facts show that

the predictions of the economy account are the correct ones.First, the iconicity account is compatible with a hypothetical situation

in which the pronominal possessor in the inalienable construction is

actually longer than the corresponding form in the alienable possession.

However, economy additionally predicts that the form of the inalienable

pronominal possessor not only tends to be bound, but also tends to be

shorter than the alienable possessor. This is in general borne out, and I

know of no counterexamples. Some examples are given in (29).

(29) alienable

construction

inalienable

construction

a. Nakanai luma taku lima-gu

(Johnston 1981: 217) house I hand-1sg

‘my house’ ‘my hand’

b. Hua dgai� fu d-za�(Haiman 1983: 793) I pig 1sg-arm

‘my pig’ ‘my arm’c. Ndjebbana budmanda ngayabba nga-ngardabbamba

(McKay 1996: 302–6) suitcase I 1sg-liver

‘my suitcase’ ‘my liver’

20 M. Haspelmath

d. Kpelle Ða p�r�i m-polu

(Welmers 1973: 279) I house 1sg-back

‘my house’ ‘my back’

e. Ju|’hoan mı tju m ba

(Dickens 2005: 35) 1sg house 1sg father

‘my house’ ‘my father’

Second, Haiman’s account in terms of distance matching predicts thatthe additional element in alienable constructions should occur in the

middle between the possessor and the possessum, as seen in the canonical

examples from Maltese (is-siggu tieg�h-i [the-chair of-me] ‘my chair’, see

§1) and from Abun ( ji bi nggwe [I of garden] ‘my garden’, see (18)).

However, the extra element may also occur to the left or right of both

the possessor and the possessum, as seen in (30).

(30) alienable

construction

inalienable

construction

a. Puluwat nay-iy hamwol pay-iy

(Elbert 1974: 55, 61) poss-1sg chief hand-1sg

‘my chief ’ ‘my hand’

b. 0O 0odham n-mi:stol-ga n-je 0e(Zepeda 1983: 74–81) 1sg-cat-possd 1sg-mother

‘my cat’ ‘my mother’

c. Koyukon se-tel-eO se-tlee 0

(Thompson 1996: 654, 667) 1sg-socks-possd 1sg-head

‘my socks’ ‘my head’

d. Achagua nu-caarru-ni nu-wıta

(Wilson 1992) 1sg-car-possd 1sg-head

‘my car’ ‘my head’

My economy account only predicts that the coding of inalienable con-

structions should tend to be shorter, but it says nothing about the posi-tion of the extra coding element in alienable constructions, so cases like

(30a–d) are counterevidence to Haiman’s iconicity account, but com-

patible with my economy account. Haiman (1983: 795) himself cites the

Puluwat example, recognizes that it is a problem for him, and ac-

knowledges the need to reformulate his initial generalization. But he

does not seem to recognize that the facts no longer support any role of

iconicity.

Finally, some languages show overt coding of inalienable nouns aswell, but only when they are not possessed. An example comes from

Koyukon (Athabaskan; Thompson 1996: 654, 656, 667):

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 21

(31) Koyukon unpossessed possessed

alienable teł se-tel-e 0

socks 1sg-socks-possd

‘socks’ ‘my socks’

inalienable k 0e-tlee 0 se-tlee 0

unsp-head 1sg-head

‘head’ ‘my head’

Haiman’s iconicity does not make any predictions about unpossessed

constructions, but the economy account predicts just what we see: Alien-

able nouns tend to have overt coding in the possessed construction,

whereas inalienable nouns tend to have overt coding in the unpossessedconstruction.

Thus, the iconicity account is both too weak (in that it does not predict

the shortness of inalienable possessive pronouns, seen in (29)) and too

strong (in that it wrongly predicts that the patterns in (30) should not be

possible). Economy, by contrast, makes just the right predictions.

6.2. Causative constructions

Again I claim that direct causatives are significantly more frequent than

indirect causatives and that that explains why they exhibit more cohesive

coding than indirect causatives. No appeal to iconicity is necessary.

In order to show that this is true, ideally one would examine a corpus

of a language with a regular grammatical contrast between direct and in-direct causation, as illustrated in (19) for Buru and in (20) for Japanese. I

hope that this paper will inspire such research, and I expect that the direct

causatives are much more frequent than the indirect causatives. In the lit-

erature on English, the contrasts between the di¤erent types of periphras-

tic causatives have received some attention. According to Gilquin (2006:

7), the frequency in the British National Corpus of the four causative

verbs that combine with an infinitive are as in (32):

(32) spoken written total

make (‘I made him go’) 898 258 1,156

get (‘I got him to go’) 350 52 402

cause (‘I caused him to go’) 15 207 222have (‘I had him go’) 48 29 77

Since the make and get causatives are usually regarded as expressing a

more direct type of causation, while the cause and have causatives express

a more indirect type of causation, this is just what we would expect.It is also possible to compare lexical causative verbs with the corre-

sponding periphrastic cause causatives (this is also what Haiman 1983

22 M. Haspelmath

mostly does for the semantic aspects). Some figures from the British Na-

tional Corpus are given in (33) (these are only the forms with a pronoun

object, i.e., kill me, cause him to die, etc).

(33) stop 3267 cause to stop 6

kill 2400 cause to die 2

raise 466 cause to rise 3

bring down 269 cause to come down 0

drown 80 cause to drown 0

These comparisons are more problematic than those in (32) in that the

length of the two types of causatives di¤ers sharply, so one might suspect

that the lexical direct causatives are more frequent simply because they

are shorter. In general, such e¤ects do not seem to be particularly strong,

if they exist at all (see Haspelmath 2008: §6.5 for further discussion), but

still in the ideal case we would like to perform our corpus study on a lan-guage where all causatives are expressed grammatically (i.e., even ‘kill’

and ‘raise’ are expressed as ‘die-caus’ and ‘rise-caus’). But since many di-

rect causatives are highly frequent (in an absolute sense) in all languages,

we normally find a lot of portmanteau expression of causatives, which

limits our options for corpus counts. Nevertheless, the figures in (32) and

(33) should be su‰cient to make a good initial case for the claim that

direct causatives are generally more frequent than indirect causatives.

If this is true, then the economy account makes a further prediction:that markers of indirect causation should not only be less cohesive, but

also tend to be longer. And indeed a number of languages have two

causatives di¤ering primarily in length, not in cohesion (cf. Dixon 2000:

74–78).

(34) indirect causative direct causative

a. Amharic as-balla a-balla

(Haiman 1983: 786, caus-eat caus-eat

Amberber 2000: 317–320) ‘force to eat’ ‘feed’

b. Hindi ban-vaa- ban-aa-

(Dixon 2000: 67, be.built-caus be.built-caus

Saksena 1982) ‘have sth. built’ ‘build’c. Jinghpaw -shangun sha-

(Maran and Clifton 1976)

d. Creek -ipeyc -ic

(Martin 2000: 394–399)

Although Haiman (1983: 786) cites the example from Amharic as an in-

stance of an iconicity contrast, it does not actually fit his iconicity expla-

nation. The two causatives of Amharic and the other languages in (34)

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 23

do not di¤er in cohesion, but only in length, so the contrast is predicted

only by the economy account.10

6.3. Coordinating constructions

While Haiman’s discussion of examples like (21–22) above only mentions

the semantic contrast between greater and less conceptual distance, Wal-

chli’s terminology (accidental vs. natural coordination) already points to

the real motivating factor: Natural coordination (as in 21b, 22b and 23b)

is ‘‘natural’’, i.e., frequent and expected for the pair of expressions, while

accidental coordination is infrequent and hence unexpected. Thus, it iseconomical to use more explicit and less cohesive coding in accidental

coordination, and less explicit and more cohesive coding in natural

coordination.

Doing the frequency counts for clause coordination is fairly trivial. For

example, in the German version of The wolf and the seven little kids (one

of Grimm’s fairy tales), there are 47 und-coordinations, and 41 of them

show subject identity, while only 6 have di¤erent subjects. All 47 cases

exhibit temporal closeness.For noun phrase conjunction of the type da-dzma ‘brother-and-sister’

(23b), the frequency counts are less straightforward, because the defini-

tion of accidental and natural coordination is quite vague: Walchli (2005:

5) describes natural coordination as ‘‘coordination of items which are ex-

pected to cooccur, which are closely related in meaning, and which form

conceptual units’’. This is not specific enough to test the claim directly,

but it seems plausible that for noun phrases, too, it will be possible to

show that coordinations of the type ‘brother and sister’ will turn out tobe more frequent than coordinations of the type ‘the man and the snake’.

6.4. Complement-clause constructions

For many of the examples given by Haiman and Givon, the frequency ex-planation is completely straightforward. With ‘want’ verbs (cf. 24a–b),

the same-subject use is of course overwhelmingly more frequent than the

di¤erent-subject use, for well-understood reasons (our desires naturally

concern first of all our own actions), and this is often reflected in shorter

coding (cf. Haspelmath 1999). This explains the contrast between English

wanna and want to, and also a similar contrast between gotta and got to (I

gotta go home now vs. I got to go to Hawaii last winter) that was already

pointed out and correctly explained by Bolinger (1961: 27) (‘‘condensa-tion is tied to familiarity’’, cited approvingly by Haiman 1985: 126).

There are also obvious frequency asymmetries between the pairs make/

cause (cf. 25), want/wish (cf. 26), and tell/insist (cf. 27) which su‰ce to

24 M. Haspelmath

explain the shorter coding of the first member of each pair.11 Givon is

right that in each case there is also a semantic contrast, but in order

to show that the semantic contrast is indeed responsible for the formal

contrast, he should provide contrasting examples of constructions with

roughly equal frequency.

In contrasts such as (28a–b) (She saw him coming out of the theatre vs.

She saw that he came out of the theatre), which do not exhibit a strikingfrequency asymmetry, another factor is clearly highly relevant: In (28a),

the complement event necessarily occurs simultaneously with the main

event, in contrast to (28b), where the complement event could take place

at some other time (She saw that he would come out only two hours later/

that he had come out two hours earlier). In Cristofaro’s (2003: §5.3.2)

terms, (28a) shows ‘‘predetermination’’ of the tense value of the comple-

ment clause, and Cristofaro rightly explains the lack of finiteness (i.e., the

lack of tense) in (28a) as due to ‘‘syntagmatic economy’’: Informationthat can be readily inferred from the context can be left out. (See also

Horie 1993: 203–212 for related discussion.)

This factor of predetermination is of course not unrelated to the

broader notion of semantic closeness. If a complement-taking verb prede-

termines the tense value and other semantic properties of its complement,

this can be seen as one facet of ‘‘conceptual closeness’’ or ‘‘event integra-

tion’’. However, such cases do not provide evidence for iconicity of cohe-

sion, because the higher syntagmatic cohesion of She saw him coming out

of the theatre would be expected anyway for reasons of economy.12

7. Conclusion

I conclude that for most of the core phenomena for which iconicity of

quantity, complexity and cohesion have been claimed to be responsible,there are very good reasons to think that they are in fact explained by fre-

quency asymmetries and the economy principle. The final result may look

iconic to the linguist in some cases, but iconicity is not the decisive causal

factor.

Linguists have rarely discussed the mechanism by which iconicity could

come to have a causal role in shaping grammars. However, Givon claims

that iconic structures are easier to process than noniconic structures:

The iconicity meta-principle: All other things being equal, a coded experience is

easier to store, retrieve, and communicate if the code is maximally isomorphic to

the experience. (Givon 1985: 189)

And similarly, Dressler et al. (1987: 18) say that the more iconic a sign is,

the more ‘‘natural’’ it is, i.e., the easier speakers find using it.

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 25

If these claims were correct also for iconicity of quantity, complexity

and cohesion, it would indeed be predicted that such iconic structures

should be preferred by speakers, and we should see a significant e¤ect of

iconicity in language structures. But in fact we do not see such an e¤ect.

We see e¤ects of frequency and predictability, i.e. of the economy princi-

ple, which (as everyone agrees) is independently needed. What we can

conclude from this is that the above claims are wrong, i.e., that iconicstructures are apparently not necessarily preferred in processing.

The respective role of iconicity and economy was discussed already

in the 1980s. Haiman (1983: 802) recognized that formal complexity/

simplicity is very often economically motivated, and he rejected the sub-

sumption of economic motivation under iconicity, even though one might

argue that the correspondence between a linguistic dimension (full vs. re-

duced form) and a conceptual dimension (unpredictable vs. predictable) is

itself iconic. As an example of economic motivation, he cites the tendencyfor predictable referents to be coded with little material (short pronouns

or zero), while less predictable or unpredictable referents are coded with

more material (longer pronouns or full NPs) (as documented in Givon

(ed.) 1983).

However, Givon (1985: 197) sees the correlation between unpredict-

ability and amount of coding material as primarily iconic (see also Givon

1991: 87–89), and he objects to Haiman’s economy account:

. . . the principle of economy has not been working here by itself, since the end re-

sult of such a situation would have been the exclusive use of zero anaphora for all

topic identification in discourse. (Givon 1991: 87–89)

But that economy (favoring the speaker’s needs) is not the only relevantfactor in communication should be clear from the beginning—if there

were no opposite principle of distinctiveness (favoring the hearer), we

would have no linguistic forms at all. Another argument that Givon

makes is the following:

It may well be that Zipf-like economy considerations were indeed involved in the

diachronic . . . shaping of the quantity-scale . . . But the end result is nonetheless

an iconic—isomorphic—relation between code and coded. And such a relation

surely carries its own meta-motivation, i.e., [the iconicity meta-principle, cited at

the beginning of this section]. (Givon 1991: 87–89)

This last sentence simply does not follow. If the end result is iconic in the

eyes of the analyst, this does not mean that it is iconically motivated, i.e.,

that iconicity is a relevant causal factor. The empirical evidence from

26 M. Haspelmath

frequency distributions and cross-linguistic coding types that was cited in

this paper shows that iconicity may well be irrelevant for an explanation

of the grammatical asymmetries considered here. That is, in the debate

between Haiman and Givon, Haiman was right to favor economy over

iconicity in explaining the quantity scale for referent expressions. How-

ever, as I hope to have shown here, Haiman’s economy explanation

should be extended also to many other cases that he and others explainedin terms of iconicity.

Received 04 December 2006 Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary

Anthropology, Leipzig, GermanyRevision received 05 April 2007

Notes

* Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Jena, Tohoku University,

Seoul National University, and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. I am grateful

for all comments that I received on these occasions and on other occasions. I also

thank Brian Kessler for help with the corpus counts. Contact address: Max Planck In-

stitute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany;

author’s e-mail: 3haspelmath@eva.mpg.de4.

1. In C. S. Peirce’s received typology of signs, there are three types of icons: diagrams,

images, and metaphors (see, e.g., Dressler 1995 for discussion). Nowadays metaphor

is not generally discussed under the heading of iconicity, and imagic iconicity is rele-

vant primarily for onomatopoeia. This paper is exclusively concerned with possible

iconicity e¤ects in grammar, so only diagrammatic iconicity will be considered here.

The relevance of Peirce’s semiotic concepts to the study of grammar was first brought

to linguists’ attention by Jakobson (1965).

2. The idea that (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) isomorphism can be considered an in-

stance of Peircean iconicity was apparently first proposed by Anttila (1989, originally

published in 1972). A number of authors have noted that this represents a fairly

extreme extension of Peirce’s original concept, and Itkonen (2004) flatly rejects the

subsumption of isomorphism under iconicity.

3. Haiman (1985: 194–195) recognizes that ‘‘the motivation for the reduction is also

partly economic: one gives less expression to that which is familiar or predict-

able’’, but he does not consider the possibility that the motivation may be entirely

economic.

4. Lako¤ and Johnson (1980: 127) apply their principle ‘‘more of form is more of con-

tent’’ (which they call a metaphor, not relating it to iconicity) to cases of iteration (She

ran and ran and ran and ran) and lengthening (He is bi-i-i-i-ig!). Such extragrammatical

phenomena may well be motivated by a kind of iconicity of quantity. However, their

attempt to extend the principle to grammatical reduplication fails: While many cases of

reduplication signal ‘‘more of content’’ (e.g., plurality, continuative aspect), this is by

no means always the case (Moravcsik 1978 also mentions a widespread sense of dimi-

nution and attenuation, and more specific senses such as indi¤erence and pretending).

Grammatical reduplication is apparently just like a‰xation in that the reduplicated

form is always the rarer one.

5. The third vs. first/second person contrast has also been interpreted as a kind of ‘‘icon-

icity of absence’’ (closely related to iconicity of quantity as seen in §2): Haiman (1985:

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 27

4–5), citing Benveniste (1946), claims that the third person, as a non-speech act partic-

ipant, can be seen as an ‘‘absent’’ person, a ‘‘non-person’’ that is iconically represented

by a non-desinence (i.e., zero). But neither Benveniste nor Haiman mention impera-

tives, where the hearer is present, but a second-person desinence is typically absent

(see (10) below). (See also the discussion in Helmbrecht 2004: 228–229.)

6. Lehmann (1974: 113) notes that length correlates with rarity, but instead of following

Zipf in explaining length with reference to frequency/rarity, he suggests that rarity can

also be seen as equivalent to improbability or informational value. He then assumes

that informational value correlates with semantic complexity and infers that rare items

tend to be semantically complex. But evidently informational value in the statistical

sense is very di¤erent from semantic complexity. Talking about animals or perceiving

is perhaps in some technical sense of high informational value (even though it is not

very informative), but it is hard to argue that animal and perceive are semantically

more complex than cat or see.

7. A reviewer observes that the English pair widow/widower in (10) is also an isolated

exception and asks how it is di¤erent from beautiful/beauty. The answer is that the

widow/widower contrast is not isolated from a cross-linguistic point of view: There is

a general tendency for this pair to show overt coding on the male member (e.g., Ger-

man Witwe/Witw-er, Russian vdova/vdov-ec), whereas beautiful/beauty is isolated not

only within English, but also cross-linguistically.

8. Also much of the earlier functionalist literature is insu‰ciently explicit with regard to

the causal factor. For example, Comrie (1989: 128) only invokes the ‘‘naturalness’’ of

certain associations between role and animacy, a relatively vague notion compared to

frequency.

9. Cf. also Lako¤ and Johnson’s (1980: 128–132) principle ‘‘closeness is strength of

effect’’, which is, however, not related to iconicity by them, but is regarded as a

metaphor. The frequency-based perspective here suggests that Lako¤ and Johnson’s

metaphor-based account is not necessary.

10. A further observation is that direct vs. indirect causation is not the only semantic

parameter by which competing causatives di¤er. Dixon (2000: 76) lists the following

parameters and observes that they all tend to correlate with the degree of ‘‘compact-

ness’’ of the causative marker (i.e., its shortness).

longer marker shorter marker

action state

transitive intransitive

causee having control causee lacking control

causee unwilling causee willing

causee fully a¤ected causee partially a¤ected

accidental intentional

with e¤ort naturally

Not all of these can be subsumed under ‘‘less conceptual distance’’, but they can be

plausibly related to frequency asymmetries. This is a matter for future research.

11. Leech et al. 2001 give the following figures for the verbal lexemes, which can be taken

as representative for the complement-clause constructions as well: want 945, wish 30;

tell 775, insist 67; make 2165, cause 206.

12. Cristofaro (2003: Ch. 9), while pointing to the importance of the factor of predetermi-

nation, still wants to retain semantic integration and iconicity as explanatory factors

for complement-clause constructions. But like Haiman and Givon, she does not even

consider the potential explanatory value of frequency-based economy.

28 M. Haspelmath

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Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical assymetries 33

In defence of iconicity

JOHN HAIMAN*

Abstract

A number of iconically motivated grammatical distinctions, among them

that between alienable and inalienable possession in Japanese and Korean,

are graded. Haspelmath’s Zipfian frequency hypothesis may be able to

accommodate these facts (lowest bulk is most frequent, middle bulk is less

frequent, and maximal bulk is maximally infrequent), but until more data

are forthcoming, iconicity alone makes the correct predictions in those

cases, and (crucially) in others where bulk is simply not the grammatical

variable at issue in signaling markedness (as for example, the distinction

between nominative/absolutive and ergative/accusative in Kurdish). The

productivity (not just the fortuitous correctness) of an iconically motivated

‘‘more form’’ implies ‘‘more meaning’’ principle is attested in: (a) the

(pre)history of the development of nominalizations in Romanian and

Khmer, (b) in the frequent operation of ‘‘Watkins’ Law’’ whereby 3sg.

forms are interpreted as if they were zero-marked, even when they are not,

and (c) grammaticality judgments about the di¤erences between anaphoric

epithets and structurally identical non-anaphoric noun phrases like the pig

in English. Like reduced form, so too elaborated form, may have a number

of motivations, not only iconic and economic (both cognitive), but also

esthetic. It is probably misconceived to look for only one motivating factor

to account for most observed grammatical facts, although the motivating

factors are more easily identified when they operate alone.

Keywords: iconicity; frequency; productivity.

1. Introduction

Martin Haspelmath’s article is a stimulating and thought-provoking cri-

tique of the notion of iconic motivation which deals with a broad range

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 35–48

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.002

0936–5907/08/0019–0035

6 Walter de Gruyter

of data and demands careful scrutiny. Not surprisingly, I am not equally

convinced by all of his arguments.

Haspelmath’s fundamental argument is a version of Occam’s razor:

certain phenomena of reduced expression which seem to be iconic are

equally motivated by Zipfian reduction, which is ‘‘necessary anyway’’.

He thus proposes that for a variety of phenomena which seem to manifest

diagrammatic iconicity, only frequency—in fact, no cognitive explana-tion whatsoever—is necessary. It is important to recognize this aspect of

his argument. To say that frequency itself is motivated by some concep-

tual considerations would be to beg the question—which one? But since

he never denies that iconicity is also ‘‘necessary anyway’’ in other areas

of grammar, Occam’s razor won’t work for him. Moreover, he has not

yet done all his homework. The iconicity hypothesis is compatible with

graded phenomena. For example, Sohn (1994) and Tsunoda (1995) have

argued that possession (in Korean and Japanese) may be graded sothat there may be three or even four-way contrasts in conceptual close-

ness that are mirrored in grammatical performance and grammaticality

judgments. To claim that frequency counts also reflect this graduation,

Haspelmath would need to produce frequency comparisons of not two,

but three or more forms. Until such evidence is available, paired fre-

quency counts alone will not be able to compete with iconicity.

Let us however assume for now that there are a variety of phenomena

for which both a frequency and an iconicity explanation are equally plau-sible. When a structure is equally motivated by two constraints, however,

credit should be given

a) to the one that is applicable to a broader range of phenomena—notjust the one which seems to have one or two fewer exceptions. (I am

not impressed by Haspelmath’s claims that here and there an excep-

tion to the iconicity principle makes the ‘‘wrong prediction’’, while

frequency does not. Frequency also has its exceptions. For example,

as Orwell (1957: 150) and others have pointed out, it is not necessar-

ily always true that the shorter of two forms is the most frequent:

infrequency, verbal sludge like ‘‘the American people’’ at least in po-

litical discourses, swamps out homely expressions like ‘‘Americans’’,probably by orders of magnitude. In the same way, the occasional

counterexample to a generalization about iconicity is not convinc-

ing.)

b) to the one that is shown to be productive—that is, responsible for the

creation of novel forms. Productivity is the real test for psychological

reality.

36 J. Haiman

2. Broader ‘‘range of phenomena’’ arguments

2.1. Alienable vs. inalienable possession

One of the best apparent pieces of evidence for diagrammatic iconicity is

the contrast between alienable and inalienable possession. Typically,

though not always, the expression of alienable possession is more com-

plex, with greater linguistic distance between possessor and possessum,than that of inalienable possession and this seems to reflect conceptualiza-

tion iconically (inalienable possession—at least of body parts—is concep-

tual closeness to the point of identity: and you can’t get closer than

that.) Haspelmath argues, with convincing statistics, that inalienable pos-

session is more frequently expressed, and that the di¤erent degrees of

bulkiness of ‘my arm’ versus ‘my house’ in languages which make an ex-

plicit distinction between the two is nothing but a Zipfian consequence of

this di¤erence in their relative frequency of occurrence. Indeed Haspel-math makes much of the fact that in some languages like Puluwat, his

frequency test makes the right ‘‘predictions’’ about morphological bulk,

while iconicity does not. (I first noted this as a problem myself. I would

now hazard the guess that Puluwat, like other Oceanic languages, first

allowed the inversion of alienable possession structures like

Possessor

1

þ X # Possessum

2

! 2 1

as an ‘‘occasional stylistic’’ inversion, as is still the case in Tinrin (Osumi

1995: 437–438) or Paamese (Crowley 1995: 384, 386). Iconicity is noteternal.)

But morphological bulk is not the only means whereby the conceptual

contrast between alienable and inalienable possession can be expressed.

As William James (1890) pointed out:

it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he calls mine, the line is

di‰cult to draw. In its widest possible sense, a man’s self is the sum total of all

that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes

and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and his friends. (James 1890:

291–292)

That is, the contrast between what one is and what one merely has is an infi-

nitely gradable one, and languages sometimes reflect this gradation in a variety

of (iconic) ways.

2.1.1. Possessor ascension. The phenomenon of possessor ascension orexternal possession exists in English as well as in many other languages

(cf. Bally 1926; Hyman 1977; Durie 1987; Clark 1995; Tsunoda 1995;

Payne and Barshi 1999). The contrast is illustrated by pairs like:

In defence of iconicity 37

She patted his cheek/head/knee. (no possessor ascension)

She patted him on the cheek/head/knee. (possessor ascension)

In English possessor ascension is possible with all (real or imagined) body

parts, and with clothes one is actually wearing at the time the action

occurred, but not with clothes in one’s closet, with pets, or with one’s

productions or other possessions.

She tapped him on the shoe (OK when worn, not OK when not)

*She tapped him on the gerbil/wallet/article he had just written/car

The operative criterion is not exactly inalienable possession but one very

closely related to it. Possessor ascension may occur when the possessor

can be identified with the possessum. It may seem like arrant chutzpah to

invoke possessor ascension in defence of the idea of conceptual closeness,since it is the relatively inalienable possessor which can be separated from

the possessum in this construction. But note that ascension is a natural

consequence of identity: Who pats my shoulder is ipso facto patting me

(cf. Hyman 1977: 107; Durie 1987: 388; Tsunoda 1995: 590, among

many). Thus possessor ascension is iconic of conceptual closeness, al-

though the means for expressing this closeness are di¤erent than in cases

like Hua d-zorgeva ‘‘my hair’’ versus d-gai’ zu’ ‘‘my house’’. Iconicity can

provide a common explanation (or at least a common characterization)of these facts, and frequency does not.

2.1.2. Honorific agreement. The phenomenon of honorific agreement is

the tendency for honorifics to appear not only on NP denoting respected

persons, but on NP denoting their possessions, or on predications that are

made concerning these possessed NP.

Sohn (1994) and Tsunoda (1995) provide careful examinations of

honorific agreement in Korean and Japanese, whereby a verb maymark the respect that the speaker accords to its subject or object. How-

ever, when that subject or object is a NP consisting of a possessor (mod-

ifier) and a possessum (head), and the one respected is the possessor,

as in ‘‘the emperor’s X’’, there is a cline of subtle and widely shared

grammaticality judgments depending on where the possessum is on the

hierarchy:

Body part > inherent attribute > clothing worn > (kin) > pet >production > other

The higher the possessum on the hierarchy, the more likely that possessor

respect agreement as marked on the verb (either by a special verb form or

38 J. Haiman

by a respect su‰x) will be acceptable (Tsunoda 1995: 576). Accordingly,

‘the emperor’s hand’ is accorded respect; ‘the emperor’s glasses’ less; ‘the

emperor’s horse’ still less; ‘the emperor’s book that he wrote’ less still;

and ‘the emperor’s car/villa’ none at all. Below, the same range of facts

illustrated from Korean (Sohn 1994: 176):

(1) a. sensayng-nim-uy phali khu-sey- yo

teacher hon.gen. arm big hon.pol.

‘The teacher’s arms are big.’ (arms are inalienably part of the

teacher)

b. sensayng-nim-uy ankyengi khu- (sey)-yo

teacher hon.gen. glasses big hon. pol.

‘The teacher’s glasses are big.’(glasses are less likely to bask in the teacher’s reflected honor

and glory)

c. sensayng-nim-uy namwuka khu-(?sey)-yo

teacher hon.gen. trees big hon. pol.

‘The teacher’s trees are big.’

(trees even less than glasses)

b. sensayng-nim-uy kaytuli khu- (sey)-yo

teacher hon.gen. Dogs big hon. pol.‘The teacher’s dogs are big.’

(dogs the teacher owns are less likely to share in his honor than

trees he has planted, perhaps because they have a will of their

own)

The iconic principle behind these judgments is this:

The more we tend to identify the possessum with the possessor, the more

we..show our respect for it, in accordance with our respect for the possessor.

(Tsunoda 1995: 584)

This is exactly in accordance with the conceptual closeness of possessorand inalienable possessum as marked in physical closeness. The iconicity

hypothesis suggests a common conceptual basis for these facts. The fre-

quency hypothesis proposes none.

2.2. Markedness in general

Haspelmath argues (I think largely convincingly) that local markedness

(Tiersma 1982) or markedness reversal (Andersen 1972) phenomena dem-

onstrate that markedness is not so much an icon of the unexpected as

a consequence of the relative infrequency of the unexpected. There is

In defence of iconicity 39

nothing inherently marked even about singular or plural, which is why

the unmarked form of ‘stars’ may be (in some languages) the plural. But

relative markedness is reflected not only in relative bulk (the Zipfian cor-

relation) but in other ways as well.

Consider one elaboration of markedness reversal, Silverstein’s well-

known hierarchy of animacy (1976), and its ability to explain a number

of nominative/ergative case-marking splits. The ergative is markedrelative to the nominative and marks unexpected/infrequent subjects

(typically inanimate nouns, and typically transitive subjects in the past

tense). Conversely, the accusative is marked relative to the nominative

and marks unexpected/infrequent objects (typically animate human

nouns, and objects in the present tense).

Sorani Kurdish happens to be a language in which the accusative

and ergative are marked in exactly the same way—a triumphant demon-

stration of Silverstein’s hypothesis that markedness alone is at issue inboth nominative/accusative and nominative/ergative oppositions. But in

Kurdish the marked/unmarked distinction (called the oblique/direct dis-

tinction in Western accounts, cf. McCarus 1958) is instantiated not by

greater versus lesser bulk, but by the contrast between agreement su‰xes

on the verb (for the unmarked S and O) versus mobile pronominal clitics

which land (roughly) after the first immediate constituent of the VP (for

the marked A and O), cf. Haiman (forthcoming c). There is no di¤erence

in bulk between the agreement su‰xes on the one hand and the pronomi-nal clitics on the other. It is only in their syntactic behaviour that they

di¤er systematically. To claim with Haspelmath that the ‘‘unmarked’’ is

simply the most reduced is to miss the obvious generalization that in

Kurdish, as in other languages with split ergativity, it is the nominative

which is the unmarked grammatical relation.

3. Productivity arguments

Haspelmath correctly notes that investigators have had little to say on the

genesis of iconicity: it is merely something that is already there, to be

(alternately) oohed and aahed over or dismissed as epiphenomenal. This

section examines some evidence for the productivity of iconic motivations

for morphological asymmetries. Such evidence is relatively hard, but not

impossible, to find.

It is worth emphasizing before going on that token frequency can makeno predictions about productivity. It can only account for changes that

have already happened. When an utterance is about to be made for the

first time, there is nothing for frequency to work on.

40 J. Haiman

3.1. takete/maluma thought experiments

I suggested that periphrastic causatives like ‘cause to rise’ tend to evokesome image of magic or telekinesis as opposed to ‘raise’. Haspelmath ar-

gues that there is no need to account for such judgments since the shorter

form is simply the most frequent. One typically raises objects through di-

rect contact rather than by waving a wand. But consider now a new form

like the verb disappear as a transitive verb, which first made its appear-

ance in English (at least for me) in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:

– I just heard them say they were going to disappear Dunbar.

– Why are they going to disappear him?

– I don’t know.

– It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar. What the hell

does it mean when they disappear someone? (Heller 1972 [1955]:

376)

It has now become widespread, but I still recall the image it conjured up

when I first read this book in the sixties. Contrasted with make disappear

it included as at least part of its meaning the notion of directly killing, asopposed to ‘make disappear’ which would have suggested some bureau-

cratic mediation. Speakers who make judgments like this are basing their

images on a contrast between patterns and performing their computations

without reference to frequency, since the frequency of a new form when it

is first introduced is zero.

3.2. length revisited

As most cognitive linguists maintain, and as Haspelmath (1993: 106–107)

has also contended, human imagery and conceptualization tend to be

based on concrete experience, and are not always the same as what is

viewed by the elite of the scientific community as ‘‘objective physical

fact’’. For example, consider notions of up and down: the sun still ‘‘rises’’and ‘‘sets’’, even though we accept Copernicus.) In his discussion here,

Haspelmath seems to retreat from this sensible position: an entity is trisyl-

labic, although things are monosyllabic. Hence length does not corre-

spond to conceptual complexity. To Haspelmath (as to Leibniz), an

entity may have seemed conceptually prior to things and people (and

how fortunate at least for Leibniz that ens is monosyllabic in Latin). Hu-

mans in general simply do not seem to operate in this manner: before we

make abstractions about entities, we are at home with things and people(cf. Wierzbicka 1972, who boldly disregarded both the thought of Leibniz

and the morphology of English in insisting that someone and something

are mutually independent semantic primitives).

In defence of iconicity 41

In the same way, it is, if not ridiculous, at least highly unlikely, that hu-

man beings begin their thinking with a priori dimensions of absolute

space, time, colour, and morality (among them length), which they then

‘‘populate’’ with judgments like ‘‘long’’ versus ‘‘short’’, ‘‘good’’ versus

‘‘bad’’, ‘‘green’’ versus ‘‘red’’ and so forth. Rather, the conceptual dimen-

sions like ‘‘length’’, ‘‘width’’, ‘‘time’’ and ‘‘morality’’ and personifications

like ‘‘life’’, ‘‘death’’, ‘‘beauty’’ and ‘‘justice’’ come into being (if they doso at all) only after scores of these judgments are made and people have

reflected on them. (It is satisfying, if ultimately irrelevant, that modern

physics now seems to ‘‘agree’’ with this folklore to the extent that space,

rather than preexisting, is thought to be created by the objects within it.)

This is why in every language I have ever heard of, nominalizations like

length are systematically more complex than judgments like long from

which they derive (again, we can and should take occasional exceptions

like beauty and (German) Tod ‘‘death’’ in stride). And that is also whythere are languages (like Hua) in which words like ‘‘death’’, ‘‘justice’’

and ‘‘beauty’’ do not exist all, and therefore have a frequency of zero.

We can observe the generation of the verb/nominalization distinction

in the recorded history of one language (Romanian) and in the tentatively

reconstructible prehistory of another (Khmer). In both languages, inher-

ited phonetic material was exapted (essentially from the careful pronun-

ciation of a verb form) to create a novel and productive derivational

nominalizing su‰x (Romanian -re from the inherited infinitive) or infix(Khmer awm(n)- from an inherited unstable anacrusic syllable in sesqui-

syllabic roots) to form new words (Haiman 2003). Considerations of fre-

quency will not explain why this recycled material was assigned the novel

task of marking nominalization in both languages (and also marking

causativity in Khmer). The iconic principle that ‘‘more form is more

meaning’’ can do so naturally.

3.3. Watkins’ Law

Not only is it true that the 3sg. form in the indicative or the 2sg. in the

imperative are typically zero, facts which may or may not be accountable

through Zipfian reduction. It is more interesting to observe that in para-

digmatic restructurings, 3sg. is often treated as if it were zero, even when

it isn’t (Watkins 1962: 1–6; Haiman and Beninca 1992: 89; Bybee 1985:

55). So we are faced not with actually reduced forms but the reinterpreta-tion of non-reduced forms. Zipf may account for the actual erosion of a

frequently occurring form, but not for the perception of a non-reduced

form as if it were reduced.

42 J. Haiman

3.4. Full nouns and anaphoric expressions

On the relative abbreviation of anaphoric forms, I would have beentempted to accept Haspelmath’s position, but now I am not so sure. Con-

sider the well-known e-mail joke variously told about various political

leaders:

George Bush and his chau¤eur are out for a drive in the countryside. Suddenly a

pig darts across the road in front of the car and is killed. Bush sends his driver to

the farmhouse to apologize and make amends (insert a more plausible politician if

you wish) and settles down to wait. After more than an hour, the chau¤eur re-

emerges from the farmhouse. In his left had he holds a Havana cigar; in his right,

a bottle of champagne. His shirt is undone and covered with lipstick.

– What happened?

– Well, I got the cigar from the farmer, and the champagne from his wife, and

for the last hour, their daughter has been making passionate love to me.

– What did you tell them?

– Just that I’m George Bush’s driver, and I’ve killed the pig.

The linguistic judgment that needs to be accounted for is that this joke

can only be written, and not told. The reason, as everyone seems to agree,is that what the chau¤eur said can only be pronounced

– . . . I’ve killed the PIG

while what the farmer’s family responded to could only be

– . . . I’ve KILLED the pig.

The contrast, of course is between the uses of the expression the pig as

a full noun phrase (the chau¤eur’s speech) and as an epithet (as in the

farmer’s understanding). Epithets need not be monosyllabic. Other possi-

bilities include the cocksucking bastard, that idiotic asshole, the cross-eyed

son of a bitch, or virtually anything else one might want to use to charac-

terize George Bush or anyone else. Thus there need be no contrast in

morphological bulk between an epithet and a full NP. What is commonto all epithets, however, is that in addition to incorporating any amount

of information or speaker’s attitude about a referent, they also function

as anaphoric expressions, and refer back to some antecedent, wherein

that referent is first named. The totally iconic intuition that underlies the

grammaticality judgment above is that epithets, as anaphors, are copies of

an original referring expression, and like copies everywhere, paler than

their originals. This pallor is indirectly reflected in the locus of sentence

stress on the verb rather than its object. Whether ‘‘relative pallor’’via destressing is the same fact as the relative abbreviation of anaphoric

In defence of iconicity 43

pronouns in general is perhaps open to debate, but here Occam is on the

side of iconicity.

4. Conclusions

Both complexity and elaboration may arise more or less accidentally:Frequency may lead to erosion (thus Zipf 1935), and appendix-like

‘‘quirky’’ vestigial residues may result in unnecessary elaboration in lan-

guages as well as in biological organisms (Mayr 2000, Dahl 2005, Kuteva

to appear). But there are also multiple non-accidental motivations for

both compact and elaborated expression. Among the functionally moti-

vated bases for compactness are brutality (e.g., four letter words) and

esthetic power (e.g., haiku). Among other motivations for elaboration are

a) various mechanisms of phonetic bulking which prevent total loss of

both lexical and grammatical categories (Bloomfield 1933: 395–396;

Bolinger 1975: 438; Matiso¤ 1982: 74–76; Heath 1998),

b) high register and/or politeness (Geertz 1955; Aoki and Okamoto1988)

c) disambiguation via diacritics (Haiman 1985: 60–67),

d) the iconic representation of conceptual symmetry (Haiman 1988) and

e) esthetic appeal (ritual elaboration, Haiman to appear a,b).

Doubtless there are also others. In approaching human language, the

rational exuberance of Chappell and Thompson 1992 (who uncover no

fewer than seven di¤erent motivations for the absence of qualifying de in

Chinese possessive constructions), or of Hugo Schuchardt 1885: 23 (‘‘I

perceive here the motley interplay of innumerable drives’’) seems to do

more empirical justice to its subject than Haspelmath’s reductionism.

Each of these motivations is most clearly attested ceteris paribus, that

is, when they operate unopposed. Haspelmath makes a strong case forfrequency as the sole possible motivation for di¤ering expressions of one

conceptual dimension (transitive versus intransitive): frequently or typi-

cally ‘‘spontaneous’’ events like freezing will typically occur as root in-

transitives, and form their marked transitive congeners via an extra

causative morpheme. Conversely, events which are typically seen to be

brought about by external agents, like breaking, will typically occur as

transitive verbs, and form their intransitive congeners via an extra medio-

passive or reflexive morpheme. (Note that here again, human conceptual-ization is not the same as objective physical fact. To a physicist, freezing,

melting and boiling are brought about by external agency no less than

breaking). This case is exactly analogous to the contrast between typically

44 J. Haiman

‘‘introverted’’ and typically ‘‘extroverted’’ transitive actions discussed at

considerable length in Haiman 1985: actions typically performed upon

oneself occur in the typical case with unexpressed or reduced objects

(e.g., ‘‘I shave’’: middle voice) while actions more typically performed on

others occur when they are reflexive with a separate object noun phrase

(e.g. ‘‘I kicked myself ’’: reflexive voice). Armed with this clear example

of economic motivation, Haspelmath attempts to eliminate iconicity inother cases as well, with less success.

I think we must acknowledge that iconicity is clearly one possible mo-

tivation for the asymmetric realization of referential asymmetry. I have

tried to argue here that it is preferable to frequency when it accounts

for a broader range of related phenomena, and when it seems to be pro-

ductive in generating new forms. Moreover, iconicity is the only possible

motivation for the even more wide-spread if not universal manifestations

of referential symmetry (in distributivity, comparison, reciprocity, coordi-nate conjunction and so on) that have been discussed elsewhere in the

literature (Lako¤ and Peters 1969; Haiman 1980, 1985, 1988).

I believe that this is puzzling: Iconicity seems at least at present to o¤er

no proven cognitive benefits (Here I am reluctantly in disagreement with

Givon 1985: 189; cf. Bellugi and Klima 1976; Bonvillian et al. 1997;

Tomasello et al. 1999). If we grant this, it is unexplained why it should

occur at all. Given the fact that it disappears so rapidly under convention-

alization (Bloom 1979), moreover, it cannot possibly be regarded as avestigial feature—from proto-language, or from Old English, or even

from last week. In other words, for iconicity to appear in language at all,

it has to be productive. Now it seems that neither of the traditional moti-

vations for linguistic form (economy of e¤ort for the benefit of the

speaker versus clarity for the benefit of the hearer) can account for it.

I very tentatively propose that iconicity is generated over and over not

only for purely cognitive reasons, but because speakers take a purely es-

thetic pleasure in making the form fit the sense. Some purely creativedrive is necessary to account for the ultimate genesis of linguistic material

(which sound change, analogy and grammaticalization merely erode and

tidy up), but it is frequently overwhelmed by the other two (and perhaps

others). Yet a creative esthetic drive compounded of ‘‘imitation and am-

bition’’ is well attested in human behavior generally and even in language

it is not only inferable on a priori grounds. Indeed it is responsible for the

creation of non-referential non-iconic symmetry, which may include not

only ‘‘twin forms’’ like flimflam (Pott 1862; Marchand 1960), but evennuts and bolts phenomena like grammatical agreement (Ferguson and

Barlow 1988: 17; Haiman to appear a,b). A creative esthetic drive may

even be responsible for the spontaneous creation of ‘‘expressive mor-

In defence of iconicity 45

phemes’’ like ideophones, as noted long ago by Hermann Paul 1880,

Ch. 9. But that is a subject that deserves another treatment.

Received 28 February 2007 Macalester College, USA

Notes

* Author’s email address: 3Haiman@Macalester.edu4. Contact address: Linguistics

Search, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA.

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48 J. Haiman

On iconicity of distance

WILLIAM CROFT*

Abstract

Haspelmath argues that certain universal asymmetries in linguistic distance

previously analyzed as examples of iconicity of distance are better analyzed

as the result of frequency. It is argued here that Haspelmath’s arguments

can be countered by an advocate of iconicity of distance as an explanatory

factor. Iconicity of distance is not di¤erent in kind from iconicity of conti-

guity, which Haspelmath endorses. Haspelmath’s argument works only if

one takes relative frequency instead of absolute frequency; yet it is gener-

ally accepted that economy e¤ects are the result of absolute frequency.

The empirical frequency data that Haspelmath presents is inconclusive.

However, Haspelmath presents data that suggest that an iconicity of dis-

tance analysis, at least for possession constructions, must be revised as icon-

icity of length. Finally, criteria are o¤ered to di¤erentiate the e¤ects of

economy, iconicity of distance/length, and iconicity of independence.

Keywords: frequency; iconicity; economy; distance.

Haspelmath’s article challenges explanations based on iconic motivationfor three categories of linguistic phenomena, quantity, complexity and co-

hesion (distance). For all three of these phenomena, Haspelmath argues

that an explanation in terms of economic motivation, that is, based on

di¤erences in frequency, is superior to the iconicity explanation that

has been o¤ered in the literature. Haspelmath does not deny that icon-

icity plays a major role in determining linguistic structure; his critique

does not touch the most important manifestations of iconicity in lan-

guage, namely paradigmatic isomorphism, syntagmatic isomorphism,and contiguity.

I believe that Haspelmath is correct in his arguments that economic

motivation is a superior explanation for the quantity and complexity phe-

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 49–57

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.003

0936–5907/08/0019–0049

6 Walter de Gruyter

nomena he discusses. I did not consider either of these to be examples

of iconic motivation in Typology and Universals (Croft 2003). Instead,

length and complexity are reflexes of typological markedness (Greenberg

1966). Typological markedness, at least the formal asymmetries in expres-

sion that Haspelmath discusses, are economically motivated, as Green-

berg argues (Haspelmath cites Greenberg’s frequency-based explanations

in both cases).Iconicity of cohesion is another matter. An explanation in terms of

iconic motivation can be largely defended, and an explanation in terms

of economic motivation appears to be unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, Has-

pelmath’s article helps us to tease apart the relationship between iconicity

and economy in motivating linguistic universals.

Haspelmath divides Haiman’s iconicity of distance into two, contiguity

(see above) and cohesion. Haspelmath distinguishes contiguity from the

scale of iconicity of distance for the grammatical relationship of X to Yin (1) (from Haiman 1983: 783):

(1) a. X A Y (an additional word is used to express the relationship

between X and Y)b. X Y (no additional word is used to express the relationship be-

tween X and Y)

c. X-Y (X and Y are morphologically bound)

d. Z (a portmanteau expression of the concepts denoted by X and

Y)

Haspelmath argues that the scale in (1) does not correspond to dis-

tance, ‘because (b) and (c) do not literally di¤er in distance, and distance

is not really applicable to (d)’ (§5). But it is not clear to me that the notion

of distance is inappropriate for the distinctions in (1). The presence vs.

absence of a third morpheme can be fairly straightforwardly interpreted

in terms of linguistic distance (but see below). The contrast between mor-

phological freedom ( juxtaposition) and boundedness is intended torepresent both prosodic and segmental di¤erences in behavior that do

represent phenomena that can reasonably be called distance, even in a

strict temporal sense. Prosodically, morphologically free elements may

occur in di¤erent intonation units, and be interrupted by pause. Segmen-

tally, the articulatory gestures for the forms X and Y may overlap (in

assimilation and other segmental e¤ects), which represents a certain tem-

poral overlap of the formal expression of X and Y. Finally, portmanteau

expression represents complete temporal overlap of the formal expressionof X and Y: all of Z expresses both X and Y. Thus, it is not unreasonable

to consider the scale in (1) to be an extension of iconicity of contiguity,

which Haspelmath accepts as genuinely iconically motivated.

50 W. Croft

The more important question, however, is whether the phenomena that

Haspelmath discusses really are better explained in terms of economic

rather than iconic motivation. Haspelmath discusses four examples: at-

tributive possession constructions, causative constructions, coordinating

constructions, and complement clause constructions. In the case of posses-

sive constructions, he gives frequency data as evidence for a frequency-

based explanation, and o¤ers other grammatical arguments to support afrequency-based explanation over an iconic explanation. In the case of

the other three constructions, however, he o¤ers little or no frequency

data and few other arguments. It is only for possessives that Haspelmath

has a well developed argument against the iconicity explanation and in

favor of the frequency explanation. I will therefore focus on Haspel-

math’s arguments regarding possessive constructions.

The relevant typological universal for possessives is that if there is a

di¤erence in linguistic distance (cohesion) between the alienable and in-alienable constructions, the inalienable construction will always be lower

on the distance scale in (1) than the corresponding alienable construction.

Haiman explains this universal by iconicity of distance.

Haspelmath’s frequency explanation is based on the relative frequency

of the possessed to the unpossessed form of a noun.1 In text counts from

English and Spanish, Haspelmath demonstrates that the relative fre-

quency of body part terms and kinship terms in the possessed form com-

pared to the unpossessed form is greater than the relative frequencyof alienable nouns in the possessed form compared to the unpossessed

form. Haspelmath notes that inalienable nouns in the unpossessed con-

struction are crosslinguistically sometimes overtly coded (see his Koyu-

kon examples), and that this fact can be explained in terms of frequency.

In fact, Haspelmath’s text counts actually indicate that even kinship

terms and body part terms occur more frequently in the unpossessed

construction.

Thus, an economy explanation only works if one uses relative fre-quency of unpossessed vs. possessed inalienable nouns compared to the

relative frequency of unpossessed vs. possessed alienable nouns. But all

other examples of typological markedness—frequency-based di¤erences

in the structural expression of concepts—are of absolute frequency, not

relative frequency. Many such examples are given in Greenberg (1966)

and Bybee (1985); see also Croft (2003: 151, 154). In the one study that

that compares relative and absolute frequency with respect to phenomena

attributed to economy, namely morphological irregularity in Russiannominal paradigms (Corbett et al. 2001), absolute frequency was a

strongly significant factor, but relative frequency was only weakly signifi-

cant (see Croft 2003: 206–207).

On iconicity of distance 51

It is not an accident that absolute frequency has been found to be the

causal factor for economically motivated linguistic patterns. The theoret-

ical explanation for economy (e.g., Bybee 1985) requires absolute fre-

quency. Economy e¤ects are due to degree of entrenchment of linguistic

forms (morphological forms or constructions such as the possessive) in

the mental representation of linguistic knowledge. Entrenchment leads

to routinization of the production of the form by a speaker, which inturn brings about reduction of that form. But entrenchment is a result

of exposure to the number of tokens of the linguistic form; that is,

entrenchment is a function of the absolute frequencies of forms, not rela-

tive frequencies.

Haspelmath also appeals to predictability to account for economy

(§2.2). Unfortunately, predictability is a vague concept: any mathemati-

cal relationship can be construed as predictable. But the most natural

psychological interpretation of predictability, as what the speaker wouldbe expected to produce, also relies on absolute frequency. If the posses-

sion construction is reduced for inalienable nouns compared to alien-

able nouns because inalienable nouns are more predictable in the pos-

session construction, this means that one would expect the absolute

frequency of inalienable nouns in the possession construction to be

greater than the absolute frequency of alienable nouns in the possession

construction (or perhaps greater than the absolute frequency of inalien-

able nouns in the unpossessed construction). In other words, relativefrequency would not be expected to lead to economy e¤ects such as

reduction.2

Furthermore, the iconicity of distance hypothesis is not about the rela-

tionship of the possessed construction to the unpossessed construction.

The iconicity of distance hypothesis compares the relationship of two pos-

sessed constructions, the inalienable construction and the alienable con-

struction. The iconicity of distance hypothesis makes no claim about the

unpossessed construction, or about the relationship of the unpossessedconstruction to the possessed construction. This evidence is irrelevant to

the iconicity account. A genuine comparison of an iconicity account and

an economy account for distance/cohesion should compare the absolute

frequency of the inalienable possession construction to that of the alien-

able possession construction.

Haspelmath’s figures appear to suggest that comparing these two abso-

lute frequencies does support an economic explanation. In English, there

are 12737 tokens of body part and kinship terms in the possessed con-struction, and only 2967 tokens of alienable nouns in the possessed con-

struction. Unfortunately, the data that Haspelmath presents represents

only a subset of both inalienable and alienable nouns. We cannot be cer-

52 W. Croft

tain if the frequency di¤erence will remain the same once the vast number

of inalienable nouns is included. Thus, Haspelmath’s frequency data is

inconclusive. Also, an economy explanation would make a di¤erent pre-

diction for those languages in which kinship terms are not found in the

inalienable possession construction (e.g., Kosraean [Kusaiean]). In such

a language, the alienable possession construction tokens would probably

outnumber the inalienable ones (this is what is implied by the tokenfrequency data for English and Spanish o¤ered by Haspelmath). In that

case, an economy account would predict that the alienable possession

construction would be the more cohesive one. This would be an incorrect

empirical prediction.

For the possessive construction, Haspelmath argues that it is the (rela-

tive) frequency of the construction that matters, not the individual words:

‘. . . the [frequent] alienable nouns may well occur in a possessive con-

struction more often than the inalienable nouns. However, the percentageof possessed occurrences of inalienable nouns will always be signifi-

cantly higher than the corresponding percentage of [infrequent] inalien-

able nouns.’ But in every case of reduced alternative constructions that

has been investigated, what determines the reduction of the linguistic ex-

pression is the token frequency of specific words in the construction, not

the construction itself (e.g., Bybee and Slobin 1982; Bybee and Thompson

1997; Bybee and Scheibman 1999; Bybee 2001). If an individual word has

a low token frequency, it tends to be regularized. This latter phenomenoncannot be explained by an economy account based on construction fre-

quency. The fact that low token frequency inalienable nouns still take

the more cohesive possessive construction must be due to some other fac-

tor. That other factor is iconicity of distance.

Haspelmath proposes that a frequency account can explain the fact

that the inalienable pronominal possessor expression is phonologically

shorter than the alienable pronominal possessor expression, and an icon-

icity of distance account cannot. The greater phonological fusion andreduction of the inalienable pronominal possessor is almost certainly due

to the fact that the inalienable possessive construction is more highly

grammaticalized than the alienable possession construction. Higher fre-

quency plays a major role in grammaticalization (Bybee 2003). Once a

linguistic expression is extended to a grammatical function, it increases

in frequency, and the increase in frequency leads to erosion of the gram-

maticalizing morphemes in the expression.

However, the relevant frequency contrast in grammaticalization is be-tween the grammaticalizing construction in a grammatical function and

its historical antecedent in its non-grammatical function. This is not

what the iconicity of distance account intends to explain. What we observe

On iconicity of distance 53

in possessive constructions is that a less grammaticalized pronominal con-

struction, which is presumably newer, has entered the possessive domain,

and is competing with the more grammaticalized possessive construction.

The result of this competition in many languages is a semantic division of

labor—a common result of competing variants (Croft 2000: 176–177).

The semantic division is always such that the more cohesive construction

is used for more inalienable possession relations. The frequency e¤ects ofgrammaticalization cannot explain this fact. Iconicity of distance explains

this fact.3

The remaining argument that Haspelmath raises against the iconicity

account is the only one that is a serious challenge to iconicity of distance

in possessive constructions. Haspelmath argues that iconicity of distance

requires the extra morpheme in alienable possessive constructions to oc-

cur between the possessor and possessum in the construction, yet it some-

times does not do so. But the iconicity explanation can be reformulated toaccommodate this phenomenon.

What is required is a reformulation of iconicity of distance with a

di¤erent measure of linguistic distance than simple temporal distance.

Haiman himself allows a nontemporal measure of linguistic distance

in his analysis of causative constructions: he argues that there is greater

linguistic distance when the causee is expressed as an indirect object

than as a direct object (Haiman 1983: 792). Haiman discusses the

Puluwat example—as Haspelmath notes—and proposes an alternativeformulation—which Haspelmath does not discuss—in terms of phono-

logical bulk (Haiman 1983: 795). Haiman’s reformulation is that a

conceptually more distant relation is encoded by a linguistically bulkier

expression. This formulation changes the iconic mapping from distance

between X and Y to length of the linguistic form used to code the rela-

tion between X and Y. This reformulation would allow us to distinguish

between iconicity of distance proper, based on temporal distance of forms

in the linguistic signal, and an iconicity of temporal length of the rela-tional expression. An iconicity of length account for possessive construc-

tions is superior to both the original iconicity of distance hypothesis and

the economy hypothesis.

Haspelmath’s arguments against iconicity of distance or length do not

hold up, at least for possessive constructions. The frequency data that

Haspelmath invokes in favor of an economy account are inconclusive or

irrelevant. Haspelmath appeals to relative frequency of constructions,

whereas economy is due to absolute token frequencies of lexical forms (ineither morphological paradigms or grammatical constructions). Where

Haspelmath o¤ers grammatical phenomena that really are economically

motivated (grammaticalization), they are di¤erent phenomena from the

54 W. Croft

ones that are hypothesized to be iconically motivated by Haiman. Where

frequency and semantics conflict (low frequency forms, languages with

smaller inalienable classes), or frequency makes no prediction (division of

labor in grammaticalization), semantics explains what is observed, and the

semantic di¤erences are iconically motivated.

Nevertheless, some grammatical phenomena are undoubtedly econom-

ically motivated. Nor should we rule out the possibility of multiple moti-vations, which Haspelmath appears to do. For example, Haspelmath

suggests (though with little data) that certain patterns in complex sen-

tence cohesion that have been taken to be conceptually close are also

higher in frequency. Haspelmath concludes that iconicity therefore has

no role to play in explaining linguistic di¤erences in complex sentence

constructions. But there is no a priori reason to assume that only one

functional motivation applies for every linguistic construction (Croft

2003: 64–69). For example, ‘natural coordination’ (such as brother and

sister; see Hasplemath, §6.3) may be more frequent than man and snake,

but it is also conceptually more of a unit (Wierzbicka 1980). What is re-

ally necessary is a careful examination of what motivations appear to be

operating to explain each typological universal, and the linguistic predic-

tions each makes.

For instance, in the analysis of complex sentences, one must distinguish

between iconicity of distance and iconicity of independence: concepts

having less conceptual independence will be linguistically no more inde-pendent than concepts having greater conceptual independence (Cristo-

faro 2003; Croft 2003: 213–219). In discussing Cristofaro’s (2003) typo-

logical universals of subordination, I suggest that deranking of clauses

(Stassen 1985) is economically motivated, because deranking involves

asymmetries in overt coding and reduced behavioral potential as well

as di¤erences in token frequency. However, di¤erences in linguistic inte-

gration of subordinate clauses is iconically motivated by conceptual inde-

pendence, because semantic integration and temporal dependence of thesubordinate clause—the factors that determine degree of linguistic inde-

pendence—are symptoms of conceptual independence, not conceptual

distance.

Table 1 indicates salient properties of di¤erent types of functional

explanations for linguistic cohesion.

Some properties are found under more than one explanation: the same

phenomenon may have alternative explanations. For example, coding

length can be explained either by economy or iconicity of distance/length. Haspelmath appears to assume that coding length is only explain-

able in terms of economy (§6), but this is not necessarily the case. One

must examine all of the properties in Table 1 in order to identify which

On iconicity of distance 55

motivation is operating. If one finds the union of properties from more

than one motivation, then it is likely that multiple motivation is the best

explanation for the linguistic phenomenon.

Received 30 April 2007 University of New Mexico,

Albuquerque, USA

Notes

1. Haspelmath incorrectly describes the distinction between absolute and relative frequency

in §4.2. There he describes relative frequency as a comparison of the absolute frequen-

cies of paradigmatic alternatives such as singular book and plural books. But this is sim-

ply comparison of absolute frequencies. Relative frequency is a proportional frequency,

measured by comparing percentages of one form relative to another form. That is,

relative frequency is a second-order comparison of sets of absolute frequencies (see also

Corbett et al. 2001: 202–203).

2. An anonymous referee points out that some recent work in cognitive linguistics (e.g.,

Gries et al. 2005 and works cited therein) makes use of relative frequency. However,

this work uses relative frequency to tease apart subtle semantic distinctions between con-

structions and to better identify individual words semantically most closely associated

with a construction’s meaning. It does not claim to motivate economy e¤ects such as

phonological reduction.

3. Haspelmath also cites the relative length of direct vs. indirect causation markers as par-

allel to the relative length of inalienable vs. alienable pronominal possessors. The same

counterargument applies to the causatives as well. It is also possible that in causation,

the di¤erence between direct and indirect causation reflects the conceptual distance be-

Table 1. Major properties of di¤erent types of functional motivation

Economy Iconicity of Distance or

Length

Iconicity of Independence

Asymmetry in coding length Asymmetry in coding length —

— Asymmetry in morphological

boundedness (e.g., [X Y] vs.

[X-Y] or [X A Y] vs. [X A-Y]

Asymmetry in

morphological boundedness

Asymmetry in behavioral

potential (Croft 2003: 95–99)

— Asymmetry in syntactic

potential

Independent phenomenon

from rest of construction

(e.g., contrasts between

[X A] and [X] regardless of

presence or absence of Y)

Involves coding of relation

between X and Y in

construction

Involves coding of relation

between X and Y in

construction

Motivated by absolute

lexical token frequency

Motivated by conceptual

distance

Motivated by conceptual

independence (which also

involves conceptual distance)

56 W. Croft

tween causer and causee, i.e., the arguments of the causative construction. In that case,

the arguments are X and Y and the causative marker is A in Haiman’s formula for lin-

guistic distance in (1a), and the di¤erences in length of direct vs. indirect causation

markers is exactly predicted by iconicity of distance.

References

Bybee, Joan L.

1985 Morphology: A Study into the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amster-

dam: John Benjamins.

2001 Frequency e¤ects on French liaison. In Bybee, Joan L., and Paul Hopper

(eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam:

John Benjamins, 337–359.

2003 Mechanisms of change in grammaticalization: the role of frequency. In Jo-

seph, Brian, and Richard Janda (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics.

Oxford: Blackwell, 602–623.

Bybee, Joan L. and Joanne Scheibman

1999 The e¤ect of usage on degrees of consitutency: the reduction of don’t in

English. Linguistics 37, 575–596.

Bybee, Joan L. and Dan I. Slobin

1982 Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense.

Language 58, 265–289.

Bybee, Joan L. and Sandra A. Thompson

1997 Three frequency e¤ects in syntax. In Juge, Matthew L., and Jeri Moxley

(eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics

Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 378–388.

Corbett, Greville G., Andrew Hippisley, Dunstan Brown and Paul Marriott

2001 Frequency, regularity and the paradigm: a perspective from Russian on a

complex relation. In Bybee, Joan L., and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency

and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,

201–226.

Cristofaro, Sonia

2003 Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Longman.

2003 Typology and Universals, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greenberg, Joseph H.

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Linguarum, Series Minor 59.) The Hague: Mouton.

Gries, Stefan Th., Beate Hampe and Doris Schonefeld

2005 Converging evidence: bringing together experimental and corpus data on the

association of verbs and constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16, 635–677.

Haiman, John

1983 Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59, 781–819.

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On iconicity of distance 57

Reply to Haiman and Croft

MARTIN HASPELMATH*

I am grateful to John Haiman and William Croft for their penetrating cri-

tiques of my claims and for the interesting challenges that they provide

for them. This o¤ers me a chance to clarify and elaborate on some of the

central points of my article. This is an important debate, because iconicityand frequency are central explanatoty concepts in functional and cogni-

tive linguistics. Even if we do not succeed in resolving the issues, our un-

derstanding will be enhanced by this discussion.

1. How frequency explains grammatical asymmetries

A key presupposition of my paper is that frequency of use implies short

coding because frequent items are more predictable. Croft assumes a

rather di¤erent account of the frequency-shortness connection. He claims

that

[e]conomy e¤ects are due to degree of entrenchment of linguistic forms . . . En-

trenchment leads to routinization of the production of the form by a speaker,

which in turn brings about reduction of that form.

This echoes similar remarks in Joan Bybee’s work (e.g., Bybee 2001,

2003), but I do not see how such a view can be reconciled with some basic

facts. To be sure, routinization often cooccurs with reduction of form, be-

cause forms that are routinized for the speaker are often also predictable

for the hearer. But in such cases the cause of the reduction is not the

routinization, but the speaker’s tendency to save energy when part of

the message is predictable. When a routinized form is not predictable

(e.g., when I dictate my phone number to someone), no reduction occurs.George Kingsley Zipf saw this correctly from the beginning of his

writings:

In listening to spoken language, we notice that, among other things, the speaker

invariably emphasizes these two: first, what is new or unexpected to the hearer;

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 59–66

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.004

0936–5907/08/0019–0059

6 Walter de Gruyter

second, what the hearer desires [for the speaker] to make especially clear . . . But

that which is unexpected, unusual, or unfamiliar to the hearer is, by definition, the

seldom. (Zipf 1929: 5)

Thus, frequency-induced reduction is to a large extent a hearer-based

phenomenon and is not due to routinization, but to predictability. It

should also be noted that predictability need not be due to linguistic fre-

quency. Stereotypical situations allow massive reduction, simply becausethe context makes the utterance content easy to predict. In grammar, too,

some reductions (e.g., lack of stress on anaphoric epithets, discussed by

Haiman in his §2.4) are due to referential predictability from the context,

not to high frequency of use.

A related issue is productivity, which, as Haiman rightly observes, is

‘‘the real test for psychological reality’’. However, an explanatory factor

like frequency of use is not meant to be ‘‘psychologically real’’ in the way

in which cognitive schemas or generative rules are sometimes said to bepsychologically real. Frequency e¤ects in processing (cf. Ellis 2002) a¤ect

language structure through speakers’ innovations that ultimately lead to

language change (cf. Bybee 2007). This type of explanation is thus akin

to adaptive explanation in biology (cf. Haspelmath 1999; Croft 2000; Ble-

vins 2004), and I take this to be the standard appproach to explaining

universals in current functional linguistics (cf. Bybee 1988; Kirby 1999;

Newmeyer 2005). Even one of Haiman’s productivity arguments (under-

analysis of 3rd person markers, or ‘‘Watkins’ Law’’, in his §2.3) is clearlyof the diachronic sort. The two real examples of productivity of a claimed

iconicity e¤ect, transitive disappear (Haiman’s §2.1) and unstressed epi-

thets (I’ve KILLED the pig, §2.4), evidently illustrate the productivity of

conventional regularities of English, not of iconicity itself. In German,

for instance, the verb verschwinden ‘disappear’ could not possibly develop

transitive uses, because there is no productive ambitransitive alternation

in the language. Of course, to the extent that these regularities of English

reflect universal tendencies, these might be due to iconicity (or frequencyor some other explanatory factor), but in that case the explanation is

again mediated by diachrony.

2. How to compare frequencies

As Croft’s comments show, there may be a question about which fre-

quencies to compare with which other frequencies. My claim is that

alleged iconicity-of-cohesion e¤ects such as alienability contrasts in

possessive constructions are due to the same kinds of frequency asymme-

tries that give rise to the classical e¤ects of ‘‘typological markedness’’

60 M. Haspelmath

(Greenberg 1966, Croft 2003: Ch. 4). Croft disputes this and claims that

my explanation is based on relative frequency, whereas typological mark-

edness is based on absolute frequency. I believe that this reflects a misun-

derstanding, so let me clarify the way I see the parallels.

We consider two forms (A and B) that are paradigmatic alternatives(Croft 2003: 90). In the case of ‘‘markedness reversal’’, there are two

classes of lexemes (I and II) that behave di¤erently, both in terms of fre-

quency and (consequently) in terms of coding. Let us take singular and

plural marking again, where quite a few languages have a class of nouns

(let us call them ‘‘plural-prominent’’) which often occur in the plural and

hence have a longer singular form (‘‘singulative’’, cf. Croft 2003: 189–

190). Even English could be said to have a few such nouns, e.g., datu-m/

data, criterio-n/criteria. Table 1 shows the frequencies of two selectedEnglish nouns, a singular-prominent and a plural-prominent noun. For

each noun, the first column gives the absolute frequency, and the second

column gives the relative frequency in percentages.

The standard frequency-based and least-e¤ort-based explanation of

the coding contrasts is that they are due to within-class, across-form dif-

ferences in frequency: In each case, the overtly coded form is significantly

rarer than the other form. As long as we only look at individual nouns,

it does not matter whether we compare the absolute or the relative fre-quencies. But when we compare di¤erent classes, it is important to com-

pare relative rather than absolute frequencies, because in absolute terms,

houses is much more frequent than criteria. Clearly, across-class, within-

form comparisons are not meaningful in the present context.

The picture for alienability contrasts is completely analogous. The two

forms are the possessed and the unpossessed form, and the two classes are

alienable nouns and inalienable (¼ kinship and body-part term) nouns.

Table 2 shows the frequencies of two selected English nouns.Again, I claim that the coding contrasts (which this time cannot be il-

lustrated from English, because English treats all possessed nouns alike)

are due to (vertical) within-class, across-form di¤erences in frequency.

Croft, by contrast, suggests that one should compare (horizontal) across-

class, within-form di¤erences, but these are as irrelevant for the form

di¤erences as in Table 1. Some alienable nouns (such as house) are very

Table 1. Frequencies of house and criterion (singular/plural) in the British National Corpus

(spoken)

class I (singular-prominent) class II (plural-prominent)

form A (singular) house 4811 83% criterio-n 137 27%

form B (plural) house-s 1020 17% criteria 365 73%

5831 100% 502 100%

Reply to Haiman and Croft 61

frequent, others (such as palace) are rarer, and some inalienable nouns

(such as head or hand ) are very frequent, whereas others (such as nose or

kidney) are rarer. What unites inalienable nouns is that they have a high

proportion of possessed occurrences, i.e., a high relative frequency of

form B. All this is just as in the singular/plural contrasts seen earlier.

In Table 2, the proportion of form B in class II is more than 50%, as isthe proportion of form B (plural) in class II (plural-prominent) in Table

1. Likewise, the proportion of form B in class I is below 50% in both

tables. However, this is not actually necessary in order to explain the

form contrast between class I and class II. All that matters is that the pro-

portion of form B is significantly higher in class II than in class I. A

higher proportion of form B means that form B is more predictable than

in class I, which means that it is more likely to be expressed in a short

way. Thus, while the figures in Table 3 are not as overwhelmingly signifi-cant as those in Tables 1 and 2, they are still significant and su‰cient to

explain the fact that in some languages, paired body parts have longer

singulars than plurals.

The figures given in my article for body-part and kinship terms in En-

glish and Spanish are more like the figures in Table 3 than the figures in

Table 1, and this may strike some observers (such as Croft) as less than

fully convincing. However, requiring that the frequency should be higher

than 50% in a within-class comparison would not be reasonable, becausequite generally, implicational universals make only relative predictions.

Some languages never mark number or possession, and some languages

always do. But when number or possession marking (or any other kind

of marking) is di¤erent for di¤erent lexeme classes, the general prediction

Table 2. Frequencies of house and nose (unpossessed/possessed) in the British National

Corpus (spoken)

class I (alienable) class II (inalienable)

form A (unpossessed) house 3614 75% nose 134 36%

form B (possessed) (someone’s) house 1197

4811

25%

100%

(someone’s) nose 238

372

64%

100%

Table 3. Frequencies of nose and foot (singular/plural) in the British National Corpus

(spoken)

class I (singular-prominent) class II (plural-prominent)

form A (singular) nose 372 92% foot 886 51%

form B (plural) nose-s 32 8% feet 877 49%

404 100% 1763 100%

62 M. Haspelmath

is that the higher the frequency of a form, the less marking it receives.

This prediction is fully borne out by the available data on possessive

constructions.

Croft also mentions Corbett et al.’s (2001) discussion of relative and

absolute frequency, and their result that relative frequency is much less

important than absolute frequency. However, Corbett et al. are interested

in morphological irregularities, not in coding asymmetries. As I note atthe beginning of §6 of my paper, ‘‘high absolute frequency favours sup-

pletion (and irregularity more generally)’’, because irregularity is due to

memorizability and has nothing to do with predictability.

Thus, coding asymmetries that correlate with frequency asymmetries

are due to di¤erential predictability, which can be measured by relative

frequencies. Absolute frequencies explain irregularity. Haiman’s cohesion

scale has two completely di¤erent explanations.

3. Kinds of iconicity

In his comments, Croft insists that Haiman’s cohesion scale can be inter-

preted in terms of temporal distance (not just cohesion, as I had argued),

and thus as an extension of iconicity of cohesion (an iconicity type that I

do not question). I find this a legitimate view, and indeed the similarities

between iconicity of cohesion/distance and iconicity of contiguity are too

obvious to be overlooked. But sometimes appearances are deceptive, andI have claimed that the phenomena explained by iconicity of cohesion are

not uniform and must be explained in two di¤erent ways. This makes

it less surprising that I also claim that contiguity phenomena have yet

another explanation. Thus, instead of Croft’s uniform explanation in

terms of iconicity of contiguity and distance (Croft 2003: §7.2.1), I have

three separate explanations for three separate kinds of phenomena: icon-

icity of contiguity (for constituency), frequency-induced predictability

(for coding asymmetries), and frequency-induced memorizability (forsuppletion).

This flies in the face of Haiman’s principle that an explanation should

be preferred if it is ‘‘applicable to a broader range of phenomena’’. But I

do not think that this is a useful heuristic for developing explanatory ac-

counts of highly complex phenomena such as language. Nobody doubts

that language structure is influenced by a variety of factors, so we should

put all our energy into identifying the precise roles of these factors and

refining our predictions, rather than reducing everything to a few big prin-ciples and sweeping the details under the rug.1 Thus, I happily admit that

my frequency account cannot be extended to the external possession and

possessor agreement constructions mentioned by Haiman.

Reply to Haiman and Croft 63

Croft accepts the frequency explanation for iconicity of complexity and

only argues for iconicity of distance/cohesion, and Haiman (1983) had

also argued only for iconicity of cohesion. So it is surprising to see Hai-

man defend iconicity of complexity, in his §2.2, with regard to contrats

such as entity/thing and leng-th/long. He apparently wants to claim that

words expressing basic and concrete meanings such as ‘thing’ and ‘long’

tend to be short, whereas words expressing derived and abstract meaningssuch as ‘entity’ and ‘length’ tend to be long. This could be evaluated

properly once the claim is made more precise, but let me note here that

many highly abstract concepts are expressed in a very short way (e.g.,

‘in’, ‘on’, ‘to’, ‘have’), and that many concrete concepts are expressed in

a very long way (e.g., ‘caterpillar’, ‘rhododendron’, ‘game console’, ‘thun-

derstorm’). Maybe these latter examples would not counts as ‘‘basic’’,

and of course children first acquire shorter words (e.g., ‘car’, ‘dog’,

‘rain’), but this is because they tend to be more frequent. Haimancites my (1993) paper in support of this view, so I should emphasize

again here that I now believe that the relevant part of that paper was

mistaken.

Croft recognizes that the cases where the possessive marker is in a pe-

ripheral rather than in a medial position (examples (30a–d) of my article)

present a serious challenge to iconicity of distance, and he suggests that it

should be replaced by ‘‘iconicity of length’’. However, he does not explain

in what sense the relationship between form and meaning would still beiconic. According to Haiman (1983: 782–783), short linguistic distance

iconically corresponds to short conceptual distance (¼ conceptual close-

ness). Iconicity of length would presumably consist in an iconic corre-

spondence between linguistic length and ‘‘conceptual length’’, but it is un-

clear what the latter could mean. Perhaps it would mean the same as

conceptual complexity, but then iconicity of length would be indistin-

guishable from iconicity of complexity, which Croft rejects just as I do.

4. Multiple motivations

Both Croft and Haiman emphasize that we should allow for the possi-

bility of multiple motivations (Schuchardt’s ‘‘motley interplay of innu-

merable drives’’), and I fully agree with this. I also agree with Haiman

that ‘‘each of these motivations is most clearly attested ceteris paribus,

that is, when they operate unopposed’’, and with Croft that ‘‘one must

examine all the properties [of a phenomenon] in order to identify whichmotivation is operating’’. Discovering the motivation(s) of a universal

tendency of language structure is not at all straightforward, and overall

our understanding is still very limited. Both John Haiman and William

64 M. Haspelmath

Croft have made substantial contributions to this enterprise, but I still

believe that the modification of their views that I proposed in my article

is hard to avoid. But to make further progress in this area, we need more

empirical work and more debates like the current one.

Received 1 June 2007 Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary

Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Notes

* Contact address: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz

6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; author’s e-mail: 3haspelmath@eva.mpg.de4.

1. In his conclusions, Haiman himself emphasizes the diversity of factors, and (ironically)

accuses me of reductionism. Evidently we need both some reductionism (such as the

principle that identical e¤ects should be derived from identical causes) and close atten-

tion to the details, and the only question is how to achieve the right balance. It seems to

me that I am more on the splitters’ side, whereas Haiman is more (and a bit too much)

of a lumper.

References

Blevins, Juliette

2004 Evolutionary Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bybee, Joan L.

1988 The diachronic dimension in explanation. In: John A. Hawkins (ed.),

Explaining Language Universals. Oxford: Blackwell, 350–379.

2001 Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2003 Mechanisms of change in grammaticalization: the role of frequency. In:

Janda, Richard and Joseph, Brian (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics.

Blackwell, 602–623.

2007 Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Corbett, Greville, Andrew Hippisley, Dunstan Brown, and Paul Marriott

2001 Frequency, regularity and the paradigm: A perspective from Russian on a

complex relation. In Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the

Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 201–226.

Croft, William

2000 Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. London:

Longman.

2003 Typology and Universals. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, Nick C.

2002. Frequency e¤ects in language acquisition: A review with implications

for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second

Language Acquisition 24(2), 143–188.

Greenberg, Joseph H.

1966 Language Universals, with Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. (Janua

Linguarum, Series Minor 59.) The Hague: Mouton.

Reply to Haiman and Croft 65

Haiman, John

1983 Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59: 781–819.

Haspelmath, Martin

1993 More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In Comrie,

Bernard, and Maria Polinsky (eds.), Causatives and Transitivity. Amster-

dam: Benjamins, 87–120.

1999 Optimality and diachronic adaptation. Zeitschrift fur Sprachwissenschaft

18(2), 180–205.

Kirby, Simon

1999 Function, Selection, and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Newmeyer, Frederick J.

2005 Possible and Probable Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schuchardt, Hugo

Gegen die Junggrammatiker. Berlin: Robert Oppenheimer.

Zipf, George Kingsley

1929 Relative frequency as a determinant of phonetic change. Harvard Studies in

Classical Philology 40: 1–95.

66 M. Haspelmath

Linguistic and metalinguistic categoriesin second language learning

KAREN ROEHR*

Abstract

This paper discusses proposed characteristics of implicit linguistic and ex-

plicit metalinguistic knowledge representations as well as the properties of

implicit and explicit processes believed to operate on these representations.

In accordance with assumptions made in the usage-based approach to lan-

guage and language acquisition, it is assumed that implicit linguistic knowl-

edge is represented in terms of flexible and context-dependent categories

which are subject to similarity-based processing. It is suggested that, by

contrast, explicit metalinguistic knowledge is characterized by stable and

discrete Aristotelian categories which subserve conscious, rule-based pro-

cessing. The consequences of these di¤erences in category structure and

processing mechanisms for the usefulness or otherwise of metalinguistic

knowledge in second language learning and performance are explored. Ref-

erence is made to existing empirical and theoretical research about the role

of metalinguistic knowledge in second language acquisition, and specific

empirical predictions arising out of the line of argument adopted in the cur-

rent paper are put forward.

Keywords: categorization; explicit and implicit knowledge; metalinguistic

knowledge; second language learning, usage-based model.

1. Introduction

This article is concerned with the role of metalinguistic knowledge, or ex-

plicit knowledge about language, in the area of second language acquisi-

tion (SLA). It is situated within a cognitive-functional approach to lan-guage and language learning, in the belief that our understanding of an

essentially pedagogical notion—metalinguistic knowledge—may be en-

hanced if we consider this notion in terms of a specific linguistic theory,

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 67–106

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.005

0936–5907/08/0019–0067

6 Walter de Gruyter

that is, the usage-based model of language. In this way, light can be shed

on a concept which is of interest to second language (L2) teachers, adult

language learners themselves, and last but certainly not least, applied lin-

guists of all theoretical persuasions, including cognitive linguists with a

pedagogical outlook (e.g., Achard and Niemeier 2004; Boers and Lind-

stromberg 2006).

In this paper, I argue that while implicit linguistic knowledge is charac-terized by exemplar-based categories, explicit metalinguistic knowledge

relies on Aristotelian categories. Exemplar-based categories are flexible,

highly contextualized, and subject to prototype e¤ects, whereas Aristote-

lian categories are stable, discrete, and clearly delineated. These charac-

teristics can be illustrated briefly with the help of the following examples

(from Taylor 2003): (1) The Pope is a bachelor. (2) Her husband is an un-

repentant bachelor.1 If the construction bachelor is considered in terms of

Aristotelian category structure, i.e., if it is defined by means of primitivebinary features such as þadult, þmale, �married, etc., sentence (1) would

be judged semantically acceptable, while sentence (2) would have to be

regarded as semantically anomalous. Conversely, if the construction

bachelor is considered in terms of exemplar-based category structure, cat-

egorization by means of primitive binary features no longer applies. In-

stead, specific attributes associated with the category [bachelor] can be

perspectivized in accordance with the linguistic and cultural context pro-

vided by the sentences in which the construction appears, whereas otherattributes may be filtered out. Thus, sentence (1) seems somewhat odd,

since bachelorhood is taken for granted in a pope. Sentence (2), by con-

trast, is no longer anomalous, since certain behavioural attributes associ-

ated with the (idealized) prototype of an unmarried man are highlighted;

at the same time, the attribute associated with the marital status of a pro-

totypical bachelor is temporarily ignored.

In addition to positing qualitatively distinct category structures, I as-

sume that the processing mechanisms operating on implicit linguistic andexplicit metalinguistic knowledge representations are qualitatively di¤er-

ent. While implicit linguistic knowledge is stored in and retrieved from

an associative network during parallel distributed, similarity-based pro-

cessing, explicit metalinguistic knowledge is processed sequentially with

the help of rule-based algorithms. I suggest that these distinctions be-

tween linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge representations and pro-

cesses a¤ect the way in which the two types of knowledge can be used in

L2 learning and performance.Indeed, it appears that the proposed conceptualization of linguistic and

metalinguistic knowledge in terms of di¤erent category structures and as-

sociated di¤erences in processing mechanisms can help explain available

68 K. Roehr

findings from the area of SLA which are indicative of both facilitative po-

tential and apparent limitations of metalinguistic knowledge in L2 learn-

ing and performance. Moreover, if read in conjunction with existing

research, the proposed conceptualization allows for the formulation of

specific predictions about the use of metalinguistic knowledge in L2 learn-

ing, both at a general level and for particular types of language learners.

The article is organized as follows: Section 2 provides definitions of themain constructs under discussion, that is, explicit and implicit knowledge,

explicit and implicit learning, pedagogical grammar, and metalinguistic

knowledge. In Section 3, assumptions about the nature of implicit linguis-

tic knowledge commonly made by researchers working in a usage-based

paradigm are outlined. Section 4 contains a summary and evaluation of

key empirical and theoretical research in relation to the role of explicit

knowledge in language acquisition, with a strong emphasis on L2 learn-

ing. Section 5 puts forward the proposal which is at the core of thecurrent paper, with the argument focusing on the contrasting category

structures of implicit linguistic knowledge and explicit metalinguistic

knowledge as well as di¤erences in processing mechanisms associated

with these. Section 6 details empirical predictions that emerge from the

argument put forward in the current paper. Section 7 o¤ers a brief

conclusion.

2. Construct definitions

Explicit knowledge is defined as declarative knowledge that can be

brought into awareness and that is potentially available for verbal report,

while implicit knowledge is defined as knowledge that cannot be brought

into awareness and cannot be articulated (Anderson 2005; Hulstijn 2005).

Accordingly, explicit learning refers to situations ‘‘when the learner has

online awareness, formulating and testing conscious hypotheses in the

course of learning’’. Conversely, implicit learning ‘‘describes when learn-ing takes place without these processes; it is an unconscious process of

induction resulting in intuitive knowledge that exceeds what can be ex-

pressed by learners’’ (N. Ellis 1994: 38–39; see also N. Ellis 1996; Hul-

stijn 2005).

It is assumed that focused attention is a necessary requirement for

bringing representations or processes into conscious awareness, i.e., for

knowledge or learning to be explicit. In accordance with existing research,

three separable but associated attentional sub-processes are assumed, thatis, alertness, orientation, and detection (Schmidt 2001; Tomlin and Villa

1994). In this conceptualization of attention, alertness refers to an indi-

vidual’s general readiness to deal with incoming stimuli; orientation

Categories in second language learning 69

concerns the allocation of resources based on expectations about the

particular class of incoming information; during detection, attention fo-

cuses on specific details. Detection is thought to require more attentional

resources than alertness and orientation, and to enable higher-level pro-

cessing (Robinson 1995). Stimulus detection may occur with or without

awareness. If coupled with awareness, stimulus detection is equivalent

with noticing, which is defined as awareness in the sense of (momentary)subjective experience (Schmidt 1990, 1993, 2001). Proponents of the so-

called noticing hypothesis argue that noticing, or attention at the level of

awareness, is required for L2 learning to take place.

It is worth noting that the concepts of attention, noticing, and aware-

ness, as well as their application in SLA, remain controversial (for critical

reviews, see, for instance, Robinson 2003; Simard and Wong 2001). Nev-

ertheless, a working definition is needed to allow for a clear discussion.

Thus, for the purpose of the present article, it is assumed that the fineline between focused attention in the sense of stimulus detection and fo-

cused attention in the sense of noticing can be regarded as the threshold

of conscious awareness, that is, the point of interface between implicit

and explicit processes and representations.

First and foremost, the present paper is concerned with the notion of

metalinguistic knowledge. Metalinguistic knowledge is a specific type of

explicit knowledge, that is, an individual’s explicit knowledge about

language. Accordingly, L2 metalinguistic knowledge is an individual’sknowledge about the L2 they are attempting to learn. The term metalin-

guistic knowledge tends to be used in applied linguistics research concen-

trating on L2 learning and teaching (e.g., Alderson et al. 1997; Bialystok

1979; Elder and Manwaring 2004), and it is closely related to applied

linguists’ conceptualization of pedagogical grammar (e.g., McDonough

2002; Saporta 1973; Towell 2002). Pedagogical grammar has been de-

scribed as ‘‘a cover term for any learner- or teacher-oriented description

or presentation of foreign language rule complexes with the aim of pro-moting and guiding learning processes in the acquisition of that language’’

(Chalker 1994: 34, quoting Dirven 1990). It is worth noting that, in dis-

cussions of pedagogical grammar, the term grammar is used in a broad

sense as referring to any aspect of language that can be described system-

atically; it is therefore not restricted to morphosyntactic phenomena.

In sum, the notion of metalinguistic knowledge is concerned with a

learner’s explicit mental representations, while the notion of pedagogical

grammar is concerned with explicit written or oral descriptions of lin-guistic systematicities which can be presented to a learner as a source of

information about the L2. Accordingly, a learner’s metalinguistic knowl-

edge may arise from encounters with pedagogical grammar, e.g., through

70 K. Roehr

textbooks and/or through exposure to rule-based or other types of form-

focused instruction (R. Ellis 2001; Sanz and Morgan-Short 2005). By the

same token, pedagogical grammar has arisen from the metalinguistic

knowledge of applied linguists, L2 teachers, and materials designers.

Thus, while the labels of metalinguistic knowledge and pedagogical gram-

mar are used to denote, respectively, an individual’s mental representa-

tions and written or oral instructional aids, the two notions are similarto the extent that they are both explicit by definition and that the latter

can give rise to the former as well as vice versa.

As the argument presented in what follows is concerned with di¤er-

ences in category structure between explicit and implicit knowledge, the

question of whether a learner’s explicit knowledge has been derived

bottom-up through a process of analysis of the linguistic input or whether

it has been acquired top-down through formal study of grammar text-

books is not of immediate relevance. In other words, for the purpose ofthe current discussion, it does not matter whether explicit knowledge has

arisen from implicit knowledge, e.g., when an L2 learner, perhaps after

prolonged experience with the L2, discovers certain systematicities and

arrives at a pedagogical grammar rule of their own, which is represented

as metalinguistic knowledge and can be articulated, or whether explicit

knowledge is assimilated from the environment, e.g., when an L2 learner

listens to a teacher’s explanation drawing on a pedagogical grammar rule

and memorizes this information as metalinguistic knowledge. In eitherscenario, the defining characteristics, including the internal category

structure, of the metalinguistic knowledge held by the learner remain the

same, as will become apparent in Section 5 below.

It is acknowledged that there may be pedagogically relevant di¤erences

between internally induced metalinguistic knowledge and metalinguistic

knowledge gleaned from externally presented pedagogical grammar that

are of practical interest to teachers and learners in the L2 classroom. I

am not aware of any empirical research pertaining to this specific issue,but one could hypothesize, for instance, that pedagogical grammar rules

presented to the learner are more accurate than metalinguistic knowledge

induced bottom-up by the learner him/herself, since the cumulative

knowledge of the applied linguistics community is based on more exten-

sive language experience than the average individual learner has been

able to gather. Alternatively, one could hypothesize that metalinguistic

knowledge derived by the learner him/herself is more relevant to the indi-

vidual’s L2 learning situation than one-size-fits-all pedagogical grammarrules acquired from a commercially produced textbook. These questions,

though clearly interesting in themselves, do not impact on the theoretical

argument put forward here, however.

Categories in second language learning 71

Finally, it is worth noting that rule-based or other types of form-

focused instruction occur not only in the L2 classroom, but also in the

context of laboratory studies. Reports of such empirical studies as well

as theoretical papers with a psycholinguistic orientation (e.g., DeKeyser

2003; N. Ellis 1993; Robinson 1997) tend not to use the terms form-

focused instruction, pedagogical grammar, or metalinguistic knowledge;

instead, they refer more generally to explicit learning conditions andlearners’ explicit knowledge. However, explicit learning conditions draw-

ing on learners’ explicit knowledge typically require knowledge about the

L2, i.e., metalinguistic knowledge. Hence, the notion of metalinguistic

knowledge is of relevance to L2 learning and L2 teaching, as well as to

psycholinguistically oriented and applied SLA research.

In the context of the present article, metalinguistic knowledge is defined

as a learner’s explicit or declarative knowledge about the syntactic, mor-

phological, lexical, pragmatic, and phonological features of the L2. Meta-linguistic knowledge includes explicit knowledge about categories as well

as explicit knowledge about relations between categories (R. Ellis 2004;

Hu 2002; Roehr 2007). Metalinguistic knowledge can vary in terms of

specificity and complexity, but it minimally involves either a schematic

category or a relation between two categories, specific or schematic. Meta-

linguistic knowledge relies on Aristotelian categories, i.e., categories that

are stable and discrete. These categories subserve sequential, rule-based

processing.In the following sections, these proposed characteristics of metalinguis-

tic knowledge will be explained and exemplified. I will begin by comparing

and contrasting the characteristics of explicit metalinguistic knowledge

with the characteristics of implicit linguistic knowledge as conceptualized

in the usage-based model of language.

3. Implicit linguistic knowledge in the usage-based model

Within the framework of cognitive-functional linguistics, the usage-based

model makes several fundamental assumptions about the nature of lan-

guage: First, interpersonal communication is seen as the main purpose of

language. Second, language is believed to be shaped by our experience

with the real world. Third, language ability is regarded as an integral

part of general cognition. Fourth, all linguistic phenomena are explained

by a unitary account, including morphology, syntax, semantics, and prag-

matics. Hence, at the most general level, the usage-based model charac-terizes language as a quintessentially functional, input-driven phenome-

non (e.g., Bybee and McClelland 2005; Goldberg 2003; Tomasello 1998).

Two specific theoretical consequences arising from these general premises

72 K. Roehr

are particularly relevant to the current discussion, namely, first, the pro-

cess of categorization and the sensitivity of knowledge representations to

context and prototype e¤ects, and second, the notion of linguistic con-

structions as conventionalized form-meaning pairings varying along the

parameters of specificity and complexity.

In the usage-based model, the representation and processing of lan-

guage is understood in terms of general psychological mechanisms suchas categorization and entrenchment, with the former underlying the lat-

ter. Entrenchment refers to the strengthening of memory traces through

repeated activation. Categorization can be defined as a comparison be-

tween an established structural unit functioning as a standard and an ini-

tially novel target structure (Langacker 1999, 2000). In view of well-

established empirical evidence from the area of cognitive psychology

(Rosch and Lloyd 1978; Rosch and Mervis 1975), it is accepted that cog-

nitive categories are subject to prototype e¤ects, which are assumed toapply in equal measure to conceptual and linguistic knowledge (Dirven

and Verspoor 2004; Taylor 2003; Tomasello 2003). A prototype can be

defined as the best example of a category, i.e., prototypical members of

cognitive categories have the largest number of attributes in common

with other members of the category and the smallest number of attributes

which also occur with members of neighbouring categories. In terms of

attributes, prototypical members are thus maximally distinct from the

prototypical members of other categories. To illustrate by means of awell-known example, robin or magpie are prototypical members of the

category [bird] for (British) speakers of English, while penguin consti-

tutes a marginal category member (Ungerer and Schmid 1996).

Categorization is influenced by the frequency of exemplars in the input

as well as by the recency and context of encounters with specific exem-

plars (N. Ellis 2002a, 2002b). As the parameters of frequency, recency,

and context interact, specific memory traces may be more or less en-

trenched and hence more or less salient and accessible for retrieval (Mur-phy 2004). In addition, exemplars encountered in the input may be more

or less similar to exemplars encountered previously. Accordingly, cate-

gory membership is often a matter of degree and cannot normally be un-

derstood as a clear-cut yes/no distinction. It follows from this that cate-

gory boundaries may be fuzzy, and that categories may merge into one

another (Langacker 1999, 2000).

Two theoretical approaches to categorization are compatible with the

usage-based assumptions outlined in the previous paragraphs, that is,the prototype view and the exemplar view (Murphy 2004). In its pure

form, the prototype view holds that concepts are represented by schemas,

i.e., structured representations of cognitive categories. Schemas contain

Categories in second language learning 73

information about both attributes and relations between attributes that

characterize a certain category. Conversely, the exemplar view, in its pure

form, posits that our mental representations never encompass an entire

concept. Instead, an individual’s concept of a category is the set of spe-

cific category members they can remember, and there is no summary rep-

resentation. In this view, categorization is determined not only by the

number of exemplars a person remembers, but also by the similarity of anew exemplar to exemplars already held in memory.

While the prototype and exemplar views may be incompatible in their

pure forms, they share a su‰ciently large number of characteristics to

allow for a hybrid model to be formulated which includes both schema-

based and exemplar-based representations (Abbot-Smith and Tomasello

2006; Langacker 2000). As a hybrid model is not only compatible with

usage-based assumptions, but also particularly informative for accounts

of language learning and use, it is adopted in the current paper.According to the hybrid model, all learning is initially exemplar-based.

As experience with the input grows and as repeated encounters with

known exemplars gradually change our mental representations of these

exemplars, it is believed that, ultimately, abstractions over instances are

derived (Kemmer and Barlow 2000; Taylor 2002). These abstractions

are in fact schemas. Schema formation can be defined as ‘‘the emergence

of a structure through reinforcement of the commonality inherent in mul-

tiple experiences’’, while, at the same time, experiential facets which donot recur are filtered out. Correspondingly, a schema is ‘‘the commonality

that emerges from distinct structures when one abstracts away from their

points of di¤erence by portraying them with lesser precision and specific-

ity’’ (Langacker 2000: 4).

To illustrate with the help of a linguistic example, a large number of

encounters with specific utterances such as I sent my mother a birthday

card and Harry is sending his friend a parcel lead to entrenchment, i.e.,

the strengthening of memory traces for the form-meaning associationsconstituting these constructions. Gradually, constructional subschemas

such as send-[np]-[np] and finally the wholly general ditransitive schema

[v]-[np]-[np] are abstracted. Entrenched constructions, both general and

specific, are described as conventional units. Accordingly, a speaker’s lin-

guistic knowledge can be defined as ‘‘a structured inventory of conven-

tional linguistic units’’ (Langacker 2000: 8).

Crucially, the hybrid view argues that representations of specific exem-

plars can be retained alongside more general schemas subsuming theseexemplars. Put di¤erently, specific instantiations of constructions and

constructional schemas at varying levels of abstraction exist alongside

each other, so that the same linguistic patterns are potentially represented

74 K. Roehr

in multiple ways. Thus, linguistic knowledge is represented in a vast, re-

dundantly organized, hierarchically structured network of form-meaning

associations.

Conventional linguistic units, or constructions, are viewed as inherently

symbolic (Kemmer and Barlow 2000; Taylor 2002), so that constructions

at all levels of abstraction are pairings of form and meaning (Goldberg

2003: 219). Hence, even though a constructional schema at the highestlevel of abstraction such as the English ditransitive [v]-[np]-[np] no longer

contains any specific lexical items, it is still endowed with constructional

meaning. Accordingly, a construction is always more than the sum of its

parts; beyond symbolizing the meanings and relations of its constituents,

it has its own semantic profile (Langacker 1991, 2000). For instance, at

the most general level, the semantics of the English ditransitive schema

[v]-[np]-[np] are captured by the notions of transfer and motion (Gold-

berg 1995, 1999, 2003).To reiterate, the unitary approach to language which characterizes the

usage-based model is applied both at the level of cognition and at the

level of linguistic structure itself. Hence, syntax, morphology, and the lex-

icon are all accounted for by the same system (Bates and Goodman 2001;

Langacker 1991, 2000; Tomasello 1998); they are regarded as di¤ering in

degree rather than as di¤ering in kind. Syntax, morphology, and the lexi-

con are conceptualized as a graded continuum of conventional linguistic

units, or constructions, varying along the parameters of specificity andcomplexity, as shown in Figure 1.2

As Figure 1 indicates, schematic and complex constructions such as the

ditransitive [v]-[np]-[np] occupy the area traditionally referred to as syn-

tax. Words such as send or above are both minimal and specific and oc-

cupy the area traditionally labelled lexicon. Morphemes such as English

plural -s or regular past tense -ed are situated at the centre of the two

clines, since instances of morphology are neither entirely specific nor en-

tirely schematic; by the same token, they are neither truly minimal nortruly complex, but they are always bound. Lexical categories like [noun],

[verb], and [adjective] are minimal but schematic, while idioms such as

kick the bucket tend to be both complex and specific in that they allow

for little variation. The example kick the bucket only permits verb inflec-

tion for person and tense, for instance, and thus ranges high on the specif-

icity scale. At the same time, the construction kick the bucket can be con-

sidered as more complex than the constructions send or above because the

latter cannot be broken down any further.To summarize, the usage-based model assumes that categorization is a

key mechanism in language representation, learning, and use. As linguis-

tic knowledge is regarded as an integral part of cognition, it is accepted

Categories in second language learning 75

that both conceptual and linguistic categories are subject to context and

prototype e¤ects. Linguistic knowledge is conceptualized in terms of con-structions, i.e., conventionalized form-meaning units varying along the

parameters of specificity and complexity. Crucially, these assumptions

underlie the usage-based account of implicit phenomena of language rep-

resentation, acquisition, and use. The role of explicit phenomena, in par-

ticular as studied in the field of SLA, is the focus of the next section.

4. Explicit knowledge in language learning

The notion of explicit knowledge has consistently attracted the interest of

researchers in the areas of SLA and applied linguistics more generally.

Over the past two decades in particular, this interest has generated an im-

pressive amount of both empirical and theoretical research. Depending

on whether researchers take a primarily educational or a primarily psy-

cholinguistic perspective, empirical studies have drawn on a variety of

correlational and experimental research designs, investigating the rela-

tionship between L2 learners’ linguistic proficiency and their metalinguis-tic knowledge, the role of explicit knowledge in instructed L2 learning,

and the e¤ects of implicit versus explicit learning conditions on the acqui-

sition of selected L2 constructions.

Figure 1. Linguistic constructions in the specificity/complexity continuum

76 K. Roehr

The most uncontroversial cumulative finding resulting from this body

of research has borne out the prediction that attention (in the sense of

stimulus detection) is a necessary condition for the learning of novel input

(Doughty 2003; N. Ellis 2001, 2003; MacWhinney 1997). Moreover, it

has been found that form-focused instructional intervention is more e¤ec-

tive than mere exposure to L2 input (Doughty 2003; R. Ellis 2001, 2002;

Norris and Ortega 2001). As it is the intended purpose of all types of form-focused instruction to direct learners’ attention to relevant form-meaning

associations in the linguistic input, this is not a surprising outcome.

Beyond the well-substantiated claim that attention in the sense of stim-

ulus detection is a necessary requirement for input to become intake, the

picture is much less clear. In other words, findings regarding the role of

explicit knowledge, i.e., knowledge above the threshold of awareness,

yield a more complex and sometimes even apparently contradictory pat-

tern of evidence. As it is beyond the scope of this paper to present an ex-haustive review of the large body of research that has been carried out in

the preceding decades, the following summary is deliberately brief and fo-

cused exclusively on representative studies that are directly relevant to the

current discussion (for more comprehensive recent reviews of the litera-

ture, see DeKeyser 2003; R. Ellis 2004). In particular, work which illus-

trates the sometimes contrasting nature of findings and conclusions as

well as work which emphasizes the complex interplay of variables in lan-

guage learning processes has been selected.Empirical research concerned with metalinguistic knowledge in SLA

has led to at least two results that highlight the potential benefits of ex-

plicit knowledge and learning. First, learners’ metalinguistic knowledge

and their L2 linguistic proficiency have been found to correlate positively

and significantly, even though the strength of the relationship varies be-

tween studies, ranging from a moderate 0.3 to 0.5 (e.g., Alderson et al.

1997; Elder et al. 1999) to between 0.6 and 0.7 (Elder and Manwaring

2004), and, reported most recently, up to 0.8 (Roehr 2007). Thus, thereis evidence for an overall association between higher levels of learner

awareness, use of metalinguistic knowledge, and successful L2 perfor-

mance (Leow 1997; Nagata and Swisher 1995; Rosa and O’Neill 1999).

Second, learners’ use of metalinguistic knowledge when resolving form-

focused L2 tasks has been found to be associated with consistent and sys-

tematic performance (Roehr 2006; Swain 1998).

While these findings are indicative of a generally facilitative role for ex-

plicit knowledge about the L2, empirical evidence likewise demonstratesthat use of metalinguistic knowledge by no means guarantees successful

L2 performance. For instance, Doughty (1991) found equal gains in per-

formance across two experimental groups comprising 20 university-level

Categories in second language learning 77

learners of L2 English from various L1 backgrounds. Focusing on restric-

tive relative clauses (e.g., I know the people who you talked with), learners

receiving meaning-oriented instruction with enhanced input and learners

exposed to rule-oriented instruction with explicit explanation of the tar-

geted L2 construction showed equal gains in performance—a finding

which suggests that metalinguistic explanations may be unnecessary.

By the same token, Sanz and Morgan-Short (2004) found support forthe null hypothesis that providing learners with explicit information

about the targeted L2 construction either before or during exposure to

input-based practice would not a¤ect their ability to interpret and pro-

duce L2 sentences containing the targeted L2 construction, as long as

learners received structured input aimed at focusing their attention appro-

priately. The study was carried out with 69 L1 English learners of L2

Spanish and concentrated on preverbal direct object pronouns. The re-

searchers concluded that structured input practice which made linkingform and meaning task-essential, as proposed in processing instruction

(VanPatten 1996, 2004), appeared to be su‰cient for successful learning.

Additional explicit information about the targeted L2 construction did

not enhance participants’ performance any further.

The ambivalent relationship between use of metalinguistic knowledge

and successful L2 performance was likewise underlined by Green and

Hecht (1992), Camps (2003), and Roehr (2006). Green and Hecht (1992)

report a study with 300 L1 German learners of L2 English which targetedthe use of various morphosyntactic features such as tense and word order.

While successful metalinguistic rule formulation typically co-occurred

with the successful correction of errors instantiating the rules in question,

it was also found that successful error correction could be associated with

the formulation of incorrect rules, or no rule knowledge at all.

In a study involving 74 L1 English learners of L2 Spanish focusing on

third-person direct object pronouns, Camps (2003) collected both concur-

rent and retrospective verbal protocol data. He found that references tothe targeted L2 construction co-occurred with accurate performance in

92 percent of cases; yet, no reference to the targeted L2 construction still

co-occurred with accurate performance in 69 percent of cases. Thus, de-

spite providing additional benefits in some cases, use of explicit knowl-

edge appears to have been far from necessary.

Roehr (2006) studied retrospective verbal reports from ten L1 English

learners of L2 German, which were obtained immediately after the com-

pletion of form-focused tasks targeting adjectival inflection. She foundthat although reported use of metalinguistic knowledge co-occurred

more frequently with successful than with unsuccessful item resolution

overall, fully correct use of metalinguistic knowledge still co-occurred

78 K. Roehr

with unsuccessful item resolution in 22 percent of cases. Along similar

lines, anecdotal evidence from the L2 classroom suggests that, on occa-

sion, learners may use their metalinguistic knowledge to override more

appropriate intuitive responses based on implicit linguistic knowledge

(Gabrielatos 2004).

Theoretically oriented work concerned with metalinguistic knowledge

has mainly sought to identify the defining characteristics of the conceptof explicit knowledge as well as the facilitative potential of such knowl-

edge in SLA. The most substantial contribution to establishing the defin-

ing characteristics of metalinguistic knowledge has arguably been made

by R. Ellis (2004, 2005, 2006), according to whom explicit L2 knowledge

is represented declaratively, characterized by conscious awareness, and

verbalizable, as mentioned in the construct definition presented in Section

2 above. Moreover, explicit L2 knowledge is said to be learnable at any

age, given su‰cient cognitive maturity. As explicit knowledge is em-ployed during controlled processing, it tends to be used when the learner

is not under time pressure. Finally, it has been hypothesized that learners’

explicit L2 knowledge may be more imprecise and more inaccurate than

their implicit knowledge.

Research with a primarily theoretical outlook has further considered

metalinguistic knowledge in terms of the categories and relations between

categories that are represented explicitly, as well as the nature of the L2

constructions described by explicit categories and relations between cate-gories. Typically, such research has conceptualized metalinguistic knowl-

edge as knowledge of pedagogical grammar rules consisting of explicit de-

scriptions of linguistic phenomena. It has been argued that metalinguistic

descriptions may vary along several parameters, including complexity,

scope, and reliability (DeKeyser 1994; Hulstijn and de Graa¤ 1994).

For instance, metalinguistic descriptions may refer to either prototyp-

ical or peripheral uses of a particular L2 construction (Hu 2002). More-

over, the L2 construction described may itself vary in terms of complex-ity, perceptual salience, or communicative redundancy (Hulstijn and de

Graa¤ 1994). In view of this multifaceted interaction between the type of

explicit description and the type of L2 construction described, it is notori-

ously di‰cult to predict which kind of metalinguistic description is likely

to be helpful to the L2 learner. Accordingly, positions have shifted some-

what over the years, with earlier work advocating fairly categorically ei-

ther the teaching of more complex metalinguistic descriptions (Hulstijn

and de Graa¤ 1994), or the teaching of simpler rules (DeKeyser 1994;Green and Hecht 1992).

In recent years, researchers have adopted a more sophisticated line of

argument. DeKeyser (2003) has highlighted the fact that the di‰culty—

Categories in second language learning 79

and hence the potential usefulness—of metalinguistic descriptions is a

complex function of a number of variables, including the characteristics

of the description itself, the characteristics of the L2 construction being

described (see also DeKeyser 2005), and individual learner di¤erences in

aptitude.

Indeed, the fact that the relative usefulness of metalinguistic descrip-

tions in L2 learning and performance is a¤ected by a range of variablesis to be expected, since language is necessarily learned and used by spe-

cific individuals in specific contexts. First and foremost, the role of meta-

linguistic knowledge in SLA is at least partially dependent upon a

learner’s current level of L2 proficiency (Butler 2002; Camps 2003; Sorace

1985). Second, a learner’s use of metalinguistic knowledge is likely to be

subject to situation-specific variation, since both the targeted L2 construc-

tion(s) and the task requirements at hand play a part in determining

whether and how metalinguistic knowledge is employed (R. Ellis 2005;Hu 2002; Klapper and Rees 2003; Renou 2000). Hence, timed tasks in

general and oral task modalities in particular may prevent a learner

from allocating su‰cient attentional resources to controlled processing

involving metalinguistic knowledge, whereas untimed tasks in general

and written task modalities in particular may have the opposite e¤ect,

possibly encouraging the use of metalinguistic knowledge.

Third, the L1-L2 combination under investigation, paired with the rel-

ative typological distance between L1 and L2, may have a part to play(Elder and Manwaring 2004). Fourth, length of prior exposure to L2 in-

struction and the type of instruction experienced have been shown to im-

pact on a learner’s level and use of metalinguistic knowledge (Elder et al.

1999; Roehr 2007). Finally, individual di¤erences in cognitive and learn-

ing style, strategic preferences, and aptitude may influence a learner’s use

of metalinguistic knowledge (Collentine 2000; DeKeyser 2003; Roehr

2005).

Most recently, existing work concerned with the role of explicit knowl-edge in SLA has been complemented by hypotheses about the nature of

the representations and processes involved in the use of metalinguistic

knowledge. Crucial to the current paper, both empirical findings and the-

oretical research suggest that explicit and implicit knowledge are separa-

ble constructs which are nonetheless engaged in interplay (N. Ellis 1993,

2005; R. Ellis 2005; Segalowitz 2003). In other words, the so-called weak-

interface position3 allows for the possibility of explicit metalinguistic

knowledge contributing indirectly to the acquisition of implicit linguisticknowledge, and vice versa. It has been argued that the two types of

knowledge come together during conscious processing (for particularly

readable reviews of the complex subject matter of consciousness, see

80 K. Roehr

Baddeley 1997; Cattell 2006). Moreover, when explicit knowledge is

brought to bear on implicit knowledge and vice versa, enduring learning

e¤ects may result (N. Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2006).

The mechanism which is thought to enable conscious processing is

called binding. During binding, a number of implicit representations in

di¤erent modalities are activated simultaneously and integrated into a

unified explicit representation that is held in a multimodal code in work-ing memory (Bayne and Chalmers 2003; Dienes and Perner 2003; N. Ellis

2005). We consciously experience this unified representation as a coherent

episode. Put di¤erently, the mechanism of binding, explained through the

temporally synchronized firing of a number of neurons in di¤erent brain

regions (Engel 2003), accounts for how implicit representations subserve

explicit representations.

With regard to explicit metalinguistic and implicit linguistic processing,

it has been proposed that ‘‘implicit learning of language occurs during flu-ent comprehension and production. Explicit learning of language occurs

in our conscious e¤orts to negotiate meaning and construct communica-

tion’’ (N. Ellis 2005: 306). Thus, during fluent language use, the implicit

system automatically processes input and produces output, with the indi-

vidual’s conscious self focused on the meaning rather than the form of the

utterance. When comprehension or production di‰culties arise, however,

explicit processes take over. We focus our attention on linguistic form,

and we notice patterns; moreover, we become aware of these patterns asunified, coherent representations. Such explicit representations can then

be used as pattern recognition units for new stimuli in future usage

events. In this way, conscious processing helps consolidate new bindings,

which are fed back to the brain regions responsible for implicit processing

(N. Ellis 2005).

Steered by the focus of our conscious processing, the repeated simulta-

neous activation of a range of implicit representations helps consolidate

form-meaning associations, often to the extent that implicit learning onsubsequent occasions of use becomes possible. Thus, as the various ele-

ments constituting a coherent form-meaning association are activated si-

multaneously during processing, they are bound together more tightly

(N. Ellis 2005). Crucially, however, it is not a question of the explicit

representation turning into an implicit representation. According to the

weak-interface position, it is not the metalinguistic knowledge, e.g., in the

form of an explicit description of a linguistic phenomenon, that becomes

implicit, but its instantiation, i.e., the sequences of language that the de-scription is used to comprehend or to construct (R. Ellis 2004: 238).4

The locus of conscious processing—metaphorically speaking—is work-

ing memory. Put di¤erently, explicit knowledge is conceptualized as

Categories in second language learning 81

information that is selectively attended to, stored, and processed in work-

ing memory. Working memory refers to ‘‘the system or mechanism un-

derlying the maintenance of task-relevant information during the perfor-

mance of a cognitive task’’ (Shah and Miyake 1999: 1). Thus, working

memory allows for the temporary storage and manipulation of informa-

tion which is being used during online cognitive operations such as lan-

guage comprehension, learning, and reasoning (Baddeley 2000; Baddeleyand Logie 1999). The so-called episodic bu¤er, a component of working

memory, is capable of binding information from a variety of sources and

holding such information in a multimodal code. Importantly, working

memory is limited in capacity (Just and Carpenter 1992; Miyake and

Friedman 1998), i.e., we can only attend to and hence be aware of so

much information at any one time.

Clearly, the fact that limited working memory resources constrain ex-

plicit processing of language a¤ects L2 and L1 in equal measure. It iswell-established that individuals di¤er in the maximum amount of activa-

tion available to them, i.e., that individuals di¤er in terms of their work-

ing memory capacity (e.g., Daneman and Carpenter 1980; Just and Car-

penter 1992; Miyake and Shah 1999). Moreover, young children generally

have smaller working memory capacity than cognitively mature adoles-

cents and adults. In other words, beyond the issue of individual di¤er-

ences, working memory capacity increases in the course of an individual’s

development.In L1 acquisition and use, the emergence of metalinguistic ability is

closely associated with the development of literacy skills, that is, another

dimension of linguistic competence which requires selective attention to

language form (Birdsong 1989; Gombert 1992). As both metalinguistic

ability and literacy skills rely on conscious processing drawing on work-

ing memory resources, a certain level of cognitive maturity which guaran-

tees su‰cient working memory capacity is required; hence, these abili-

ties do not tend to develop until a child is between six and eight years ofage.

Metalinguistic processes—whether concerned with L1 or L2—are

analogous to other higher-level mental operations that draw on working

memory resources and thus require a certain level of cognitive maturity.

Hence, the application of metalinguistic knowledge and the process of

analytic reasoning as applied during general problem-solving appear to

rely on the same basic mechanisms. Put di¤erently, use of metalinguistic

knowledge in language learning and performance can be regarded as an-alytic reasoning applied to the problem space of language; metalinguistic

processing is problem-solving in the linguistic domain (Anderson 1995,

1996; Butler 2002; Hu 2002).

82 K. Roehr

In L1, a child may raise questions about form-meaning associations

(‘Why are there two names, orange and tangerine?’), comment on non-

target-like utterances they have overheard (e.g., if another child mispro-

nounces certain words), or objectify language (‘Is the a word?’), thus not

only demonstrating their ability to monitor language use, but also show-

ing the first signs of what will eventually result in the ability to reason

about language (examples adapted from Birdsong 1989: 17; Karmilo¤and Karmilo¤-Smith 2002: 80). In L2, use of metalinguistic knowledge

can likewise be understood in terms of monitoring and reasoning based

on hypothesis-testing operations (N. Ellis 2005; Roehr 2005), which are

characteristic of a problem-solving approach. Thus, the cognitively ma-

ture L2 learner may deliberately analyze input in an attempt to compre-

hend an utterance (‘What is the subject and what is the object in this sen-

tence?’), or creatively construct output that is monitored for formal

accuracy (‘If I use a compound tense in this German clause, the firstverb needs to be in second position and the second verb in final position.’)

To summarize this section, available empirical evidence about the role

of explicit knowledge in language learning and use bears out the theoreti-

cally motivated expectation that metalinguistic knowledge can have both

benefits and limitations. Whilst the facilitative e¤ect of focused attention

in the sense of stimulus detection is all but undisputed, determining the

impact of higher levels of learner awareness and more explicit types of

learner knowledge which go beyond focused attention in the sense ofstimulus detection is less straightforward. On the one hand, L2 profi-

ciency and metalinguistic knowledge have been found to correlate posi-

tively and significantly. Moreover, use of metalinguistic knowledge is typ-

ically associated with performance patterns characterized by consistency

and systematicity. On the other hand, use of metalinguistic knowledge is

by no means a guarantee of successful performance, and higher levels of

learner awareness that reach beyond noticing may be unnecessary or pos-

sibly even unhelpful in certain situations.In the area of theory, a recent position includes the proposal that ex-

plicit and implicit knowledge are separate and distinct, but can interact.

Hence, explicit knowledge about language may contribute indirectly to

the development of implicit knowledge of language, and vice versa. As

explicit and implicit knowledge interface during conscious processing,

and as such processing is subject to working memory constraints, use of

metalinguistic knowledge in language learning and performance is likely

to have not only benefits, but also certain limitations. On the one hand,conscious processing involving the higher-level mental faculty of analytic

reasoning allows the cognitively mature individual to apply a problem-

solving approach to language learning. On the other hand, conscious

Categories in second language learning 83

processing is constrained by limited working memory capacity and thus

only permits the consideration of a restricted amount of information at

any one time.

Finally, existing research acknowledges that the relative usefulness of

metalinguistic knowledge can be expected to depend on a range of

learner-internal and learner-external variables, including task modalities,

the learner’s level of L2 proficiency, their language learning experience,their cognitive abilities, and their stylistic orientation.

Whilst it is important to bear in mind that all these factors will di¤er-

entially a¤ect the role of metalinguistic knowledge in language learning

and performance (see Section 6 below), it is argued here that, ceteris par-

ibus and over and above these factors, another, more fundamental vari-

able which goes beyond specific usage situations and individual learner

di¤erences is worthy of consideration: The contrasting category structures

of implicit linguistic knowledge representations on the one hand and ex-plicit metalinguistic knowledge representations on the other hand as well

as the di¤erent modes of implicit, associative processing and explicit, rule-

based processing constitute the basic cognitive conditions in which lan-

guage learning and performance take place. If taken into account, these

phenomena not only help explain existing findings about the apparently

ambivalent role of metalinguistic knowledge in L2 learning and use, but

also permit us to formulate specific empirical predictions that can guide

future research.

5. The representation and processing of implicit linguistic knowledge and

explicit metalinguistic knowledge

As linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge pertain to the same cognitive

domain—language—they can be expected to share certain characteristics.

Specifically, it appears that linguistic constructions and metalinguistic de-

scriptions vary along the same parameters, namely, specificity and com-plexity. The usage-based model assumes that linguistic constructions can

be more or less specific as well as more or less complex (see Figure 1

above). By the same token, empirical evidence suggests that L2 learners’

metalinguistic knowledge can be more or less specific and more or less

complex (e.g., Roehr 2005, 2006; Rosa and O’Neill 1999).

For the purpose of illustration, one might imagine the case of an edu-

cated L1 English-speaking adult learner of L2 German and consider their

metalinguistic knowledge which has mostly been derived from encounterswith pedagogical grammar in the classroom and in textbooks.5 Thus, a

metalinguistic description which this learner is aware of can refer to spe-

cific instances, e.g., ‘German hin expresses movement away from the

84 K. Roehr

speaker, while her expresses movement towards the speaker’. Alterna-

tively, it can be entirely schematic and therefore involve no specific exem-

plars at all, e.g., ‘a subordinating conjunction sends the finite verb to the

end of the clause’. Both of these examples are additionally complex, i.e.,

they state relations between categories, and they can be broken down into

their constituent parts and therefore require several mental manipulations

during processing (DeKeyser 2003; Stankov 2003). However, a metalin-guistic description can also be minimal, e.g., ‘noun’. Various combina-

tions of di¤erent levels of specificity and complexity seem possible—with

the exception of both minimal and specific.

In fact, the joint characteristics of minimal and specific appear to be

unique to lexical items, that is, linguistic constructions. By contrast, even

entirely specific metalinguistic descriptions containing no schematic cate-

gories such as ‘German ei is pronounced like English i ’ or ‘English desk

means Schreibtisch in German’ involve a relation between two specificinstances and can therefore still be broken down into their constituent

parts. By the same token, a minimal metalinguistic description such as

‘noun’, which cannot be broken down any further, is schematic rather

than specific. Put di¤erently, as soon as implicit linguistic knowledge is

made explicit, i.e., when a metalinguistic knowledge representation is cre-

ated (no matter by whom, whether an L2 learner, an applied linguist, or

any other language user), it seems to take the form of either a schematic

description (‘noun’), or a proposition involving at least two categoriesand a relation between them.

It should be pointed out that this circumstance does not exclude state-

ments about the lexicon from the realm of metalinguistic description and

representation; quite to the contrary, semantic knowledge is perhaps the

most obvious area of explicit knowledge about language, since it typically

encompasses not only L2 metalinguistic knowledge, but also L1 metalin-

guistic knowledge. Indeed, we can glean metalinguistic knowledge about

lexical items from any monolingual or bilingual dictionary. However, it iscrucial to note that, when made explicit, semantic knowledge incorpo-

rates at least two categories and a relation between them, as exemplified

by dictionary definitions of any description. Even the briefest listing of a

synonym without further explanatory comment amounts to stating a rela-

tion between two categories (‘X means Y’). Hence, one can argue that im-

plicit knowledge of the meaning, function, and appropriate usage con-

texts of minimal and specific linguistic constructions such as lexical items

is distinguishable from explicit knowledge about the meaning, function,and appropriate usage contexts of these constructions. This claim applies

not only to implicit knowledge of and explicit knowledge about the lexi-

con, but also to all other areas of language.

Categories in second language learning 85

Whilst metalinguistic knowledge is comparable with linguistic con-

structions in terms of the parameters of complexity and specificity, ex-

plicit metalinguistic knowledge di¤ers qualitatively from implicit linguis-

tic knowledge in the crucial respect of categorization, that is, one of the

key cognitive phenomena underlying conceptual as well as linguistic rep-

resentation and processing. As outlined in Section 3 above, the usage-

based model assumes that cognitive categories, whether conceptual or lin-guistic, are flexible and context-dependent, sensitive to prototype e¤ects,

and have fuzzy boundaries.

By contrast, metalinguistic knowledge appears to be characterized by

stable, discrete, and context-independent categories with clear-cut bound-

aries. Put di¤erently, metalinguistic knowledge relies on what has alter-

nately been labelled Aristotelian, categorical, classical, or scientific cate-

gorization (Anderson 2005; Bod et al. 2003; Taylor 2003; Ungerer and

Schmid 1996). For instance, the metalinguistic category ‘subordinatingconjunction’ is stable and clearly defined; in the case of German, it is in-

stantiated by a certain number of exemplars, such as weil (‘because’), da

(‘as’), wenn (‘if, when’), etc. Although some instantiations occur more fre-

quently than others, there are no better or worse category members; all

subordinating conjunctions have equal status and are equally valid exem-

plars, regardless of context.

By the same token, the linguistic construction [noun] and the metalin-

guistic description ‘noun’ can be contrasted. As all linguistic construc-tions are form-meaning pairings, the linguistic construction [noun] is not

devoid of semantic content. Even though it has no specific phonological

instantiation, it has been abstracted over a large number of exemplars oc-

curring in actual usage events (as exemplified in more detail for the

English ditransitive construction in Section 3 above); accordingly, the

linguistic construction [noun] is strongly associated with the semantics of

its most frequent instantiations, such as lexical items denoting entities in

the real world. Consequently, in the average user of English, the highlyfrequent and prototypical constructions man, woman and house can be ex-

pected to be more strongly associated with the schema [noun] than the

relatively rare constructions rumination and oxymoron, or the dual-class

words brush and kiss, for instance. Likewise, in the average user of Ger-

man, Fuhlen (‘the sensing/feeling’) is likely to be a relatively marginal

instantiation of the category [noun], compared with the more common

instantiation Gefuhl (‘sensation/feeling’). The more marginal status of

Fuhlen can be attributed to the relative rarity of its nominal usage aswell as its homophone fuhlen (‘sense/feel’), a prototypical verb. Thus,

by dint of its association with various instantiations, their respective

conceptual referents, and their usage contexts, the linguistic schema

86 K. Roehr

[noun] exhibits a category structure which is characterized by flexibil-

ity and context-dependency, and which takes into account prototype

e¤ects.

The metalinguistic description ‘noun’, on the other hand, relies on Aris-

totelian categorization. It may be defined by means of a discrete state-

ment, e.g., as ‘‘a word ( . . . ) which can be used with an article’’ (Swan

1995: xxv) or ‘‘a content word that can be used to refer to a person, place,thing, quality, or action’’.6 Metalinguistic categorization is based on clear

yes/no distinctions; frequency distributions or contextual information are

not taken into account, and prototype e¤ects are filtered out. Thus, in

metalinguistic terms, the constructions man, woman, house, rumination,

oxymoron, brush, kiss, Fuhlen, and Gefuhl all have equal status as mem-

bers of the Aristotelian category ‘noun’.

Of course, use of Aristotelian categorization does not mean that we as

language users are unaware of the potential shortcomings of such anapproach. This awareness is also acknowledged in L2 instruction which

draws on metalinguistic descriptions. Most L2 learners will be able to

think of examples of pedagogical grammar rules that are qualified by fre-

quency adverbs such as usually, in general, etc. Most L2 learners will like-

wise be familiar with statements about specific usage contexts as well as

lists of exceptions to a rule that apparently have to be learned by rote. Fi-

nally, the realm of metalinguistic descriptions is not immune to prototype

e¤ects. For instance, descriptions of prototypical functions of a certainL2 form will occur more often than descriptions of less prototypical

functions of the same form and will thus be more familiar to learners

(Hu 2002). However, it is argued here that these prototype e¤ects only

concern the presentation and/or our perception of metalinguistic de-

scriptions; they do not seem to have any bearing on the internal cate-

gory structure of explicit knowledge representations or the processing

mechanisms operating on these representations, as explicated in the

following.As a matter of fact, in order to be of use, metalinguistic knowledge re-

quires conditions of stability and discreteness; otherwise, it would be of

little practical value (see also Swan 1994). For metalinguistic knowledge

to be informative, the user needs to decide categorically whether a specific

linguistic construction is to be classified as a noun or not, otherwise a

metalinguistic description such as ‘the verb needs to agree in number

with the preceding noun or pronoun’ cannot be implemented. By the

same token, the user needs to decide categorically whether a linguisticconstruction is a subordinate conjunction or not, otherwise a metalinguis-

tic description such as ‘in German, the finite verb appears at the end of a

subordinate clause’ cannot be employed.

Categories in second language learning 87

To exemplify further, the metalinguistic description ‘in English re-

ported speech, the main verb of the sentence changes to the past tense

when it is in the present tense in direct speech’ applies in equal measure

to all English utterances, unless it is qualified by further statements about

specific contexts, e.g., ‘if something that is still true at the time of speak-

ing is being reported, the main verb may remain in the present tense’.

Further propositions are required to make explicit the formal and func-tional criteria of introducing reported speech by means of di¤erent verbs

such as say and tell, to describe the formal and functional aspects of re-

ported questions, and so forth (example adapted from Murphy 1994).

No matter how many statements are formulated, though, the user needs

to be able to clearly assign category membership in each case in order to

be able to apply the metalinguistic description, represented as metalin-

guistic knowledge, to a concrete linguistic construction. If we cannot de-

cide categorically if something is a main verb, if something is directspeech, etc., we cannot bring to bear our explicit knowledge.

As a final example, consider a general, dictionary-style metalinguistic

description pertaining to the constructions desk and Schreibtisch (‘desk’),

which is again necessarily stable and discrete. The statement that ‘English

desk means Schreibtisch in German’ is posited as a context-independent

proposition which does not take into account prototypicality or usage sit-

uations. In order to achieve a finer descriptive grain, additional proposi-

tions need to be formulated, e.g., ‘in the context of English check-in desk,the word Check-in-Schalter needs to be used in German’. Conversely, the

implicit linguistic knowledge of a proficient user of both English and

German would accurately reflect the frequency distributions of the con-

structions desk, Schreibtisch, and Schalter in connection with the relevant

referential meanings and suitable pragmatic contexts in which these con-

structions tend to appear.

The same principle applies to the internal structure of all metalinguistic

categories and propositions about relations between categories that makeup metalinguistic descriptions, regardless of whether these refer to lexico-

semantic, morphosyntactic, phonological, or pragmatic phenomena: Aris-

totelian categories are needed to allow for the e¤ective deployment of

metalinguistic knowledge. To reiterate, if we cannot take clear-cut deci-

sions about category membership, our metalinguistic knowledge is of lit-

tle practical value in concrete usage situations.

The contrasting category structures of implicit linguistic and explicit

metalinguistic representations can be expected to a¤ect the processingmechanisms which operate on these representations during language

learning and use. Indeed, implicit and explicit mental operations involv-

ing natural language appear to be analogous with what is respectively

88 K. Roehr

termed similarity-based and rule-based processing in the field of cognitive

psychology.

Similarity-based and rule-based processing have been studied in rela-

tion to categorization, reasoning, and artificial language learning, and ex-

perimental evidence for a qualitative distinction between the two pro-

cesses is quite robust, though not uncontroversial. In accordance with

the weak-interface position adopted in the current paper (see Section 4above), I am in agreement with researchers who not only regard rule-

based and similarity-based processing as separable and distinct, but also

argue that the defining property of rule-based processing is its conscious

nature (Cleeremans and Destrebecqz 2005; Hampton 2005; Smith 2005).

As mentioned previously, conscious awareness ‘‘occurs’’ in working mem-

ory, a limited-capacity resource; as rule-based processes require executive

attention and e¤ort, they may exceed an individual’s working memory ca-

pacity (Ashby and Casale 2005; Bailey 2005; Reber 2005).Empirical evidence indicates that rule-based processing is characterized

by compositionality, productivity, systematicity, commitment, and a drive

for consistency (Diesendruck 2005; Pothos 2005; Sloman 2005). A set of

operations is compositional when more complex representations can be

built out of simpler components without a change in the meaning of the

components. Productivity means that, in principle, there is no limit to the

number of such new representations. An operation is systematic when it

applies in the same way to a whole class of objects (Pothos 2005). Rule-based processing entails commitment to specific kinds of information,

while contextual variations are neglected (Diesendruck 2005). The reason

for this is that rule-based operations involve only a small subset of an ob-

ject’s properties which are selected for processing, while all other object

dimensions are suppressed (Markman et al. 2005; Pothos 2005). A strict

match between an object’s properties and the properties specified in the

rule has to be achieved for rule-based processing to apply. Because of

this, rule-based judgements are more consistent and more stable thansimilarity-based judgements (Diesendruck 2005; Pothos 2005). It should

be immediately apparent that all these properties of rule-based processing

are in keeping with the characteristics of Aristotelian category structure

detailed and exemplified above in relation to metalinguistic knowledge,

i.e., stability, discreteness, lack of flexibility, as well as selective and cate-

gorical decision-making.

The characteristics of rule-based processing can be contrasted with the

characteristics of similarity-based processing. The latter involves a largenumber of an object’s properties, which only need to be partially matched

with the properties of existing representations to allow for successful

categorization (Pothos 2005). Moreover, and contrary to rule-based

Categories in second language learning 89

processing, similarity-based processing is flexible, dynamic, open, and

susceptible to contextual variation (Diesendruck 2005; Markman et al.

2005). Again, it should be apparent that the attributes of similarity-based

processing identified in the field of cognitive psychology are fully conso-

nant with the characteristics of implicit linguistic categories assumed in

the usage-based model.

It is now possible to consider the empirical findings about the role ofmetalinguistic knowledge in language learning (see Section 4 above) in

light of the proposed conceptualization of explicit metalinguistic repre-

sentations and processes as opposed to implicit linguistic representations

and processes. First, I have argued that linguistic and metalinguistic

knowledge pertain to the same cognitive domain (language) and vary

along the same parameters (specificity and complexity). These circum-

stances are consistent with the empirical finding that the two types of

knowledge are positively correlated in L2 learners. At the same time, itis of course necessary to bear in mind that, considered on their own, cor-

relations do not allow for direct conclusions to be drawn about cause-

e¤ect relationships, or indeed the directionality of such relationships.

Second, I have suggested that linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge

di¤er qualitatively in terms of their internal category structure, with im-

plicitly represented categories characterized by flexibility, fuzziness, and

context-dependency, and explicitly represented categories showing the

contrasting attributes of Aristotelian structure. This proposal is compati-ble with the existing claim that the two types of knowledge are separate

and distinguishable constructs.

Third, research in cognitive psychology has revealed that rule-based

processes, i.e., processes which operate on explicit knowledge represen-

tations, are characterized by compositionality, productivity, systematic-

ity, commitment, and a drive for consistency. These characteristics are

consonant with the empirical finding that use of metalinguistic knowl-

edge is associated with consistent, systematic, and often successful L2performance.

Fourth, rule-based processes are associated with stability and definite

commitment to selected information, while flexibility and attention to

contextual variation are absent. Furthermore, as rule-based processes re-

quire both attentional resources and e¤ort, they are constrained by an

individual’s working memory capacity. These circumstances are in keep-

ing with the empirical finding that use of metalinguistic knowledge does

not guarantee successful L2 performance and may even be unhelpfulin certain situations. Put di¤erently, rule-based processes operating on

Aristotelian categories may not only exceed an individual’s working

memory resources in a given situation, but may also fail to capture the

90 K. Roehr

intricacies of certain linguistic constructions in the first place, as exempli-

fied below.7

In sum, it appears that the proposed conceptualization of explicit meta-

linguistic representations and rule-based processes can account for the

benefits as well as the limitations of knowledge based on Aristotelian cat-

egory structure. Such knowledge is at its best when it pertains to highly

frequent and entirely systematic patterns whose usage is largely indepen-dent of context and may be described in terms of one or a few relations

between categories. ‘In English, an -s needs to be added to present tense

verbs in the third person’ is an example of a metalinguistic description

instantiating metalinguistic knowledge of this kind. Conversely, metalin-

guistic knowledge is less useful, or perhaps even useless, when less

frequent, more item-based constructions exhibiting complicated form-

meaning relations need to be captured, since the required number of cat-

egories and propositions specifying relations between categories growsrapidly with every specific usage context that diverges from the regular

pattern.

To exemplify, our implicit representations of the linguistic construc-

tions desk and Schreibtisch (‘desk’) include a wealth of information about

appropriate pragmatic usage contexts of the linguistic forms based on cul-

tural models relating to the meanings they symbolize. Accordingly, the

implicit linguistic representations of a proficient user of English and Ger-

man would include information about the suitability of the constructiondesk to describe an item of furniture commonly found in an o‰ce, as

well as the place where you check in at an airport or see a bank clerk to

open an account. Furthermore, the proficient user would hold informa-

tion about the suitability of the construction Schreibtisch in the former

scenario but not in the latter.

At the implicit level, this probabilistic information is represented in a

vast network of associations subject to parallel distributed processing,

i.e., non-conscious operations that are una¤ected by the constraints ofworking memory and the cumbersome propositional nature of explicit

knowledge representations and processes. By contrast, the Aristotelian

categories and relations of the relevant metalinguistic description require

the formulation of a set of independent propositions that specify di¤erent

usage situations, such as ‘English desk is Schreibtisch in German’. ‘How-

ever, if you want to say English desk in German and if the expression is

used in the context of an airport or a bank, Schalter needs to be used’,

and so forth.At the level of more schematic categories, the implicit linguistic knowl-

edge of a proficient user of English and German would include not only

the schema [co-ordinating conjunction], but likewise instantiations of

Categories in second language learning 91

this schema, all of which are associated with a wealth of linguistic and

conceptual context information. Accordingly, the fact that the German

constructions aber, jedoch, allein and sondern may all be translated as En-

glish but would be complemented not only by information about the high

frequency of aber, but also by knowledge of the specific syntactic proper-

ties of jedoch, the literary or archaic connotations of allein, the tendency

of sondern to be used in contradicting a preceding negative, etc. However,the metalinguistic descriptions formulated in the previous sentence clearly

show that, when made explicit, this information needs to be stated in

terms of additional independent propositions based on stable and discrete

categories.

This potentially explosive growth of propositions that would be re-

quired to make explicit representations applicable in di¤erent contexts

has two detrimental consequences. First, it increases working memory

load and thus renders metalinguistic knowledge proportionally more bur-densome to process; and, second, it becomes less widely applicable. These

potential drawbacks of explicit, rule-based processes apply in equal mea-

sure to the use of metalinguistic knowledge, i.e., reasoning about lan-

guage, and reasoning in other cognitive domains: ‘If there is white-grey

smoke coming out of the kitchen oven where I have had fish cooking for

the last three hours, then there is a fire’ (example adapted from Pothos

2005: 8) is obviously both harder to process and less useful than ‘if there

is smoke, then there is fire’. Unfortunately, the complexity, flexibility, andcontext-dependency of natural language means that general (and truthful)

metalinguistic descriptions equivalent to the latter statement are inevita-

bly rather rare.

6. Empirical predictions

In the preceding section, I have argued that the distinct category struc-

tures and processes which characterize explicit and implicit knowledgeare consonant with existing findings in the area of SLA. Naturally, a ret-

rospective explanatory account can only take us so far. However, the the-

oretical proposals I have put forward o¤er us further and arguably more

important insights: They allow for the formulation of empirically testable

predictions with regard to the role of metalinguistic knowledge in L2

learning. In what follows, five specific hypotheses which are intended to

inform future research are presented.

(1) Linguistic constructions which are captured relatively easily by Aris-totelian categories and relations between such categories will be easier to

acquire explicitly than linguistic constructions which are not captured

easily by Aristotelian categories and relations between such categories.

92 K. Roehr

Specifically, linguistic constructions which show comparatively system-

atic, stable, and context-independent usage patterns should be more ame-

nable to explicit teaching and learning than linguistic constructions which

do not show these usage patterns.

There is as yet very little existing research which has investigated the

potential amenability of specific linguistic constructions to explicit L2

instruction drawing on metalinguistic descriptions, even though theo-retically motivated predictions about the potential di‰culties of simple

versus complex metalinguistic rules were put forward more than a decade

ago (e.g., DeKeyser 1994; Hulstijn and de Graa¤ 1994). Recent empirical

findings suggest that L2 form-function mappings which can be described

metalinguistically in conceptually simple terms and which refer to system-

atic usage patterns appear to pose the least explicit learning di‰culty (R.

Ellis 2006; Roehr and Ganem 2007) and may therefore be particularly

suitable for explicit teaching and learning. By contrast, L2 form-functionmappings with less systematic usage patterns which require conceptually

complex metalinguistic descriptions should pose greater explicit learning

di‰culty. In view of the small number of studies that have been con-

ducted so far, further investigation of Hypothesis 1 is clearly required.

(2) Use of metalinguistic knowledge will di¤erentially a¤ect the fluency,

accuracy, and complexity of L2 performance. Specifically, fluency may

decrease, while accuracy and complexity may increase.

Existing research has shown that L2 learners’ metalinguistic knowledgecorrelates positively with L2 proficiency—provided that the latter is oper-

ationalized by means of written rather than oral measures (e.g., Alderson

et al. 1997; Elder et al. 1999; Renou 2000). Given that the use of explicit

knowledge requires controlled processing which is by definition slow and

e¤ortful compared with automatic, implicit operations, this finding is

perfectly compatible with previous theoretical argumentation. However,

whilst L2 proficiency has typically been operationalized via discrete-item

tests of structural and lexical competence and/or via the four skills ofreading, writing, speaking, and listening, no study to date has investigated

learners’ use of metalinguistic knowledge in relation to the SLA-specific

developmental measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity (R. Ellis

and Barkhuizen 2005; Larsen-Freeman 2006; Skehan 1998) which cut

across both oral and written performance.

In view of the fact that explicit, rule-based processing drawing on rep-

resentations with Aristotelian category structure is subject to working

memory constraints and thus relies on the selective allocation of atten-tional resources, one would expect that increased accuracy, for instance,

can only be achieved at the expense of decreased complexity and fluency.

Likewise, increased complexity can only be achieved at the expense of

Categories in second language learning 93

decreased accuracy and fluency, whereas increased fluency is unlikely to be

achieved at all in association with high use of metalinguistic knowledge.

Averaged across a group of learners, these predicted patterns should

hold for both oral and written performance, although trade-o¤ e¤ects

can be expected to be stronger in the case of oral performance, since the

time pressures of online processing inevitably place even higher demands

on working memory. To my knowledge, none of the performance pat-terns hypothesized here have been subjected to empirical enquiry yet.

(3) Use of metalinguistic knowledge will be related to cognitively based

individual learner di¤erences. Specifically, a learner’s cognitive and learn-

ing style, language learning aptitude, and working memory capacity are

likely to di¤erentially a¤ect their use of metalinguistic knowledge in L2

performance.

I have argued that metalinguistic knowledge representations exhibit

Aristotelian category structure and that rule-based processing mecha-nisms operate on these representations. As mentioned previously, rule-

based processing mechanisms are characteristic of analytic reasoning

more generally, so that use of metalinguistic knowledge can be regarded

as problem-solving in the linguistic domain. Accordingly, individuals

with an analytic stylistic orientation and large working memory capacity

should be particularly adept at using metalinguistic knowledge.

While existing research has occasionally speculated on some of these

issues (e.g., Collentine 2000; DeKeyser 2003), no study to date hasprobed the relationship between L2 learners’ metalinguistic knowledge

and their stylistic preferences (for recent work on cognitive and learning

style in SLA more generally, see, for instance Ehrman and Leaver 2003;

Reid 1998). As far as I am aware, only one study to date has directly in-

vestigated the interplay of L2 learners’ metalinguistic knowledge, their

language learning aptitude, and their working memory capacity (Roehr

and Ganem 2007). Results indicate that learners’ level of metalinguistic

knowledge and their working memory capacity are unrelated, but thatanalytic components of language learning aptitude, i.e., components

whose operationalization incorporates no purely memory-based or purely

auditory elements, were positively correlated with learners’ level of meta-

linguistic knowledge (r ¼ 0:42). In view of the shortage of available evi-

dence, further research into the relationship between metalinguistic

knowledge and cognitively based individual di¤erence variables is needed.

(4) Use of metalinguistic knowledge and cognitively based individual

di¤erences will be related to learners’ a¤ective responses. Specifically, in-dividuals with an analytic disposition who are likely to benefit from ex-

plicit learning and teaching drawing on metalinguistic knowledge will

experience feelings of greater self-e‰cacy and will thus develop positive

94 K. Roehr

attitudes towards their L2 learning situation. By contrast, individuals with

a non-analytic disposition who are likely to benefit less from explicit learn-

ing and teaching drawing on metalinguistic knowledge will experience

greater anxiety and will thus develop negative attitudes towards their L2

learning situation.

To my knowledge, there is as yet no published research that has put

this prediction to the test (but see Roehr 2005 for some preliminaryanalyses based on a small number of cases; for work on the interaction

of a¤ect and cognition more generally, see, for instance, Schumann 1998,

2004; Stevick 1999). In view of Hypothesis 1 above, it is plausible to hy-

pothesize that metalinguistic descriptions which pertain to linguistic con-

structions characterized by systematic and relatively context-independent

usage patterns may be facilitative for any L2 learner, regardless of cogni-

tively based individual di¤erences. Such metalinguistic descriptions may

focus a learner’s attention on aspects of the L2 input that might otherwisebe ignored, thus leading to noticing, i.e., conscious processing just above

the threshold of awareness, and all its associated benefits.

If, on the other hand, metalinguistic descriptions pertaining to linguis-

tic constructions that pose more substantial explicit learning di‰culty ac-

cording to Hypothesis 1 are used, cognitively based individual learner dif-

ferences should begin to matter. An analytically oriented individual may

continue to benefit by moving beyond noticing towards understanding,

thus relying on conscious processing at a high level of awareness (Schmidt1990, 1993, 2001). The achievement of understanding is likely to result in

positive a¤ective responses such as feelings of greater self-e‰cacy and en-

hanced self-confidence. A positive attitude towards the L2 learning situa-

tion may result, which would in turn encourage the learner to deliberately

seek further exposure to the L2. In a learner with a di¤erent stylistic ori-

entation, however, this upward dynamic could well be replaced by a

downward spiral of failure to understand, feelings of anxiety and loss of

control, a negative attitude towards the L2 learning situation, and, in theworst-case scenario, the eventual abandonment of L2 study. This hy-

pothesized interaction of cognitive and a¤ective variables can and should

be put to the test.

(5) Use of metalinguistic knowledge in L2 learning will be related to L1

metalinguistic ability. Specifically, individuals who show strong metalin-

guistic ability and literacy skills in L1 development are likely to exhibit

high levels of metalinguistic knowledge in L2.

With regard to metalinguistic knowledge in adult learners, the link be-tween L1 and L2 skills has not been widely explored. Some studies have

incorporated measures of L1 metalinguistic knowledge alongside tests of

L2 metalinguistic knowledge (e.g., Alderson et al. 1997), or acknowledged

Categories in second language learning 95

the association between metalinguistic and literacy skills (e.g., Kemp

2001). Furthermore, existing research has emphasized the link between

L1 ability and aptitude for L2 learning (e.g., Sparks and Ganschow

2001), or highlighted the fact that multilingual individuals generally

show greater metalinguistic awareness (e.g., Jessner 1999, 2006). Yet, I

am not aware of any published study of cognitively mature learners

which has directly focused on the relationship between L1 and L2 compe-tence on the one hand and L1 and L2 metalinguistic knowledge on the

other hand. If Hypotheses 3 and 4 are borne out, the patterns of interplay

between individual di¤erence variables and metalinguistic knowledge can

be expected to be similar in both L1 and L2.

7. Conclusion

In this paper, I have put forward a theoretically motivated and empirically

grounded conceptualization of the construct of metalinguistic knowledge,

or explicit knowledge about language, with specific reference to L2 learn-

ing. I have argued that explicit metalinguistic and implicit linguistic

knowledge vary along the same parameters, specificity and complexity,

but that they di¤er qualitatively in terms of their internal category struc-

ture and, accordingly, the processing mechanisms that operate on their

representation in the human mind. In consonance with assumptions madein the usage-based approach to language, implicit knowledge is character-

ized by flexible and context-dependent categories with fuzzy boundaries.

By contrast, explicit knowledge is represented in terms of Aristotelian cat-

egories with a stable, discrete, and context-independent structure.

In accordance with research in cognitive psychology, implicit knowl-

edge is subject to similarity-based processing which is characterized by

dynamicity, flexibility, and context-dependency. Conversely, explicit

knowledge is subject to rule-based processing which is both consciousand controlled. Such processing is constrained by the capacity limits of

working memory; it requires e¤ort, selective attention, and commit-

ment. Rule-based processing is further characterized by stability and

consistency—properties that are achieved at the cost of flexibility and

consideration of contextual and frequency information. Rule-based pro-

cessing underlies analytic reasoning, whether in the linguistic or any other

cognitive domain. Hence, use of metalinguistic knowledge can be under-

stood as problem-solving applied to language.The proposed attributes of implicit linguistic and explicit metalinguistic

category structures and processes have been considered in relation to

available research in the field of SLA, and a post-hoc account that is

96 K. Roehr

consistent with both the benefits and the limitations of metalinguistic

knowledge as identified in existing research has been provided. Arising

from the theoretical proposals put forward in the present paper, I have

further formulated five specific predictions which, if confirmed, would

identify the conditions under which metalinguistic knowledge is likely to

be useful to the L2 learner. These predictions constitute empirically test-

able hypotheses which, it is hoped, will be addressed in future research.

Received 7 August 2006 University of Essex, UK

Revision received 16 May 2007

Notes

* I would like to thank Martin Atkinson, Bob Borsley, Ewa Dabrowska, and two anony-

mous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. I am also grateful to Sonja

Eisenbeiss, Roger Hawkins, and Max Roberts for reading an earlier version of this

paper. Address for correspondence: Karen Roehr, Department of Language & Lin-

guistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK; email:

3kroehr@essex.ac.uk4.

1. The following notation conventions are used: Schematic categories are shown in small

capitals with square brackets, e.g., [bird]. Exemplars of conceptual categories are shown

in small capitals, e.g., robin. Specific linguistic constructions are shown in italics, e.g.,

bachelor, unrepentant, etc. Metalinguistic descriptions are shown in single inverted com-

mas, e.g., ‘da sends the finite verb to the end of the clause’.

2. Langacker’s (1991) terminology is employed throughout this article. Croft (2001) uses

the terms ‘‘atomic’’ and ‘‘substantive’’ instead of ‘‘minimal’’ and ‘‘specific’’, respectively.

3. The weak-interface position can be contrasted with the non-interface position and the

strong-interface position. The non-interface position contends not only that explicit and

implicit knowledge are separate and distinct constructs, but also that they cannot engage

in interplay (Krashen 1981, 1985; Paradis 2004). The strong-interface position maintains

that explicit and implicit knowledge interact directly, and that explicit knowledge may

be converted into implicit knowledge, e.g., through prolonged practice (DeKeyser

1994; Johnson 1996; McLaughlin 1995). A review of these various positions can be

found in R. Ellis (2005).

4. Current research into the interface between explicit and implicit knowledge does not yet

o¤er any highly precise descriptions of the links between the level of the mind and the

level of the brain. Likewise, researchers’ understanding of the notion of consciousness

is still incomplete. Therefore, what I present here are hypotheses that are compatible

with existing empirical findings. While recognizing that further research is required, I re-

gard these hypotheses both as su‰ciently plausible to be given serious consideration and

as su‰ciently detailed to be incorporated into a coherent line of argument.

5. As mentioned previously, for the current discussion it does not matter whether an indi-

vidual’s metalinguistic knowledge has been derived internally or assimilated from exter-

nal sources.

6. URL: 3http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn4, retrieved 16 April 2007, based on a

keyword search for ‘‘noun’’.

7. This circumstance is consistent with the proposal that explicit knowledge about lan-

guage may be more inaccurate and more imprecise than implicit knowledge (R. Ellis

Categories in second language learning 97

2004, 2005, 2006). While, at first glance, this hypothesis seems to be incompatible with

the attributes of rule-based processing, it fits into the picture if the limitations of meta-

linguistic knowledge based on representations with Aristotelian category structure are

taken into consideration.

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Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment onArie Verhagen, Constructions of

Intersubjectivity

WOLFRAM HINZEN and MICHIEL VAN LAMBALGEN

1. Overview

Constructions of Intersubjectivity (CoI) is an important addition to the

growing body of work on ‘cognitive’ and construction-based grammars,

which CoI links to evolutionary issues in interesting ways. CoI also

touches upon a number of fundamental (indeed philosophical) issues in

the study of linguistic communication, meaning, and human cognition; it

should be applauded for the explicitness with which it does so, using lan-guage as a ‘window on the mind’ (p. 210). A concrete vision of the evolu-

tion of language is endorsed, arising against the background of analyses

of a number of seemingly disparate and scattered linguistic data. The

book thus forms an excellent starting point to engage with foundational

assumptions entering into the theoretical framework adopted. We will

here equally embed our comments within a theoretical discussion at the

level of frameworks.

The book begins by isolating a number of seemingly unrelated ‘small’grammatical puzzles, which later gain a theoretical significance for certain

‘big’ theoretical issues. The ‘small’ grammatical puzzles concern negation

(in particular the lack of functional equivalence in the use in discourse of

not impossible and possible); whether finite sentential complements in cop-

ular constructions like The danger is that depleted uranium is poisonous

are subjects or predicates; and discourse connectives (e.g., concessive con-

junctions like although). These three construction types form the topics of

Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Chapter 5 concludes the book. We herereverse the order of ‘small’ and ‘big’ and begin ‘big’, with some claims of

linguistic anthropology.

2. Anthropological and evolutionary issues

Following Verhagen, using human language is essentially a manipulative

activity: language is ‘fundamentally a matter of regulating and assessing

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 107–123

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.006

0936–5907/08/0019–0107

6 Walter de Gruyter

others’ (9). Its use is ‘never just informative, but always ‘‘argumentative’’ ’

(9–10); like animal communication systems geared at getting conspecifics

to act in ways beneficial to the communicator (8), language is about get-

ting things done rather than the disinterested representation of the world.

Any such similarity between human language and non-human communi-

cation systems would be a welcome result, as it reduces the apparent gap

separating human and ‘animal language’. That said, while human lan-guage can be used to manipulate and getting others to behave as one de-

sires, ever so often it is not so used, highlighting a crucial dissimilarity be-

tween human language and animal communication systems: we may as

well use language to freely express our thoughts or ponder and assert the

truth of something, without necessarily expecting particular functional

benefits ensuing from that. Unlike in non-human communicating species

there is no apparent cause or functional pressure for our deliberate deci-

sions to assert what we do, and much functional pressure is needed toprevent them. Nor are we restricted in what we choose to refer to, assert,

or communicate. Stuck in the immediate here and now, by contrast, as

non-human animals by and large are, they only have a small number of

non-voluntary vocalizations at their disposal, all intrinsically linked to an

immediate adaptive purpose. No doubt human language use will seem

somewhat pathological if all we say serves some instrumental purpose

and is intrinsically linked to a certain response we wish to achieve. Inter-

estingly, the descriptive and assertoric aspect of language is inescapableeven where language is used manipulativly, as in making compliments to

a lady, where unavoidably we are making a descriptive claim too (‘what a

beautiful perfume!’).

The denial that human language exhibits the very features that roman-

ticists like Schlegel, Herder, or Humboldt claimed to be so distinctive for

it—its use for the free and creative expression of thought—also has an in-

tellectual heritage we should be aware of. Assimilating human language

to non-human animal communication systems was part and parcel ofB. F. Skinner’s (1957) vision of language, who flatly denied that language

is used for purposes of reference, representation, or the assertion of truth,

arguing instead that it is an instrument serving purposes of the control of

behavior. In CoI, too, we read that language evolved as a mechanism

producing ‘pressure favoring long-term predictability of behavior’ (14).

CoI does not support a Skinnerian psychology, to be sure; nor does it

claim that all language use is a function of strategic interaction. Yet it is

not entirely clear how far removed its foundational claims about lan-guage are from Skinnerian views of language as an instrument of control.

We think it is an obvious fact that language is used as an instrument of

control. Our point is merely that (i) the opposite is equally true, (ii) not

108 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

so using it is actually a hallmark of human language that should be cen-

tral in any account of its evolution.

We suggest that, more generally, the general assimilation of human to

non-human ‘language’ on the basis of ascriptions of an evolutionary func-

tion to language, such as communication, will not lead to much insight in

linguistic structure and its special character. To begin with, function as-

criptions to whole, complex systems such as language don’t typicallytransfer to the parts from which such systems are assembled: these will

typically have independent evolutionary trajectories, unrelated to the

function for which they are later employed in when entering the system

of language. To whatever extent cognitive mechanisms entering language

are used in non-humans, and have non-communicative functions there,

language will not be rationalizable by looking at it as a communication

system. Nor will the study of non-linguistic animal communication un-

lock the secret of what makes language special. If there is anything specialto the human communication system, it is that it is a linguistic one, which

means that its being a communication system cannot possibly be what as

such explains its special features. The study of communication systems

(Hauser 1996) does not tell us much about the special properties of

human language, such as its structural and computational aspects, or the

fact of its intentional and creative use.

Again, none of this means that the study of the communicative use of

language will not let us see many interesting facts about language. CoI

succeeds rather remarkably in unearthing such facts. This book’s funda-

mental theoretical commitment however is deeper: that social and cul-

tural cognition alone is the key to the understanding of language. The

most basic explanatory notion in Verhagen’s framework, used extensively

throughout the book, is taken from Tomasello (e.g., 1999, 2003): the

human ability to take others’ perspectives (2), understand what they at-

tend to, and share their intentions. On Verhagen’s view this complex of

mental reasoning abilities is the prime biological factor distinguishing usfrom other primates. Let a primate interacting manipulatively with others

understand itself as an intentional agent, and have him ascribe intentional

life to other agents as well; have him want to share beliefs and identify

with the intentional mental life of others; then culture becomes possible,

with its own special mechanisms of inheritance, since humans can now

learn from others as opposed to merely from their own interactions with

a non-human environment. With this, language is on its way, if not given,

Verhagen suggests. For language simply is a system of conventions (ofsymbols and ways of using them) that solve a cognitive coordination

problem. It is culturally transferred (3); and thus there is no biological

adaptation specific to language needed. In sum, starting from the one

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 109

basic notion of taking another’s perspective, language evolves—for the

coordination and managing of multiple such perspectives in discourse.

3. Testing a hypothesis

What would be evidence for the correctness of such a view? What we

need is independent empirical evidence that human language is optimizedto some significant extent for the coordination task envisaged. A good de-

gree of optimization is what testing any functionalist hypothesis in biol-

ogy requires. In short, the hypothesis should be a particularly good

source for predictions of mechanisms that we can then empirically attest.

But note that even if this proves possible, the functional rationale of the

mechanisms in question will not be their cause or origin. An independent

story about the mechanisms will have to be told, as a mere hypothesis

about functions will leave the question of origin (proximate causes) open.Recognizing the need for validation above, Verhagen asserts that we

must be able to see ‘repercussions for the content that is systematically

coded in linguistic symbols’ of the capacity of understanding others as

like oneself, in short ‘read o¤ ’ the semantics of basic linguistic units from

their ways of handling perspectives:

[I]f coordinating cognitively with others is so basic a component of human prac-

tices, then we should see it reflected in more than one area of grammar [ . . . ] con-

necting, di¤erentiating and ‘‘tailoring’’ the contents of points of view with respect

to each other (rather than organizing a connection to the world) is essential for

understanding their semantics [ . . . ] (p. 4)

Here we note a potentially wrong opposition, to which we will return sev-

eral times: even granted that, generally, ‘coordinating cognitively with

others’ is basic to human cognition, and this general principle of cogni-

tion is also instantiated in grammar, we don’t see that there somehow ex-ists an opposition between ‘coordinating cognitively’ and ‘organizing a

connection to the world’, which entails that semantics cannot be under-

stood as serving both functions simultaneously. We contend, in line with

our ‘anthropological’ claims above, that it can and does.1

We also note that there are potentially two di¤erent aspects of

language that we might want to explain by appeal to their discourse

function: sentence-internal organization on the one hand, and discourse

phenomena transcending the sentence-boundary on the other. Bysentence-internal organization we mean the structure of the clause, the or-

ganization of phrases and their dependents, and syntactic mechanisms

like complementation. Sentential connectives and discourse conjunctions

110 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

fall into the class of discourse phenomena. The complementation con-

struction in (1) illustrates the first one; (2) is an example of an inter-

sentential or discourse phenomenon:

(1) George saw/knew/said that his opponent was closing in.

(2) Max fell. John pushed him.

Clearly, it is discourse phenomena that we expect a discourse-based per-spective to elucidate best. It is much less clear that such a perspective

would illuminate sentence-internal and syntactic organization. Verha-

gen’s striking claim is that a perspective departing from discourse and

cognitive coordination shows us that both central semantic and syntactic

analyses of particular linguistic constructions have been mistaken.

Now, in (2), the two sentences are obviously semantically connected

(even though they are not parts of one another, in a phrase-structural

sense, as in the construction (1)). To understand (2), it has to be inferred

that the event order is the reverse of the sentence order, and it is only by

applying causal knowledge (pushing can be a cause of falling) and a gen-

eral inference principle (no other possible cause is mentioned, whence one

must assume pushing is the only operant cause) that the listener can con-

struct the corresponding event structure. The speaker need not supply ex-

plicit information about the intended event order since he knows that the

listener is able to compute this herself. This is in fact a general fact about

discourse production and understanding: it is both impossible and unde-sirable to supply all relevant information in linguistic form and both

speaker and listener therefore appeal to general principles in computing

that information from the linguistic material given. So the principles driv-

ing the understanding in cases like (2) are not specifically linguistic ones:

they are more generally cognitive, logical, or inferential ones (examples

will be seen below). Again, we expect this to be di¤erent in (1), where we

meet a hypotactic construction missing in (2), in which, at least on a stan-

dard syntactic analysis, that his opponent was closing in is the internal ar-gument of saw (see below for more on this structural claim). It is therefore

more plausible that ‘cognitive coordination’ in discourse could potentially

tell us much about (2), but little about (1).

4. Negation and discourse connections

Let us see whether this is so and begin with the observation that clearly the

discourse in (2) is about the world, and involves a large amount of cogni-tive coordination, exemplifying language’s potential, insisted on above, to

serve both of these functions simultaneously. The di¤erence between the

general fact about discourse understanding just noted and Verhagen’s

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 111

claims is that he argues for the existence of specific grammatical construc-

tions whose purpose would lie precisely in cognitive coordination, and

whose semantics would not be explainable otherwise (or on more tradi-

tional semantic assumptions) Verhagen considers that negation is an in-

stance of such a construction, and this is the topic of Chapter 2, to which

we now turn.

We will give a slightly more formal treatment of Verhagen’s examplesin CoI, to see whether negation can indeed be used in building a case

against semantics as ‘organizing a connection to the world’. We first sum-

marise Verhagen’s take on negation, with page numbers to where Verha-

gen states his views:

a. the primary function of negation is intersubjective cognitive coordi-

nation (42, bottom of page)

b. the relation between language and the world is only secondary (42,

bottom of page)2

c. negation is concerned with the relation between distinct ‘mentalspaces’ of participants in discourse (57)

d. more specifically, the speaker uses negation to instruct the addressee

to entertain two distinct mental spaces, one of which has to be re-

jected (42, bottom of page)

e. these mental spaces may incorporate ‘topoi’, collections of culturally

determined default rules (58).

Now consider the following three example discourses:

(3) A. Do you think our son will pass his courses this term?

B. Well, he passed them in the autumn term.

(4a) A. Do you think our son will pass his courses this term?

B-a. Well, he did not pass his first statistics course.(4b) A. Do you think our son will pass his courses this term?

B-b. Well, he barely passed his first statistics course.

The general principle behind understanding such exchanges is that, in-

stead of giving a direct answer, B invites addressee A to activate a defea-

sible rule in her semantic memory (cf. the ‘topoi’ mentioned under e.

above) and to perform an inference based on the rule and the information

supplied by B. Thus in example (3), A must retrieve a defeasible rule of

the type ‘normally, if a student passes his exams in term n, then also in

term n þ 1’, and apply modus ponens using B’s observation about the au-tumn term. Things get really interesting in example (4a). Here B invites A

to activate a defeasible rule like ‘normally, if a student passes his first sta-

tistics course, he can pass other courses as well’ and apply an inference

112 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

using his utterance B-a. That the rule is defeasible can be seen from the

possible continuation of (4a) in (4a*):

(4a*) A. Do you think our son will pass his courses this term?

B-a. Well, he did not pass his first statistics course.

A. But he got a very good grade for the astrophysics course!

A more formal analysis of these examples goes as follows.3 A defeasiblerule is an implication of the form ‘if P and nothing exceptional is the case,

then Q’. Here P can be the proposition ‘a student passes his first statistics

course’, and Q the proposition ‘he can pass other courses as well’. Using

this representation, one may disentangle the coordinating and world-

relating functions of ‘not’. First o¤, sentence B-a has a dual function: it

states a fact and it triggers an inference process that allows A to deduce

B’s opinion on the relevant issue. Sentence B-a can have this dual func-

tion because the inference process that it triggers has certain universal fea-tures which are common knowledge of A and B. Namely, the inference is

a form of closed world reasoning, a form of logical reasoning which is dif-

ferent from classical logic but which is all the time applied in discourse

understanding (see van Lambalgen and Hamm 2004). The logical princi-

ple invoked here is: assume all propositions are false which you have no

reason to assume to be true. One can make sense of (4a) by invoking this

principle twice. First the defeasible rule, written fully as ‘if a student

passes his first statistics course and nothing exceptional is the case, hecan pass other courses as well’ is reduced to ‘if a student passes his first

statistics course, he can pass other courses as well’, because no informa-

tion about exceptions is supplied in the discourse. Secondly, no other suf-

ficient conditions for passing the other courses are given, so that the rule

is actually an equivalence, and utterance B-a can be used to derive the in-

tended conclusion ‘he will not pass all his courses this term’. Note that

without invoking closed world reasoning, the inference that B implicitly

appeals to in (4a) is the classically invalid ‘denial of the antecedent’. In(4b) the suggestion is that if a student barely passes a statistics course,

then one actually has an exceptional circumstance. Therefore the previous

reduction of the defeasible rule no longer applies, and the inference using

utterance B-a fails.

The defeasible character of the inferences involved is brought home

further by the discourse (4a*), where the function of the utterance ‘But

he got a very good grade for the astrophysics course!’ is precisely to high-

light a second defeasible rule: ‘if a student passes an astrophysics courseand nothing exceptional is the case, he can pass other courses as well’. In

this case the second application of closed world reasoning fails, thus ren-

dering invalid the conclusion previously drawn. The circumstance that

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 113

conclusions from logical arguments may have to be withdrawn when new

information comes in, may have reinforced the impression that ‘organiz-

ing the connection to the world’ is of minor importance in language use.

But in actual fact, these discourses are all about one’s best guesses about

the state of the world. We conclude, then, that at least with respect to sen-

tential negation, the general framework of non-monotonic logic elegantly

captures the data in question, and the uniqueness implied in Verhagen’sclaims about the need for a functional explanation is without support.

Note that non-monotonic logic is not intrinsically a framework for rea-

soning in an intersubjective context at all: we find the same principles of

reasoning in other cognitive domains such as planning, hence their ratio-

nale is not purely in cognitive coordination, leading to further doubts

about the foundational assumptions used.

Another example in the same vein is taken from Chapter 4, on dis-

course connections. Consider Verhagen’s discussion of although and but

on pp. 167–174. He mentions the following general explication of the

meaning of ‘although’ (167): ‘p although q’ means: (a) truth conditions: p

& q; (b) presupposition: q implies not-p. Here ‘presupposition’ means that

if ‘q implies not-p’ is not yet present in the discourse, it must be intro-

duced (‘presupposition accomodation’). Verhagen correctly notes that if

‘q implies not-p’ is formalised as the material implication of classical

logic, (a) and (b) are in immediate contradiction, and then after some dis-

cussion draws the following moral: ‘What is especially important to avoidthe derivation of contradictions, even if the defeasibility of generaliza-

tions is recognized, is that a background mental space, distinct from that

of the speaker/writer, is invoked in which the shared topos is construed

as a basis for a causal inference (168).’

A formalisation in non-monotonic logic again shows that we can re-

main agnostic about the necessity (and precise form) of mental space rep-

resentations. We shall provide representations for ‘although’ and ‘but’

using the defeasible conditionals introduced above. These feature a con-junct ‘nothing exceptional is the case’, which we shall formalize here as

‘not-ab’ (where ‘ab’ is a proposition letter indicating some abnormality):

‘p although q’ means: (a) truth conditions: p & q; (b) presupposition: q

& not-ab implies not-p.

‘p but q’ means: (a) truth conditions: p & q; (b) presupposition: p & not-

ab implies not-q.

In both cases (a) and (b) are consistent, and jointly entail the derivation

of an abnormality. Thus, if someone utters ‘p although q’, he contributes

a variable for an abnormality to the discourse, which can be unified with

114 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

a concrete circumstance. E.g., ‘He failed his exam, although he worked

very hard. He was sick on the day of the exam.’ The second sentence is

read as an instantiation of the abnormality pointed at by the first sen-

tence. No special machinery for mental spaces needs to be adopted; it suf-

fices to apply to general principles for discourse coherence such as the in-

troduction of variables to be unified with linguistic material.

5. Cognitive significance

Before we continue with our discussion of linguistic matters and return to

the issue of sentential complementation in the next section, there is a

methodological point we want to raise: the use of ‘formal’ representations

in cognitive linguistics, especially Verhagen’s use of Fauconnier’s theory

of ‘mental spaces’ in explaining the function of negation. We presented a

formal analysis of Verhagen’s examples involving negation in non-monotonic logic, without first explaining Verhagen’s own ‘mental space’

analysis. We did so because we have severe doubts as to the adequacy of

such analyses in a cognitive context. We fully agree that the most produc-

tive way to do linguistics is to relate it to human cognition as a whole.

But what makes a particular piece of linguistic analysis also cognitive?

Let us pause to consider this important question in some detail. At the

outset of modern linguistics in the 1950s a demand was imposed on

theories of linguistic competence according to which such theories shouldbe ‘explicit’. That is, they should not rely on badly understood and

question-begging notions such as ‘understanding’, ‘intending’, or ‘grasp-

ing the meaning’. In practice, explicitness meant to give such psycho-

logical processes a computational or algorithmic description.4 Adopting

this methodological decision, a given semantic analysis of a natural lan-

guage should employ representations that have well-defined formation

rules, and the mapping between syntactic and semantic representations

should be computationally transparent.Note that a purely semantic analysis of a linguistic phenomenon can as

such be considered to be successful if it gets the truth conditions of sen-

tences and entailments between sentences in context right. Here, one

does not put any demands upon the semantic representations used except

that one can meaningfully speak of entailments between them. Although

this demand is by no means trivial, it does not yet su‰ce for explanatory

significance in the context of a study of human cognition. We do not wish

to imply that only pointing at a neural substrate su‰ces for a demonstra-tion of cognitive reality. Clearly, a given linguistic analysis can stand on its

own feet and does not need validation from neuroscience.5 Yet, the con-

cepts and entities used in abstract syntactic and semantic representations

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 115

must at least not be in conflict with known constraints on the processing

of these structures or their storage in long-term and working memory, for

example.6

The simple point we want to make here is that this integration of fields

of inquiry operating at di¤erent levels of abstraction (i.e., linguistic and

neurological) depends on the explicitness of the computational descrip-

tions involved. In particular, semantic representations need to be mathe-matically definite enough to be used in algorithms. We have strong doubts

that this desideratum is met by Fauconnier’s theory. The analysis of nega-

tion presented above in terms of non-monotonic logic goes some way to-

ward fulfilling theses desiderata, since, as is shown in Stenning and van

Lambalgen (2008), the proposed system has considerable cognitive signif-

icance, including an appealing neural implementation.

6. The complementation construction

Let us now return to sentential complementation constructions such as

(1). Verhagen’s suggestion (Chapter 3) is that sentential complementation

is a special purpose construction that, again, intrinsically serves a coordi-

nation aim. Verhagen claims that (1), repeated here as (5), is fundamen-

tally di¤erent in structure from a construction like (6):

(5) George knew/saw/said that his opponent was closing in.(6) George knew/saw/said something.

That is, it is wrong to construe (5) as a ‘transitive construction’ on the

basis of a mere analogy with (6). In particular, he argues that the em-

bedded clause in (5) is not a syntactic constituent or verbal argument (p.

83). Rather, (5) is a ‘construction’ in its own right, a holistic template

with irreducible sound and meaning properties (p. 79) that doesn’t follow

from any ‘general’ phrase-structural rules.However, no structural analysis of the sentences in question is actually

provided in this chapter, and no definition of what it would be for the

that-clause to be a ‘constituent’ is provided. Clearly, a structural analysis

is not ipso facto provided once certain functional claims are made: the

mechanisms underlying certain functions are a logically independent

issue. But standard tests for constituency suggest that we can question

the that-clause, as in (7), or elide it, as in (8):

(7) George saw/knew/said what?

(8) George saw/knew/said that his opponent was closing in, and Bill

saw/knew/said so too.

116 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

Verhagen’s conclusion by contrast is rather exclusively derived from

claims about di¤erences in discourse functions of (7) and (8), which we

claim is a logical error and fails to provide any independent evidence for

the functions used to an explanatory purpose.

In addition, a wrong opposition arises again. Let it be true that (5) in-

dicates a ‘perspective’ in the matrix clause, and that a thought is being

‘perspectivized’ in the embedded one, as Verhagen argues. This observa-tion appears fully consistent with the that-clause in (5) being a constituent

that is the complement of the matrix verb. To the extent that there is a

di¤erence between (5) and (6) in the functional respects just noted—

although that di¤erence is not obvious to us—it can follow composition-

ally from the di¤erence in the two complements of the matrix verb, which

after all di¤er, in syntactic category and Case. Again, independent evi-

dence is needed for a di¤erence in structure between (5) and (6)—

evidence not simply predicated on the functionalist hypothesis made.Contrary to the claims made in this chapter, a standard generative

constituent structure analysis of (5) would not proceed merely from an

intuited ‘analogy’ or ‘relatedness’ between (5) and (6) (as stated on p.

87). It would also not proceed by a ‘top-down’ analysis (p. 82). On the

contrary, it would build such a structure from the bottom upwards, be-

ginning with the minimal assumption that saw and the CP in question

must be somehow merged with one another, giving rise to a structure of

the general form [X Y]. Assuming in addition to that minimal require-ment that in human language, phrases are headed, one of X and Y will

have to be the head, H, which thus ‘projects’, with Y becoming its com-

plement or internal argument. The result is then as a whole predicated of

an external argument, Z (i.e., George). In this way we derive that the

common underlying structure of (5) and (6) is indeed [Z [X [Y]]], an anal-

ysis making the rather minimal assumptions that:

(i) human language is combinatorial (there is a recursive operationmerging constituents),

(ii) the organization of expressions is hierarchical (it contains phrases

over and above lexical items),

(iii) phrases are headed (Merge(X,Y) is of type X or else type Y), and

(iv) branching is binary (Merge takes two arguments).

This analysis moreover does not automatically assume the possibility of

generalizing over clausal and nominal structures: it does not refer to anysuch constructions, which are not even visible for a minimal analysis that

appeals to abstract notions such as head, complement, internal argument,

and external argument, alone. So it also does not predict that in all

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 117

contexts nominal arguments can be inserted where the putative clausal ar-

guments can be, which is the prediction that Verhagen (pp. 83–85) pro-

vides evidence against.

It is neither clear to us why double object constructions like They

warned us that the profit would turn out lower would support Verhagen’s

viewpoint (see p. 86), nor why inversely linked predications of the type

in (7) and (8) do:

(7) [The danger] is [that the middle class feels alienated].

(8) [That the middle class feels alienated] is [the danger].

We here briefly discuss only the latter case. The problem posed by Verha-

gen is that more than hundred years of analysis could not settle whether

the that-clause in (7)–(8) is a subject or predicate. But perhaps this is a

wrong dilemma. It may precisely be a feature of these constructions that

they are organized around a symmetrical predicational relation between

two XPs in a Small Clause (SC) as in (9), in a way that either of themcan raise to a sentence-subject position in front of the auxiliary, resulting

in either (10) or (11) (see Moro 2000):

(9) SC

CP DP

that . . . alienated the danger

D(10) SUBJECT [BE [Small Clause [The danger] [that the middle class feels

alienated]]

D(11) SUBJECT [BE [Small Clause [The danger] [that the middle class feels

alienated]]

Neither the CP nor the DP in (9) are the head in the Small Clause (or

‘project’), which explains their symmetry, and potentially the fact that ei-

ther of them can raise out of the Small Clause.

7. Constructions as such

Above we appealed to a minimal computational machinery in terms of bi-

nary Merge, which led us to the scheme [Z [X [Y]]]. An argument for using

a minimal phrase structural analysis generated by a recursive operation

118 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

Merge is that we need some account of the recursive machinery of lan-

guage (unless recursivity is denied, which it is not in the present volume).

If one assumes a minimal conception to account for recursive structure

building (Merge on its current ‘minimalist’ construal is such a candidate,

see Hinzen 2006), the question whether there is a ‘complementation con-

struction’ and whether or not it is identical to a ‘direct object construc-

tion’ (p. 86) cannot even be formulated. Merge is too primitive to be sen-sitive to such categorial distinctions, giving us a much simpler vision of

the linguistic system’s basic computations. The question is whether this is

a bad or a good result.

The claimed achievement of the Principles and Parameters framework,

incorporated into Minimalism, was that constructions as we can perceive

them in languages at a descriptive level can be shown to follow from

more abstract generative principles which are neither language-specific

nor construction-specific. Thus, what we called the ‘complementationconstruction’ above is simply the overt consequence of Merge plus the

fact that some heads subcategorize for an object that is semantically a

proposition. This, if feasible, is a desirable view, we contend, because the

abstract generative principles in question, if indeed minimal, have to be

part of anyone’s account; and because having constructions as merely

the overt result of deeper, fewer, and more abstract structure-building op-

erations is both explanatorily beneficial and in no conflict with the fact

that they take up distinctive discourse functions when used. From an evo-lutionary viewpoint, too, a minimal and construction-free grammar (that

remains descriptively adequate) should be welcomed: it allows to accom-

plish more (a great variety of linguistic constructions) with less (minimal

structuring principles cutting across constructions), which is arguably in

line with general principles of economy and conservativity in biological

evolution.

8. Perspective-taking

As noted, Verhagen doesn’t deny recursion, but places it outside language,

in perspective-taking, which as such, he argues, is ‘inherently recursive’

(p. 98). That sentential complementation constructions are paradigmati-

cally recursive is on his view only a sign for the fact that they are the

‘grammaticalization’ of this basic human cognitive capacity. The problem

with this account however is that to our knowledge there is no evidence

for recursive perspective-taking outside human language; ipso facto wecannot invoke perspective-taking to explain language, and the direction

of explanation might precisely have to be reversed, unless there is a com-

mon cause of both. Furthermore, ‘taking a perspective on something’

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 119

can—although it need not—involve what philosophers traditionally have

called a propositional attitude. It need not, since it has been observed in

false belief tasks that while a child may take the wrong perspective

(namely its own) in propositional terms, it takes the right perspective in

behavioural terms, e.g., by looking at the right spot (Clements and Perner

1994). That is, the notion of perspective as such is consistent with both

propositional and non-propositional mental representations; it doesn’t ex-plain why it should be the case that we take propositional perspectives or

why such forms of thought exist. Although there are some claims for

propositionality in non-humans (Seyfarth 2006), there are also strong

ones against it (Terrace 2005), and the notion of propositionality invoked

in the former claims is too broad to illuminate the specifics of human

clause structure and the propositional meanings that sentential construc-

tions have. There is also evidence that the understanding of sentential

complementation is actually itself an instrumental causal factor in thegenesis of ‘mind-reading’ and how the child forms explicit propositional

representations of false beliefs, a task that is not mastered before senten-

tial complementation itself is (De Villiers 2005). All of this indicates that

Verhagen’s bold attempt to explain language from social cognition may

well—at least partially—have the cart before the horse.7

9. Meaning

We close with a general observation on the philosophy of meaning as-

sumed in CoI. If the meaning of linguistic expressions is inherently and

necessarily linked to their discourse purpose, we face consequences such

as that an assertion of There are seats in this room implies a presupposi-

tion having to do with the seats being comfortable, as Verhagen asserts

(15). But obviously, there can be assertions about seats in rooms where

these seats fail to be comfortable. Hence, the implicature is a mere con-

textual one, and ipso facto not an inherent (non-contextual) aspect of theexpression in question. Is the claim the radical one that there are no such

inherent aspects of the meaning of an expression at all? If it isn’t, a non-

contextual notion of linguistic meaning as determined by linguistic form

needs to be preserved on which the compositional process of meaning

determination would be based. If it is, that would entail giving up the

compositionality of meaning, which depends on the availability of a

context-independent notion of meaning that is determined by the syntac-

tic part-whole structure of the expression in question (see Fodor andLepore 2002). We may be wary of giving up this widely endorsed con-

straint, as it seems needed to explain the forms of recursivity that lan-

guage exhibits. Note that to whatever extent we endorse compositionality

120 W. Hinzen and M. v. Lambalgen

as a principle for the generation of meaning, meaning will not be ‘conven-

tional’: meaning will follow by necessity from algebraic laws of phrasal

composition, in much the way that 5 follows from composing 2 and 3 by

means of the operation ‘þ’.

Note, also, that if the meaning of a sentence is spelled out by appeal to

its argumentative consequences, it will be the case that there is nothing to

rationally explain why we endorse the inferences we do. If we want to jus-tify moving from ‘A&B’ to ‘A’, say (or claim classical validity for this

move), part of what we will appeal to is the meaning of ‘&’ (and our

grasp of that meaning). We couldn’t justify the classical rule of conjunc-

tion elimination, say, by the existence of a causal mechanism carrying us

from premise to conclusion, or the desirability of the result, or the force

of a drug that we take. By consequence, an independent notion of mean-

ing is needed, even if an argumentation-oriented perspective is adopted,

and meaning can’t consist in argumentative consequences alone.

10. Conclusions

Summarizing our main claims, we believe that while the data that CoI un-

earths are rich and certainly need explanation, they have an explanation

in more traditional formal semantic or syntactic frameworks which are

implicitly rejected in CoI. In short, the data do not support either the

analyses provided or the foundational assumptions about language en-dorsed. Again, we see no conflict between older ‘representational’ or ‘dis-

interested’ perspectives on the use of language, and observations on the

discursive functions that linguistic expressions may serve. We also see a

danger in one-sided perspectives on language that leave out some of its

distinctive features. Coordination in discourse and manipulative commu-

nication are very clearly vital functions of language, and taking this as

our starting point many important phenomena of language may come to

the surface: we fully concur with Verhagen on this issue. But their expla-nation will be another question.

Received 31 January 2007 Durham University

Revision received 21 March 2007 University of Amsterdam

Notes

1. Figure 1.2 on p. 7, as one referee notes, may suggest that Verhagen recognizes both fac-

tors. But the claim made is that special foundational significance attaches to the former

function and that negation and complementation illustrate this, and we dispute this.

2. Since the two first points are important in what follows, it is worthwhile to quote Verha-

gen directly: ‘[T]he linguistically most relevant properties of negation, the ones that it

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 121

shares with other elements in the same paradigmatic class, are purely cognitive opera-

tions’ (p. 57).

3. Here we follow the analysis of defeasible conditionals given in Stenning and van Lam-

balgen (2006). The interested reader is referred to this paper for a fully formal treatment

of phenomena related to the ones discussed here.

4. ‘Algorithmic’ is taken in a wide sense here, and also includes computations in neural

networks.

5. Empirical linguistic arguments for a universal argument-adjunct distinction, for exam-

ple, are not empirically invalid if we can’t link or translate the primitives used in the

analysis to primitives of a neurobiological description.

6. Together with constraints flowing in this particular direction (Dabrowska 2004), it is an

equally reasonable proposal at this point that linguistics may and should impose con-

straints on neuroscience. That is, explicit linguistic proposals for computational pro-

cesses underlying language should be the basis for evaluations of (and predictions for)

neuroscientific experimentation (see e.g., Stockall and Marantz 2006; Poeppel and Em-

bick 2005; for such a perspective for the case of syntax, and Baggio and van Lambalgen

2007 for the case of semantics).

7. One referee claims that it is no objection to Verhagen that ‘there is no evidence for

recursive perspective-taking outside human language’, since Verhagen precisely claims

that perspective taking is what makes humans di¤er from other animals. The point

however is whether it explains language, and recursion therein. For this it needs to

have the relevant formal properties (propositionality, recursivity) independently of

language.

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Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Verhagen 123

Intersubjectivity and explanationin linguistics: A reply to Hinzen

and van Lambalgen

ARIE VERHAGEN*

1. Introduction

Let me start by saying that I very much appreciate both the e¤ort that

Hinzen and Van Lambalgen (hereafter, H&L) have put into commentingon Constructions of Intersubjectivity (hereafter, CoI ), and their comments

as such. It is important for all cognitive disciplines studying language that

representatives from di¤erent schools of thought try to address each

other’s work, in terms of both results and foundations. We may not reach

agreement as a result of a discussion, but it will still be helpful in clarify-

ing matters for ourselves and for other interested scholars, and thus for

the future development of our common field of study. This is true even

if the divide is deep—which is the case here in a number of respects, asH&L indicate themselves.

Another important preliminary remark concerns the nature and scope

of our di¤erences. Philosophically they are certainly far reaching, but

from an empirical point of view it is useful to notice that H&L do not

present counterexamples to the actual linguistic analyses presented in

CoI. Rather, their main point is that such analyses can also be provided

in other frameworks, which they label ‘‘more traditional’’ than cognitive

linguistics, and which should in their view be preferred for other than em-pirical reasons, having more to do with general ideas about concepts such

as ‘‘meaning’’, ‘‘communication’’, ‘‘grammar’’, etc., and the way these re-

late to even more comprehensive concepts such as ‘‘evolution’’ or ‘‘lan-

guage’’. Below, I will actually dispute that H&L’s comments show that

the alternative, ‘‘non-cognitive’’, frameworks provide these explanations

(and suggest that they are not forthcoming either), but it is good to note

at the start that their own comments do not concern the empirical claims

of CoI. In fact, in my own view, our main di¤erence concerns the questionwhat may count as an explanation in the analysis of linguistic phenomena.

Finally, as to the organization of this reply, I will not follow H&L’s

comments step by step, as this would lead me to repeat myself too much.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–1 (2008), 125–143

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.007

0936–5907/08/0019–0125

6 Walter de Gruyter

Instead, I will first concentrate on the notion of ‘‘meaning’’, addressing

mainly sections 2, 3, and 9 of H&L (section 2 below); then I will look at

the grammar of negation and argue that the alternative analysis H&L

suggest is linguistically unmotivated, which is partly due to them leaving

out some pieces that constitute important components of the argumenta-

tion in CoI; it is at this point that the di¤erence in what should be allowed

to count as an explanation in linguistic analysis becomes most concrete.In this section (3), I will also deal with H&L’s remarks about mental

spaces, ‘‘cognitive significance’’ (their section 5), and formalization.

Section 4 concerns H&L’s sections 6–8, dealing with complementation,

recursion, and some basic assumptions about grammatical structure. Sec-

tion 5 concludes this reply.

2. What do we mean by ‘‘meaning’’?

Perhaps the most ba¿ing passage for me to read in H&L’s comments was

in the second paragraph of their Section 3. They first summarize the gen-

eral programme of CoI: to demonstrate that the specific human ability to

manage perspectives is systematically reflected in the meanings of several

grammatical constructions, in the sense that these meanings are often

related to the management of such perspectives—what I call ‘‘intersubjec-

tive cognitive coordination’’—rather than to describing the world (speci-

fying an object of conceptualization in some way). What ba¿ed me wasthat they immediately add to this: ‘‘which entails that semantics cannot

be understood as serving both functions simultaneously’’ (and then they

set out to argue that this is a bad idea). How could it be that they see

this as a core idea of CoI, while evidence against it is abundantly present

in the book? Specifically, the first section (p. 210–212) of the Concluding

Remarks is entitled, ‘‘Not everything is intersubjectivity (although inter-

subjectivity is widespread)’’, and it refers back to parts of the book where

the meaning of di¤erent items was claimed to involve both the objectiveand the intersubjective level of conceptualization (cf. also CoI section

1.3, esp. p. 18). Moreover: why would it be an entailment? There must

be something that I missed, and I assume it is to be found in what H&L

conceive of as meaning, and hence as semantics.

H&L devote a separate section to meaning, but the points they make

there are closely related to some they make at the beginning. In section

9, they contest the proposal that evoking inferences is part of the meaning

of linguistic expressions, and defend a ‘‘context-independent’’ notion ofmeaning; in section 2, they oppose an argumentative view of language

use (their picture of this view is a bit of a straw man; see the end of this

section) to the ‘‘romanticist’’ view that language is used for the ‘‘free and

126 A. Verhagen

creative expression of thought’’ (construed as ‘‘reference, representation

or the assertion of truth’’), claiming that the latter function, unlike the

former, is crucial for understanding what makes language di¤er from an-

imal communication systems. We can safely equate these two opposi-

tions, since ‘‘argumentative’’ in the Ducrot-sense adopted in CoI means

‘‘evoking inferences’’ (through associated ‘‘topoi’’, or ‘‘defeasible rules’’),

and the context-independent meaning, as explicated by H&L, consists inthe contribution of a linguistic (or logical) symbol to the reference or the

truth conditions of an expression containing the symbol.

Just how close these two oppositions are connected also comes out in

H&L’s discussion of Ducrot’s example of the use of seats, used in CoI to

elucidate and specify the idea of ‘‘argumentativity’’: saying There are

seats in this room invites the addressee to (i.a.) ascribe a certain positive

degree of comfort to the room under discussion. H&L write: ‘‘But obvi-

ously, there can be assertions about seats in rooms where these seats failto be comfortable. Hence [my italics], the implicature is a mere contextual

one, and ipso facto not an inherent [italics original] (non-contextual) as-

pect of the expression’’. The implicit premise, necessary to complete this

line of reasoning, can only be: ‘‘If an aspect of the interpretation of an

expression is not truth-conditional (does not have to represent something

in the world of which the expression is predicated), then this aspect is not

an inherent aspect of the meaning of the expression, but a contextual

one’’. First of all, this begs the question, the point of dispute preciselybeing how ‘‘linguistic meaning’’ should be construed: as (strictly) truth-

conditional or as (at least also) argumentative. So in principle, we could

stop the debate here, as this basic point of H&L contains a fatal fallacy.

However, I find it even more important to note that H&L overlook the

fact that their observation has actually been used as an argument for the

argumentative view (cf. CoI 11, and the Ducrot reference cited there).

The point is that the utterance There are seats in this room has its argu-

mentative value regardless of the actual degree of comfort, or lack there-of, of the seats in the room under discussion (the only condition is that

the language users mutually share the idea that rooms with seats are nor-

mally more comfortable than rooms without). This is precisely the point

that explains why the statement that the seats are uncomfortable can only

be connected to this utterance by means of an adversative connective,

e.g., but, and that something like and moreover is incongruent. Assuming,

for the sake of the argument, that it is somehow established as true that

the seats in a certain room are not exactly comfortable, this still does notmake the text ‘‘There are seats in this room, and moreover they are un-

comfortable’’ a coherent one. If we want to express, i.e., represent linguis-

tically, both the presence of seats and their lack of comfort, then we have

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 127

to mark this as contrastive, and that is what makes a linguist, whose job

is to account for the use and distribution of linguistic expressions and

their constituent parts, conclude that the argumentative character is in-

herent in the linguistic elements involved.

H&L do say that semantics should account for both ‘‘inherent’’ and

‘‘contextual’’ aspects of linguistic expressions. But they equate these two

notions with ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘argumentativity’’, respectively, and then also

with the sentence and discourse levels (their Section 3). So according to

H&L, the following 1-to-1 relationships hold:

a) Inherent meaning : descriptive : sentence level (and presumablybelow)

b) Contextual meaning : argumentative/inferential : discourse level

It seems to be this relatively implicit—but contestable and contested1—

view of meaning and the organization of semantic description that makesH&L conclude that the CoI-view of linguistic meaning as including as-

pects of discourse and argumentation gives up the possibility to account

for relationships between language and the world. Not only do they first

implicitly identify ‘‘inherent meaning’’ with ‘‘descriptive meaning’’, thus

begging the question, they moreover connect descriptive meaning espe-

cially to the sentence level. Since sentence semantics presumably in their

view precedes discourse and inferential semantics (sentences being taken

as the building blocks of discourse), it follows from considering some in-ferential and discourse meaning as ‘‘inherent’’ that there is no possibility

to account for correspondences between language and the world. In any

case, this is the only way in which I can make any sense at all of their

statement.

But, of course, nothing of this kind actually follows from the basic as-

sumptions of CoI, or cognitive linguistics in general. It is knowledge of

shared (i.e., cultural) cognitive models that is directly evoked by linguistic

elements, not information about the world; but some of the inferencesthat knowing these models allows us to make, do involve the world.

Thus, the primary meaning of beautiful is to express a positive evaluation,

not to give a description of some sort (consider the task of specifying the

truth conditions for H&L’s example of beautiful perfume . . .); knowing

the culture, and especially having some relevant experience, allows many

language users to make some inferences about actual properties of the

perfume involved. But it is not necessary to make such descriptive infer-

ences, and a person not (capable of ) making them can still understand theutterance.

Another important point about conceptions of meaning relates to the

role of convention. Section 9 of H&L contains many clauses of which

128 A. Verhagen

the noun meaning is a part, but it is not at all clear that it can be used in

the same sense in all these statements; in other words, H&L do not seem

to be aware of, or at least they do not at all worry about, a possible poly-

semy of the term meaning, which might a¤ect the contents and conse-

quences of their statements. They object to the ‘‘philosophy of meaning’’

they think they find in CoI, but do not explicate what specific sense of

meaning they mean. They state one point of their own position, in rela-tion to ‘‘compositionality’’ as: ‘‘meaning will not be conventional: mean-

ing will follow by necessity from algebraic laws, etc.’’. But in a context

like this (leaving aside the issue whether compositionality is indeed to be

viewed as an algebraic phenomenon, independent of a particular cogni-

tive system), meaning does not have the same sense as in, for example

‘‘The meaning of the word banana is: a category of fruit with (prototypi-

cally) characteristics X, Y, Z’’. The latter involves a relation between a

sound and a concept that is conventional; banana means what it doesbecause speakers of English mutually share knowledge of the rules for

the proper use of the word. So in all larger expressions, the meaning of

the whole is partly conventional, because of the words; moreover, the bal-

ance between conventionality and compositionality is not fixed (consider

banana republic), and there are even complete sentences with a meaning

that is mostly a matter of convention (An apple never falls far from the

tree). This is very elementary linguistics, of course. The basic hypothesis

of CoI, about intersubjectivity being a prominent aspect of meaning, isexplicitly stated in terms of the meanings of ‘‘linguistic symbols (words

and constructions)’’ (p. 4), i.e., conventional signs. The claim is that inter-

subjectivity is so important that several linguistic elements, especially a

number of grammatical ones, are conventional instruments for intersub-

jective management (and that they have not su‰ciently been recognized

as such in the past). Nothing in the argumentation for this point hinges

on a view of compositionality, which is an important, but independent is-

sue. But H&L keep talking about ‘‘(philosophy of ) meaning’’ as if it werea unitary concept, and then present compositionality ‘‘of meaning’’ as an

argument against conventionality ‘‘of meaning’’. It will be clear that this

is simply completely beside the point. Moreover, if all the senses of mean-

ing are to be subsumed under one ‘‘philosophy of meaning’’, this philoso-

phy is never going to be anywhere near coherent, so of little explanatory

value.2

As a final remark on meaning, a word on H&L’s terminology in rela-

tion to very general scientific and philosophical commitments. In theirattempt to challenge the idea that argumentation and intersubjectivity

are inherent aspects of linguistic meaning, H&L use ‘‘manipulation’’ and

‘‘control’’—alluding to behaviourism—as terms for the function of

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 129

language use as viewed in CoI, while CoI itself uses ‘‘management and

assessment’’ and ‘‘cognitive coordination’’. Manipulation normally goes

against the interests of the receiver, and especially: without the receiver

recognizing the intentions of the sender (usually, it involves deceit). The

point of the use of ‘‘argumentation’’ in CoI is precisely to simultaneously

express similarity to animal communication (it is an attempt to influence),

and a di¤erence: it is an attempt to convince, i.e., to influence the re-ceiver’s decision making process, by (i.a.) displaying one’s communicative

intention.3 Of course, it is true that we can and do sometimes use lan-

guage, and our brains, to ponder the truth of something, just as it is true

that we can and do sometimes use our legs to run for fun or in an athlet-

ics competition, that we can and do use our brains to play chess and

watch the stars, etc.. But focussing on these kinds of uses is not going to

get us very far in understanding how the features involved (legs, brains,

language, etc.) fit into the natural world, that is: in explaining them. Thechallenge is precisely to develop hypotheses, maximally constrained by

what we know about evolution and communication in general, about the

way the human communication system also got to be ‘‘usable’’ for some

functions, such as reference and description, for which is was not, in all

probability, originally an adaptation (cf. Verhagen forthcoming a).

3. Negation and connectives: Interaction between grammatical items

and its explanation

For negation, the point H&L try to make is that a ‘‘more traditional’’

non-monotonic logical approach, enriched with clauses that introduce

the possibility of exceptions, can account for the same observations and

generalizations as CoI without introducing the notion of ‘‘mental spaces’’;

if that were true, then their analysis would be simpler (using at least one

theoretical construct less than mine). Moreover, they have objections

against this construct as they have doubts about its cognitive and formalstatus (see the end of section 3.2 for some remarks on this last point).

3.1. Exception clauses and topoi

As H&L notice, their use of ‘‘exception clauses’’ runs parallel to the use

in CoI of Ducrot’s concept of ‘‘topoi’’. The general template of the latter

is ‘‘If P, then normally Q’’; the template for H&L’s defeasible rules is ‘‘If

P and nothing exceptional is the case, then Q’’. Indeed, for the cases theydiscuss, their analysis produces the same account of inferences associated

with negative sentences as the one in CoI; the descriptive adequacy

of their account is thus not better than CoI ’s, so the approaches might

130 A. Verhagen

be considered notational variants. But one important question is: How

about cases they do not discuss, but which are part of the account in

CoI ? Does their analysis generalize to these cases? This amounts to a

question of explanatory power; it will be taken up in section 3.2. Another

question, also an issue of explanation, is: Does their analysis classify ele-

ments into categories that make sense linguistically? In other words: Does

their characterization of the semantics fit the distribution of the linguisticelements involved? This is the issue for the remainder of this section.

In H&L’s analysis, barely indicates the existence of an exception; for

example in He barely passed his first statistics course, barely indicates

that the passing was abnormal, so the clause ‘‘nothing exceptional is the

case’’ is not satisfied, and therefore the subsequent derivation of a rele-

vant inference Q (e.g., ‘‘he can pass other courses as well’’) is blocked.4

The same result is produced in CoI by the assumption that barely invali-

dates the applicability of topoi associated with the content of the sentence(‘‘the performance was so minimal that one cannot draw conclusions that

one would otherwise draw from the fact that he passed’’). First, it seems

to me that there may be a serious conceptual problem with the exception-

approach. ‘‘Exception’’ does not seem to be a primitive notion; it presup-

poses the notion of a rule, whereas the reverse does not hold. Rules (in-

cluding those about what is ‘‘normally’’, not necessarily always, the case)

can be experientially based generalizations (e.g., in terms of frequency:

‘‘What happens most of the time?’’), but not the other way around. In-deed, exceptions must be defined in terms of rules (negatively), as they

are not themselves generalizations (what makes something an exception

is the background rule). Thus it seems to me that H&L’s use of ab as ‘‘a

proposition letter indicating some abnormality’’ as if it were something

unanalysable, may mask the possibility that their analysis ultimately

reduces to mine.

Second, it is clear that the exception-approach to barely implies that it

belongs to a di¤erent class of linguistic elements than not: the first belongsto the ‘‘abnormality indicators’’, the second does not. Here we reach a

fundamental di¤erence between the logical approach of H&L and the lin-

guistic one of CoI. The initial reason for reconsidering the semantics of

barely in argumentative terms was that both not and barely license the

let alone construction, i.e., their distribution is similar in a linguistically

important way (grammatical behaviour). What the analysis of CoI shows

is that this grammatical behaviour parallels the inferential (and discourse

connecting) properties of both elements (not the real-world relations), andcan thus be explained by assuming that the grammatical properties are

determined by argumentative rather than ‘‘real-world’’ aspects of mean-

ing. By putting not and barely in semantically di¤erent categories of

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 131

elements, H&L simply give up this explanatory power. On the basis of

their account, if the grammatical behaviour of elements reflects their

meaning, then one should expect not and barely to be grammatically

very di¤erent, but in fact they are not; taking the programmatic idea of

‘‘language as a window on the mind’’ seriously should precisely lead one

to taking the intersubjective analysis seriously, I maintain. As I said, I

suspect the ultimate source of H&L overlooking this point is that theirbasic concerns are logical, rather than linguistic.5

3.2. Explanatory scope

The last comments in the previous section already indicate that H&L do

not always take into account that an important part of the argumentation

in CoI involves connections between di¤erent parts of the linguistic sys-

tem, and that they focus their semantic analysis only on certain words

and constructions in isolation. In fact, this is a more general tendency,

that severely undermines the power of their criticism and their ‘‘alterna-

tive’’. For one thing, they do not discuss how their analysis of the de-

feasibility of the argumentative implications of not and barely can beapplied/extended to almost, while this is, again, an integral part of the

argumentation in CoI. The importance of the point can be demonstrated

with example (1) (H&L’s 4a*), showing the defeasibility of (at least some

of the) argumentative inferences associated with a negated sentence:

(1) a A. Do you think our son will pass his courses this term?b B-a. Well, he did not pass his first statistics course.

c A. But he got a very good grade for the astrophysics course!

Just like I invoked a wide-spread cultural model (‘‘Statistics is a hard sub-

ject’’), H&L invoke another one in the form of astrophysics to demon-

strate that in a next move in the discourse, the initial suggestion ‘‘He isnot going to pass’’ can be reversed again (‘‘If he is smart enough to get a

good grade for astrophysics, he may still pass’’). Now the point is that the

same reversal can also be established by certain sentences that contain the

operator almost:

(2) ¼ (1)aþb

c A. But he almost passed the astrophysics course!

In this case, A’s utterance entails the negation of ‘‘He passed astrophysics’’:

in actual fact, the student in question neither passed statistics nor astro-physics. But by means of almost, speaker A construes the latter as an argu-

ment for the conclusion that he might still pass the term, i.e., in the same

way as the strongly positive statement in (1)c. This is straightforwardly

132 A. Verhagen

accounted for in CoI ( just like barely is a relatively weak negative opera-

tor, almost is a relatively weak positive operator on the argumentative

orientation of an utterance), which also explains why almost does not li-

cense the let alone construction (the argument from linguistic distribution

again), despite the entailment of a negation.

How should this be accounted for in an exception-approach? First of

all, H&L do not themselves indicate what such a generalization wouldlook like. Perhaps we should say that almost also marks the event de-

scribed in the sentence as an exception, so that otherwise licensed infer-

ences cannot be derived? That would clearly not su‰ce, as it would then

be said to have the same meaning as barely. In fact, we can now see that

the characterization of barely as an exception-indicator is insu‰cient—

minimally, the direction, i.e., negative, of the inferences involved should

be included in this characterization. So suppose we characterize almost P

as ‘‘not-P, and something abnormal is the case’’. Even though this mightseem better, I don’t think it is. The problem is to derive positive infer-

ences from the negative statement. Recall that the general form of the de-

feasible rule, according to H&L, is ‘‘If (P and nothing abnormal), then

Q’’. When we now have, due to the presence of almost, ‘‘not-P’’ as a mi-

nor premise, then it seems to me that nothing can be derived anymore.

The conjunction of the rule (a) ‘‘If (P & nothing is abnormal), then Q’’

with (b) ‘‘something abnormal is the case’’ can lead to the derivation of

(c) not-Q, even if P is the case (with ‘‘closed world reasoning’’); but theconjunction of the same rule (a) with (b) ‘‘not-P and something abnormal

is the case’’ cannot produce the derivation of (c) Q, as not-P by itself

contradicts the antecedent clause of the rule (‘‘P & nothing is abnormal’’).

In fact, it seems to me that in this case, too, not-Q would have to be de-

rived, given the falsity of the antecedent clause. Thus, I conclude that

there are good grounds for claiming that the exception-approach does

not generalize to almost, and in that sense is also low in explanatory

power, while almost fits naturally into the argumentative framework ofCoI, as a weak positive argumentative operator, complementary to the

negative barely.

A similar conclusion holds for H&L’s discussion of the concessive

connective although. While their reanalysis in terms of the exception-

approach can provide an adequate semantic characterization of sentences

of the type p although q in isolation from the rest of the linguistic system,

they do not show that it accounts for interactions with other elements, in

particular negation. Precisely this interaction is the key part in the argu-mentation in CoI: although cannot occur in the scope of negation, i.e.,

‘‘not p although q’’ must be understood as ‘‘(not p) although q’’; it can-

not be interpreted as ‘‘not (p although q)’’, while its positive (causal)

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 133

counterpart because can occur in the scope of negation: ‘‘not p because q’’

can in principle be read both as ‘‘(not p) because q’’ and as ‘‘not (p be-

cause q)’’. In this case, I will refrain from elaborating H&L’s approach

myself to see how it might work, and simply observe that this is what

they actually should have done in order to make their point, but they

haven’t.

The analysis in CoI of these phenomena crucially rests on the assump-tion that sentential negation introduces a separate representation (‘‘men-

tal space’’) of the viewpoint that the speaker of the present sentence op-

poses. This point is also not mentioned by H&L, who simply dismiss

‘‘mental spaces’’ as if they were only used in the analysis of negative sen-

tences as such. On the contrary, chapter 4 of CoI shows that a mental

space analysis of negation provides an explanation not only of the combi-

natorial restrictions between negation and although, but also of a number

of such restrictions between negation and causal connectives—some ofwhich exhibit scope restrictions similar to although. Moreover, the mental

space analysis of negation is motivated in chapter 2 (as it is in the mental

space literature in general) independently of the argumentative analysis of

negation, viz. in terms of the interpretation of discourse anaphors follow-

ing negative sentences, and the connective On the contrary. The greatest

explanatory power of the mental space approach, according to CoI, lies

in the possibility of this single idea to unify the analysis of the linguistic

distribution of a number of phenomena. While it may be possible to con-struct an analysis of simple although-sentences without ‘‘special machin-

ery for mental spaces’’, this analysis again does not naturally generalize

to cases of interaction with other phenomena, as manifested in distribu-

tional and interpretive restrictions—a fundamental concern for a linguist

with the ambition to provide explanations. But again, H&L’s concerns

seem to be located more in the dimension of logical rather than linguistic

analysis.

It is in this context that H&L dedicate a separate section, with the title‘‘Cognitive significance’’, to the status of the theoretical construct of

‘‘mental spaces’’, which in their view is rather dubious. To many cogni-

tive scientists, this may appear somewhat puzzling, because the basic

idea of mental spaces seems to be just a specific formulation of the funda-

mental human capacity of perspective taking and perspective shifting: to

entertain the ‘‘same’’ object or idea in di¤erent ways, from di¤erent an-

gles, etc., i.e., to combine di¤erence and sameness, by means of ‘‘parti-

tioned representations’’ (Dinsmore 1991). As it turns out, however, whatH&L mean is that it is not (to their knowledge and/or standards) su‰-

ciently formalized. In their view and invoking Chomsky’s earliest work,

the most important condition for a linguistic analysis to be called a

134 A. Verhagen

‘‘cognitive’’ one, is to be explicit, which they immediately identify with to

be given a ‘‘computational or algorithmic description’’. Firstly, notice

that they move, very quickly, from what might be a necessary condition

to a necessary-and-su‰cient one. Secondly, it is quite strange, in view of

the history of science (including recent cognitive science) to read that the

integration of fields of inquiry should ‘‘depend’’ on the explicitness of

computational descriptions. In actual fact, the possibility of operation-alising generalizations obtained by one kind of research method in terms

of another seems at least as important, and to my mind much more com-

mon (‘‘If your distributional analysis says that A and B are basically the

same/di¤erent, and if this is psychologically real, then the results of my

reaction time/fMRI-measurements/etc. should look like this: . . . .’’). But

in the main stream of the generative enterprise, the focus has been on

developing formalisms rather than on deriving such predictions from the

theory and testing them. The confrontation with evidence, however, is thehallmark of empirical science; the generative preoccupation with formal-

isms at the expense of maximising evidence is thus indicative of the fact

that linguistics is seen more like philosophy or mathematics than like

science. It seems to me that H&L’s point of view is only a recent carry-

over of the unfortunate identification, in the 1950s indeed, of ‘‘language’’

with ‘‘formal language’’ (in the sense of ‘‘the set of well-formed strings of

elements taken from some finite alphabet’’) that has hindered the under-

standing of human languages as historical and psychological phenomenathat cannot be so defined, but that are still quite real ( just like, to take a

well known example, a biological species).

4. Complementation and recursion

4.1. A minimalist ‘‘account’’?

There is a curious sort of complementarity in H&L’s response to CoI.

Their discussion of negation and connectives contains an alternative se-

mantic analysis, but does not really pay attention to combinatorial and

distributional (i.e., syntactic) aspects as sources of evidence for the seman-

tics. Their treatment of complementation constructions exhibits the re-

verse pattern: it focuses almost completely on the issue of the proper

syntactic analysis, and contains no more than two sentences about the

semantics; in fact, for the sake of the argument they go along with the

CoI-analysis (in brief: matrix clauses are perspectival operators, ratherthan event descriptions with other events as parts),6 so here they ignore

the possibility that the semantics may provide a constraint on the syn-

tactic analysis (which, to be sure, is not to say that it would ‘‘ipso facto’’

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 135

provide such an analysis). Be that as it may, their comments essentially

come down on an argument against a constructionist approach to syntax,

from the point of view of Chomsky’s ‘‘minimalist program’’,7 and I will

accordingly also only comment on issues of syntactic analysis strictu senso.

They do make some comments on perspective taking, and I will also have

a bit to say about that, but they are unrelated to the syntactic analysis.

H&L suggest that ‘‘standard tests for constituency’’ provide evidence infavour of the idea that clausal complements should be analysed as verbal

arguments, i.e., as bearing the same syntactic relation to the verb as a

nominal complement. The problem is that these tests of constituency are

never conclusive. They give the examples George saw/knew/said what?

and George saw/knew/said that X, and Bill saw/knew/said so too, to sug-

gest the generalization that complement clauses in general can be ‘‘re-

placed’’ by what and so. But that is simply not true, witness *George

warned/was afraid what? and *. . . and Bill warned/was afraid so too,while George warned/was afraid that his opponent would raise taxes is

fine. Thus, although the distribution of what and of so partly overlaps

with that of complement clauses, there are also discrepancies. This makes

‘‘allowing replacement by what/so’’ basically worthless as ‘‘tests’’, as they

sometimes produce the answer ‘‘no’’ and sometimes ‘‘yes’’ to the question

‘‘Does this complement clause bear the same syntactic relationship to

the matrix verb as a noun phrase or a pronoun?’’. What H&L do, decid-

ing that the ‘‘yes’’-answer is the decisive one, is a clear case of the ‘‘meth-odological opportunism’’ in much syntactic argumentation exposed by

Croft (2001: Ch. 1). As we saw previously, H&L have a tendency to over-

look one of the most basic concerns of a (cognitive) linguist: to account

for the distribution of linguistic elements, and to take the patterns in this

distribution as the most reliable indicators for the precise way in which

language provides a window on the mind.

H&L mention part of the more complete discussion of this issue in CoI,

admitting that it is not really clear to them what the problem is, and thengo on to provide an analysis of one type of complementation construc-

tion in terms of the minimalist program. They start with formulating a

number of what they call ‘‘rather minimal assumptions’’. Leaving aside

whether they are really minimal in the sense of ‘‘virtually a conceptual ne-

cessity’’ (I don’t think so), I will restrict myself to the question whether

this approach accomplishes what H&L claim it does. They state that

these assumptions allow one to describe the similarities between nominal

objects and clausal complements, and of course it does: any su‰cientlyabstract analysis does. They then say that because this analysis does not

refer to syntactic categories—i.e., it abstracts from the di¤erences be-

tween nominal and clausal phrases—it does not predict that nominal

136 A. Verhagen

and clausal phrases have the same distribution. But of course, without

additional (presumably not so minimal) stipulations, that is precisely

what the analysis does predict. If the claim is (and that is how H&L pres-

ent it) that the minimalist approach can explain the occurrence of both

nominal and clausal complements (and not only describe what, however

minute and abstract, is similar to them), then the system as they describe

it must predict the same distribution for the two (and more?) types ofphrases that are instantiations of the fully general category label X

(again, without additional stipulations). It seems to me that there is more

of a ‘‘logical error’’ here than in CoI (cf. footnote 6).

Somewhat more mildly, one could say that it while it may be true that

H&L’s minimalist analysis does not strictly predict the same distribution

for nominal and clausal phrases, it does not predict the di¤erences either.

Then the CoI-analysis would still have to be viewed as superior, since

it does predict the possibility of clausal complements with warn and be

afraid despite the fact that these predicates do not take nominal objects:

they are both perspective markers (as a verb of communication, and a

mental state predicate, respectively) and hence fully compatible with the

hypothesized meaning of the complementation construction (notice that

the analysis of form and function crucially meet here). But in any case,

the minimalist analysis as provided definitely does not account for the ob-

served distribution of clausal complements as only partially overlapping

with that of nominal ones.Surprisingly, the most detailed actual syntactic analysis in H&L’s paper

ultimately results in a full contradiction. For the rather sketchy analysis

of standard object complementation (the George saw/knew/warned/ . . .

examples above), H&L invoke the general principle that phrases are

headed. They then attempt to give a minimalist account of copular

complementation constructions of the type The danger is that the middle

class feels alienated—which fit straightforwardly into CoI since being a

danger is not an observable property in the world, but rather a subjectiveassessment; hence the matrix clause evokes a (perhaps unidentified)

perspective, and thus satisfies the conditions for combination with a com-

plement clause. In the minimalist account, the predication must count as

symmetrical—only in this way is it possible for either element of the

‘‘small clause’’ allegedly underlying such sentences to ‘‘surface’’ as the

subject of the sentence (cf. That the middle class feels alienated is the

danger). H&L state explicitly: ‘‘Neither the CP [¼ clause] nor the DP

[¼ nominal phrase] are the head’’. This directly contradicts their minimal-ist claim (iii) (‘‘phrases are headed’’), which was moreover necessary in

the description of ‘‘object’’ complements. I conclude that their account is

inherently inconsistent, and hence that it again does not accomplish what

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 137

it is claimed to accomplish, also not for copular matrix clauses of comple-

ments. And then we even have not yet touched upon all the theoretical

machinery invoked, such as movement and empty structural positions,

for which Occam’s razor would require independent evidence—but that

is a much more general issue than need concern us here.

4.2. Perspective taking, recursion, and understanding false beliefs

In CoI, it is observed that the hypothesis of complementation expressing

perspective taking immediately accounts for the fact that complementa-

tion is a prototype of recursion in language (the possibility for a structure

of type X to be embedded in another structure of type X), since concep-

tual perspective taking itself inherently allows for recursion. Thus, the

source of this case of recursion in language is in a sense ‘‘placed outside

language’’, but that is di¤erent from ‘‘placing recursion outside lan-guage’’, as H&L construe it. More importantly, they contest the CoI ex-

planation on the basis of the argument that this explanation would only

work if this conceptual recursivity is ‘‘propositional’’, for which they

claim there is no evidence. They do not state very precisely what they

mean by ‘‘propositionality’’, but they refer to experiments involving

what is known in ‘‘theory of mind’’ research as false belief tasks; these

are tasks in which subjects must be able to entertain another person’s be-

lief about the world and predict how s/he would act on that basis, whileknowing simultaneously that this belief is false (hence the term), so that

the subject’s own response to the situation would be di¤erent. If recursion

were restricted to this kind of ‘‘management of incompatible beliefs’’,

then H&L would have a point, because (understandably) having a system

of secondary representation for beliefs, i.e. a system on top of the primary

sensori-motor system, seems to be a necessary condition for performing

false belief tasks adequately.

However, managing false beliefs is simply not the same as perspectivetaking, it is one of its most abstract and complex forms. Human children

develop several skills of social cognition before language, such as rec-

ognizing intentionality (distinguishing intentional acts from accidental

events), sharing attention (e.g., in gaze following), and directing attention

(pointing, showing. These basic skills all involve perspective taking, and

their development is a necessary condition (given the arbitariness of con-

nections between sound and meaning as children encounter them in the

world) for the development of linguistic symbolic communication (Tom-asello 1999): it is only through recognition of an adult’s intention that a

child can start to make guesses about the meaning of some sound. More-

over, these skills clearly already exhibit the potential for recursion; e.g., a

138 A. Verhagen

child can manage other people’s attention to get them to show something

to the child. More recently, is has been shown that very young children

(and, to a limited extent, young chimpanzees) can also recognize other

people’s goals and desires, as evidenced by their propensity to provide

help (Warneken and Tomasello 2006). These are complex social cognitive

skills, and even in cases where our closest relatives can be argued to have

similar abilities, humans are usually much better at them, also at a youngage. Still, they are less complex than understanding beliefs, which are rel-

atively permanent mental states not directly caused by the outside world

(such as perceptions) but by other mental states or events—nor directly

causing actions, but only indirectly so through guiding plans and inten-

tions (cf. D’Andrade 1987). And they all involve simple alignment of the

self with the other, not alignment plus dissociation, which, as mentioned

above, requires a system of secondary representation.

Thus, understanding other people as having intentions and desires likeoneself is simpler and more basic, also developmentally, than understand-

ing beliefs, and especially false beliefs. Now language, being a system of

symbolic communication, has the (fortunate) automatic ‘‘side e¤ect’’ of

also providing humans with a system of secondary representation (cf.

Keller 1998: 127–128), so that it may, itself being based on capacities for

social cognition, provide the sca¤olding to enhance these capacities to

a level like that of managing false beliefs. Thus, the acquisition of false

belief understanding may very well be dependent on the acquisition of arepresentation system for perspectivization, such as complementation. As

a matter of fact, Tomasello has been one of the scholars contributing

some of the most compelling evidence for this view so far (Lohmann

and Tomasello 2003). So it is not at all a matter of ‘‘putting the cart be-

fore the horse’’, but rather a matter of treating ‘‘perspective taking’’,

‘‘theory of mind’’, etc. not as monolithic concepts, but as configurations

of features that constitute a family of related perspectivization capabilities

of di¤erent degrees of complexity.8

5. Conclusion

H&L attempt to show that data adduced in CoI as support for an inter-

subjective, argumentative view of meaning in grammar, have an explana-

tion in other approaches, which they consider ‘‘more traditional’’ and

that they would in principle consider superior; but in general these at-

tempts fail. The reasons for this failure are various, including misunder-standings and misconstruals, but the most important one is the fact that

they ignore the precise character of the task of explanation in linguistics,

which involves taking the distribution of linguistic elements seriously:

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 139

if several linguistic forms behave similarly with respect to one or more

environments—grammatical ones and/or discourse ones—then an analy-

sis should account for this (with a minimum of assumptions, of course),

to be acceptable as an explanation (in some cases, H&L’s overlooking of

this crucial point even makes them leave out certain crucial parts of anal-

yses in CoI from their own discussion). Indeed, it is only by taking the

distribution of linguistic elements seriously in this sense, that the study oflanguage provides an independent ‘‘window on the mind’’, such that cer-

tain conceptions of the nature of ‘‘meaning’’ and ‘‘mind’’ are not already

built into the foundational concepts of a purported explanation.

It is thus ironic, in my view, that H&L turn ‘‘explanation’’ into their

major point in their conclusions: I couldn’t agree more.

Received 28 September 2007 Leiden University, The Netherlands

Revision received 19 November 2007

Notes

* Author’s email address: 3arie@arieverhagen.nl4.

1. The usefulness of drawing boundaries and connections in this way has been disputed by

cognitive and functional linguists for decades now, and these alternatives have produced

several important insights. In an important sense, Fauconnier’s (1985) theory of Mental

Spaces was motivated by the discovery of the inferential character of meaning at the

level of the sentence, and even below; metaphors were demonstrated to be both inherent

(in sentences and in words) and argumentative in Lako¤ and Johnson (1980), etc.; an

approach showing quite directly that the distinctions invoked by H&L must be called

into question, is Levinson’s (2000) theory of ‘‘presumptive meanings’’. So given the state

of the art in cognitive linguistics, and in cognitive science in general, some more argu-

mentation to still maintain the ‘‘traditional’’ view is highly desirable, to say the least.

Even though, admittedly, one cannot cover everything in a relatively short commentary

article, references to other work do not constitute such an argumentation (cf. Bierwisch’s

2006 response to Hamm, Kamp and Van Lambalgen 2006).

2. The situation may even be worse. In English (unlike some other languages), the term

meaning may also be used for a contextually derived, i.e., person and time bound, inter-

pretation of a linguistic element or a piece of discourse, and even for what a speaker/

writer ‘‘means’’ (i.e., intends to convey) with an utterance, and it seems to me that

H&L include these senses in their notion of ‘‘meaning’’ too. Needless to say, all the

senses are related, but they are certainly not identical. One important di¤erence is that

conventional meaning is, by definition, a social phenomenon, while speaker meaning is,

also by definition, an individual phenomenon. Therefore, a theory of speaker-meaning

and a theory of conventional meaning can never be the same, as a matter of principle

(although they can and should inform and constrain each other).

3. H&L widen the gap between animal and human communication, not only by making

humans very di¤erent from animals, but also by underestimating the cognitive and com-

municative capabilities of animals, especially when they say that these are ‘‘[s]tuck in the

immediate here and now’’ (see Emery and Clayton 2004 on certain food caching birds),

‘‘only have a small number’’ of vocalizations (see Kroodsma 2004: 122 on some song-

140 A. Verhagen

birds having repertoires of thousands of songs), which are ‘‘all intrinsically linked to an

immediate [ . . . ] purpose’’ (cf. Pepperberg 2004 on Grey parrots).

4. H&L also notice that the exception-approach entails the derivation of a variable for an

abnormality. Rather than an advantage, I consider this somewhat of a problem, as I

have no trouble understanding I barely passed and I failed although I worked hard with-

out being committed to even the existence of a particular abnormality such as being sick

on the day of the exam; so the occurrence of some abnormality does not seem to be a

necessary condition for the occurrence of an exception. Rather, the inference of the

possible existence of an abnormality seems to be a defeasible inference itself (which it is

not in H&L’s approach, as far as I can see).

5. In their footnote 2, they actually cite one of a number of passages from CoI stating this,

but they seem to simply have missed the point. In a way, their analysis consists of a

return to the position of Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor (1988), the problems of which

precisely motivated the alternative analysis in CoI.

6. In one of these two sentences, they insert the proviso that the functional di¤erence be-

tween their examples (5) and (6) is ‘‘not obvious’’ to them. But one of the (repeated)

methodological points in CoI is that such di¤erences are often not obvious when one

looks at sentences in isolation, and only become visible when one looks at what are

and are not coherent ways of fitting a sentence into a piece of discourse; it is that kind

of evidence that is adduced in CoI to make the point. H&L do not recognize the validity

of this kind of evidence, claiming it contains a ‘‘logical error’’, but it is clear that this

opinion is entirely based on the fallacy of assuming a 1-to-1 relationship between ‘‘sen-

tence’’ and ‘‘inherent meaning’’ as discussed in section 2, so not a matter of logic but of

assumptions about the subject matter.

7. In fact, they devote a separate section to a very general discussion of this topic. The

issue has been discussed in many other places in a more adequate way than I could do

here, so I will restrict myself to two remarks. First, H&L call the idea that constructions

can be reduced to ‘‘deeper’’ principles that are not construction-specific, a ‘‘claimed

achievement’’ of Chomsky’s two most recent research programmes. However, if there

is one thing that work in constructional approaches over the last 10 years or so has es-

tablished, then it is tons of evidence that the claimed result is not at all achieved, and in

fact inachievable, for all practical and theoretical purposes. The alleged reduction of

raising constructions and passive constructions to a single non-specific rule ‘‘Move NP’’

or even ‘‘Move’’, a few other principles, plus some construction-like stipulations (cf.

H&L’s idea of some syntactic heads ‘‘subcategorizing’’ for specific semantic categories)

to take care of the details, turned out not to generalize to many other constructions, and

meanwhile one construction after the other was found that has demonstrably unique,

so irreducible, and yet productive features. Second, for conceptual reasons to doubt

the general desirability of the Minimalist approach, I would like to point here to work

within the generative tradition that H&L adhere to (though not the two research pro-

grammes mentioned above), viz. Jackendo¤ and Pinker (2005) and Culicover and Jack-

endo¤ (2005), esp. chapter 1.

8. A possible misunderstanding I have encountered in discussions of this point is that per-

spective taking would be the only source of recursion in language. It is true that CoI

does not mention other possible sources, i.e., in other conceptual domains. As a matter

of fact, I think that there are other such sources, independent of perspective taking (e.g.,

the specification of locations or referents, as manifested in embedding of prepositional

phrases and relative clauses). But these still do not create an ‘‘overall’’ potential for

recursion of all kinds of phrases; rather, recursion is restricted to its own functional

‘‘niches’’ (see also Verhagen forthcoming.b).

A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 141

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A reply to Hinzen and van Lambalgen 143

Tense and cognitive space:On the organization of tense/aspect systems

in Bantu languages and beyond

ROBERT BOTNE AND TIFFANY L. KERSHNER*

Abstract

Bantu languages are well-known for their complex tense systems encoding

multiple degrees of remoteness. Two assumptions underlie most approaches

to analysis of such systems: (1) that linguistic time is optimally construed

as a unidimensional expanse, whereby multi-tense systems carve up the

timeline in regular progressive intervals away from the speech event; and

(2) that tense markers quintessentially exhibit no overlap in denoting

reference along this expanse. In this paper, the authors propose a di¤erent

approach to understanding Bantu tense systems which treats linguistic

time—from the perspective of Ego (the conceptualizer)—as a multi-

dimensional array comprising cognitively dissociated temporal worlds, or

domains, temporally linked and grounded in the deictic dichotomy between

events construed as occurring in a contemporal world of the ‘‘present’’ ver-

sus those situated in cognitively dissociated domains. That is, tense markers

function to situate events in one of two distinct conceptual types of domain

that correlate with di¤erent construals of time: Ego-moving or moving-

time. Support comes from a variety of curious facts found in Bantu lan-

guages. A key element of this approach is that it provides an explanation

for why temporal overlap of tenses does, indeed, occur, and advances the

position that there are conceptually di¤erent pasts and futures.

Keywords: Bantu; cognitive domains; dissociation; semantics; tense.

1. Introduction

In his influential work Tense, Comrie (1985: 50) alludes to ‘‘a possibleuniversal of tense systems: in a tense system, the time reference of each

tense is a continuity.’’ By this, he seems to imply (1) that linguistic time

is optimally construed as a unidimensional expanse and (2) that tense

Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008), 145–218

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.008

0936–5907/08/0019–0145

6 Walter de Gruyter

systems exhibit no gaps in denoting reference along this expanse, a posi-

tion reiterated in, for example, Givon (2001) and Frawley (1992). How-

ever, Comrie points out a possible exception to that hypothesis in Burera,

an Australian aboriginal language.1 Burera has a formal opposition be-

tween two verbal su‰xes, -nga and -de, each of which has two temporal

interpretations, present time reference (‘be V-ing’) and recent past (‘V-ed

in last few days’) with -nga, hodiernal past (‘V-ed earlier today’) and re-mote past (‘V-ed more than a few days ago’) with -de. Both morphemes

appear to denote discontinuous time reference and, hence, constitute

counter-examples to the purported universal. Bybee et al. (1994: 104), cit-

ing data from Merrifield 1968) point out a similar case in Palantla Chi-

nantec. In this language, ka1 denotes an action just completed or com-

pleted on another day, in opposition to na2, which refers to an event

occurring earlier on the same day. Significantly, Comrie suggests margin-

alizing this kind of situation in coming to understand tense systems:

This kind of tense opposition does not fit well within most current conceptions of

tense, although its existence must be acknowledged; at best, one could appeal to

its rarity as an excuse for according it marginal status within the overall theory.

(p. 89)

We believe, contrary to Comrie’s view, that such seemingly idiosyn-

cratic distinctions constitute keys to understanding how tense systemsare organized. In particular, we believe that they provide evidence for a

multi-dimensional conceptualization of time and cognitive space. In this

paper, we set out various kinds of evidence from Bantu and similar Ban-

toid languages that support this view.

Tense systems in Bantu languages are typically rich and complex, with

multiple past and/or future tense markings. Thus, a common set of past

tenses may include a distinct form for immediate past, another for a past

earlier in the day, a third for yesterday or a few days ago, and a fourth fora more distant past. Generally, Bantuists conceive of these di¤erent past

forms as denoting linear temporal reference at farther and farther remove

from the speech event. Nurse (2003: 99), for example, states, ‘‘. . . di¤erent

languages divide the timeline up di¤erently, resulting in a di¤erent num-

ber of tenses. In principle, the timeline can be cut at many points.’’ If this

view were correct, we should expect to find that the only di¤erence se-

mantically would be in the time referred to or, morpho-syntactically, in

the form of the tense marker. However, as we will show in the cases ex-amined here, other di¤erences in the semantics and morpho-syntax arise

that cannot be explained, or are unsatisfactorily explained, in terms of a

simple linear timeline.

146 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

2. Tense and time

Tense, painted in rather broad strokes, has commonly been defined as

that grammatical category that marks the location in time of some event2

with respect to some conventionally recognized reference locus (see, for

example, Chung and Timberlake 1985 among others). That is, temporal

relations can purportedly be conveyed in terms of four basic concepts:an anchoring reference locus, a situated event, a direction or temporal

location vis-a-vis the reference locus, and, in some cases, the degree of

remoteness from the reference locus. The typical deictic reference locus

in natural language is the time of the speech event itself, with events con-

strued as situated temporally before, after, or simultaneous with it. Con-

sonant with this perception of tense is the common view that tense is best

understood and represented in terms of a one-dimensional linear timeline

anchored by the speech event. Indeed, Frawley (1992: 337–338) explicitlystates that ‘‘[t]he stereotypical, ideal timeline is an entirely adequate

model of linguistic time.’’ Likewise, Givon (2001: 285) asserts that ‘‘[t]he

category tense involves the systematic coding of the relationship between

two points along the ordered linear dimension of time.’’ As we intend to

show, data from a variety of Bantu languages demonstrate that this is too

simple a mental model of tense systems and that there is not such a simple

linguistic correspondence between time and tense, that the common corre-

lation of tense marking solely with the traditional unidimensional timelinefails to account adequately for the range and di¤erences in usage one finds.

As suggested in the statement from Frawley cited above, linguists in

general and Bantuists in particular have persisted in correlating tenses

with a simple timeline. However, Comrie (1985: 2), though subscribing

to the simple linear view that such a ‘‘diagrammatic representation of

time is adequate for an account of tense in human language,’’ does ob-

serve that the timeline ‘‘does not directly represent the flow of time, i.e.,

whether the present moment is viewed as moving along a stationary time-line, or whether time is viewed as flowing past a stationary present refer-

ence time point.’’ (p. 3) Nevertheless, he demurs in stating that these

di¤erent perspectives on the flow of time ‘‘do not seem to play any role

in the characterisation of grammatical oppositions cross-linguistically.’’

(p. 3) Binnick (1991: 5–6) and, later, Lako¤ and Johnson (1999) also

call attention to these alternative perspectives of time but, again, do not

correlate them formally with tense or tense systems. We believe it is nec-

essary to integrate the contrasting perspectives directly into any semanticanalysis of tense/aspect systems as a cogent organizational principle.

In adopting this position, we do not claim that there are di¤erent time-

lines but, rather, di¤erent construals of time—time as path vs time as

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 147

stream (Figure 1). In the former, time is construed as a stationary time-

line along which Ego, the conceptualizer, moves, as diagrammatically

presented in Figure 2a; in the latter, time itself is perceived as moving

(Figures. 2b, c). Additionally, either Ego or Event may be perceived as

moving with respect to the other. Metaphorically, one could visualize theformer as a person on a raft (moving-Ego) floating past a gathering

(stationary-Event) on the bank of a stream (Fig. 2b), the latter as a per-

son standing on a bridge over the stream (stationary-Ego) observing var-

ious items floating by beneath the bridge (moving Event(s)) (Fig. 2c). In

the latter case, one can imagine the observer either to be observing items

floating toward her (coming from the ‘‘future’’) or, on the other side of

the bridge, to be observing items as they pass by going downstream

Figure 1. Alternative construals of time

Figure 2. Ego (speaking at (S)) and Event (E) construed in relation to time(line) [The fig-

ure (I) represents Ego, a diamond ()) the location of an event on a imeline.]

148 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

(moving o¤ into the ‘‘past’’). [N.B. abbreviations can be found in the

Appendix.]

In Figure 2b, Ego (at S) conceptualizes herself as moving in time with

respect to a stationary event (E); in Figure 2c, she conceptualizes herself as

stationary while E moves in time toward her. In each case, the temporal

relation of Ego and Event is constant in time; what varies is the cognitive

orientation the individual conceptualizing the situation chooses to adopt.

Our claim is that a language may correlate these di¤erent orientationswith di¤erent formal linguistic features, providing the means for a speaker

to adopt either a path or stream construal at the time of speaking.

In order to reduce the number of schemas used in the paper and to fa-

cilitate comparison of formal marking in each construal, we combine the

path and stream orientations illustrated in Figure 2 into one diagram-

matic representation, as in Figure 3. Furthermore, we will, henceforth,

for ease of exposition, refer to each line as a timeline, even though con-

ceptually they represent alternative perspectives on one timeline.This contrast in perspectives of time was noted and expressed as early

as the work of Gustave Guillaume (1929, 1937, 1945 cited in Hewson

et al. 2000) and later in the work of Benveniste (1965), Traugott (1978),

Fleischman (1982), Emanatian (1992), Hewson et al. (2000) and, most re-

cently, Evans (2005). Hewson et al. (2000: 38–40), following Guillaume,

correlate moving time with aspect, moving ego with tense; Traugott

(1978) and Fleischman (1982) discuss the di¤erences with respect to come

and go as grammaticized temporal markers, but do not utilize the con-trast further in developing a model of the organization of tense systems.

Emanatian (1992), though espousing a solely ‘‘moving-ego’’ analysis of

‘come’ and ‘go’ temporal use in Chaga (E.62)3, grants the possibility

that the moving-ego analysis and the moving-event analysis may describe

‘‘di¤erent routes for ‘come’ verbs to become future markers.’’ Evans

(a) Ego-moving;

(b) moving-Ego or moving-Event

[i.e., either Past to Future or Future to Past (as shown), respectively]

Figure 3. Linguistic construals of time(line) combined

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 149

(2003) provides the most detailed discussion and analysis of these cogni-

tive models of time, arguing that they represent complex, and not pri-

mary, metaphors. All of these views consider there to be a binary contrast

in perspectives. We believe there to be a tertiary distinction that has sub-

tle consequences for temporal marking systems. We will return to this is-

sue in Section 4, but first we consider tense in relation to mental worlds.

3. Tense and mental worlds

Tense systems constitute the overt manifestation of the linguistic organi-

zation of time. Although the multiple conceptual perspectives of time

noted in the preceding section constitute a key organizing principle, just

as important is the concept of mental worlds or, as we shall refer to

them, cognitive temporal domains. These domains are grounded in the

fundamental dichotomy that exists between basic and dissociated deicticviews of realis, space, and time. As background to this discussion, we be-

gin with a brief overview of reference time, or reference locus, found in

the linguistic literature. Two linear models of tense, one—Reichenbach’s

(1947) model—that has been and continues to be particularly influential

(cf. Smith 2004; Helland 1995; Hornstein 1990, for example), the

other—Bull’s (1960) model—much less so, merit a brief discussion.

Although Reichenbach’s work can be considered ‘‘anti-mentalist’’ to a

certain extent and ignored aspectual relations, the influence of his modelof tense relations nevertheless merits a brief review. In breaking with the

Jespersenian model of ‘‘primitive’’ absolute tenses (cf. Binnick 1991: 110–

112), Reichenbach (1947) defined tenses in terms of the relations holding

among three times—the time of the speech event (S), the time of the event

(E), and a reference time (R), inclusion of the abstract reference time per-

haps the most significant feature of his model. The relative order of each

of these with respect to the two others determined temporal reference. Al-

though this model provided a solution to problems inherent in di¤erenti-ating the preterite and the perfect, there nevertheless were problems with

the approach. As Comrie (1981: 25) and later Declerck (1991: 236) point

out, the model advanced the idea that specification and strict ordering of

all three times in a linear manner along a timeline were both necessary

and su‰cient conditions for the proper specification of any tense. How-

ever, for some tenses, such specification is unnecessary and infelicitous.

For example, in the future perfect in French or English, as in il aura

chante ‘he will have sung’, the strict ordering between all three times forthe future perfect—S–E–R, S,E–R, E–S–R—is unwarranted; the rela-

tion of E to S is not part of the meaning of the form, but simply deter-

mined pragmatically from context. That is, aura chante ‘will have sung’

150 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

simply indicates that the event ‘‘sing’’ preceded the reference time (R),

which itself is posterior to S; it does not indicate the temporal relationship

of E with respect to S. Rather, as Comrie (1981) and Dinsmore (1982)

propose, and Binnick (1991) reiterates, one can specify two pairwise rela-

tions: E with respect to R, and R with respect to S. As Binnick (1991:

115) rightly points out with respect to Reichenbach’s approach, ‘‘[t]ense

is a matter of how R relates to S.’’ In Reichenbach’s terms, this wouldbe R—S (past), R,S (present), S—R (future).

Although Reichenbach’s introduction of the concept of reference time

was, perhaps, his most controversial and key contribution in thinking

about temporal relations, it is not simply a question of reference point.

As Klein (1992: 533) indicates, the possibility of explaining the di¤erent

behavior of the past and perfect, for example, ‘‘hinges on what is under-

stood by R’’. Thus, he proposes a more explicit and precise definition of

reference time, which he labels ‘topic time’ (TT), as ‘‘the time span towhich the claim made on a given occasion is constrained’’ (p. 535). While

we believe this to be a very useful and salutary proposal, what Reichen-

bach (and subsequent adherents to his model) as well as Klein have not

addressed, and what seems to be vaguely hinted at, for example, in Com-

rie’s and Declerck’s critiques, is that reference time needs to be further de-

composed into two separate concepts, reference anchor and reference

world, and that linguistic time is conceptualized cognitively. The refer-

ence anchor constitutes a locus of orientation with respect to which anevent may be temporally related, as in the English past perfect, for exam-

ple she had sung, in which the singing occurred prior to some other time

or event which itself preceded the moment of speaking (in the pairwise

modification of Reichenbach’s terms, E–R:R–S). On the other hand, ref-

erence worlds—or, as we will label them since we are speaking of mental

activity, cognitive domains—constitute temporal time spans within which

events are asserted to occur. This kind of distinction began to emerge in

the work of Bull (1960).Bull’s model, similar in certain respects to that of Reichenbach, has had

significant influence on the development of some of the ideas presented in

this paper. In his work, Bull proposes a model in which there are multiple

‘‘axes of orientation’’, each anchored by a di¤erent reference point. Al-

though the number of axes is in principle infinite, Bull (1960: 22) suggests

that the maximum number grammatically encoded in any language is not

likely to exceed four. He labels these axes in the following manner: PP

(present point equivalent typically to the time of speaking S) for referencetime at the speech event, RP (retrospective point) for a reference time in

the past, AP (anticipated point) for a reference point in the future, and

RAP (retrospective anticipated point) for a reference point posterior to

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 151

another reference point in the past. Events can be temporally related to

each of these reference anchors in three ways, which Bull labels vectors:

anterior to it, simultaneous with it, posterior to it, as shown in Figure 4.

Since Bull’s system is based on the notion of relativity, events can only

be projected and construed in relation to one reference point at a time.

Hence, reference points other than PP, the present speech event, may be

potentially encoded in grammatical forms that indicate the temporal rela-tion of the particular ‘‘axis’’ (or reference point) to the speech event.

Though providing a rich model for analyzing tense relations by implicitly

di¤erentiating reference anchor (his primary points, i.e., PP, AP, etc.)

and reference ‘‘world’’ (his ‘‘axes of orientation’’), Bull nevertheless envi-

sioned temporal relations as features of a single timeline (pp. 22, 24).

Furthermore, his model fails to separate the di¤erent kinds of temporal

relations encoded in the di¤erent verb forms, in particular, the di¤erence

between have forms and -ed forms. This singular view of the timeline, aswe have stated, is insu‰cient to account for the distinctions one encoun-

ters in many tense systems; rather, a dual perspective is necessary.

We incorporate and develop further some of the insights from these

various models into one conceptual framework, but diverge in significant

ways from the simple linear approaches. Tense, in our view, denotes that

relation that holds between S (the locus of the speech event) and a cogni-

tive temporal domain (comparable, but not identical, to Bull’s notion of

axis and Klein’s topic time), a relation that is best construed in termsof clusivity: inclusivity—i.e., the deictic center (anchored at S) occurs

within the time span of the cognitive world—versus exclusivity, or

dissociation—i.e., the deictic center at S is external to, or dissociated

Figure 4. Bull’s (1960) tense schema

152 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

from, the cognitive world. In the privileged case of inclusion, i.e., when

the cognitive world includes S, we label that world the P-domain, denot-

ing a primary, prevailing experiential past and future perspective. For re-

lations of non-inclusion, or dissociation, we refer to that cognitive world

as a D-domain. For expository convenience, we represent these di¤erenttemporal domains (i.e., the di¤erent cognitive worlds) as bounded qua-

drangular planes, as in Figure 5, correlated with two perspectives of

time: (i) ego projecting movement over the temporal landscape from one

cognitve domain to the next, and (ii) either moving-ego or moving-event

(dotted arrows) passing through the P-domain. That is, Ego construes

herself as moving across the temporal landscape from one cognitive

domain, or world, to another. Within a given cognitive world, Ego con-

strues time as moving, either carrying Ego along into the future, or carry-ing events toward Ego from the future. In our analyses of the various lan-

guages, we endeavor to determine which perspective of Time-moving is

relevant. However, limited data in some languages has precluded making

a definitive determination. This lacuna, though unfortunate, does not im-

pede analysis of the organization of temporal systems within the domain

model.

To illustrate this model, we can consider the binary tense distinction in

English represented morphologically in the contrast opposing -ED and Ømarked verb forms. The Ø-marked English verb forms situate the event

in the P-domain. Although labeled a ‘‘present’’ tense, the Ø-form does

not necessarily denote coincidence with the time of speaking (however,

see, for example, Langacker 2001 for a vigorous argument that it does4).

Rather, the event may be construed in a number of ways other than

present within the domain. It may, for example, be construed as future or

Figure 5. Correlation of cognitive worlds with three perspectives on time

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 153

as past (better known under the rubric ‘‘historical present’’). Consider the

phrase we’re dining out, progressive aspect in the Ø-tense form. One can

use this in any of the following:

(1) a. We’re dining out. (response to a query via cell phone while at a

restaurant)

b. Tomorrow, we’re dining out.

c. Yesterday, we’re dining out, completely enjoying our evening,

when her phone buzzes.

d. We’re dining out every night this month.

e. When we’re dining out, I always have red wine.

Context and/or use of adverbials of time situate the event with respect to

the speech event. Certainly, there are specific constraints in English on

when the simple Ø-form can be used felicitously, for example, its non-

use for an on-going action at S (such as, I work now), a Modern Englishdevelopment (cf. Middle English al dares for drede ‘‘all are cowering for

fear’’ Burrow and Turville-Petre 1992: 45). Our claim is simply that the

Ø-form situates the event somewhere in the P-domain, as illustrated by

the positions of the small diamonds ()) in Figure 6a, in opposition to -ED.

The -ED form, in our view, indicates that the cognitive domain does

not include the deictic locus at S and, furthermore, is specifically past

(Fig. 6b). Note that we are not claiming that the only semantic function

of -ED in English is to mark past tense; that is only one of its functions. Itclearly has others, for example, marking irrealis (e.g., If I knew the an-

swer, I would tell you) or marking social distance or politeness (I wanted

to ask you about that picture). In its role as tense marker, however, it

has only past meaning. However, our model presents a framework invit-

ing a unified approach to both temporal and non-temporal uses of

morphology.

4. Cognitive Grammar and mental space models of tense and aspect

Having briefly outlined our model in the preceding section, we turn here

to a synoptic consideration of two other cognitive approaches that also

address tense and aspect. In his Cognitive Grammar approach, Lan-

gacker (2000: 23) considers tense to be the ‘‘primary grounding element’’

of a finite clause, which ‘‘profiles a grounded instance of a [process] type

[i.e., a lexical verb]’’. Hence, tense is one kind of ‘‘grounding predica-

tion’’, whose function is to locate the clausal profile, i.e., the process de-noted by the verb in the finite clause, in relation to the ground (the time

of the speech event, the participants, and any immediate circumstances)

(Ibid. 220), which constitutes the locus of conception and viewpoint, and

154 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

is evoked implicitly as a point of reference. A verb profiles a complex re-

lation, a process, in which its evolution through time is salient (Ibid. 222).

As an example, for English, Langacker proposes two aspectual classes,

perfective and imperfective, construed essentially as bounded, as in Fig-

ure 7a, or unbounded (Fig. 7b) within the immediate temporal scope

(IS), respectively.

The processual profile, i.e., the grounded process, in English is specified

for location in time by either of two markers, Ø or -D, which denote that

a. P-domain (contemporal) construals of Ø-marked forms

[) ¼ potenital positions of events]

b. D-domain (past) indicating dissociation of cognitive space from S; marked by

-ED

Figure 6. Temporal worlds and S: English Past (-ED) vs Contemporal (Ø)

Figure 7. Perfective and imperfective processes in time (Langacker 2000: 224)

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 155

the process is either ‘‘proximal or distal to the ground’’. An example of

such a relationship, the past of a perfective verb, is schematized in (8),

where the squiggly lines denote the time of the speech event.

This approach to tense and aspect, although adopting a conceptual

cognitive framework, di¤ers little from those that we discussed previ-

ously. Tense is construed and represented in terms of relations along a

unidimensional expanse of time. As we have stressed, such a simple view

of tense relations is inadequate to capture the multi-layered systems ofBantu languages.

A richer cognitive model addressing tense and aspect is that originally

developed and propounded in Fauconnier (1985, 1997) and further ex-

panded in Cutrer (1994). According to Mental Spaces Theory (MST),

tense and mood provide the means for keeping track of the time and real-

ity status (epistemic distance in MST terms) of a configuration of mental

spaces built up in discourse. Essentially, then, they constitute a discourse

management tool. Mental spaces, in the theory, are partial and tempo-rary conceptual domains constructed during the process of discourse

(Fauconnier 1997 and Evans and Green 2006). There are four di¤erent

kinds of space (Cutrer 1994: 71–73): (1) a Base space, which is always

in the present and contains the initial viewpoint from which events are

construed; (2) a Viewpoint space, essentially equivalent to the notion of

reference or vantage point, that space from which deictic relations are

determined; (3) a Focus space, which is where meaning is actively being

constructed (‘‘that space which an utterance is about’’); and (4) an Eventspace, ‘‘the temporal space in which the event encoded by the verb takes

place’’. An example illustrating the following brief narrative will make

these concepts clearer.

(2) Anna is moving to Kansas. She has lived in Indiana for five years.

Yesterday, she rented a U-haul truck.

An MST representation of the passage in (2) begins with a Base (B)

space, which is also the initial Viewpoint (V), Focus (F), and Event (E)

space, as in Figure 9. This space is interpreted by default as in the present,

as denoted by the verb form is moving. Note that there is much more to

Figure 8. Past of a perfective process (Langacker 2000: 225)

156 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

the structure of these spaces in MST; we have limited the information to

that which is relevant to tense and aspect representation.In the second sentence, according to the principles of MST, the present

perfect functions to keep the Base space in focus while adding new infor-

mation relevant to the meaning structure being built in the Base. That is,

the event lived represents an event that is complete with respect to the

Base space and, hence, is accorded a new space (Fig. 10). Focus, how-

ever, remains in the Base (indicated by present has). Current relevance of

the perfect arises from the divergence of Event and Focus spaces, indicat-

ing that knowledge of the former has some relevance in the latter.In the third sentence, the adverbial yesterday is considered to be a space

builder, hence, this sentence establishes a new space which is marked for

past (-D) with respect to the Viewpoint space, which is in the Base (Fig.

11). This new space is now also the Event space. What di¤erentiates past

from present perfect is that the new space is also the Focus space.

Figure 9. Representation of Anna is moving to Kansas.

Figure 10. Representation of She has lived in Indiana for five years.

Figure 11. Representation of Yesterday, she rented a U-haul truck.

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 157

This short sample of MST representation of temporal relations in a text

illustrates the basic principle behind the theory: Base, Viewpoint, Focus,

and Event serve as general discourse organizers. Tense and aspect provide

information on the distribution, location, and configuration of these or-

ganizing mental spaces. Tense comprises three categories—Past, Present,

Future—that either denote an already existing space or create a new one.

They function, therefore, as discourse links, connecting various spacescognitively. Aspect—Perfect, Progressive, Imperfective, Perfective—

provides information about the arrangement of Viewpoint and Focus

(Cutrer 1994: 100), but, unlike tense markers, does not put a space in Fo-

cus. Crucially, with respect to our model,

[t]he tense-aspect categories characterized here are not represen-tations of seman-

tic form, nor are they intended as language specific grammatical categories. But

rather, they are characterizations of conceptual discourse links, which operate at

the cognitive construc-tion level, and which in the strongest possible claim, are

universal. Each tense-aspect category is a universal type of local link between

spaces, a local relationship which may be extablished between spaces as part of

the underlying cognitive structure. These discourse links are conceptual notions

which are separate from language, but which may be encoded by the grammatical

conventions of individual languages. (Cutrer 1994: 94)

We believe our model complements this approach. As Fauconnier (1997:

82) notes, ‘‘Languages di¤er . . . in the type of coding they adopt andwhat they code.’’ Thus, whereas MST focuses on tense-aspect in terms of

its conceptual linking of events in discourse, our focus is on the organiz-

ing principles of the tense-aspect system itself, what distinctions are made

within a system and how they relate to each other, in short, what gets

encoded. Consequently, we feel the two approaches may be combined

fruitfully to provide a global picture of how tense-aspect systems are or-

ganized and how they are used to manage discourse.

Concluding this brief excursus into other cognitive approaches, we re-turn to a consideration of the issue of deixis in our approach.

5. Tense and other verbal deixis

Our view of temporal deixis in terms of dissociation is commensurate

with two other possible deictic verbal categories—realis and spatial

position—which denote whether the situated event is treated as real or

not, or as occurring in the immediate vicinity of the speech event or not.In each case we can identify two domains—real vs. not real, here vs. not

here—one coincident, one dissociated, a distinction comparable, perhaps,

to Traugott’s (1978) proximal-distal relation.

158 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

The speech event, then, can be considered to be grounded in the real,the here, and the contemporal.5 We believe that this deictic dichotomy

between the extant ‘‘real, here and contemporal’’ and the displaced ‘‘not

real, not here, or not contemporal’’ constitutes a second significant facet

of the organization of tense distinctions in cognitive space. For this

reason, we propose that cognitive space is divided into two distinct con-

ceptual domains for each of four contrasting deictic components: realis,

temporality—opposing a contemporal domain with a non-contemporal

(past) domain, on one hand, and a non-contemporal (future) one, onthe other—and spatial location, as in Table 1.6 In each case we can

contrast inclusion of the deictic center within the prevailing cognitive

world, for which we use the label P-domain, and dissociation, for which

we employ the label D-domain. More simply stated, we are proposing

that there are paired conceptual worlds, suggested by the oppositions

set out in Table 1, that natural human languages may choose to mark

grammatically.

A language may choose to mark none of these oppositions grammati-cally, one, or more. Comparison of several disparate languages in Table

2, for example, shows that Norwegian morphologically marks not con-

temporal (past) with -ET, while Slave [Athapaskan, Hare dialect] (Rice

2000) marks not real and not contemporal (future) with -O-, while Tunen

Table 1. Verbal deixis

inclusive dissociative

reality: real not real

temporality: contemporal not contemporal P

(i.e., Cog domain ¼ prior to S)

not contemporal F

(i.e., Cog domain ¼ later than S)

spatial position: here not here

Table 2. Dissociative marking (morphological) in Norwegian, Slave, and Tunen

Norwegian Slave Tunen

reality: not real n.m. -O- n.m.

temporality: not contemporal P(ast) -ET n.m. l�not contemporal F(uture) n.m. -O- Ðo

space: not here (away) n.m. n.m. ka

[N.M. ¼ not marked; indicates no overt morphological marking]

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 159

[Bantu, Cameroon] (Dugast 1971) marks not contemporal (Past) with l�,

not contemporal (Future) with Ðo, and not here with ka.7

What is relevant and significant here is that markers for one deictic re-

lation may come to be used for one of the other relations. For example,

Botne (2003a: 396–97) shows that in Chindali (Bantu, Malawi) an

itive marker -ka-, indicating an action occurring at a distance from

the deictic center, developed an additional role as a future tense marker.Parallel to this, a remote past marker, also -ka-, added the function of ir-

realis marker. Consequently, Chindali marks all of the deictic contrasts

with the same morpheme -ka-. This expansion of functions from one

deictic function to another is also found in English -ED, which began

as a marker of past tense, but came to be used as well for irrealis.

The inclusive vs. dissociative distinction, therefore, constitutes an impor-

tant cognitive opposition that unifies these and, perhaps, other such

contrasts.This concept of dissociation is not a new idea. Seiler (1971) appears to

have been the first to use the concept as a feature in his analysis of the

preterit in Greek. Steele (1975) adopts it in her analysis of irrealis and

past in the reconstruction of Proto-Uto-Aztecan, while Traugott (1978)

implies it in her proximal-distal distinction of tense relations. However,

James (1982) and Fleischman (1989) argue against Steele’s use, preferring

instead to retain the temporal meaning ‘‘past’’ as a basic, fundamental

notion from which an irrealis reading is derived. More recently, Cutrer(1994: 184) notes that ‘‘. . . temporal distance extends to express non-

actuality or non probability.’’ Similarly, Taylor (2002: 395) states that,

‘‘. . . the past tense presents a situation as ‘located distant from the

ground’, whether this be distance in time or distance in reality.’’ We do

not dispute that irrealis use may derive from past use. What we are pro-

posing here, however, and what di¤ers from previous proposals, is that

dissociation involves potentially all deictic phenomena related to linguis-

tic specification of event occurrence and that it constitutes a fundamentalorganizing principle not only of tense phenomena, but also of related

verbal deictic phenomena. Furthermore, temporally it is not simply a

separation of past from present. As our data and analyses will demon-

strate, there are potentially several kinds of past or future reference that

can be di¤erentiated: one or more that fall within the P-domain and one

or more which are dissociative and, hence, fall within a (past or future)

D-domain.

As further exemplification of the essential concepts we have set forthhere, consider briefly the case of Nugunu (A.62), a Bantu language

spoken in Cameroon, whose basic TAM system provides a concrete illus-

tration of these relationships in a complex system. There are eight verb

160 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

conjugations in Nugunu, as shown in (3) (Gerhardt 1989). In addition

to the pre-verbal temporal marker, the verb in some cases acquires a

H(igh) tone on non-initial syllables (for example, go f�y�ga ‘reveiller’

[wake up] > f�y��ga in the remote past (P3)).

(3) Nugunu verb conjugations (Gerhardt 1989; Orwig 1991 [ex. in (e)])a. P3 matoa ma mba mo bombana gala ‘la voiture l’a cogne avant-hier’

voiture elle P3 le cognerþH avant-hier [‘the car struck him the day before

yesterday’]

b. P2 a a d��maa8 nt��m�� y�h� iyo ‘il a defriche son champs hier’

il P2 defricherþH champs son hier [‘he cleared his field yesterday’]

c. P1 a baa f�y�ga tulubu ‘il s’est reveille tot (ce matin)’

il P1 reveiller tot ‘he woke up early (this morning)’

d. RSL go a g��l�� ok��d� ba t���b�n� ‘tu as pris la femme de ton frere

(et tu l’as encore)’tu RSL prendreþH femme de ton_frere

[‘you’ve taken the wife of your brother’

(and you still have her)]

go a f�y��ga ‘tu t’es reveille’

tu RSL reveillerþH [‘you’ve awakened’]

e. Pr a d��mba ‘he’s leaving/about to leave’

3S leave

IMPF a duenene (<due ‘sell’) ‘he is selling/will sell’

3S sell.IMPF

f. F1 d� gaa miee ınoni y���y� ‘nous allons l’enterrer aujourd’hui’

nous F1 enterrerþH aujourd’hui ceci [‘we are going to bury her/him today’]

g. F2 a na bola ‘il arrivera’ [demain/dans quelques

jours]il F2 arriver

‘he will arrive’ (tomorrow/in a few days)]

h. F3 a nga foaga nya Ða heeni ‘il construira une maison la-bas’

il F3 construireþH maison la-bas [‘he will build a house over there’]

Time reference:

P3 before yesterday

P2 preceding relevant time unit (e.g., yesterday, last month, etc.)

P1 earlier today

RSL resultative

F1 today or tomorrow [but with adverb can be used for more distant time]

F2 1 or 2 days after tomorrow [later if certain]

F3 >2 days

The remote tenses, P3 and F3, comprise an initial nasal segment, hence,

m.ba and n.ga. The near tenses, P1 and F1, are decomposable as ba-a and

ga-a, respectively. The initial CV element can be observed alone in certain

relative clauses, where only the initial morpheme appears, as illustratedby the P1 example in (4a), followed by what Orwig (1991: 151) terms a

dependent marker (DEP), -na-. Note that the P2 and F2 tense markers

do not change in form, as shown for P2 in (4b).

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 161

(4) Nugunu P1 and P2 in relative clauses (Orwig 1991)

a. P1 a baa Ða a baa go gue, g�cam�na g���g� m ba na bola

he P1 do he P1 INF die time which I P1 DEP arrive

‘he had already died when I arrived’

b. P2 aÐa m��s�� ma a na hume, m b��� ��da naa nyonyı

when mass it P2 DEP let_out I NAR go to market

‘when mass let out, I went to the market’

The time denoted by P2 varies according to context, but always de-

notes the relevant time unit preceding the temporal locus, for example,

yesterday (if the locus is today), last month, last year. Consequently, thetemporal denotation overlaps that of P3 in time. In the model we are pro-

posing, this is readily accounted for: the two denote di¤erent perspectives

of the timeline; P3 situates an event in a D-domain, P2 in an anterior time

unit of the P-domain. The temporal markers of Nugunu are summarized

in Table 3 below.

A salient feature of this set is the parallel nature of the morphemes for

past and non-past, morphologically similar in both segmental form and

tonal marking. The remote tenses are both N.CV and low-toned, theP2/F2 tenses mono-morphemic and high-toned, the P1/F1 tenses CV-a

with reversed H and L pattern. Given the separability of the final -a and

the predictability of the tones, we can analyze the -a as the same element.

The identity in form (i.e., a) of P2 and RSL makes it tempting to analyze

them as the same morpheme, as Gerhardt (1989: 321) does. Historically,

the P2 use undoubtedly arose from the resultative (RSL) use, which de-

notes a post-Nucleus resultant state of an event (Fig. 12) that has oc-

curred at some time prior to the moment of speaking; this state continuesto exist at the speech locus S, as illustrated in Figure 13a. Because the

state is denoted as current at S, adverbials denoting the time of the event

E cannot be used, as Gerhardt notes.

P2, on the other hand (illustrated in Figure 13b), denotes the temporal

relation of the event proper (E) with respect to S. In this case, it situates E

in that time unit immediately anterior to the current time unit. The rele-

vant temporal unit may be a ‘‘natural’’ time unit such as yesterday (or

Table 3. Nugunu tense markers

Tense marking

P3 m-ba n-ga F3

P2 a na F2

P1 ba-a ga-a F1

RSL a Ø(-an) Pr (Impf )

162 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

last month, last year), or a ‘‘societal’’ time unit, such as that of a ruler’sreign, as in (5). In this use, a temporal adverbial such as iyo ‘yesterday’ is

appropriate.

(5) ofuÐe yunu yo ı indenyee g�d�Ð� nyoma

chef ce-la 3S P2 diriger.P2 village an

s����d� (Gerhardt 1989: 321)

dix

‘ce chef-la dirigea le village dix ans’

(sous entendu, c’est le predecesseur de celui qui regne maintenant)

[‘that chief ruled the village for ten years’(understood that it is the predecessor of the one who rules now)]

The question we pose here is why there should be such regularity in the

patterning of form and meaning. We propose that our domain model

provides a principled and motivated answer. The schema in Figure 14 il-

lustrates the Nugunu tenses in the model we have laid out. The tensemarkers can be sub-divided into two sets based on their formal and se-

mantic characteristics, one that patterns along the moving-Ego timeline

through the P-domain, one along the Ego-moving timeline across the

Figure 12. Event structure and extension (post-Nucleus result phase)

a. a as Resultative (RSL) marker

b. a as Past P2 marking Anteior time unit

[Anterior (AnTU) and Current (CTU) time units]

Figure 13. Resultative (RSL) and Past P2 interpretations of a

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 163

temporal landscape connecting domains. We have analyzed each tense

marker as comprised of two elements; the P2 and F2 have Ø marking

where the P1 and F1 have final -a. Those markers that correlate with the

moving-Event timeline (and, hence, the P-domain) have a final -a when

marking the current time unit (i.e., within the bold quadrangle), zero-

marking when specifying the adjacent time units. Those correlated with

the Ego-moving timeline have an initial nasal element. Close observation

shows that the tones also pattern regularly.What evidence is there in Nugunu to support the claim that the per-

ceived flow of time through the P-domain is toward the future, i.e., a

moving-Ego conceptualization? Both the resultative (RSL, see (3d)) and

the present imperfective (Pr Impf, see (3e)) foster this interpretation. The

RSL does not denote a retrospective view (]E X) of the event it marks,

but rather a continuous, on-going view of the result state at the time Ego

speaks (]E---Xd) Figure 15. This is supported by the fact that use of this

form does not permit a past time adverbial that would situate the time ofthe event itself.

The present imperfective (marked by -an- or -anan- or a phonological

variant) denotes an unbounded temporal interval which is construed

Figure 14. Organization of tense markers in Nugunu

Figure 15. Resultative (RSL) ]E---Xd

164 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

either as time contained within the event (an internal view of the eventE) (Fig. 16a) or as time containing the event (an external view that

invites a future interpretation) (Fig. 16b). In this case, Ego’s perspective

is toward the endpoint (]E) of the event, hence, Ego is construed as

embedded in the time matrix moving forward through the interval into

the future.

Further justification for this analysis of the organization of tense

markers comes from two sources. First, the F2 and F3 futures do not

reflect simply a di¤erence in remoteness. They di¤er in the degree of cer-tainty associated with each. The F2 future typically denotes a time tomor-

row or the day after. However, it may also denote a more distant time if

the speaker is certain. The F3 future typically denotes a time a few days

away, but may also be used to indicate uncertainty on the speaker’s part.

This epistemic di¤erence is captured nicely in the dissociation of the fu-

ture D-domain, and unifies temporal and epistemic meaning.

Second, certain types of dependent (DEP) clause marking di¤er ac-

cording to domain (see Orwig 1991). The examples in (4) above illustratethis for P1 and P2, where the marker is na. In fact, it is na for all of the P-

domain markers, except for Pr and F2, which require a su‰x -mo on the

verb. (These -mo forms appear to be an alternative to use of na in order

to avoid a present tense that would look identical in form to F2 and a na

na sequence that would result in F2.) On the other hand, the two remote

tenses, P3 and F3, both attach a final -a, as shown in (6) (Orwig 1991:

158). Thus, the two D-domains mark dependency di¤erently from the P-

domain.

(6) a. P3 a mba Ða a baa go due f�a s��h��, gecam�na g���g�he P3 do he P1 INF sell avocados her time which

m mba-a bola

I P3-DEP arrive

‘he had already sold her avocados when I arrived’

a. Internal imperfective view of time in E (be V-ing)

b. External imperfective view of time containing E (will V )

Figure 16. Pr Impf Xd ]E

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 165

b. F3 nobola no Ðga Ða no baa go naaa, gecam�na g���g� o

rain it F3 do it P1 INF fall time which you

Ðga-a gulu

F3-DEP return

‘the rain will already have fallen when you return’

The sentences in (6) also show that the P1 marker is not an absolute

tense, but a relative one: Specifically, it denotes a past event considered as

a completed whole occurring within the temporal domain of the particular

reference time. The futures behave in the same way, as shown for F1 in (7).

(7) Kunuu a mba l�� i ıyimene, goÐaa a g��� ��da

Tortoise he P3 be he know that he F1 go

naa Makoa [Orwig 1991: 160]to Makoa

‘Tortoise knew that he would go to Makoa (later that day)’

The Nugunu tense system, then, can be analyzed as having the catego-

ries shown in Table 4, lines indicating which forms may cooccur.The morphemes |ba| and |ga| invariably denote past and future, respec-

tively, whether situated in the P- or D-domains, which particular domain

being dependent on whether they co-occur with N- or not.

6. Resultatives and perfects: di¤erences between Nugunu and English

What we have labeled the Resultative (RSL) in Nugunu—marked by a—

has a translation in the English Present Perfect, as noted above in (3d).We have also observed that P1—marked by baa—may be translated by

the English Past Perfect (4a and 6a). Clearly, there is not a straightfor-

ward correspondence between the Nugunu and English forms. How to

reconcile this apparent lack of correspondence within the framework of

our model?

As we showed in Figure 12, Resultative a denotes a continuing post-

Nucleus state brought about by some event E that occurred in the past.

Table 4. Nugunu verbal categories

Domain Past/Future Dependency

N. a

ba

ga

Ø na

a

na (V)-mo

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::::::::::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

166 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

That is, it denotes the extension of the results of E into the present. Be-

cause of this phasal focus, we can consider the Resultative to be a kind

of Aktionsart, marked only in the P-domain. From this developed the

P2 anterior time unit sense. In order to di¤erentiate this latter kind of

domain-internal relation from the cross-domain relations of tense proper,

we adopt the term ‘‘tenor’’ to refer to the di¤erent temporal relations (dis-

tinct from aspect and Aktionsart) marked in the P-domain.9 Consonantwith this distinction, henceforth, the terms past and future will be used

to refer to tense relations (i.e., cross-domain temporal relations), Mpast

and Mfuture for tenor (domain-internal) relations along the Time-moving

dimension.

How, then, do the Nugunu Resultative and the English Perfect com-

pare? Both exhibit a moving-Ego time dimension, while neither permits

co-occurrence with a time adverbial denoting a past time. In both the

event E may have just occurred, though this is not directly denoted bythe construction itself, but determined in context. They di¤er in that the

Nugunu Resultative denotes a post-Nucleus phase to the event, while the

English Perfect denotes a ‘‘temporal template (or overlay)’’ imposed on

the event schema (Fig. 17). The imposed overlay establishes a point of as-

sessment (PoA) that acts as a new reference point (R2) that is, itself, situ-

ated temporally with respect to S, while the event proper is interpreted

temporally with respect to R2. It is this point of assessment from which

the duration of time elapsed from the onset phase of the event (E[) (as in(Figures 17b–d), is determined. In the present perfect, R2 is coincident

with S as a default reading. The Nugunu Resultative lacks not only the

temporal overlay, but also the point-of-assessment from R2 of the En-

glish Perfect. Consequently, it does not permit specification of duration

of time since the event occurred; rather, it only denotes a position in the

extension—the result phase—of the event.

Although many linguists consider the perfect to be an aspect, we

follow Bybee (1985: 160) here in considering it to have primarilyfeatures of tense (tenor, in our model); it appears aspectual because it

introduces a point-of-assessment (R2) that may be situated inside the

event boundaries, as in (Fig. 17b). It is tense-like in that it relates the

time of the event to the time of assessment, which itself is related to

the time of reference. Current relevance at S is an invited interpretation

from the extension of the temporal overlay to a point of coincidence (of

R2) with S.

Consider now the ‘‘past perfect’’ use of Nugunu baa. In simple usage,P1 baa denotes a hodiernal past, as shown in (8). However, it may be

combined in a complex construction with auxiliary Ða ‘do’, which may

occur with any of the tense/tenor markers, for example, as with P1 baa

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 167

(9a) and P3 mba (9b) (Orwig 1991: 158).10 Although these examples

have been translated with the past perfect, they denote a ‘‘past-in-the-

past’’ or ‘‘ante-past’’ reading rather than a perfect reading. The English

Perfect may have either a past perfect or an ‘‘ante-past’’ interpretation,

as in (10).

(8) P1 a baa bola na g�y��n��he P1 arrive with morning

‘he arrived this morning’

(9) a. P1þP1 a baa Ða a baa go gue, g�cam�na g���g� m ba

he P1 do he P1 INF die time which I P1

na bola

DEP arrive

‘he had already died when I arrived’

a. Temporal overlay (bold) on Event structure.

b. Dave has lectured for 40 minutes; he’ll wrap up shortly.

c. He has lectured at IU since 1985.

d. He has lectured at IU. [experiential]

Figure 17. Interpretations of the English Perfect (moving-Ego time matrix)

168 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

b. P3þP1 a mba Ða a baa go due f�a s��h��, gecam�na

he P3 do he P1 INF sell avocados her time

g���g� m mba-a bola

which I P3-DEP arrive

‘he had already sold her avocados when I arrived’

(10) a. The Corps had built a bridge across the river the [past perfect]

previous year, but Spring flooding destroyed it

last year.

[past]

b. The Corps had built a bridge across the

river the previous year, but Spring flooding

had destroyed it before the road opened.

[antepast perfect]

[antepast]

Thus, P1 denotes a past tenor relation (i.e., within the same domain) withrespect to some specified reference locus. When that reference locus is not

S, its temporal location is indexed by temporal marking on the auxiliary

verb Ða ‘do’, either P1 or P3, a schema of the latter provided in Figure 18.

The di¤erence between Nugunu and English lies in the nature of the

temporal marking within the domains. In the P-domain, Nugunu mor-

phologically marks either tenor—proximity (current or anterior time

unit)—or result state of a past event. In contrast, English does not mark

domain-internal temporal relations morphologically. Zero-marked verbforms do not specifically situate the event with respect to S, though the

default interpretation is time of speaking (S). Rather, these ‘‘non-past’’

forms can be used for any time, but only when temporal position is speci-

fied by the appropriate temporal adverb. Thus, either the ‘‘historical

R2 indexed by Ða; temporally situated by mba (P3)

E (sell ) temporally situated by baa (P1)

Figure 18. Past-in-the-past (or ‘‘ante-past’’) in Nugunu

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 169

present’’ yesterday he tells the chief he’s taking the day o¤, and the chief

fires him or the future tomorrow he tells the chief he’s quitting is accept-

able. The periphrastic present perfect imposes over the event structure a

temporal overlay whose salient endpoint establishes a point of assessmentand a new point of orientation from some contextually identifiable locus

(the default being S), from which magnitude (¼ duration) and/or past ex-

istence may be assessed; hence, one may indicate duration of the interval

or the time at which the event began (e.g., since 2 o’clock). Thus, while in

Nugunu one can indicate the time period (this morning, yesterday, etc.),

in English the perfect permits only adverbials of duration or point of

origination.

R2 indexed by have; temporally situated by -D

E (built) temporally situated by -N (i.e., the past participial form)

a. Perfect in the past

b. Perfect in the antepast

Figure 19. Perfect and Past-in-the-past (or ‘‘ante-past’’) in English

170 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

In this paper, we present a general picture of tense, tenor, and dissocia-

tion, adducing from a variety of Bantu languages seemingly curious

evidence of di¤erent kinds that doesn’t find a satisfactory analysis in a

simple one-dimensional linear approach. These cases, we propose, sup-

port the view of a bipartite mental model of deictic relations. Before turn-

ing to consideration of ‘‘curiosities’’ in individual languages, we add a

brief note on aspect in our approach.

7. Aspect and tenor in the domain approach

Aspect denotes the particular temporal view of time in the narrated event.

More precisely, a specific aspect denotes a particular temporal phase of

the narrated event as the focal frame for viewing the event. This focal

frame depicts the status of the event in relation to the vantage point deter-

mined by Ego, by default typically the moment of speaking. Tenor, onthe other hand, situates the event at some location in time in relation to

a reference point. We have already addressed di¤erences between resulta-

tives and perfects in the last section. Here we present a brief sketch of

some aspect and tenor marking in Kilega (D.25), a Bantu language spo-

ken in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in order to illustrate other

types of aspect and tenor in the P-domain.

Kilega, like most Bantu languages, exhibits a complex set of tense, ten-

or, and aspectual marking. Data here are drawn from Botne (2003b andfield notes).

From the vantage point of the moment of speaking, Ego may adopt

any of three aspectual views of the event: inceptive, continuative, culmi-

native, marked by the prefixes -sa-, -ku-, and -a-, respectively. Because as-

pect interacts di¤erently with the di¤erent inherent lexical aspect of verbs,

we illustrate below three cases, with the activity verb -kangula ‘clear’, the

inchoative transitional achievement verb -zombama ‘be(come) hot’, and

the inceptive achievement verb -boboka ‘soften; become soft’.With the activity verb -kangula, the aspects denote views of three di¤er-

ent phases of the event, the beginning (or Onset), the core (or Nucleus), or

the culmination (or Coda), as exemplified by the sentences in (11) and the

diagrammatic representation in

(11) a. a-sa-kangula i ƒswa11 ‘he has started clearing the field’

b. a-ku-kangula i ƒswa ‘he is clearing the field’

c. a-(a-)kangula i ƒswa ‘he has just cleared the field’

Not all events are activities. Achievements di¤er in that they have a

punctual core (Nucleus), and may have di¤erent configurations of onset

and coda phases. Two such verbs are illustrated below. The inchoative

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 171

transitional achievement verb -shika ‘be(come) hot’, as exemplified in

(12), comprises both an onset ‘‘coming-to-be’’ phase as well as a stativecoda phase. As with the activity verb, the inceptive and culminative as-

pects indicate a focal frame just before or just following the nucleus of

the event, as in Figure 21. The continuative -ku-, however, denotes time

in the stative coda phase, rather than in the nucleus phase. That happens

for two reasons: (1) the nucleus is a point, so it cannot be continuative; (2)

the stative coda constitutes the semantic essence of the event. Hence, we

can say that continuative -ku- depicts an interval in the semantic core of

the event, which may or may not be the nucleus.

(12) a. i ƒdya li-sa-shıka ‘the food is beginning to get hot’

b. i ƒdya ly-a-shıka ‘the food has just become hot’

c. i ƒdya li-ku-shıka ‘the food is very hot’

The inceptive achievement verb -boboka ‘soften’ (13) di¤ers from -shika

in not encoding a coda phase; rather, it encodes an onset and punctual

nucleus (Fig. 22). Again, the three aspects may apply, with the inceptiveand culminative aspects denoting, as expected, inception and culmination

with respect to the nucleus of ‘‘softening’’. However, the semantic essence

in this verb is the onset phase, which is denoted by continuative -ku-.

(13) a. byına bi-ku-boboka ‘the fish [are showing signs that they] will

soften [as they cook]’

b. byına bi-sa-boboka ‘the fish are almost [beginning to be] soft’

c. byına by-a-boboka ‘the fish have softened [and are ready to

eat]’

Figure 20. Focal phases of -kangula denoted by aspect marking

Figure 21. Focal phases of -shika ‘be(come) hot’ by aspect marking

172 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

The three aspectual markers constitute a set depicting di¤erent views

of the event at the moment of speaking S, schematized for the di¤erent

views of an activity verb in Figure 23.

These aspects may have as their vantage point some time other than S.

In such cases, a complex construction—a form of the auxiliary verb be

plus the aspect-marked form of the verb—is used. Be indexes the new

vantage point, determined according to tenor marking in the P-domain,as shown in Figure 24, or by tense marking. Note that the completive

and continuous aspect constructions behave as tenor markers in the cur-

rent time unit in opposition to those that mark the anterior and posterior

time units.

(14) a. tw-a-bez-ag-ile tu-ku-kangula i ƒswa ‘we had been clearing the field

1P-P2-be-IMPF-P2 1P-CONT-clear field [at that time]’ (yesterday)

Figure 22. Focal phases of -boboka ‘soften’ by aspect marking

Figure 23. Three views of an activity verb at S (P-domain)

Figure 24. Tenor marking in the Kilega P-domain

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 173

b. tw-a-b-e tu-sa-kangula i ƒswa ‘we will have started clearing the

1P-F2-b-F2 1P-INCEP-clear field field [at that time]’ (tomorrow)

c. tw-a-bez-ag-a tw-a-kangula i ƒswa ‘we had cleared the field [at that

1P-P1-be-IMPF-P1 1P-COMP-clear field time]’ (earlier today)

As the Kilega data suggest, certain forms may be perceived as more or

less denoting aspect or tenor within a TMA system. Data from other lan-

guages in our exposition will illustrate further di¤erences between the

two.Having fleshed out our model first, we turn now to our goal in this

paper: to illustrate various kinds of evidence from Bantu and Bantoid

languages that support this concept of separate cognitive domains. The

kinds of evidence that we focus on here come from unexpected and inad-

equately explained ‘‘curiosities’’ in the data.

8. Curiosity #1: Use of the remote past in Basaa (A.43; Cameroon)

The common approach to Bantu language tenses, as for most languages,

is to map tense markings to appropriate intervals of a timeline (cf. for

example, Nurse and Muzale 1999 for Ruhaya and other lacustrine Bantu

languages; Maganga and Schadeberg 1992 for Kinyamwezi; Taylor 1985for Runyankore/Rukiga, among others). We have done this for some

simple tense markings in Basaa, labeling for convenience each form P1,

P2 and so forth, as it seemingly situates events farther and farther from

the tense locus, here the speech event (S) (see Fig. 25 and examples in

(15)). While this approach seems intuitively sensible at first glance, it nev-

ertheless fails to account for the data in any satisfying way or provide any

insight into how Basaa speakers organize and conceptualize event space.

(15) a. P1 a n-sebel juu ‘she called last night’

b. P2 a bı-sebel ı s��ndı ntagb� ‘she called last week’

c. P3 a Ø-w�� ı gwet bı 14 ‘she died in the war of

(19)14 (WWI)’

a Ø-pam £aÐ l��nthen today

‘she went out ages ago

today’

Figure 25. Tenses in Basaa (Mbom 1996; Hyman 2003)

174 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

d. Pr/F1 a n-temb kokoa ‘she is returning this

evening’

e. F2 a ga-masak ı Ðwıi nl�� ‘she will dance next year’

f. F3 nsaÐgw a-£a ı Ðk�Ð ısı

k��l yada

‘there will be peace in the

world one day’

a a-k� ha l��n ‘she will leave later today’

there today

Time reference (general):P3 remote past

P2 yesterday or earlier

P1 earlier today

Pr/F1 present or future today

F2 tomorrow or later

F3 remote future

The particular curiosity (indicated by ) that we focus on here is the

use of the remote past P3 and remote future F3 with the adverbial len ‘to-

day’, which, apparently, cannot be done with either P2 or F2. Naturally,

one has to wonder why this should be the case. We propose that the P3

and F3 markers, unlike the P2 or F2 markers, situate the event in a D-domain, as schematized in Figure 26. In Basaa, this represents a subjec-

tive sense of distance or separation of the event with respect to the speech

event; hence, not only can it be used to refer to temporally distant events,

but also to temporally proximate ones, which are subjectively construed

as ‘‘remote’’, or ‘‘dissociated’’ in our terms. The other verbal morphemes

denote temporal divisions within the P-domain, as illustrated. The N-

Figure 26. P- and D-domains in Basaa

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 175

morpheme denotes an event within the current time unit (CTU)—tone

marking determining before or after S—for example, ‘today’, ‘this

month’, etc., P2 bı- and F2 ga- adjacent time units (anterior or posteriorto the CTU), for example, ‘yesterday’, last month’, or ‘tomorrow’, ‘next

year’, respectively. P2 and F2 cannot be used with len ‘today’ because

they encode for a time period that is NOT the current time unit.

Time in the P-domain is represented tentatively as moving-Ego, al-

though there is little evidence available. Most grammatical descriptions

appear to describe the Mbene variety of the language. Schurle (1912: 74)

notes, however, that the Bakoko variety uses a form that incorporates the

verb k� ‘go’ in the near future, as in mi n-k� l� ‘I will come’ [lit I F1-gocome]. Following the analyses with motion verbs set out in Botne (2006b),

we believe this use to be indicative of a moving-Ego timeline.

In a more conventional manner, we can represent the semantic organiza-

tion of the Basaa tense system as in Table 5. The (extended) contemporal

dimension comprises two cross-cutting concepts: (1) direction—earlier

(<S) or later (bS)—with respect to the deictic anchor, i.e., the speech event

S, and (2) location with respect to the deictic anchor, either situated within

the same time unit or in the comparable adjacent/contiguous time unit.This analysis of Basaa implies that there are, then, di¤erent kinds of re-

moteness possible. In the P-domain, we find a ‘‘measured’’ remoteness in

terms of temporal proximity to the deictic center, within or outside of the

relevant current time unit. Projection of an event into a D-domain, on the

other hand, connotes a subjective separation and distance; the event is in

another ‘‘world’’. This distinction, we feel, provides the basis for a more

nuanced analysis of the concept of ‘‘remoteness’’. This issue will appear

again in several of the following cases.

9. Curiosity #2: Negation patterns in Tunen (A.44; Cameroon)

A second type of evidence comes from Tunen. Like Basaa, Tunen exhib-its multiple past and future tenses. Unlike Basaa, however, it is the nega-

tive forms that are of direct interest, as they vary across the tenses. Hence,

examples of both a‰rmative and negative tenses are illustrated in the sen-

tences in (16)–(18).

Table 5. Organization of Basaa temporal markers

Contemporal [P-domain] Not contemporal

CurrentTU ContiguousTU

<S n- bı- Ø [Past D-domain]

bS n- ga- a- [Future D-domain]

176 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

(16) a. P4 m�k� l� wamıa mon �n [Dugast 1971: 182]

leopard P4 my child kill

‘the leopard killed my child’

a 0. wamıa mon ata m�t� a l� l� na [Ibid.]

my child NEG one 1S NEG P4 be_sick

‘not one of my children was ever sick’

b. P3 ba ka nekaka bılih�ni m��Łs�� mal�ndolonum [Ibid. 180]

3P P3 meeting fix days seven

‘they set the meeting in seven days’

b 0. hiseli sa siana metana ’ta bu�s�antelope NEG lie_down hunger NEG day

bom�t� [Ibid. 181]

one

‘Antelope did not sleep hungry, not even for one day’

c. P2 m� na nifu samb� o buana numw� [Ibid. 178]

1S P2 package put bed under

‘I put the package under the bed’

c 0. o sa miaÐo sin [Ibid. 179]

2S NEG me see

‘you did not see me’

d. P1 m� no mokolo n�k [Ibid. 176]

1S P1 foot break

‘I broke my foot’ ( just a moment ago)

d 0. same negative form as P2 [Ibid. 194]

(17) a. Aorist a miaÐo mona bwan�n [Ibid. 172]

3S me child carry.for

‘he carries the child for me’a 0. m�s� l� b�lab�nia bı b�ndo n� [Ibid. 173]

chimpanzees NEG food of humans eat

‘chimpanzees don’t eat human food’

b. Present ba ndo ef��ny� [Ibid. 176]

3P Pr maize_porridge

‘they are eating maize-porridge’

b 0. a l�� ndo buoli nyo [Ibid.]

3S NEG Pr work work

‘he is not working’

(18) a. F1 m�� ndo bua buhın� sabon-ak [Ibid. 183]

1S F1 your debt pay-F1

‘I will pay your debt’ [today]a 0. niÐı� miaÐoa, m� sa noye

save me 1S NEG in_that_manner

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 177

kia ton [Ibid. 185]

do anymore

‘save me, I won’t act like that anymore’

b. F2 o na sabon imwınyi na many ıkul’ em�t� [Ibid.]

2S F2 pay goat and medicines time one

‘you will pay (for) the goat and medicines at the same

time’

b 0. o kal o s�� y��m ımil� sa ta [Ibid. 186]2S explain 2S say my palm_nuts NEG produce_much

‘you said that my palm nuts would not produce

much [oil]’

c. F3 m�� Ðo ndasa bulil� [Ibid. 187]

1S F3 VEN.come tomorrow

‘I will come tomorrow’

c 0. m�� so Ðo aÐo mim� f��l�bi [Ibid. 188]

1S F3 NEG 2S hut build.CAUS

‘I will not have a hut built for you’

These sentences illustrate the general use of the di¤erent tense markers.

As one might expect, the markers change form from one tense to another,

with the sole exception of F1, which is the Present plus the su‰x -Vk

(whose vowel harmonizes with the root vowel). The general time refer-

ence of each and both a‰rmative and negative markers are listed in Table

6. The curious facts in Tunen are (1) why some tenses form their nega-tives with a form of sa while others do so with l� or so, and (2) why the

present and F1, which have the same a‰rmative marker ´ndo, have di¤er-

ent negative marking. Moreover, note that the l� and so negatives are

added to the a‰rmative tense marker, while sa negatives replace the cor-

responding tense marker.

Table 6. A‰rmative and negative tense markers in Tunen (Dugast 1971)

Time reference A‰rmative T Negative T

P4 distant, time not precise l� l� l�P3 pre-hodiernal ka sa

P2 earlier today; stories na sa

P1 immediate past no [same as P2]

Aorist general present Ø l�Present in midst of E at S ´ndo l�� ndo

F1 hodiernal ´ndo -Vk sa

F2 time not precise, certain na sa

F3 tomorrow or later, certain ´Ð�o so Ðo

178 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

At first glance, the forms and distribution of the negative markers seem

almost arbitrary; sometimes a variant of sa, sometimes l�, and in one case

so, with no apparent motivation for the distribution. For example, why

should P4 and Pr tenses have l�, but P3 and P2 forms of sa? The distribu-

tion assumes a definite pattern when we consider the organization of these

markers in terms of P- and D-domains. Our proposed analysis of the

organization and distribution of the a‰rmative tense markers, based ontheir form and semantics, is shown in Figure 27. The timeline in the P-

domain is presented as moving-Event, based on the premise that P3 ka

was derived from the itive (movement away) marker ka. It is temporally

sub-divided by multiple verb markers; the P4 and F3 markers, however,

situate events in di¤erent D-domains, either not contemporal (past) or

not contemporal (future), respectively.

It is the organization and distribution of negative markers, however,

that is of primary interest here. First, we find that all of the sa negativesare situated along the moving-Event timeline (i.e., within the P-domain),

di¤ering only in tone: pre-S before today a low tone, pre-S today a

high tone, post-S a rising tone (Fig. 28a). Mous (2003: 294–95) treats

each sa form as a distinct temporal morpheme ‘‘because nothing can

be gained in terms of economy of description by extracting a common

negative element sa . . .’’. We disagree; there are two pieces of semantic

information encoded in each unit: sa indicates negation, tone the time ne-

gated. Hence, we conceive of each as a combination of two elements, seg-mental sa plus a tone. Furthermore, these sa forms completely replace the

a‰rmative tense markers and are, consequently, the only indicators of

time.

Figure 27. Distribution of a‰rmative tense marking in Tunen

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 179

Second, the ‘‘odd’’ negatives l� and so lie along the Ego-moving time-

line, l� for non-future, so for the future D-domains. Unlike the sa forms,

these co-occur with the corresponding a‰rmative tense marker.There are two present constructions, the Aorist (called Present indefini

by Dugast) and the Present (called the Present ponctuel by Dugast). In

both cases, l� is inserted before any tense marking. Since the Aorist form

is simply the bare verb, it has simply l� plus the verb in the negative. In

the present, l� occurs before the tense marking, hence, l�� ndo (the high

tone on l�� arising contributed by ndo). The Aorist expresses a general

fact, habit, or situation ‘‘sans consideration . . . de position dans le temps

. . .’’ (Dugast 1971: 172). That is, it does not denote an event on-goingat S. Thus, the semantics of this form naturally correlate with the Ego-

moving timeline, which depicts time as static and unbounded. It is not

surprising, then, that the negative patterns the way it does. On the other

a. Negatives along the moving-event timeline (P-domain)

b. Negatives along the Ego-moving timeline

Figure 28. Distribution of negative tense marking in Tunen

180 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

hand, the Present does denote an event on-going at S and so presents a

di¤erent situation.

From the data examined so far, we can see that Pr and F1, both having

the tenor marker ndo, behave di¤erently with the negative: F1 patterns

in the negative—i.e., manifests a form of sa—with other tenor forms

in the P-domain; Pr, like the Aorist, patterns with l� negatives outside

the P-domain. Since we naturally anticipate an on-going present topattern within the P-domain, why might the negative Pr pattern as it

does in Tunen? We propose the following. In the a‰rmative, the F1 ndo

Root-Vk construction clearly derives from the Pr, hence, both F1 and Pr

in the a‰rmative can be assumed to assert a fact about an event occur-

ring in the P-domain, one soon after S (F1), one on-going at S. Negating

F1 denotes that in the world that Ego perceives to exist at S (i.e., the P-

domain), it is not a possibility that E will occur in the near future. Negat-

ing Pr, on the other hand, denotes that E is not real at the moment ofspeaking S. Tunen speakers have, as we have observed, correlated this

fact with the use of l�, denoting ‘‘not real’’ at S. That is, the present af-

firmative asserts the reality of E at S, the negative the non-reality (or, to

put it another way, X may be doing something, but E isn’t it, i.e., the

reality).

Support for this comes from the observation that the morpheme l�is linked to the verbal deictic D-domain not real, in that it is found

in the negative of irrealis constructions (what Dugast labels ‘‘la formesubjective’’ (1971: 189–90), Mous (2003: 297) ‘‘optative’’), which in the

a‰rmative have the form sp- -root, in the negative sp-l�-root. This

‘‘subjective’’ form is used in expressing wishes, desires, intentions, ques-

tions. Tunen speakers have, then, negated Pr with the same negative

form associated with dissociated domains, past and, specifically, irrealis.

The analysis of negative forms in Tunen suggests an organization such

as that depicted in Table 7. What is clear from these data is that the dis-

tribution of negatives in Tunen is not arbitrary, but motivated, we claim,by the contrast in perspectives on time coupled with the cognitive division

between P- and D-domains.

Table 7. Organization of negative marking in Tunen

Contemporal

[P-domain]

Not Contemporal

[Temporal D-domains]

Not real

[Irrealis D-domain]

<S sa (p3) l�þ T (p4)

sa (p2)

¼S l�þ T (pr)

>S sa (f1 and f2) soþ T (f3)

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 181

10. Curiosity #3: Di¤erential implications with tense markers: Lusaamia

(J.34, Kenya) and Ekoti (P.30, Mozambique)

The simple sequential correlation of tense markers with a single timeline

would suggest that the only di¤erence between, for example, one future

marker and another would lie in the temporal distance from the time

of speaking (although see Janssen 1994 for a di¤erent view in Dutch).

However, data from Lusaamia and Ekoti demonstrate that this is not

necessarily the case. Rather, there is a di¤erence in implications or in re-

strictions on use. Consider first a pair of examples from Lusaamia, one

marked with the near future prefix -na-, the other with the remote futureprefix -axa- and final -e, as shown in (19).

(19) Lusaamia (data from Botne field notes)

a. xusuubıra mbwee a-na-meny’-a1P.hope.FV that 3S-F2-live-FV

‘we hope that it [child] will live’

[implies child exists, i.e., is living]

b. xusuubıra mbwee y-axa-meny’-e1P.hope.FV that 3S-F2-live-F2

‘we hope that it [child] will live’

[implies child has not been born]

Note that in (19a) the sentence is only felicitous when the child spoken

of is actually alive at the moment of speaking. Use of the remote future

construction, in contrast, is felicitous if the child has not yet been born,

regardless of whether, say, the mother is currently pregnant or not. This

di¤erence in implication falls out naturally in the model we are propos-ing. As illustrated by the schema in Figure 29, the -na- future situates the

event within the P-domain, that is, within the contemporal world in

which the speaker perceives herself to be. In contrast, the -axa-ROOT-e

future construction situates the event in a dissociated future world in which

the child does not yet exist; that world we have labeled a D-domain. (See

Botne 2006a for greater detail and discussion of Lusaamia TMA forms.)

The dotted timeline indicates that we do not have enough evidence at

this time to select between a moving-Ego or moving-Event analysis.A similar contrast is found in Ekoti. There are two simple past con-

structions, a recent past formed with -a-. . .-a (20) and a remote past

formed with -aa-. . .-iy-e (21).

(20) Recent Past (P1)a. taana n-a-c-a fooxi [Schadeberg and Mucanheia

2000: 172]yesterday 1P-P1-eat-P1 together

‘yesterday we ate together’

182 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

b. mwanakhw’aawe a-(a-)n-xıc-el-a wuuluvala [Ibid. 170]chicken.her 3S-P1-it-slaughter-APPL-P1 become_old

‘her chicken, she slaughtered it because of old age’

c. k(i)-a-n-sıkan-a ari wiıkuri [Ibid. 135]

1S-P1-3S-meet-P1 3S.be LOC.Inguri

‘I met him (while) he was in Inguri’

d. mvuka w-(a-)uum-a ncuwa [Ibid. 164]

rice it-P1-dry-P1 LOC.sun

‘the rice (has) dried in the sun’

(21) Remote Past (P2)

a. Hayaathi ti-ye y-aa-m-parız-iye hooma taana [Ibid. 151]

Hayathi COP-3S 9-P2-3S-heat-P2 9.fever yesterday

‘Hayathi got/had a fever yesterday’b. (a-)aa-lum-ach-ı(y)-w-e [Ibid. 89]

1S-P2-bite-INT-P2-PASS-P2

‘he was very badly bitten’

According to Schadeberg and Mucanheia (2000: 112), the P1 tense de-

notes a completed action in the recent past, perfective in nature. It also

may be used when there is a sense of present result, as in (20d). Although

translatable by the English Perfect, it is neither a perfect as in English nor

fully resultative, indicating a present state. Nevertheless, it invites a sense

of current relevance.

The remote past denotes an event that happened in a distant past.

However, as the example in (21a) illustrates, this may be as recent as

Figure 29. Lusaamia domain organization

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 183

yesterday. We posit that the di¤erence between the uses of the two tenses

lies in the dissociative nature of the remote past. That is, the so-called re-

mote past situates an event in the D-domain, the recent past in the P-domain (Fig. 30). Current relevance arises from an event’s being situated

in the P-domain in opposition to the D-domain.

The timeline through the P-domain denotes moving-Ego. Evidence

comes from grammaticalization of the verb -eetta ‘go’ (>-tta) in the pres-

ent progressive/immediate future construction. This construction, as

shown by the examples in (22), consists of the present tense marker

-n(i)- prefixed to the phonologically-reduced form of ‘go’ followed by

the infinitival form of the main verb. The present marker alone on themain verb, as in (22b) indicates a generic fact, and can be considered to

mark present along the Ego-moving timeline.

(22) a. ki-n-tta o-lawa [Schadeberg and Mucanheia 2000: 142]

1S-Pr-GO INF-leave

‘I am leaving’ or ‘I am about to leave’’

b. akotı a-n-lıma maxapa m-pamela [Ibid. 109]

Koti_people 3S-Pr-cultivate farm LOC-interior

‘the Koti people farm in the interior’

What is curious in Ekoti is that the distinction between the two past

forms has consequences for the syntax. In the examples in (23), we find

that the same proposition—portuguese build fortress—requires di¤er-

ent tense marking depending on whose ‘‘world’’, the Portuguese or the

fortress, is perceived as salient.12 In (23a), the Portuguese are the salient

agents who built in the remote past, hence, the remote tense marker is

Figure 30. Ekoti pasts

184 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

used. However, in the passive (23b), when the fortress becomes salient as

the subject, the near past marker is used.

(23) Ekoti [Schadeberg and Mucanheia 2000: 116]

a. azuku (a-)aa-cek-ıye fortaleeza

Portuguese 3P-P2-build-P2 fortress

‘the Portuguese built the fortress’

b. fortaleeza y-a-cek-ıw-a n’aazuku

fortress 3S-P1-build-PASS-FV by-Portuguese

‘the fortress was built by the Portuguese’

As with the case in Lusaamia, this di¤erence in use and implications

falls out naturally from the model we are proposing. The action of the

Portuguese, the subject and topic of the active sentence (23a), occurred

in a remote and dissociated past and, hence, is marked with the D-

domain tense marker. However, the fortress, subject and topic of the pas-

sive sentence (23b), still exists in the contemporal world of the speaker

and is marked with the past appropriate to the P-domain.A reviewer has suggested that use of the recent past for (23b) may be a

conventionalization of the fact that the resulting state is nearer the pre-

sent than is the agent of the action. The same reviewer also suggested

that the Lusaamia examples could be accounted for by the lexicalization

or idiomatization of an invited inference. Specifically, the remote future

use emanates from the invited inference that the child’s not yet existing

is necessarily more remote than if the child has already been born. True,

these may be possible ways to account for the observed data. However,our model provides a principled and motivated framework within which

these, as well as other, disparate facts can be accounted for in a unified

manner. Another of these disparate curiosities occurs in the next language

we examine.

11. Curiosity #4: Di¤erential temporal implications of lexical items in

Chisukwa (M.20, Malawi)

Another kind of implicational evidence can be found in the senses of par-

ticular lexical items as they are used with di¤erent tenses. Consider, for

example, the Chisukwa verb -fwa ‘die’ (24) (data from Kershner field-

notes). Apart from its common use referring to humans (24a), it can also

be used metaphorically with respect to the closing of a store (24b and c).

(24) Inchoative verb uku-fwa ‘to die’

a. PR a-ku-fw-a. ‘s/he is dying/will die.’

3S-Pr-die-FV

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 185

b. P2 isitoolo y-aa-fw-ıile ‘the store closed’

9.store 9-P2-die-CMPL [implication: temporary]

c. P3 isitoolo i-ka-fw-a ‘the store closed’

9-P3-die-FV [implication: out of business]

In a strictly linear analysis, we would expect the only di¤erence be-

tween P2 and P3 to be an earlier or later time reference, such as ‘yester-

day’ and ‘before yesterday’, respectively. However, what we find is that

there is an implication of temporariness for P2, but of permanency for

P3. Although anomalous in a simple linear model, this distinction is mo-

tivated in our domain model. The P3 marker -ka- situates the event in theD-domain where the event is interpreted as permanent, i.e., no longer

active, as opposed to P2, which indicates it is past in the P-domain but still

‘‘active’’, hence, interpreted as a potentially temporary state of a¤airs.

A second, and similar, piece of lexical evidence is found in the di¤er-

ence in inter-pretation of the aspectualizer -leka ‘cease’ when it occurs

with -ka- P3 forms in contrast with tenses marked with -aa-, e.g., P1 and

P2, as shown in (25). Similar to the -fwa case in (24), there is an implica-

tion of permanency with -ka- and temporariness without -ka-; this is re-flected in the interpretation equivalent the verb receives, that is, ‘quit’

(for P3) versus ‘stop’ (for P1).

(25) Aspectualizing verb uku-leka ‘cease’

a. P3 tu-ka-lek-a pakuseenga boo aafulala

1P-P3-cease LOC.INF.build after 3S.P1.become_injured

‘we quit building after he became injured’

P1 tw-aa-lek-a pakuseenga boo aafulala

1P-P1-cease LOC.INF.build after 3S.P1.become_injured

‘we stopped (temporarily) building after he became

injured’b. P3 ba-ka-leka pakugobola ifıloombe looli bakubyaala

3P-P3-cease LOC.INF.harvest maize but 3P.Pr.plant

n’ukugobola amalesi

and.harvest millet

‘they quit harvesting maize and, instead, are planting and

harvesting millet’

P2 b-aa-lek-ite pakugobola ifıloombe

3P-P2-cease-CMPL LOC.INF.harvest maize

‘they stopped (temporarily) harvesting the maize’

As in the preceding cases of interpretation in Lusaamia and Ekoti, one

might say that the di¤erence in interpretations is due to an invited infer-ence that permanent cessation would naturally extend further into the

past, while temporary cessation is more likely with a recent past. Again

186 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

we point out that, while such an account is possible, it seems to us to be

rather ad hoc. In our analysis, the various and disparate curiosities we

have enumerated can all be accounted for in a unified manner.

12. Curiosity #5: Parallel constructs in Lucazi (K.13, Angola)

With Lucazi, we consider six ‘‘non-future’’ verbal constructs that illus-trate the inter-connection of tense, tenor, and aspect. These constructs

do not constitute all the ‘‘non-future’’ forms in the language—there are

also gnomic, habitual, and progressive forms as well—but the ones we ex-

amine here are su‰cient to illustrate a particularly interesting case of pat-

tern congruity within the dissociative model.

The six constructs each consist of a prefix (two prefixes in one instance)

and a su‰x circumscribing a verb stem, as shown in Table 8, labeled as in

Fleisch (2000). As the reader will note, there are two prefixes, -na- and -a-

that recur, and which Fleisch has associated with the concepts anterior

and perfective, respectively. Our analysis diverges from Fleisch’s in sig-

nificant ways; consequently, the reader should note carefully that we do

not employ the terminology as he does.

We begin our analysis by considering first the two formally parallel

patterns with cross-cutting co-occurrence of the prefixes -na- and -a- with

the su‰xes -V and -ile, as set out in Table 9. The su‰x -V represents a

vowel that typically harmonizes with that of the verb stem.Consider the examples in (26) of the -a-. . .-ile construct, Fleisch’s ‘‘Sim-

ple Past’’.

(26) -a-. . .-ile constructa. v-a-hıt-ile mu-musenge [Fleisch 2000: 164]

3P-PST-pass-PFV LOC-bush

‘they crossed the wilderness’

Table 8. Lucazi ‘‘non-future’’ constructs (Fleisch 2000)

Anterior -na-. . .-V -a-. . .-V Present Perfective

Past Anterior -na-. . .-ile -a-. . .-ile Simple Past (Perfective)

Hesternal Past -na-ka-. . .-ile -a-. . .-a Perfective

Table 9. Parallel prefixþ su‰x pairs in Lucazi

affixes -V -ile

-na- -na-. . .-V -na-. . .-ile

-a- -a-. . .-V -a-. . .-ile

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 187

b. ka-tali u-a-mu-sum-in-ine13 [Ibid. 165]

dog 3S-PST-3S-bite-APPL-PFV

‘the dog bit him’

c. kasumbi u-a-y-ile ku-alenga ndonga [Ibid. 142]

chicken 3S-PST-go-PFV LOC-border river

‘one day, Chicken walked along the river’

Fleish (2000: 166) notes the following characteristics associated with use

of the Simple Past:

� it denotes absolute temporal reference;� it is associated with a notion of remoteness, though not in a strictly

metrical sense (i.e., the sense of remoteness arises from something

other than simply temporal linear distance);� it provides the temporal reference point as a background for other

states of a¤airs;� it does not express or imply later consequences resulting from occur-

rence of the event.

These semantic attributes lead us to conclude that the -a-. . .-ile construct

denotes a complete (i.e., whole) and completed event situated at an un-divided moment in the past. In our model, it situates an event in the past

D-domain. Hence, we label it the D-Past. How does this D-past di¤er

from the similar -na-. . .ile construct, which also denotes a past event?

Fleisch (2000: 168) notes first that the -na-. . .-ile construct ‘‘. . . may re-

fer to markedly remote states of a¤airs, but at the same time it is in some

respects ‘less remote’ than the simple past [i.e., what we are calling the D-

Past]’’. Second, it has potentially a ‘‘past perfect’’ interpretation, as in

(27c–e), meaning it can be interpreted with respect to some referencepoint other than S; hence, it is relative and not absolute.

(27) -na-. . .-ile construct

a. tu-na-hıluk-ile [Fleisch 2000: 168]

1P-PANT-return-PFV

‘we (had) returned’

b. kaha tusitu vose va-na-lı-kungulu-ile [Ibid. 344]

then animals all 3P-PANT-REFL-gather-PFV

‘then all the animals gathered’

c. kaha vangazi vavene va-na-handek-ele ngu-avo: . . . [Ibid.]

then judges themselves 3P-PANT-speak-PFV QUOT-3P

‘then the judges themselves spoke, saying . . .’

d. kasumbi ngu-eni mu-nji-n(a)-amb-ile [Ibid. 169]chicken QUOT-3S 18-1S-PANT-say-PFV

‘Chicken said, ‘‘[that is] why I had said . . .’

188 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

e. amba, nge-oco mu-na-han-a mulonga ku-li [Ibid. 349]

that like-that 18-PANT-give-CMPL judgment 17-COP

ou kasumbi, kasumbi omu njila na-handek-eleDEM chicken chicken DEM way 3S.PANT-speak-PFV

‘so, like that, a judgment was found; Chicken had told the

truth’

The -na-. . .-ile construct, then, is like the D-past in that it denotes

completion of the event. Unlike the D-past, though, it typically implicates

relevance to some posterior situation. In our model, we propose that it

situates an event in the past of that domain in which the reference locusis situated, that is, it is a past internal to a domain, the default interpreta-

tion being the P-domain. Hence, though denoting past, that past may be

felt to be ‘‘less remote’’ than the D-past or ‘‘markedly remote’’ when in-

terpreted as anterior to some other situation.

We account for the similarity and di¤erences between these two con-

structs in the following manner. The -ile su‰x denotes a perfective aspect.

That is, it denotes a perspective on the event following the terminative

coda phase of the event, as shown for the -na-. . .-ile construct in Figure31. If the point perspective is interpreted with respect to the event itself

(Fig. 31a), an aspectual role, then the interpretation is a completed event.

However, the point perspective can also be interpreted as a reference

point, as in (Fig. 31b), in which case it functions to index a new reference

locus (R2). The event is, then, interpreted as occurring prior to that event

and contributing a sense of relevance at that point.

The -a-. . .-ile and -na-. . .-ile pasts di¤er, then, in two important ways.

First, the former situates a completed event in a dissociated D-domain,i.e., that domain external to the reference locus (S); the latter situates the

a. Simple ‘‘perfective in past’’ reading

b. Perfect reading (had V-ed prior to some reference event)

Figure 31. Dual interpretations of the -na-. . .-ile perfective aspect

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 189

event internal to a domain (by default in the P-domain). Hence, the -a-

form situates the event along the Ego-moving timeline, thereby marking

a tense relation, the -na- form along the Time-moving timeline, thereby

marking a tenor relation. Second, the -a- form treats the event as a com-

pleted ‘‘whole’’, the -na- form as a completed endpoint.Let us turn now to the -na-. . .-V construct. Instead of the perfective suf-

fix -ile, it has a final, typically harmonizing, vowel, transcribed -V. This

ending is semantically similar to, yet subtly di¤erent from the perfective

-ile. Although, like the perfective, it expresses completion according to

Fleisch, it also expresses either immediacy of the event (‘‘[w]ith action

type verbs the anterior predicates express a verbal action which immedi-

ately preceded the reference moment and is still relevant to the latter.’’

(pp. 157–8), as in (28a and b), or it expresses relevance of the event tothe time of reference (by default the speech event), as in (28c and d).

(28) -na-. . .-V construct

a. tu-na-fum-u mu-Vunonge [Fleisch 2000: 160]

1P-PFV-come_from-CMPL LOC-Menongue

‘we have just come from Menongue’

b. tu-na-sokulul-a lipito mu-va-na-het-e [Ibid. 207]

1P-PANT-open-CMPL door 18-3P-PANT-reach-CMPL

‘we have opened the door (because) they have [ just] arrived’

c. vi-ka u-na-kuatilil-a? [Ibid. 124]

8-which 2S-PANT-seize-CMPL

‘what [lit which thing] have you seized [and still hold]?’

d. hee, mu-na-man-e ku-teta laza mulonga? [Ibid. 346]

INTJ 2P-PANT-finish-CMPL INF-cut already 3-judgment

‘ooh, have you already reached a judgment?’

Figure 32. Temporal analysis of -a-. . .-ile and -na-. . .-ile in the dissociative model

190 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

yii, u-na-hu-u

yes 3-PANT-become-CMPL

‘yes, it has come to be’

The di¤erence between this construct and the perfective ones lies in the

location of the aspectual viewpoint. For the perfectives, we saw that the

viewpoint was situated post-Coda; in this construct, however, it is situ-

ated post-Nucleus. That is, in both instances something has been com-

pleted, in the former it is the whole event, in the latter the nucleus phase.

That it is the nucleus only that is construed as completed is evident from

the di¤erence in interpretation of activity and inchoative achievement

verbs. The former have an ‘‘immediate past’’ interpretation, as in (28aand b) above, the latter either an immediate past or a resultative state in-

terpretation, as in (29). We will label this the Completive aspect, in oppo-

sition to the Perfective aspect discussed previously.

(29) a. cimbanda na-y-i [Fleisch 2000: 280]healer 3S.PANT-go-CMPL

‘the healer has/is gone’

b. muangana na-tsi [Ibid. 157]

king 3S.PANT-die.CMPL

‘the king has died/is dead’

The reason for this is illustrated by the schemas in Figure 33. Inchoa-

tive achievement verbs, unlike activity verbs, encode a stative coda phase.

The completive aspect situates Ego in the post-N coda phase of the

event (Fig. 33b), which may be interpreted as immediately post-N (hence,

a. With activity verbs

b. With inchoative achievement verbs (N ¼ point of transition)

Figure 33. Completive -V

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 191

a have just V-ed interpretation), or as some unspecified location in

the coda (hence, an is V-ed interpretation). A comparable distinction

has been proposed for similar su‰xes in Zulu (see Botne and Kershner

2000).

The meaning and use of the -a-. . .-V construct follows from the analy-

ses we have just presented. The su‰x -V denotes a post-Nucleus perspec-

tive, the prefix -a- that the event is situated at an undivided (i.e., punctive)moment of time along the Ego-moving timeline. This, in fact, is what we

find. With some verbs, there is a performative sense with the utterance, as

in (30a), which might best be translated as ‘‘have just this instant named’’.

With others, there may be a sense of ‘‘have come to act in this way at this

very moment’’, as in (30c). In all cases, the event is immediate to S.

(30) Present Completive -a-. . .-V

a. nji-a-mu-luk-u ou mu-ana li-zina

1S-PST-name-CMPL this 1-child 5-name

li-a-eni Joao [Fleisch 2000: 163]5-POSS-3S John

‘I (have) named this child John’

b. vi-ze vi-nzunda vi-mu-a-mon-o va-a-li-kungulul-ile [Ibid.]

8-DEM 8-frog 8-2P-PST-see-CMPL 3P-PST-REFL-gather-PFV

‘these frogs that you (pl) have just seen [¼ just mentioned in

story] gathered (again)’

c. m-bambi u-a-hev-e [Ibid. 303]

9-duiker 3S-PST-be_foolsih-CMPL

‘how foolish the duiker is’ or ‘the duiker is being foolish’

Before considering the final two constructs, we pause here briefly to

summarize the findings so far. We have di¤erentiated the four constructs

in terms of the aspectual meaning encoded in the su‰x and in terms of

the temporal character encoded in the prefix. The su‰x denotes either

a completive (post-Nucleus) perspective or a perfective (post-Coda)

perspective on the event. The prefixes -na- and -a- distinguish relations

within a domain (Time-moving timeline) from relations across domains

(Ego-moving timeline), respectively. Table 10 sets out the distinctions.

Table 10. Lucazi constructs in a dissociative model analysis

TempusAspect Completive

(post-Nucleus)

Perfective

(post-Coda)

Anterior (tenor) -na-. . .-V -na-. . .-ile

Past (tense) -a-. . .-V -a-. . .-ile

Aspect

192 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

The -a-ka-. . .-ile construct (Fleisch’s Hesternal Past) is the same as the

Anterior Perfective tenor in form, with addition of the prefix -ka-.14 It is

perfective and past, situating an event in that time unit adjacent to the

current relevant time unit, for example, yesterday (vs. today) (31a). It is

relative in the sense that it is anchored to a moment of speaking whether

current or otherwise, as the example in (31b) illustrates. It di¤ers from the

Anterior Perfective in that it apparently has only a past perfective inter-pretation, and not a past perfect interpretation as well.

(31) Contiguous Anterior Perfective -na-ka-. . .-ile

a. tu-na-ka-y-ile ku-Venduka ngoco

1P-ANT-IT-go-PST 17-Windhoek and

tu-na-ka-hıluk-ile zau [Fleisch 2000: 169]1P-ANT-IT-return-PST yesterday

‘we went to Windhoek and returned yesterday’

b. muan-etu na-handek-a zau ngu-eni mema

brother-1P 3S.PANT-speak-CMPL yesterday QUOT-3S 6-water

a-na-ka-tontol-ele muakama zaulize [Ibid. 170]

6-PANT-AnTU-be_cold-PFV very_much day_before_yesterday

‘my brother said yesterday that the water had been cold the

day before’

The final construct to consider is the -a-. . .-a construct. Two related

facets of its three uses are exhibited in its experiential (32) and resultative

(33) readings. The experiential interpretation denotes not only an occur-

rence of the event at some indefinite time in the past, but typically thatthe event denotes an important attribute or characteristic of the subject

at the reference time. Hence, according to Fleisch, (32c) indicates not

only that ‘‘we’’ have come from Menongue, but that our ‘‘coming from

Menongue’’ is an integral attribute, either because we were born there or

because we lived there for a lengthy period of time.

(32) Experiential -a-. . .-a

a. nj-a-mon-a ngandu [Fleisch 2000: 160]

1S-PF-see-FV crocodile

‘I have seen a crocodile’

b. na-ngandu na eni u-a-fum-a mu-liyaki [Ibid. 161]

and-crocodile and 3S 3S-PF-come_from-FV LOC-egg

‘and Crocodile, he too, has come from inside an egg’

c. tu-a-fum-a mu-Vunonge [Ibid. 160]1P-PF-come_from-FV LOC-Menongue

‘we come from Menongue’

[implies birth there or living there for some time]

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 193

The resultative use is very similar to the experiential in that the event

has occurred at some indefinite time in the past, and a characteristic state

exists at the time of reference. This use is found with inchoative achieve-

ment verbs that express a resultant state, as in (33a). In order to indicate

that the state existed at a particular time in the past, it is necessary to

combine the -a-. . .-a construct with the auxiliary verb -pu- ‘be(come)’, it-

self marked with the past perfective construct, as in (33b). In this complexconstruction, the auxiliary verb functions to index a point of reference

with respect to which the resultant state is understood.

(33) Resultative -a-. . .-a

a. kasumbi u-a-lı-zind-a na-ngandu [Fleisch 306; 341]

chicken 3S-PF-REFL-hate-FV COM-crocodile

‘Chicken and Crocodile hate one another’

b. ci-tapalo c(i)-a-pu-ile c(i)-a-sungam-a [Ibid. 307]7-street 7-PST-be-PFV 7-PST-be_straight-FV

‘the street was straight’

In neither case does the -a-. . .-a construct co-occur with temporal ad-

verbials, either of location or duration in time. On the other hand, as the

reader can see, both interpretations denote a property characteristic of the

subject at the reference time. We propose that the -a-. . .-a construct im-

poses a temporal frame (in bold in Figure 34) over event structure alongthe Ego-moving timeline. The di¤erence between the experiential and re-

sultative readings is determined solely by whether the event coded by the

verb expresses a stative coda phase or not. If so, then we have the resulta-

tive reading (Fig. 34b), in which the viewpoint (the right edge or bound-

ary) of this frame is located in the coda phase of the event; if not, we find

an experiential reading, in which the right edge is outside the event, but

the event is within the ‘‘experiential’’ frame (Fig. 34a).

The temporal frame overlies the timeline, precluding identification ofspecific time units on the timeline. Consequently, the time at which the

nucleus (N) of the event occurred is not statable with this verb construct.

Moreover, the frame depicts the ‘‘state’’ of the event as existing over the

duration of the interval, interpreted as denoting an experience or attribute

true of the subject over that interval.

There is a third use of the -a-. . .-a construct, one which does not follow

from either of the complex temporal models—Ego-moving or Time-

moving—we have outlined so far. This is its use in narrative to expressconsecutive occurrence of events, as in (34), although Fleisch (2000: 263)

notes that this is not as common, or as stylistically appropriate, as use of

the D-past perfective in many contexts.

194 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

(34) Narrative sequencing with -a- . . . -a

setting: kasumbi u-a-y-ile kualenga

chicken 3S-PST-go-PFV along

ndonga [Fleisch 2000: 342]

river

‘one day Chicken walked along the river’

event 1: kaha u-a-mon-a nguvi

then 3S-PST-see-FV hippopotamus

‘then he saw Hippopotamus’

event 2: kunahu u-a-mu-sik-a ngu-eni: . . .

then 3S-PST-3S-call-FV QUOT-3S

‘then he called him, saying: . . .’

(35) event 3a: kaha nguvu u-a-y-ile

then hippo 3S-PST-go-PFV

u-a-ka-lek-ile ngandu [Ibid.]

3S-PST-SEQ-tell-PFV croc

‘then Hippopotamus went and told Crocodile’

a. Experiential, e.g., see a crocodile

b. Resultative (of change-of-state verb), e.g., hate

Figure 34. Interpretations of the -a-. . .-a construct

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 195

event 3b: kaha nguvu u-a-y-a3S-PST-go-FV

u-a-ka-lek-a ngandu [Ibid. 162]

3S-PST-SEQ-tell-FV

‘then Hippopotamus went and told Crocodile’

The storyteller apparently gave two renditions of the same story, one in

which he reverted to the D-past perfective when the scene changed (35a),

one in which he continued with use of the -a-. . .-a construct in sequencing

events (35b). In both cases, the itive marker -ka- adds emphasis to aclosely tied sequence.

The use of -a-. . .-a in the narrative follows not from the Ego- vs Time-

moving models that we have discussed throughout the paper, but rather

from a complex temporal sequencing model (see Evans 2005: 229–234

for a detailed discussion), in which sequences of events are conceptualized

as discrete entities with respect to some event in question other than the

time of speaking (S). In Lucazi story narrative, this event is typically

marked with the D-past perfective construct -a-. . .-ile, as in (34) above.Subsequent events may be marked either with the same form or with the

-a-. . .-a construct. As Evans (2005: 230) indicates, a consequence of inte-

gration into this model is the imposition of an in-tandem alignment on

the events (Fig. 35).

These rather curious parallel sets of constructs find a motivated analy-

sis in the model we are proposing. As illustrated in Figure 36, the similar-

ity, both morphological and semantic, between the Anterior and Past sets

results from their patterning in similar fashion along a timeline; theirdi¤erences arise from their patterning along di¤erent perspectives of the

timeline, the Anteriors along the moving-Event perspective, the Pasts

along the Ego-moving perspective. The Perfect indicates that an event

has been completed, but also falls within the experiential domain of the

reference locus, i.e., it is relative. Hence, we can conclude that it is found

in both the P-domain and the past D-domain. As noted above, the Past

Anterior does not co-occur with the D-Past, but does co-occur with the

Perfective. This falls out from the occurrence of both in the P-domain, incontrast to the D-Past, which situates an event in a di¤erent domain.

Figure 35. Complex sequencing model of narrative sequencing with -a-. . .-a

196 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

13. Curiosity #6: Multiple futures in Chisukwa (M.20, Malawi)

To this point we have focused primarily on past tenses. Here, we will

discuss the occurrence of multiple future tenses in Chisukwa that seem to

overlap at least to some extent in temporal reference. There are four such

forms, as shown in Figure 38; data in (36) are from Kershner (2002).

They di¤er in marking: ti vs tiise, and Ø vs ka. Furthermore, speakers of

Chisukwa consider tiise . . .-ka-. . .-e marked events to be ‘‘deeply re-mote’’. What needs to be clarified is the relation these configurations

Figure 36. Organizational schema of Lucazi Anteriors and Pasts

Figure 37. Future tenses in Chisukwa

Figure 38. ‘‘Simple’’ futures in Chisukwa

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 197

have to one another semantically and what the individual morphemes

contribute to the meanings.

(36) F1 ti a-mu-busy-eF 3S-3S-tell-F

‘s/he will tell him/her’ (sometime soon)

F2 tiise a-mu-busy-e pala abasikali biisa

FCont 3S-3S-tell-F if police 3P.P1.come

‘s/he may tell him/her if/when the police (have) come’

F3 ti tu-ka-byaal-e amalima

F 1P-F3-plant-F beans

‘we will plant beans’ (at some point)

F4 tiise tu-ka-byaal-e amalima

FCont 1P-F3-plant-F beans

‘we might plant beans’ (e.g., at some point if we have money)

[Note: FCont ¼ contingent future]

The configuration ti . . .-e (F1) denotes the highly probable occurrence

of an event in relatively close proximity to the speech event (S). That is,

the speaker is confident of the event happening; hence, it is perceived as in

the ‘‘here-and-now’’ (Fig. 38). In contrast, the similar configuration ti

-ka-. . .-e (F3) suggests less certainty, both in speaker confidence of the

event taking place and in the time at which it might occur. We propose

that the -ka- marks dissociation, situating the event in a future D-domain.Hence, from the speaker’s perspective, the event is subjectively more re-

mote. The configurations with tiise (F2 and F4) contrast with each other

in the same way as the ti configurations (F1 and F3). The question, then,

is how the tiise forms di¤er in meaning and use from the ti forms.

The tiise configuration indicates that the occurrence of the reported

event depends on the fulfillment of prior information or on the occurrence

of some other event, a second reference locus R2. The element tiise is

appropriately analyzed as bi-morphemic: tiþ :se. The morpheme -:se

induces vowel length, but does not a¤ect vowel quality. Evidence for this

comes from the negative forms: ta (<tiþ a) and taase (<tiþ aþ :se)

(Kershner 2002: 193). It is the morpheme -:se that establishes the new

R2. Moreover, this -:se derives from the verb ‘come’, -iisa.

Consider, then, the sentence with F4 in (36) above and its schematic

representation in Figure 40 below. The marker -ka- situates the event in

the future D-domain. tiise indicates that there is another condition or event

(in this case, have money) that must be fulfilled before the reported eventplant beans will occur. Hence, tiise establishes a new reference locus, an

R2, e¤ectively indexing some discourse established event as the substantive

time of R2, thereby creating a new locus of orientation and, hence, a new

198 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

perspective on time. The reported event is future with respect to R2 within

the future D-domain. It is for this reason that tiise . . .-ka-. . .-e events are

considered by Sukwa speakers to be ‘‘deeply remote’’.

A simple linear analysis does not account for these di¤erences in a de-

scriptively accurate or explanatory manner; our domain analysis does. As

the schema in Figure 40 shows, the ti and tiise configurations comprise

parallel sets in the P- and D-domains. Events marked with ti are ‘‘simple’’futures, either in the P-domain or D-domain. On the other hand, events

marked with tiise are indexed to an antecedent R2. This, in essence, con-

stitutes a kind of ‘‘mediated’’ remoteness, in contrast to the more direct

remoteness of the D-domain.

Figure 39. Representation of F4

Figure 40. Combined schema of Chisukwa futures

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 199

These data demonstrate, once again, that the same markers may be

used to express temporal relations in both P- and D-domains. Typically,

though not necessarily, there will be a marker such as Chisukwa -ka- that

indicates which of the two domains the tense marking is referencing.

We have seen in this analysis of Chisukwa that the futures involve

more than simple temporal meaning; they involve as well semantic di-

mensions of greater or lesser epistemic certainty and contingency. Ourmodel, we believe, lends itself well to integrating both temporal and non-

temporal dimensions of meaning in one unified account. Although we are

not able to extend the analysis here to other non-temporal uses, condi-

tional contexts, for example, we feel that the account we have provided

holds much promise for future investigation.

14. Curiosity #7: Discontinuity and pattern in Kom tense markers

(Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon)

Kom presents a challenging case, both for Comrie’s hypothesis of conti-

nuity in the time reference of tense marking as well as for our thesis that a

dissociated domain approach provides a motivated, explanatory analysis

of the data. There are four past tenses, a present/future, and three fu-

tures, in addition to two aspects, imperfective and completive. Data are

from Chia (1976).

(37) a. Amadu n�n læ fel

A. P4 work

‘Amadu worked’ [remote]

b. ivuı tı na s�� su� ıa

rain P3 IMPF INCEP fall

‘rain was beginning to fall’

c. Peter læ nyiÐ busi-busi

P. P2 ran in_morning

‘Peter ran in the morning’

d. wu ni yem njaÐ jætaka wa gwi

3S P1 sing song before 2S come

‘she sang a song before you came’

(38) 'es n�n kfı asaÐ �we afein

1P Pr harvest corn week this

‘we are harvesting corn this week’

(39) a. Pauline ni yem njÐa a-lıkfıa

P. F1 sing song LOC-evening

‘Pauline will sing a song in the evening’

200 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

b. Peter læ fel-a alıbus

P. F2 work-F tomorrow

‘Peter will work tomorrow’

c. wu n��n læ yem njaÐ �lva wu lema kwen

3S F3 sing song when 3S grow reach

‘she will sing a song when she matures’

As one can readily see from these examples and the list of tense

markers alone in Table 11, Kom tense marking is replete with segmental

forms recurring in di¤erent tense constructions and, hence, having di¤er-

ent time reference. For example, the forms n�n and læ—with di¤erenttones—occur in tenses referring to three di¤erent times, while ni is em-

ployed in two.

The P4 and F4 tenses stand out as curiosities in two ways: they are

composed of two elements, unlike other markers, and they incorporate

the same morpheme—n�n – as does the present/future (Pr/F1) tense. Al-

though one could certainly describe the system in terms of a simple linear

model with di¤erent degrees of remoteness incorporated into it, it would

be di‰cult to see any coherent motivation for the semantic and morpho-logical patterning in such an analysis. Although the overall distribution of

tense markers suggests a gradual temporal demarcation outwards from

the present (and even that pattern is disrupted by P3), that doesn’t pro-

vide any explanation for the composition of P4 and F4 from Pr/F1 n�n

and P2/F3 læ. However, it does become understandable and motivated

in the domain approach we are advocating. First, n�n functions to denote

a kind of present along both timelines. Not only does it indicate an on-

going event at S, it is found in generic sentences as well. In (40) a simplepresent generic is formed with the present tense. Furthermore, a past or

future generic is also possible, as Chia points out (1976: 125), but only

with the P4 or F3 tenses, respectively, as illustrated in (41). No other

tenses can be used this way. That is, only n�n tenses can be used to denote

Table 11. Kom tense markers

Tense markers Temporal reference

P4 n�n læ long ago

P3 tı sometime before today (e.g., yesterday, last year)

P2 læ early in the day

P1 ni a little while ago (aP3 hours)

Pr/F1 n�n now or in a little while (aP3 hours)

F2 ni later in the day

F3 læ tomorrow or specific known time in the future

F4 n��n læ some time in the future (after tomorrow)

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 201

generic events, i.e., genericness is associated with the static perspective of

time along the Ego-moving timeline. At any point along this line, the

speaker’s perspective is from within a particular cognitive domain forwhich that situation named by a verb is true.15

(40) Kom n�n fel akun

Kom_people Pr cultivate rice

‘the Kom cultivate rice’

(41) a. ngumıs�� n�n læ na kful nfu�locusts P4 IMPF eat grass

‘locusts ate grass’b. ngumıs�� n��n læ na kful nfu�

locusts F3 IMPF eat grass

‘locusts will eat grass’

Thus, n�n (in its generic or gnomic use) situates events along the Ego-

moving timeline (see Fig. 41); læ marks either of the dissociated D-

domains (41). Consequently, location of events in either D-domain is

marked by n�n læ, past or future being di¤erentiated by reversed tone

patterns on the tense markers.

In contrast, all the tenor markers situate events along the moving-event

timeline, that is, within the P-domain, as illustrated in Figure 42. Note in

particular that n�n occurs as a marker of present along both timelines.Note, too, that læ here marks time units ‘‘removed’’ from S, i.e.,

not contiguous with S; hence, use of læ appears to be consistent over

each timeline.16 More specifically, the tenor forms in the P-domain are

organized in form, meaning, and distribution by two interacting princi-

ples. First, the time frame is sub-divided into approximately equivalent

Figure 41. Distribution of n�n forms

202 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

intervals grounded in the concept of today (see Fig. 43a), creating a bi-

lateral symmetry. Two relatively short intervals (approximatelye 3 hrs)

form the central core, the more future interval of which contains the

time of the speech event. One time unit removed are the comparable in-

tervals earlier and later in the day. All four of these today intervals re-

ceive a low (L) tone on the tense marker. Parallel intervals outside of to-day, the pre-hodiernal and post-hodiernal intervals, both receive high

(H) tone on the tense marker. Second, the tense forms refer to abstract

metrical units in relation to S (Fig. 43b). Thus, ni refers to those time

units abutting S, læ to those time units twice removed from S. Those two

that are temporally past receive L tone, those that are future, H tone.

Figure 42. Tenor marking in the P-domain

Figure 43. Organizational principles in the Kom P-domain

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 203

Note that the tones in the upper and lower schemas match, with the soleexception of ni ‘later in the day’, where we observe a HL sequence. This

pattern, which initially appeared out of place, is to be expected from the

correlation of hodiernal temporal divisions with grammatically abstract

temporal units denoted by the tense markers, as illustrated here.

The Kom case demonstrates that continuity of time reference is a prin-

ciple that holds within a region of one domain, for example, over the past

in the P-domain. Thus, læ occurs in the past of the P-domain, but also in

the future, a separate region. It also marks each of the D-domains. This‘‘symmetrical’’ pattern is not just a coincidental fact about Kom; the

same type of correspondence in form between remote past and future do-

main marking can be found in numerous Bantu languages, as the exam-

ples in Table 12 attest.

Segmentally, the dissociative (remote) marker in each of the languages

is identical; tonally, they are identical in two languages, di¤erent in three,

as well as in Kom. This fact supports the view that Bantu languages often

mark the two dissociative D-domains in the same way, typically usingtone to separate past from future.

In sum, we can retain Comrie’s continuity hypothesis as a universal

principle, but with the stipulation that the same marker may be used in

di¤erent domains or in comparable intervals (past/future) of the P-

domain.

15. Limits on domains: Bamileke-Dschang (Grassfields Bantu;

Cameroon)

The discussion to this point has addressed languages that mark at most a

past and a future D-domain in addition to the P-domain. One may well

ask whether more than one past or future D-domain can be marked and,

Table 12. Some Bantu languages with comparable marking for D-domains

Tones identical

Sibende F12 P2 -a-ka- cf. P1 -a- Yuko Abe p.c.

F2 -loo-ka- F1 -loo-

Kimatuumbi P13 P2 -a- Ø-. . .-ite cf. P1 -Ø-. . .-ite Odden 1996

F2 -a-luwa- . . -a F2 -luwa-. .-a

Tones differ

Ewondo A72a P3 -ngaþH Redden 1979

F3 -ngaþMid

Gimbala H41 P3 -ga- Ndolo 1972

F2 -ga-

Ciila M63 P2 -a-ka- cf. P1 -a- Yukuwa 1987

F2 -la-ka- F1 -la-

204 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

in fact, whether there are any limits on the number of domains marked.

In making a first pass at addressing these questions, we can consider the

case of Bamileke-Dschang, whose tense system represents perhaps the

fullest development possible, having five pasts and five futures, illustrated

by the examples in (42)–(43).

(42) Pasts in Bamileke-Dschang [Hyman 1980: 227]

a. P1 aa !taÐ ‘he bargained’ [ just a moment ago]

3S.P1 bargain

b. P2 a aa ntaÐ ‘he bargained’ [earlier today]

3S P2 bargain

c. P3 a ke taÐ !Ð� ‘he bargained’ [yesterday]

3S P3 bargain

d. P4 a le taÐ !Ð� ‘he bargained’ [before yesterday]

3S P4 bargain

e. P5 a le la$ n!taÐ ‘he bargained’ [long ago]

3S P4 P5 bargain

(43) Futures in Bamileke-Dschang [Ibid. 228]

a. F1: a!a !taÐ ‘he is about to bargain’

3S.F1 bargain

b. F2 aa !piÐ !Ð� taÐ ‘he will bargain’ [later today]

3S.F1 F2 bargain

c. F317 aa !s�$e taÐ ‘he will bargain’ [tomorrow]

3S.F1 F3 bargain

d. F4 a!a la$e !taÐ ‘he will bargain’ [after tomorrow;

3S.F1 F4 bargain some days hence]

e. F5 a!a fu !taÐ ‘he will bargain’ [a long time from

now]3S.F1 F5 bargain

Following analysis of these constructions, Hyman (1980: 228) extractsthe tense formatives as listed in Table 13. What is of particular interest

and relevance for our discussion here are the two pasts, P4 and P5, and

the F4 future.

Table 13. Bamileke-Dschang tenses

Time reference Past Future

Proximate P1 a F1!a

Same day P2 aa F2 a !piÐe1 day P3 ke F3 a !s�$e2 days P4 le F4

!a la$e1 year or more P5 le la$ F5

!a fu

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 205

Before discussing in more detail those tenses, it is important to note

that the Bamileke system, according to Hyman, represents relative tense

marking rather than absolute. This can be observed, for example, in the

‘‘crastinal’’ (tomorrow) future F3, derived from the verb le-s�$ ‘to come’.

A sentence such as that in (44) may be interpreted in absolute terms with

respect to the time of speaking, as illustrated in the schema in Figure 44.

(44) a ke !le �g� oo !s�$e z���� !m�� [Hyman 1980: 229]

he P3 say that you.F1 F3 see child

‘he said that you will see the child’ [tomorrow]

However, the same sentence can be interpreted relatively, i.e., with re-

spect to some other reference locus identified in the discourse context, in

this case that denoted by ‘‘said’’, as in (45). The F3 tense marker still sit-

uates the event in the adjacent posterior time unit, but that unit is now

understood to be ‘‘today’’ because the reference locus R is situated in the

time unit ‘‘yesterday’’ (Fig. 45). It is thus significant for our model that it

is not restricted to absolute tense, S being simply a special locus of orien-

tation. At any orienting locus, there will be two perspectives on time, andthe model will apply accordingly.

(45) a ke !le �g� oo !s�$e z���� !m�� [Hyman 1980: 229]he P3 say that you.F1 F3 see child

‘he said that you will see the child’ [today]18

The Bamileke-Dschang system, because it is more complex than most,

lends itself well to a domain analysis rather than a simple linear analysis.

Figure 44. Absolute interpretation of a s�$

206 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

Consider that four of the tenses denote times within the current timeunit of today, while two others denote times one time unit away, either

yesterday or tomorrow. We propose that these ‘‘tenors’’ situate events

along the moving-Event timeline in the P-domain (Fig. 46). One piece of

evidence supporting this analysis comes from the crastinal (‘tomorrow’)

future noted above; the verb ‘come’ (44–45) denotes events moving to-

ward and past the reference locus. Its counterpart, ke, seems likely to

have derived from an obsolete verb for ‘go’ or an itive marker (compare

the case of Lucazi, note 14 and see Botne 2006b).Consider now the more remote past tenses, P4 and P5. We can analyze

le (P4) as denoting a remote past, situating an event in a D-domain. But

what about P5? As the time reference indicated in (43) and Table 13

Figure 45. Relative interpretation of a s�$

Figure 46. Bamileke-Dschang P-domain

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 207

shows, this is a very remote past; in fact, it is constructed in part with the

P4 past marker le. Hence, we propose that it establishes a second D-

domain in a more remote past than P4 (Fig. 47), that is, the la$ element

instills an ‘‘earlier’’ time sense.

We see also in Figure 47 and in (43d) and Table 13 that la$ appears as a

marker of a future D-domain (F4), but that it is not the most remote fu-ture. Assuming these two tenses derived from the same morpheme la$, this

is an odd situation. There is, however, a unifying analysis behind this cu-

riosity. Hyman (1980: 234) points out that la$, in conjunction with P2 and

P3 (i.e., the P-domain pasts) is also used as a pluperfect, as shown by the

examples in (46). He concludes from this that the pluperfect and far re-

mote past use (P5) are comparable anteriors and can be factored out of

the tense system, but that the future la$ (F4) is not comparable and must

be treated di¤erently. However, within the framework of our model, wecan see that la$ functions consistently and coherently in the di¤erent time

dimensions. In the ‘‘tenor’’ dimension of the P-domain, i.e., along the

moving-Event timeline, it combines with P2 and P3 to indicate anteriority

to an indexed orienting locus; in the ‘‘tense’’ dimension across domains,

i.e., along the Ego-moving timeline, it denotes a domain prior to another

D-domain, i.e., P5 prior to P4, or F4 prior to F5. Thus, the key concept

underlying la$ in both time dimensions is temporal anteriority, construed

in a manner commensurate with the particular conceptualization of thetimeline. This division of functional roles lends further support to the

analysis proposed in Figure 47, as the hesternal ke and crastinal s�$ both

behave in the same way with respect to la$.

Figure 47. Bamileke-Dschang temporal domains

208 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

(46) a. a aa nda� ntaÐ ‘he had already

bargained’

[Hyman 1980: 234]

he P2 la� bargain

(earlier today)

b. a ke nda� ntaÐ ‘he had already bargained’ (yesterday)

he P3 la� bargain

Assuming this analysis to be appropriate, we propose further that

it also represents the limits of a tense and tenor system. That is, once

a language goes beyond one D-domain in either the past or the future,

it will systematize only one more domain in that time sphere (whether

past or future) and that marking of that domain will be built upon or

with respect to the marking of the other D-domain. One might appropri-ately consider and compare this situation with the ‘‘surcompose’’ past

tenses of French, built upon the passe compose, or the use of the English

pluperfect for a ‘‘past-before-past’’ interpretation, as noted in §5 (Fig.

19b).

16. A brief re-examination of Burera and Palantla Chinantec

We return here briefly to the cases of Burera and Palantla Chinantec,whose tense systems, as we indicated in the introduction, posed problems

for the idea of a linear, continuous marking of tenses. Following from our

analyses in terms of the approach we have advocated here, there is no is-

sue of continuity; seemingly discontinuous tenses are continuous within

their domains. Where Burera di¤ers from Bantu languages is that it only

marks tenor relations within domains and not tense relations between do-

mains, as shown in Figure 48. Note that we have no data to determine the

Figure 48. Burera tenses in the domain approach

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 209

direction of the Time-moving timeline; for expository purposes, we have

represented it by a dotted line moving toward the past. The same holds

for the case of Palantla Chinantec below (Fig. 49).

As an interesting aside, Glasgow (1964) suggests (following a sugges-

tion by Richard Pittman) interpreting the Burera tenses as occurring in

two ‘‘frames of reference’’. Although it is unlikely that either of them had

our approach in mind, the spirit seems similar.The case of Palantla Chinantec (Merrifield 1968) is similar to that of

Burera but illustrates a simpler system than that of Burera in that it does

not make a remoteness distinction within the D-domain. Like Burera,

however, it only marks tenor relations within domains and not tense rela-

tions between them.

17. Conclusion

Our goal in this paper has been to present various curious kinds of data

that find no satisfactory motivation or analysis in a traditional one-

dimensional linear model of temporal relations. The di¤erent kinds of

curiosities investigated, we propose, provide evidence for a multi-

dimensional model, organized by and grounded in two cogent factors:

(1) the relevance of three perspectives on time—Ego-moving vs Time-

moving (moving event vs moving ego)—which motivate di¤erences in

the organization of tense markers, and (2) the di¤erentiation of temporalmarking into cognitively distinct domains. This di¤erentiation into sepa-

rate cognitive domains is not unlike the distinction proposed by Chafe

(1994: 198–99) between ‘‘displaced conscious experience’’ and ‘‘immedi-

Figure 49. Palantla Chinantec

210 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

ate conscious experience’’, and perhaps relates in some way to the distinc-

tion Givon (1984: 405) makes between active and permanent files in a

mentally projected world.

In the model we propose, tense systems may grammatically mark con-

tinuity of time relations along a timeline in each domain; that is, a tense

marker may denote the temporal relation of an event with respect to a

reference locus within a domain, the ‘‘tenor’’ of the event. We can thussalvage Comrie’s proposed universal of continuity by stating that ‘‘in a

tense system, the time reference of each tense (i.e., tenor) is a continuity

within a specific domain.’’

Second, tense systems may mark discontinuity of relations reflecting

deictic dissociation, i.e., contemporal vs not contemporal for either

past or future times, that is, the relation of a reference frame to S. Thus,

a tense marker may function to project an event into a separate cognitive

domain. This also has implications for Comrie’s universal: along the Ego-moving timeline, i.e., across domains, the time reference of each tense

marker will have the same general meaning (recall the Kom case of lœ as

remote marking).

Third, tense systems may mark di¤erent kinds of remoteness, three of

which we have identified here. These include ‘‘metrical’’ remoteness in

either the P- or D-domains, ‘‘dissociative’’ remoteness imbued by projec-

ting an event into a D-domain, and ‘‘mediated’’ remoteness, a conse-

quence of a reported event being directly related to a second tense locusintervening between it and the speech event.

Given these findings, we believe this model establishes a functionally

versatile cognitive framework that accommodates the diversity and range

of tense/aspect systems we encounter in Bantu languages and beyond,

and provides a dynamic means for analyzing and comparing deictic phe-

nomena in the verb in a finer-grained manner than has previously been

the case.

Received 5 September 2006 Indiana University, USA

Revision received 28 August 2007 Kansas State University, USA

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 211

Appendix

Abbreviations

AnTU anterior time unit IMPF imperfective PFV perfective

APPL applicative INCEP inceptive PoA point of

assessment

C coda INF infinitive POSS possessive

CMPL completive INT intensive Pr present

COM comitative INTJ interjection PST past

CONT contigent IS immediate

scope

QUOT quotative

COP copula IT itive R2 2nd reference

locus

CTU current time unit L low tone REFL reflexive

CV consonant-vowel LOC locative RSL resultative

DEM demonstrative N nucleus S speech time

DEP dependent NAR narrative SEQ sequentive

E event NEG negative t time

F future O onset T tense

FV verb-final vowel PANT past

anterior

TAM tense, aspect,

mood

H high tone PASS passive V vowel

HOD hodiernal PF perfect

Note: 1S; 2S; 3S ¼ 1st person singular, etc; 1P; 2P; 3P ¼ 1st person plu-

ral, etc.; P1; P2; P3; etc. ¼ nearer past, more distant past, etc.; F1; F2;F3; etc. ¼ nearer future, more distant future, etc.; numbers that appear

as glosses with nouns indicate verb classes. The same number on the verb

or modifier denotes agreement with that noun. A diamond ()) marks the

location of an event on a timeline. In Reichenbach, PP ¼ point present,

RP ¼ recalled point, AP ¼ anticipated point, RAP ¼ recalled anticipated

point.

212 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

Notes

* This paper has gone through many revisions, profiting from comments and discussion

following presentations at the 98th Annual meeting of the American Anthropological

Society (1999), the 32nd Annual Conference on African Linguistics (2001), The 4th

World Conference on African Linguistics (2003), an IULC colloquium (2004), and the

International Conference on Bantu Grammar (2006). We wish to thank Phil Lesourd,

John Hewson, Brian Joseph, and Ewa Dabrowska, as well as a coterie of reviewers

for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank Carol Orwig and Keith

Patman for assistance with obtaining and clarifying data on Nugunu. Any errors or

misinterpretations are the sole responsibility of the authors: Robert Botne, Indiana

University (botner@indiana.edu) and Ti¤any L. Kershner, Kansas State University

(tlkershn@ksu.edu).

1. Dixon (2002) refers to it as Burarra.

2. We use the term ‘‘event’’ throughout the paper in a very general and generic sense to

refer to any type of basic predication. It is equivalent here to what ‘‘situation’’ would

be in a more technical discussion of verb types.

3. Numbering such as E.62 refers to the referential classification of individual Bantu lan-

guages followed by Bantuists (based on Guthrie 1948, 1971), the letter identifying one

of 16 zones, the number a particular language within a zone.

4. There are at least two problems with Langacker’s arguments. First, with respect to fu-

ture use, although the simple Ø-form often applies to ‘‘scheduled’’ events, this does not

necessarily appear to be the case. If I am exasperated with the meals I am getting at

home, I could say ‘‘Tomorrow we eat out’’, or ‘‘Tomorrow we will eat out’’, or ‘‘To-

morrow we are going to eat out’’. The former seems no more scheduled than the other

two. A similar remark can be made about past use as a ‘‘historical present’’. Langacker

considers this use to constitute a ‘‘virtual’’ occurrence of the event(s) at the time of

speaking. However, there’s no reason to believe this past use is any more virtual than

that marked by -ED; neither is actually occurring at the time of speaking.

5. There is no term that captures exactly the essence of the cognitive domain coincident

with S, hence we use the term ‘‘contemporal’’ here for lack of a more precise term.

‘‘Contemporal’’ is, naturally, a relative notion whose range is determined by each lan-

guage but whose meaning suggests prevailing e¤ect or relevance at S. It replaces the

use of ‘‘(extended) now’’ in Botne (2003a).

6. A possible additional contrast seems to exist in the case of oral vs written language use.

Consider, for example, the passe compose vs preterit distinction in French, with the lat-

ter having narrowed its use to marking specifically written language, again indicative of

a dissociative function. Perhaps others are possible as well: narrative-non-narrative, for

example.

7. Allomorphic variation occurs in most morphemes: Norwegian (-et, -te, -de, -dde), Slave

(-o-, -u-, -wo-).

8. The double letters at the end of the verb appear to be an orthographic convention for

writing a falling or rising tone on a short vowel. For temporal markers, double letters

indicate length.

9. We do not believe this to be the same thing as ‘‘taxis’’, Jakobson’s (1971) term often

equated with ‘‘relative tense’’, although Guldemann’s (2002) definition—‘‘the time re-

lation between the communicated state of a¤airs and another state of a¤airs which is

encoded or implied in the discourse context and which serves as the temporal reference

point’’—is very similar. The di¤erence is to be found in the use of S or some specified

time (other than that related to some event) as the reference anchor in our case.

Tense and cognitive space in Bantu languages 213

10. It may also be used in the future as, for example, in (6b) above.

11. Kilega has a 7-vowel system, apparently involving ATR distinctions in the high vowels

(Botne 2003b).

ATR

þ � � þHigh i ƒ i u uƒ

Non-high e a o

12. We thank Thilo Schadeberg for bringing this example to our attention.

13. -ine is an allomorph of -ile, occurring following a nasal in the verb stem.

14. Note that the itive (i.e., motion away) marker -ka- denotes the ‘‘movement’’ out of the

current time period of today into the preceding time interval ‘‘yesterday’’. This accords

with the ‘‘moving event’’ perspective of time, as shown in the schema.

15. In our model, simple or progressive, habitual, and generic ‘‘presents’’ can be di¤erenti-

ated by the timeline and domain that are relevant. A simple or progressive present

indicates an event situated at S along the Time-moving timeline in the P-domain; a ha-

bitual is ‘‘true’’ of the whole domain. Generics or gnomics, on the other hand, denote

the relation of an event to the static timeline from the perspective of Ego-moving

across a static temporal landscape.

16. The morpheme lœ appears to have derived from the verb lœli ‘wake up’ (Chia 1976: 95–

96), grammaticized as a marker referring to events ‘earlier in the day’. While this may

have been motivation for its grammaticization as an ‘‘early today’’ past, it doesn’t ap-

pear to provide motivation for its other uses.

17. There is an alternative construction for F3 with !lu!lu instead of ! s�$ ! e. Since, according

to Hyman (1980), they are comparable semantically, we will only consider the latter

form here.

18. One reviewer noted that this sentence might be ambiguous between seeing the child

later today (i.e., after S) and seeing the child earlier today (i.e., before S). Although an

interesting question, we do not have an answer, as Hyman (1980) does not give any

more information than the two readings we have cited here.

214 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

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218 R. Botne and T. L. Kershner

Three types of conditionals and their verbforms in English and Portuguese

GILBERTO GOMES*

Abstract

An examination of conditionals in di¤erent languages leads to a distinction

of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and sub-

junctive). The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or

as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels subjunctive and

indicative are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals

comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the

quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have

a time shift in contemporary English and the future subjunctive in Portu-

guese (though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of if with in

case or supposing are usually possible with approximately the same mean-

ing. Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features.

Keywords: conditionals; indicative; subjunctive; counterfactuals.

1. Indicative and subjunctive

Conditionals are often classified into two types: subjunctives (or counter-

factuals) and indicatives (Edgington 1995; Dancygier 1998; Bennett

2003). Here is an example of a subjunctive conditional:

(1) If he were here today, he would certainly help her.

The verb form used in the antecedent of this conditional is traditionally

called the past subjunctive. The verb to be is at present the only verb in

English that has a distinctive form for the past subjunctive (in the first

and third persons singular: were). It should be noted that the pastsubjunctive refers to the present time. The use of the subjunctive impli-

cates that the condition expressed by the antecedent is not real, but only

imaginary. The main verb in the consequent (help) is preceded by the

Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008), 219–240

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.009

0936–5907/08/0019–0219

6 Walter de Gruyter

modal verb would, and this verb-phrase corresponds to the conditional

mood of other languages. It usually expresses an unreal, imaginary sit-

uation that would be the consequence of the condition expressed by the

antecedent.

Thus, subjunctive conditionals typically involve unreal, imaginary sit-

uations. That is why they are often called counterfactual conditionals. It

is usually agreed, however, that the falsity of the antecedent in counter-factuals is conversationally implicated rather than asserted (Anderson

1951; Stalnaker 1975; Iatridou 2000). This is because a subsequent sen-

tence may assert it without redundancy or cancel it without contradiction.

The term counterfactual is somewhat too strong, since not always is

the antecedent really deemed ‘‘contrary to fact’’. Sometimes this type of

conditional is used when the speaker thinks that the antecedent is only

probably (and not certainly) false. For example:

(2) If she were at home, we might visit her now.

Counterfactuals may be used even when the speaker considers the ante-

cedent probable, but wants to avoid the conditional to be interpreted as

too direct a suggestion. For example, Jean may say to Charles

(3) If you took a taxi, you would arrive on time.

believing that Charles will probably accept the implicit suggestion. But in

saying so she is distancing herself from this suggestion by speaking as ifshe believed that he was not (or probably not) going to take a taxi; other-

wise she would have simply said If you take a taxi, you will arrive on time.

The subjunctive verb form were is certainly related to the indicative

form were used for the past, although the latter is not used for the first

and third persons singular. Would may also be the past of will, but here

it merely indicates an imaginary present or future. According to Iatridou

(2000), past tense morphology as a component of counterfactual mor-

phology is found not only throughout Indo-European languages but alsoin other totally unrelated languages. Imagining a situation that is not

occurring now seems to be cognitively related to remembering a past sit-

uation which is similarly not occurring now. As Langacker (1991: Ch. 6)

observes, both involve an epistemic distance between the designated pro-

cess and the speaker. According to him, ‘‘instead of ‘present’ vs. ‘past’ we

can speak more generally of a proximal/distal contrast in the epistemic

sphere’’ (Langacker 1991: 245). As this contrast is usually referred to a

time-line mental model, the predication of immediate reality is commonlyinterpreted as one of present time and that of non-immediate reality as

one of past time (Langacker 1991: 246). In counterfactuals, by contrast,

the distal morpheme is interpreted as one of unreal circumstances.

220 G. Gomes

We should bear in mind that the verb forms described above are those

of the English language. The same counterfactual conditional structure

may be expressed in other languages with the aid of verb forms that do

not have the same properties as those used in English. For instance, in

German, the same verb form (Konjunktiv II) is used for both the ante-

cedent and the consequent. What is important, however, is that there are

verb forms for conditionals involving imaginary and unreal conditionsthat are di¤erent from those used in conditionals involving possibly real

conditions, such as the following one:

(4) If he was here yesterday, he certainly helped her.

Here there is no would in the consequent, and the indicative is used in

both the antecedent and the consequent. Conditionals of this sort are

called ‘‘indicative conditionals’’. Instead of he were, as in (1), we have

he was. It should be noted, however, that in contemporary English the

meaning of (1) may also be expressed by:

(5) If he was here today, he would certainly help her.

In older days this was considered incorrect, and some still consider it so,

but it is part of spoken and written language for many dialects of English.

Many would say that the verb in the antecedent of (5) is in the indicativemood. Yet, the fact that a verb form normally used for simple statements

about the past is here used for the present time—a past/present time

shift—may at least be considered as an equivalent of the past subjunctive.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (quoted in Edgington 1995: 240) gives the

following examples:

(6) If he heard, he gave no sign.

(7) If he heard, how angry he would be!

The first heard refers to the past, the second to the present. Accordingto Fowler’s, ‘‘the first heard is indicative, the second subjunctive’’. Others

would consider both as simple past indicative. It would be harder to

maintain that I were and he/she/it were also belong to the simple past

indicative.

2. The present subjunctive in English ‘‘indicative’’ conditionals

Consider now the following two examples, which are not counterfactual,since they involve possibly real conditions:

(8) If he is here tomorrow, he will certainly help her.

(9) If he be here tomorrow, he will certainly help her.

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 221

These say in relation to the future what (4) says in relation to the past.

However, while in (4) there is no time shift and no subjunctive, in (8) we

have a present/future time shift and in (9) a subjunctive.1 In (8), is, which

in simple statements is normally used in relation to the present, refers to

the future. (9) follows the regular form for this kind of conditional in

16th- and 17th-century English. For example:

(10) If he be not in love with some woman, there is no believing old signs.

(Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, Act III, Scene II)

(11) A commander of an army in chief, if he be not popular, shall not

be beloved, nor feared as he ought to be by his army (. . .) (Hobbes,Leviathan, Ch. XXX)

Here we have what is called the present subjunctive, by contrast with

the past subjunctive that we have seen in counterfactual conditionals.

This archaic form is still sometimes found in recent times:

(12) If it be your will [ . . . ], I will speak no more. (Song by Leonard

Cohen, 1984)

(13) I will be fine with you if you be good to me. (Song by Rick Astley,1988)

(14) . . . in general, this has a negligible e¤ect on the correlogram, but if

the grouping be very drastic, it is possible to introduce corrections

analogous to Sheppard’s corrections . . . (L. B. C. Cunningham and

W. R. B. Hynd, 1946)

(15) But right now those considerations—if we be at war—are secondary

to victory. (Victor Davis Hanson, in National Review Online, 23

October 2001)(16) And if we be robbers, how can we expect anything di¤erent from

our children? (Sermon by Rabbi Barry H. Block, 17 February

2006)

(17) ‘‘It would make it more important if that be the case,’’ he [Ralph

Nader] said yesterday. (New York Daily News, 5 February 2007)

This use of the present subjunctive in English conditionals has usually

been overlooked. Although rare now, it clearly infirms, for example, the

following statement by Bennett (2003: 11): ‘‘The conditionals that are

called ‘indicative’ under this proposal are indeed all in the indicative

mood (. . .).’’

The fact that ‘‘indicative’’ conditionals such as (9)–(17) use the sub-

junctive mood—though this use is now archaic—may be enough reasonto question the adequacy of the traditional terms ‘‘subjunctive’’ and ‘‘in-

dicative’’ for distinguishing these two classes of conditionals, even in En-

glish. The fact that the subjunctive mood is also used in many ‘‘indicative’’

222 G. Gomes

conditionals in Portuguese and in classical Spanish (see below) is an addi-

tional argument against this label.

The adequacy of classifying conditionals as indicative or subjunctive

has previously been questioned for the opposite reason. Thus Dudman

(1988) maintains that English counterfactuals use the indicative, not the

subjunctive mood, in spite of If I/he/she/it were. Bennett (2003: 11) also

states that ‘‘most and perhaps all of [subjunctive conditionals] are in theindicative mood also’’. To my mind, at least those with If I/he/she/it

were are undeniably in the subjunctive mood. In addition, the subjunctive

is also the rule in counterfactuals in other languages, such as German and

Spanish. An example in Spanish:

(18) Si el jefe estuviese/estuviera aqui no sucederıa

If the boss were here not would happen

eso.

this.

‘If the boss were here, this would not happen.’

(‘‘Estuviese/estuviera’’ are alternative forms of the past

subjunctive (‘‘preterito imperfecto de subjuntivo’’).)

My point against this nomenclature is not that most ‘‘subjunctives’’ in

English use the indicative, but rather that ‘‘indicatives’’ may have the

present subjunctive in English (If it be, etc.)—even if this is exceptional

in current English—and the future subjunctive in Portuguese and also inclassic Spanish. An example in classic Spanish:

(19) Si fuere a Mexico, visitare las

If go-1sg-fut sbj to Mexico, visit-1sg-fut ind thepiramides.

pyramids.

‘If I go to Mexico, I’ll visit the pyramids.’2

3. Three syntactical forms for conditionals in Portuguese

Let us now examine conditionals in Portuguese. (I will present the discus-

sion in a way that can be followed by those who have no knowledge ofPortuguese.)

(20) (I know that she is not Italian.)

Se ela fosse italiana, ela seria europeia.

If she were Italian, she would be European.(21) (I do not know whether she is Italian or not.)

Se ela for italiana, ela e europeia.

If she be-1sg-fut sbj Italian, she is European.

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 223

(22) (I know that she is Italian.)

Se ela e italiana, ela e europeia.

If she is Italian, she is European.

In Portuguese, there are three di¤erent forms of the verb in the ante-

cedent in these three cases: fosse—for—e. (20) has the Portuguese imper-

fect subjunctive (corresponding to past subjunctive in English) in the

antecedent: fosse (were). (‘‘If she were [fosse] Italian, she would beEuropean.’’) (21) has the Portuguese so-called future subjunctive in the

antecedent: for. (‘‘If she is [for] Italian [which is not certain], she is Euro-

pean.’’) (22) has the present indicative: e (is). (‘‘If she is [e] Italian [as we

know she is], she is European’’).

The use of the future subjunctive always implicates doubt. For in-

stance, if X tells Y that Maria has studied a lot, Y may respond:

(23) Se ela estiver cansada, e melhor parar.

If she be-1sg-fut sbj tired, is better to stop.

‘If she is tired, she had better stop.’

This implicates that, although she has studied a lot, she may be tired or

not. It also implicates that, if she is not tired, perhaps the best thing to do

is to go on studying (for example, because of her test tomorrow).

Now let us imagine a second situation, in which X told Y that Maria is

tired, because she has studied a lot. Y may respond:

(24) Se ela esta cansada, e melhor parar.

If she is tired, is better to stop.

‘If she is tired, she had better stop.’

Y could never use (23) in this situation. If he already knows that she is

tired, he would never use estiver, which implicates doubt. He must use the

present indicative esta. In the first situation, by contrast, some dialects of

Portuguese would use (24), but others would not (unless the speaker had

already concluded that she is tired, from the fact that she has studied a

lot).Thus, the Portuguese language has three grammatical forms for the

conditional, not just two. The one using the future subjunctive (or future

perfect subjunctive) in the antecedent, which is absent in English, French,

German and other languages, is usually a clear sign of doubt and is

not used when the antecedent is treated as certain. In English (among

other languages), the noncounterfactual conditional construction is usu-

ally used in situations involving uncertain conditions, but it can also be

used in those involving conditions accepted as facts, like (22).3 The threegrammatical forms present in Portuguese and the di¤erences in their use

suggest a distinction among three types of conditional sentences.

224 G. Gomes

4. Three types of conditional according to acceptance or as-if acceptance

of the antecedent

What should we call these three types of conditional? Those such as (1)–

(3), (5), (7) and (20), in which the speaker accepts or speaks as if she ac-

cepted that the antecedent is false or probably false, but imagines a situa-

tion in which it would be true, are often called counterfactual conditionals,

a traditional name that may be kept.4 I propose to call those such as (4),

(6), (8)–(17), (19), (21) and (23), in which the speaker is or pretends to beor speaks as if she were uncertain about the truth of the antecedent,

uncertain-fact conditionals. For those such as (22) and (24), in which the

speaker accepts or speaks as if she accepted that the antecedent is true, I

suggest the name accepted-fact conditionals.5

Thus, I suggest that we should prefer ‘‘counterfactual’’ to ‘‘subjunc-

tive’’ to refer to the first class, and that so-called ‘‘indicative’’ conditionals

should be divided in two classes: ‘‘uncertain-fact’’ conditionals and

‘‘accepted-fact’’ conditionals. This classification of conditionals based onthe acceptance or as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent needs to

be defended against objections that may be raised following two influen-

tial traditions in the philosophy of conditionals. First, several philoso-

phers have noted that counterfactuals are sometimes used in cases in

which the speaker believes the antecedent to be true. Second, it has been

argued that the di¤erence between counterfactual and indicative condi-

tionals is deeper than and not explained by the belief in or acceptance of

the truth of the antecedent. The first objection is discussed in the section 8and the second in section 9.

5. The distinction between accepted-fact and uncertain-fact conditionals

Further examples of uncertain-fact and accepted-fact conditionals are

given below. Suppose Johnny is trying to solve the following problem:

What is the value of x if x þ y ¼ 27 and x � y ¼ 9? He is a clever boy,

but he has never studied algebra. He thinks: ‘‘27 may be the result of add-ing several pairs of numbers. Let’s try one.’’

(25) If x is equal to 20, then y is equal to 7.

(26) And if x is equal to 20 and y is equal to 7, then x minus y is equal to

13.

‘‘But x � y ¼ 9. So x is not equal to 20.’’ After trying another pair of

numbers that add up to 27 and failing again, he decides to ask his older

sister for help. Then she teaches him:

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 225

(27) Look: x � y is equal to 9. And if x � y is equal to 9, then x is equal

to 9 þ y.

(28) Now, if x is equal to 9 þ y and x þ y is equal to 27, then 9 þ y þ y

is equal to 27.

From there she finds the solution.

The verb forms used in all these four conditionals in English are: is–is.If Johnny were thinking in Portuguese, (25) and (26) would typically have

the verb forms for–sera (future subjunctive–future indicative).6 This

would show that Johnny is just trying out numbers that may or may not

be the right ones. By contrast, his sister would use the verb forms e–e

(present indicative–present indicative) in (27) and (28), because she is

dealing with certainties. In (28), for example, she is certain that x is equal

to 9 þ y, because she deduced this (in (27)) from the second equation

of the problem. In (27) and (28) we have accepted–fact conditionals,with is–is in English and e–e in Portuguese. In (25) and (26) we have

uncertain-fact conditionals, with is–is in English and typically for–sera

in Portuguese.

We can see that the verb form used in the antecedent does not in

general allow one to make the distinction between accepted-fact and

uncertain-fact conditionals in English. In Portuguese, the use of the future

subjunctive (or future perfect subjunctive) indicates an uncertain-fact con-

ditional, but indicative forms may be used in both types.The question then arises whether the conventional meaning of the con-

ditional construction is di¤erent or the same in accepted-fact conditionals

as compared to what it is in uncertain-fact conditionals. Let us consider

English conditionals without ‘‘would’’ in the consequent. One could ar-

gue that the default interpretation of the antecedent of such conditionals

is that it refers to an uncertain fact and that, in certain cases, additional

information may override this default interpretation, so that their ante-

cedent is understood as referring to an accepted fact. Alternatively, onecould argue that the meaning of the conditional construction does not

include anything about the antecedent referring to an accepted fact or

to an uncertain fact. In other words, one may ask whether the condi-

tional construction in these cases is ambiguous or vague as regards the

uncertain-fact/accepted-fact contrast.7

This is a di‰cult question, but there is an argument that favours the

ambiguity thesis. This is the fact that if can usually be paraphrased with

in case or supposing in uncertain-fact conditionals (but not in accepted-fact conditionals) and by since or given that in accepted-fact conditionals

(but not in uncertain-fact conditionals). This points to a di¤erence in the

meaning of if in each type of conditional. In an accepted-fact conditional,

226 G. Gomes

the meaning of if is similar to the meaning of since or given that, while in

uncertain-fact conditionals it is similar to the meaning of in case or sup-

posing. (This may be compared to the two meanings of while, a word

that may either mean whereas or during the time that.)

Note that I am not claiming that if, as used in uncertain-fact and in

accepted-fact conditionals, is synonymous with in case (or supposing)

and with since (or given that), respectively, but only that their meaningsare usually similar enough to allow the respective paraphrases. However,

this di¤erential possibility of paraphrasing accepted-fact and uncertain-

fact conditionals is a linguistic fact that indicates a di¤erence in the mean-

ing of the conditional construction in these two types.

For example,

(29) If you don’t want me here, (then) I’ll leave.

may either mean something similar to

(30) In case you don’t want me here, (then) I’ll leave.

or something similar to

(31) Since you don’t want me here, (then) I’ll leave.

Example (29) could be used either by someone who is considering thehypothesis of being unwanted to be there ( just as (30)) or by someone

who has had clear evidence that she is really unwanted to be there ( just

as (31)). It will be an uncertain-fact conditional in the first case and an

accepted-fact conditional in the second.

Suppose the following isolated sentence is overheard in an airport:

(32) If your flight is late, you’ll miss your connection.

Two interpretations are possible: (1) There is a possibility of your flight

being late and, in that case, you’ll miss your connection; (2) Your flightis late and consequently you’ll miss your connection. Excluding any influ-

ence of special intonation or facial expression, the conditional construc-

tion itself might favour the first interpretation. However, special circum-

stances might favour the second. Suppose that this takes place in a small

airport with only one scheduled departure in the next three hours and

that the person who hears the sentence knows that this departure is de-

layed. She may then think that the addressee is taking this flight and that

the speaker is referring to the known fact that it is late. My point is thatthe hearer cannot fail to interpret the sentence one way or the other (or

even consider both alternatives). According to the first interpretation, the

sentence could be paraphrased as ‘‘In case your flight is late, you’ll miss

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 227

your connection’’ or ‘‘Supposing your flight is late, you’ll miss your con-

nection’’. According to the second, it could be paraphrased as ‘‘Since

your flight is late, you’ll miss your connection’’ or ‘‘Given that your flight

is late, you’ll miss your connection’’.

Many conditionals in Portuguese are also ambiguous as concerns the

uncertain-fact/accepted-fact distinction, as the following example:

(33) Se ele foi contratado, vamos primeiro ver o

If he was hired, go-1pl imp first see the

trabalho dele para depois criticar.

work of him for after criticize.‘If he was hired, let’s first see his work and then criticize it.’

The sentence could be used either by one who thinks that the man was

hired or by one who is merely considering the hypothesis that he was.8 As

in English, however, di¤erent paraphrases for se [if] would be possible ineach case. If (33) is meant as an accepted-fact conditional, se could be

paraphrased with ja que [since] or dado que [given that], but not with

caso [in case] or supondo que [supposing]. If it is meant as an uncertain-

fact conditional, se could be paraphrased with caso or supondo que (in

which case the verb tense would have to be changed to the past perfect

subjunctive: ‘‘Caso ele tenha sido contratado, . . .’’ or ‘‘Supondo que ele

tenha sido contratado, . . .’’) but not with ja que or dado que.

6. Comparison with other proposed distinctions

My distinction has nothing to do with the thesis of Dudman (1984, 1989)

according to which indicatives should be divided in two classes according

to the presence or absence of a time-shift (and that those presenting

a time shift should be classified in the same group as counterfactuals).

To my mind, the presence of a present/future time shift is undoubtedly

significant, since it is a sure sign of an uncertain-fact conditional. (Noaccepted-fact conditional has a time shift.) However, there are many

uncertain-fact conditionals that do not have a time shift. For example,

when the antecedent refers to the past, as in (4), there is no time shift.

Thomason and Gupta (1980: 299) give an example in which the present

tense in the antecedent may refer to the present, thus without a time shift:

If he loves her, he will marry her.

Haegeman (2003) proposed a distinction between two types of indica-

tive conditionals that is also di¤erent from that between uncertain-fact and accepted-fact conditionals: the distinction between premise-

conditionals and event-conditionals. According to her, the conditional

clause in event-conditionals ‘‘structures the event’’: it expresses an event

228 G. Gomes

which will lead to the main clause event. In premise-conditionals, by con-

trast, the conditional clause ‘‘structures the discourse’’: it expresses a

premise leading to the matrix clause (Haegeman 2003: 318–19).

As it happens, almost all of her examples of premise-conditionals are

accepted-fact conditionals or may be interpreted as such. Here is one:

(34) John won’t finish on time, if there’s (already) such a lot of pressure

on him now. (Haegeman 2003: 322)

The speaker here clearly accepts that there is a lot of pressure onJohn. However, the following example, also classified by the author as a

premise-conditional, is an uncertain-fact conditional:

(35) If his children aren’t in the garden, John will already have left home

(. . .). (Haegeman 2003: 325)

The speaker now seems uncertain about whether John’s children are still

in the garden or not. So we see that Haegeman’s distinction does not

coincide with mine.

In fact, I do not find the distinction between event- and premise-

conditionals very clear. In (34), classified as a premise-conditional, we

could also say that the event expressed by the conditional clause willlead to the main clause event, which is how Haegeman characterizes

event-conditionals.

Edgington (2003) also found di‰culties with Haegeman’s distinction.

She stresses the following two characteristics of event-conditionals as dis-

cussed by Haegeman: a causal relation between the conditional clause

and the main clause, and ‘‘tense oddity’’ (what I have called a present/

future time shift). And she concludes:

Given that there can be tense oddity and no causation running from conditional

to main clause, and vice versa, I am left somewhat uncertain about where to draw

the line between event-conditionals and the rest (Edgington 2003: 396).

Haegeman states that event-conditionals may be clefted and premise-

conditionals may not. (A conditional of the form ‘‘A only if B’’ is said to

be clefted when it is transformed to one of the form ‘‘It is only if B that

A’’.) For example, we cannot say:

(36) *It is only if there is already such a lot of pressure on him now, that

John will finish the book. (Haegeman 2003: 323)

Edgington remarks that without the word such this example would be

in order. She notes that the role of such here is to suggest that ‘‘the

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 229

speaker already knows that there is all this pressure on John now’’. She

considers that conditionals in which the premise is really accepted by the

speaker are ‘‘marginal and untypical’’ and notes that ‘‘while this is not

part of Haegeman’s o‰cial doctrine of premise-conditionals ( . . . ) quite

a few of her examples are of this kind’’ (Edgington 2003: 397). Such con-

ditionals are precisely my accepted-fact conditionals.

Other authors have also proposed distinctions between types of indica-tive conditionals that do not coincide with the one I am arguing for. Eve

Sweetser, for example, makes a distinction between content conditionals,

in which ‘‘the realization of the event or state of a¤airs described in the

protasis is a su‰cient condition for the realization of the event or state

of a¤airs described in the apodosis’’ (Sweetser 1990: 114), and epistemic

conditionals, in which ‘‘knowledge of the truth of the hypothetical premise

expressed in the protasis would be a su‰cient condition for concluding

the truth of the proposition expressed in the apodosis’’ (Sweetser 1990:116). Both may either be uncertain-fact conditionals or accepted-fact

conditionals. Incidentally, it may be noted that an example such as (4)

(If he was here yesterday, he certainly helped her) fits both of Sweetser’s

categories.9

7. Features and uses of accepted-fact conditionals

Accepted-fact conditionals are no doubt much rarer than those of thetwo other types. In chapters 1–8 (part 1) of Hobbes’s Leviathan, I found

only one accepted-fact conditional against 41 uncertain-fact and 11

counterfactual conditionals. In chapters 1–6 of Portrait of a Lady, by

Henry James, I also found only one accepted-fact conditional against 17

uncertain-fact and 9 counterfactual conditionals. In Portuguese, a search

in Contos Fluminenses by Machado de Assis revealed 6 accepted-fact con-

ditionals against 31 uncertain-fact and 16 counterfactual conditionals.

(Atypical conditionals as defined elsewhere (Gomes 2007) and discussedin section 10 were excluded from these counts. The search involved only

conditionals with if in English or se in Portuguese.)

One might ask why people would use a conditional if they are certain

about the antecedent. They may do so to draw a conclusion from a

known fact or an accepted premise. Examples are Johnny’s sister’s sen-

tences (27) and (28). Another example is the following (in a context in

which the speaker had a life-threatening illness):

(37) If I’m alive, (it’s because) my doctors did a good job.

Dudman (1986) quotes two other good examples of what I call

accepted-fact conditionals:

230 G. Gomes

(38) If it had not been possible to stop, or even delay, the Japanese up

country with the help of prepared defences and relatively fresh

troops, it was improbable that they would be stopped now at the

gates of the city (J. G. Farrell 1978).

(39) If they weren’t my doing, and they weren’t, then I couldn’t control

their appearance or disappearance (Donald E. Westlake 1974).

In accepted-fact conditionals (as noted earlier), if (or if . . . then) may

often be paraphrased with since or given that with little change in mean-

ing, as for example in (38). This may lead one to question whether

accepted-fact conditionals are in fact conditionals (see Bennett 2003: 5).

I will argue that they are, for four reasons. First (most obviously), they

share the same overall linguistic structure with other conditionals. Theyuse the same conjunctions (if; if . . . then), the same pattern for building

the compound sentence and the same or similar intonation and prosody

in speech. They may have di¤erent verb forms, but counterfactuals also

do and this does not prevent us from considering them as conditionals.

From a grammatical point of view, there is no reason not to consider

them as conditionals.

Second, they usually share many basic logical and cognitive properties

with the other two types of conditionals. All three types are often used tomake inferences. They may be used to draw a conclusion, based on regu-

larity or on logical necessity, or to indicate this regularity or logical neces-

sity itself. They may all be used to make a prediction, dependent on some

condition. They may also be used to indicate the subject’s intention to do

something in the future, conditional on a certain circumstance.

Third, though in accepted-fact conditionals since can often be used to

paraphrase if, this does not show that their subclause is merely a reason

clause. This is shown by the fact that many since-clauses cannot be para-phrased with if-clauses. For example: Since she was not there, I went

away. The subclause here is not meant as conditional and consequently

we cannot say: *If she was not there, I went away. Thus, the subclause in

accepted-fact conditionals is not merely an adverbial clause of reason (or

cause), as might be thought from the possibility of paraphrasing if with

since, but a real conditional adverbial clause.

Fourth, accepted-fact conditionals may in many cases supply an ade-

quate contrapositive for counterfactual conditionals. For example:

(40) If she were Italian, she would be European.

(41) If she isn’t European, she isn’t Italian.

Within a context that gives reason to state (40), (41) is an accepted-fact

conditional, since in fact we know that she is neither European nor

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 231

Italian. If we did not, we would not assert the counterfactual (40). Other

examples:

(42) If it had rained, the road would be wet.

(43) If (as is indeed the case) the road isn’t wet, it hasn’t rained.

(44) If she were very ill, she would be in bed.

(45) If (as is indeed the case) she is not in bed, she is not very ill.

The phrase as is indeed the case was included in parentheses in (43) and

(45) to make clear that these are intended as accepted-fact conditionals.

It could be omitted in a suitable context. In many dialects of Portuguese,

we would not need to include the corresponding phrase, since the verb

form (present indicative) would already implicate that. (If we had been

in doubt, we would have used the future subjunctive.)

Although quite rare, accepted-fact conditionals should be recognized

and distinguished from other ‘‘indicative’’ conditionals. They are the con-ditionals that are really indicative, since they involve conditions that the

speaker considers (or acts as if she considered) to be real. The others deal

with uncertain conditions, and in some cases this is reflected in the use of

a time shift in English (and other languages) and of the future subjunctive

in Portuguese and classic Spanish.

8. Acceptance and as-if acceptance

In rare cases, a counterfactual is employed even though the speaker does

not really accept the antecedent as false. Anderson (1951) gives the fol-

lowing example:

(46) If he had taken arsenic, he would have shown just these symptoms

[those which he in fact shows].

Note, however, that this example could have been used as a usual

counterfactual, in a situation where the speaker believes the antecedentto be false. Suppose that there is another medical condition that presents

the same symptoms as arsenic poisoning and that the result of a special

test has shown that the patient has that medical condition. The sentence

would then be just a comment on the similarity of symptoms. Alterna-

tively, the counterfactual could have been used to convey that the speaker

finds it highly improbable that the man has taken arsenic, and that he is

perplexed by the similarity between his symptoms and those of arsenic

poisoning.If the sentence is used in a situation where the speaker believes the an-

tecedent to be true (the possibility that the example is intended to show),

we should first ask why the speaker would have chosen to use it, instead

232 G. Gomes

of saying something simpler as, for example: He shows symptoms of arse-

nic poisoning. It seems that the latter would be a clear suggestion that the

man has taken arsenic, and that making such a direct suggestion is pre-

cisely what the speaker is trying to avoid in (46). Here is where an as-if

acceptance of the falsity of the antecedent can be identified. The speaker

acts as if she was making a default assumption that the man has not

taken arsenic, but remarks that, had he done so, he would have shownjust the symptoms he in fact shows. It is a euphemistic way of suggesting

that he has indeed taken arsenic.

An uncertain-fact conditional could have been used to make the same

point in a simpler (though not as euphemistic) way:

(47) If one takes arsenic, one shows just these symptoms [which he

shows].

Edgington (1995: 240) gives another example:

(48) People in line are picking up their bags and inching forward—and

that’s what they would be doing if a bus were coming.

It would seemingly be more natural to say: and that’s what they usually

do if a bus is coming. The counterfactual here seems to be a more elabo-

rate way of saying the same thing. It is as if the speaker were saying

something like: ‘‘First let’s assume that no bus is coming, since we cannot

see one from here. Then let’s imagine a situation that we’ll treat as unrealin which a bus is coming. What would people do in this situation? They

would pick up their bags and inch forward. Now, what are they doing

now? They are picking up their bags and inching forward. So let’s revise

our initial assumption and conclude that a bus is probably coming.’’

Again, the speaker seems to provisionally act as if she accepted that the

situation described in the antecedent is unreal. It is a way of avoiding

commitment to the hypothesis that a bus is coming.

As noted earlier, the falsity of the antecedent in counterfactuals is usu-ally considered to be conversationally implicated rather than asserted

(Anderson 1951; Stalnaker 1975; Iatridou 2000), since a subsequent sen-

tence may assert it without redundancy or cancel it without contradiction.

The same applies to the truth of the antecedent in accepted-fact condi-

tionals, as shown in the following example by Sweetser (1990: 128):

(49) Well, if (as you say) he had lasagne for lunch, he won’t want spa-

ghetti for dinner. But I don’t believe he had lasagne for lunch.

Declerck and Reed (2001: 45) have also shown that there are cases in

which the antecedent is accepted only to be challenged by a question in

the consequent.

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 233

It is thus clear that in special cases an accepted-fact conditional may be

used even though the antecedent is not in fact accepted as true. In such

cases, however, an as-if acceptance is always the reason for using this

type of conditional. Suppose someone believes that the other person is

lying and this is why he is nervous. She says:

(50) If you are not lying, there is no reason to be nervous.

This may be seen as an ironic (or cautious) equivalent of:

(51) If you were not lying, there would be no reason to be nervous.

Pretended belief or a provisional strategic acceptance of the antecedent

is again the explanation. In (50) the speaker acts as if she accepted as a

fact that he is not lying, when in fact she believes he is. The utterance

seems to function as a reductio ad absurdum. If the addressee is not lying,

there is no reason to be nervous and a person does not get nervous whenthere is no reason to be nervous. But the addressee is nervous, so it is not

true that he is not lying. The feigned belief in the truth of the antecedent

(achieved by giving it the form of an accepted-fact conditional) is pre-

cisely what makes the sentence ironic, since the speaker is suggesting

something (the fact that the addressee is lying) which is the opposite of

the natural implicature of the sentence (which could be accepted if in

fact the addressee were not nervous).

The antecedents of some accepted-fact conditionals are said to be‘‘echoic’’, since they repeat something that has previously been stated by

the interlocutor. It has been noted (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Dancygier

1998) that in such cases the speaker does not necessarily share the belief

in the assumption echoed. However, she certainly acts as if she shared

that belief. She manifests at least a provisional acceptance—which may

be ironic or not—of the content of the antecedent.

An uncertain-fact conditional may also be used instead of a counterfac-

tual for irony. Instead of saying that since he is not Superman he will notbe able to do it, one might say:

(52) If he is Superman, he will be able to do it.

In saying this, one acts as if one considered his being Superman as an un-

certain fact, while in fact one believes it to be false.

9. Degree of acceptance or as-if acceptance of the antecedent as a basis

for distinguishing the three types of conditionals

I will now argue that the speaker’s degree of acceptance or as-if accep-

tance of the reality or probability of the condition described in the

234 G. Gomes

antecedent is su‰cient for explaining the di¤erence between the three

types of conditionals. Consider a situation in which three people saw a

man kill John. X is uncertain whether this man was Oswald or not and

says:

(53) If Oswald wasn’t the one who killed John, then someone else was.

Y is sure that the man was not Oswald and says:

(54) If Oswald wasn’t the one who killed John (as in fact he wasn’t), then

someone else was.

Z is sure that the man was Oswald and says:

(55) If Oswald had not been the one who killed John, then someone else

would have been the one who killed him.

Though these three sentences sound unnatural, they are grammaticaland make sense. They could certainly be replaced by simpler ones, but

they were chosen on purpose to have a parallel formulation in the three

cases and at the same time avoid di¤erent contextual assumptions that

would be induced by a simpler wording (see Fogelin 1998).

The only di¤erence between the three is the belief that the speaker has

concerning the truth of the antecedent (and that of the consequent, as a

result). Y believes it is true, Z believes it is false and X is uncertain about

it.10 If they did not have these respective beliefs, at least they would beimplicating acceptance of, non-acceptance of and uncertainty about the

truth of the antecedent, respectively.

We have a di¤erent situation in the following famous pair of examples

(from Lewis 1973: 3, based on Adams 1970):

(56) If Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, then someone else did.

(57) If Oswald hadn’t killed Kennedy, then someone else would have.

The person asserting (56) implicates that she is uncertain and the oneasserting (57) implicates that she is certain about Oswald having killed

Kennedy. As Fogelin (1998) has shown, however, in addition to the dif-

ferent degree of acceptance concerning the truth of the antecedent, each

conditional involves di¤erent contextual assumptions. Thus, they are in-

terpreted di¤erently by the listener and they would be asserted by people

wanting to communicate di¤erent thoughts. One believes that Kennedy

was bound to be killed; the other is merely concerned with the identity

of the killer.Pairs of examples such as this (first suggested by Adams 1970), have

been considered by Lewis (1973) and many others after him as evidence

that the di¤erence between indicative and subjunctive conditionals cannot

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 235

be explained by the speaker’s opinion about or acceptance of the truth of

the antecedent. However, I am in complete agreement with Fogelin

(1998) in attributing any further di¤erence to the contextual setting. He

shows that the disparity in the reasons for believing each conditional sim-

ply disappears when the relevant contextual features are held constant.

This is obtained by changing the wording of the sentences, as in (53) and

(55).11 (I have merely added (54) to complete the picture of the threetypes.)

Counterfactuals are thus used when the speaker accepts or speaks as

if she somehow accepted that the antecedent is false or highly improba-

ble; uncertain-fact conditionals are used when the speaker accepts or

speaks as if she somehow accepted that the antecedent is uncertain; and

accepted-fact conditionals are those used when the speaker accepts or

speaks as if she somehow accepted that the antecedent is true or highly

probable.

10. Atypical conditionals

I have distinguished three types of conditionals. This is not to say that ev-

ery conditional should fall into one of these types. There are also some

deviant ones, which I call atypical conditionals. (I have elsewhere pro-

posed a definition and an explanation of atypical conditionals (Gomes

2007). For instance (from Edgington 1995: 240):

(58) If he took arsenic, he’s showing no signs.

The person who says so probably believes the antecedent is false and

could have said:

(59) If he had taken arsenic, he would be showing signs of arsenic

poisoning—but he isn’t.

At least she is uncertain about it and could have said:

(60) If he took arsenic, signs of arsenic poisoning are expected—but he’s

showing no such signs.

Example (59) includes a typical counterfactual and (60) a typical

uncertain-fact conditional—and they also include a comment with but

after these conditionals, to convey the meaning of the atypical (58).

11. Conclusion

An examination of conditionals in English and Portuguese has thus led

us to distinguish three types of conditionals instead of the usual two

236 G. Gomes

(indicative and subjunctive). The labels ‘‘indicative’’ and ‘‘subjunctive’’

were found inadequate, since subjunctive verb forms may be found in ‘‘in-

dicative’’ conditionals (in the archaic use of the present subjunctive in En-

glish and of the future subjunctive in classical Spanish, and in the current

use of the future subjunctive in Portuguese). Moreover, so-called indica-

tive conditionals comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact

conditionals and the quite rare accepted-fact conditionals.Uncertain-fact conditionals may have a time shift in contemporary

English and the future subjunctive in Portuguese (though not all of

them do). Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features. Al-

though accepted-fact conditionals are rare, I have argued that they are

genuine conditionals, which have the theoretically important function

of providing a contrapositive for many counterfactuals (when a contra-

positive is valid). When the verb forms used do not permit the identifi-

cation of an accepted-fact conditional, it may be recognized by thepossibility of adding ‘‘(as is indeed the case)’’, ‘‘(as you say)’’ or ‘‘(as X

says)’’ after if, or by the possibility of paraphrasing if with since or given

that.

I have argued that the degree of real or as-if acceptance by the

speaker of the truth of the proposition expressed by the antecedent is

su‰cient to explain the di¤erential use of these three types (and that

further di¤erences are accidental and due to contextual features). The

task of establishing common or di¤erent truth conditions for them maybe considered as a subsequent one, which is outside the scope of this

paper.

Received 14 May 2007 Universidade Estadual do

Revision received 15 December 2007 Norte Fluminense, Brasil

Notes

* Laboratory of Cognition and Language, Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense,

Campos, RJ, Brazil. E-mail: 3ggomes@uenf.br4.

1. Interestingly, Gibbard (1980) considers conditionals in which there is a present/future

time shift as ‘‘grammatically subjunctive’’.

2. The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: 1, 3—first, third person; sg—

singular; fut—future; sbj—subjunctive; ind—indicative; imp—imperative; perf—

perfect.

3. Although I have emphasized in section 2 that there is an archaic use of the present sub-

junctive in ‘‘indicative’’ conditionals in English (which questions the adequacy of this

label), I am not claiming that this use is preferentially associated with a type of condi-

tional, as the future subjunctive is in Portuguese.

4. Against the term ‘‘counterfactual’’, Bennett (2003: 12) remarks that it may be consid-

ered as ‘‘based on a feature that has nothing to do with the antecedent’s being

Three types of conditionals in English and Portuguese 237

contrary-to-fact, but only with the speaker’s thinking that it is so’’. However, I do

not think that this is really a problem. The label’s reference to the speaker’s opinion

may easily be considered as implicit: a conditional will be called counterfactual when

the speaker accepts or speaks as if she accepted that the antecedent is (or probably is)

contrary-to-fact.

5. Following Auwera (1986), Comrie (1986) and Bhatt and Pancheva (2006), among

others, one might call such conditionals factual conditionals. However, the term has

already been used in relation to uncertain-fact conditionals that express habitual or

general facts. Moreover, ‘‘accepted-fact’’ shows that the speaker may merely be treat-

ing the antecedent as true, without in fact committing herself to its truth.

6. Though they might also have e–e (present indicative–present indicative).

7. I am indebted to the Editor for this observation.

8. However, the use of the indicative seems to favour the accepted-fact interpretation.

Using the future perfect subjunctive, this could be framed unambiguously as an

uncertain-fact conditional:

Se ele tiver sido contratado, vamos primeiro ver o

If he be-1sg-fut perf sbj hired, go-1pl-imp first see the

trabalho dele para depois criticar.

work of him for after criticize.

‘If he was hired, let’s first see his work and then criticize it.’

9. This accords with the following observation by Dancygier and Sweetser (2005: 17):

‘‘Since reasoning from cause to likely e¤ect is just as possible as reasoning from e¤ect

to likely cause, epistemic conditionals can also follow the direction of content causal

contingency.’’

10. In Portuguese, a di¤erent verb form could have been used in each: (56) Se nao tiver sido

. . . (57) Se nao foi . . . (58) Se nao tivesse sido . . .

11. The context of (57) is fixed by changing the pair to: If Oswald did not kill Kennedy, then

someone else stepped in and did. If Oswald had not killed Kennedy, then someone else

would have stepped in and killed him (Fogelin 1998). The first sentence might have

been used by a conspirator who was unsure whether Oswald had succeeded in killing

Kennedy. That (56) might be used in a context similar to that of (57) had already

been pointed out by Bennett (1995: 334–5). The same conspirator having the same

beliefs concerning the presence of someone prepared to step in if Oswald failed might

utter (56) before knowing that Oswald had succeeded and (57) after knowing that he

had. By contrast, the context of (56) is fixed by using wordings similar to those of (53)

and (55) (Fogelin 1998).

References

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240 G. Gomes

Much mouth much tongue:Chinese metonymies and metaphors

of verbal behaviour

ZHUO JING-SCHMIDT

Abstract

This paper explores metonymical and metaphorical expressions of verbal

behaviour in Chinese. While metonymy features prominently in some of

these expressions and metaphor in others, the entire dataset can be best

viewed as spanning the metonymy-metaphor-continuum. That is, we observe

a gradation of conceptual distance between the source and target which cor-

responds to the gradation of figurativity. Specifically, roughly half of the

expressions we encounter are based on the ORGAN OF SPEECH ARTICULATION

FOR SPEECH metonymy and can be considered as clustering around the met-

onymic pole. The other half can be seen as tending towards the metaphoric

pole, as they are largely motivated by conceptual metaphors: (a) VERBAL

BEHAVIOUR IS PHYSICAL ACTION, (b) SPEECH IS CONTAINER, (c) ARGUMENT

IS WAR (or WORDS ARE WEAPONS) and (d) WORDS ARE FOOD. The interac-

tion between metonymy and metaphor is an important cognitive strategy in

the conceptualisation of verbal behaviour. The findings (i) evidence the gra-

dient predictability of idiom meanings based on semantic compositionality,

(ii) confirm the hypothesis of a bodily and experiential basis of cognition,

(iii) suggest the existence of culture-specific models in the utilization of ba-

sic experiences, and (iv) point to the role of emotion in the metaphorisation

of verbal behaviour as a socio-emotional domain.

Keywords: Chinese; verbal behaviour; metaphor; metonymy; embodi-

ment; emotion.

1. Introduction

Since Lako¤ and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By (1980), many

cognitive linguistic studies have been conducted on conceptual metaphor

and metonymy as evidence of the embodiment of human cognition (e.g.,

Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008), 241–282

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.010

0936–5907/08/0019–0241

6 Walter de Gruyter

Lako¤ and Johnson 1999; Lako¤ 1987; Johnson 1987; Kovecses 2005, in-

ter alios). This line of research has corrected the long-held misconception

of metaphor and metonymy as mere rhetoric devices. They are, as we

now know, the fundamental components of our cognitive behaviour as

well as an integral part of our socio-cultural practice (Kovecses 2005:

8–9).

Within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor is under-stood as the conceptualisation of an abstract or, to use Kovecses’ word,

‘‘intangible’’, domain in terms of a basic, usually physical and tangible,

domain (Lako¤ and Johnson 1980; Kovecses 2005; Langacker 1987).

The former is known as the target domain and the latter the source. Met-

aphor is not only functionally expressive and interactional, it is also

conceptually constitutive, as Kovecses (1999) has argued. For example,

according to Lako¤ and Johnson, underlying the utterance I’m on top of

the world! is the happiness is up metaphor. This metaphor not only en-ables us to understand and express the emotion of happiness in terms of

the spatial relationship encoded in up. More fundamentally, it enables us

to understand and to express how it feels to be happy at all.

Metonymy, on the other hand, is understood as the process whereby a

certain aspect of a given domain provides mental access to another aspect

of the same domain or, as Croft (2002) points out, a subdomain is

mapped into another subdomain within the same domain matrix. For ex-

ample, the question Have you read Goethe? makes little sense unless thename of the writer is taken to refer to, and, more importantly, to provide

conceptual access to, the literary works produced by the writer. Thus,

metonymy is functionally a conceptual access mechanism (Kovecses and

Radden 1998).

Given the distinct functions of metaphor and metonymy, it might ap-

pear that the two processes would be two distinct mental strategies in

their respective prototypical instantiations. In real linguistic conceptual-

isations, however, metaphor and metonymy are hard to separate. Goos-sens (2002) describes a number of di¤erent forms in which metaphor and

metonymy interact in British English expressions of verbal behaviour. He

coined the term ‘‘metaphtonymy’’ to refer to the intertwinement of the

two processes. Barcelona (2000) argues that metaphor and metonymy

are inseparable not only at the level of combined uses, but, more funda-

mentally, at the conceptual level. He points out that metonymy enables

metaphorical mapping by ‘‘recognising’’ the abstract structural similarity

between the source domain and the target domain. Because of the intimaterelationship between the two processes, metaphor and metonymy are

increasingly being regarded as constituting a continuum rather than a bi-

nary distinction. Dirven (2002) contends that the metaphor-metonymy

242 Z. Jing-Schmidt

continuum can be understood as a gradation between conceptual close-

ness and conceptual distance, which explains the varying degrees of figu-

rativity as seen in metaphor and di¤erent types of metonymy.

Having outlined the basic tenets of Cognitive Linguistics regarding

conceptual metaphor and metonymy, a brief reference to Conceptual

Blending is in order because of its immediate relevancy to the Theory of

Conceptual Metaphor in terms of Lako¤ and Johnson. It should be notedthat Lako¤ and Johnson (1980: 147–148) have explicitly argued that the

metaphorical mapping creates similarities between the source domain and

the target, similarities that ‘‘do not exist independently of the metaphor’’.

The recognition of a ‘‘creation’’ of similarities alone, however, is insu‰-

cient for the construction of a distinct novel meaning, at least with respect

to certain metaphors. Critically, the novelty of the constructed meaning

seems to resist explanation based on a two-domain mapping. This point

has been stressed by a number of cognitive linguists in view of thestrengths of the four-space model known as mental integration or blend-

ing in the sense of Turner and Fauconnier (1995) and Fauconnier and

Turner (2002). Grady et al. (1999), for instance, argue that blending de-

velops ‘‘emergent content’’ as a result of experiential incongruity. Such

incongruity gives rise to, and thus accounts for, connotations that are

otherwise not inferable from the input. A famous example is the surgeonas butcher metaphor. The sense of incompetence behind this metaphor,

Grady et al. (1999: 103–106) argue, results from the contradiction be-tween helping and healing as the surgeon’s presumable goal, and butch-

ery as the means being named. Croft and Cruise (2004: 203–204), Ko-

vecses (2005: 268), and Evans and Green (2006: 403–404), among other

scholars, also acknowledge the relative mental complexity and conceptual

richness made explicit by the blending model. In the present paper, the

reader will also encounter particular cases that call for the notion of

blending as an adequate complement to the main model being adopted

here, namely the metaphor-metonymy-interaction model. Accordingly,applicability of the blending model will be pointed out in the analysis of

such cases.

Cognitively oriented studies of figuration in the Chinese language have

made significant contributions to our awareness and appreciation of

culture-specific as well as universal patterns of conceptualisation. For ex-

ample, Kornacki (2001) shows that metaphors and metonymies are among

the driving mechanisms of Chinese concepts of anger. Ye (2001) presents

metaphors and metonymies in the conception of sadness in Chinese. Mostconspicuously, Yu’s numerous analyses of metaphors and metonymies

demonstrate how di¤erent body-part terms are employed for the con-

ceptualisation of various abstract experiences including emotion, social

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 243

dignity, control, and thought (Yu 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b). The

present study is aimed to continue the cognitive linguistic e¤ort to expli-

cate the conceptual mechanisms by which humans make sense of complex

and abstract experiences. Specifically, I focus on Chinese lexical com-

pounds and idiomatic expressions that metonymically and/or metaphori-

cally conceptualise verbal behaviour. In short, I study the figuration in

the Chinese language about language.1

Verbal behaviour generally refers to the use of language for social pur-

poses. In this general sense, it includes instantaneous linguistic actions

as well as stable dispositions that characterise persons in relation to the

use of language. To the extent that the physical production of language

(speech) is based on species-specific physiology, verbal behaviour has its

universal biological basis and is subjected to physiological constraints.

Consequently, body-parts that conspicuously participate in the articula-

tion of speech sounds constitute an important source from which the con-ception of verbal behaviour derives by way of metonymy. In Chinese,

about 50 compounds and idioms describing verbal behaviour involve one

or more salient speech organs including the mouth (zui or kou), the tongue

(she), the lips (chun) and the teeth (chi or ya). To illustrate the role played

by body-part related metonymies in the conception of verbal behaviour,

consider the compounds (1a, b), the idiom (1c), and their uses in (2)2:

(1) a. zui-ying (mouth-hard) ‘verbally stubborn, unwilling to admit an

obvious mistake’

b. zui-tian (mouth-sweet) ‘marked by a readiness to utter flattering

words’

c. duo-zui-duo-she (much-mouth-much tongue) ‘marked by the an-noying tendency to make unsolicited remarks or general verbal

indiscretion’

(2) a. women zuo-de bu hao, dei chengren, buyao zui-ying.

1PL do-RES not-good, must admit, not-want mouth-hard‘We are not doing well, we have to admit it, and shouldn’t be

too stubborn to admit it.’

b. zhe ren suiran benshi bu da, danshi zui-tian.

this person though ability not big, but mouth-sweet

‘Although this person doesn’t have great abilities, he’s good at

flattering.’

c. dajia dou bu yanyu, pian ni duo-zui-duo-she, you ni shenme shi a?

everyone all not speak, just 2SG much-mouth-much-tongue,have 2SG what matter Q

‘All were silent, only you couldn’t spare your mouth and

tongue. It was none of your business!’

244 Z. Jing-Schmidt

Here, by means of a metonymical mapping, the body-parts zui ‘mouth’

and she ‘tongue’ define the conceptual space in which to understand the

meanings of the respective expressions as the space of verbal behaviour.

However, structurally simple as they are, the items in (1) cannot be ana-

lysed as simply metonymic. Rather, the juxtaposition of the body-parts

with the adjectives describing palpable properties indicates the interaction

between metonymy and metaphor. To be specific, ying ‘hard’, tian ‘sweet’and duo ‘much’ are metaphorical because literally they describe texture

and taste in the sensual domain and quantity in the physical domain, re-

spectively. Thus, the three expressions represent an embedment of meta-

phor in metonymy in the conception of ‘verbal stubbornness’, ‘verbal do-

cility’, and ‘verbal indiscretion’, respectively. It is crucial to note that the

properties described by ying, tian and duo are in no way objective and in-

herent to the entities being described. To the contrary, they express how

people feel about certain verbal behaviours, thus reflecting people’s inter-action with their environment including both physical objects and ab-

stract phenomena. That is to say, they are interactional in the sense of

Lako¤ (1987: 51).

The idea of interactional properties of reality, however, has long been

well-known and widely acknowledged in cognitive psychology. Church

(1961: xii), for instance, points out that ‘‘human knowledge has an inevi-

table component of ambiguity, since we repeatedly discover that proper-

ties found in reality are in fact reflections of ourselves—projections.’’Hebb (1972: 234–245), drawing on the fact that ‘‘the same sensory stimu-

lation can give rise to completely distinct perceptions, and di¤erent stim-

ulations can give rise to the same perception’’, argues for the necessity to

distinguish perception from sensation. Although Hebb does not explicitly

claim that the properties of reality we perceive are interactional in nature,

the experimental evidence of the complexity of perception he provides

suggests this idea. Section 2.1 will address the interactional properties de-

scribed by metaphors embedded in body-part metonymies in details.The metonymy involving the body-parts of speech articulation is not

uniquely Chinese. Expressions that operate by the same metonymic prin-

ciple abound in languages throughout the world. For examples, English

speakers are familiar with mouthpiece, give mouth to one’s feelings,

badmouth someone, give someone a mouthful, the gift of tongues, have a

sharp tongue, lip service, loose lips, etc. The Japanese use kuchi ga karui

(mouth-light) ‘annoyingly talkative’, warukuchi (bad-mouth) ‘slander’,

kuchisaki dake (mouth-first-merely) ‘mere words, lip service’. The Ger-mans say bose Zungen (evil-tongue) ‘verbally vicious people’, jemandem

die Zunge losen (somebody-tongue-release) ‘cause somebody to talk’,mund-

faul (mouth-lazy) ‘unwilling to speak’, in aller Munde (in-all-mouths)

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 245

‘well-known’, sich den Mund verbrennen (self-mouth-burn) ‘do harm to

oneself by speaking mindlessly’, to name just a few. In Goossens’ (2002:

359) data on English expressions, 49 out of 109 items based on body-parts

contain a body-part that is ‘‘instrumental’’ to speech. The Duden Univer-

sal Dictionary (1996) lists roughly 30 phrasal idioms and compounds con-

taining the mouth and about 20 items containing the tongue as referring

to verbal behaviour in German. The crosslinguistic observance of themetonymic conception of verbal behaviour in terms of the relevant oral

structure suggests that the universal physiological reality of speech articu-

lation has a powerful and predictable e¤ect on the conceptualisation of

verbal behaviour.

Universality or near universality is also readily observed in the large

repertoire of expressions motivated by conceptual metaphors in Chinese:

(a) verbal behaviour is physical action, (b) speech is container, (c)argument is war and words are weapons, and (d) words are food.These conceptual metaphors are not arbitrary conventions of the lan-

guage, but are rooted in basic human experience relevant to existence

and survival. Because of the widely shared experiential, and mostly phys-

ical, basis, the meanings of the idioms are by and large recoverable on

account of the meanings of the components, though to a varying extent.

On the other hand, because the use of language for social purposes

is largely learned cultural behaviour, cultural conventions of perceiving

and discoursing on such behaviour are likely to give rise to variations inthe conceptualisation of verbal behaviour. Variation may occur either

in the source domain or in the target. That is to say, on one side, the

‘‘ideas associated with a source domain agreed upon by a community of

speakers’’ to define a certain abstract experience may be culture-specific

(Kovecses 2005: 12). These culture-specific ideas are congruent with

what Bruner (1990: 40) calls ‘‘folk psychology’’ which embodies the inter-

pretive principles elaborated by a culture. For example, sweetness in the

physical domain of taste is a crosslinguistically common source of meta-phor. Yet the a¤ective connotation of the target onto which sweetness is

mapped may vary from language to language. While sweet taste, e.g., in

(1b) zui-tian ‘sweet-mouthed, apt to flatter’, is mapped onto a slightly

contemptible verbal tendency in Chinese, it is usually associated with

a¤ection and related positive emotions in English, e.g., sweetheart,

sweetie.3 On the other side, the same target domain may be approached

through di¤erent sources across cultures. For example, the quality of

garrulity is approached via the physical domain of (the lack of ) weightin Japanese, e.g., kuchi ga karui (mouth-light). In Chinese, by contrast,

it is understood in terms of physical disintegration, e.g., zui-sui (mouth-

shattered). Thus, given the role of culture in the conceptualisation of

246 Z. Jing-Schmidt

abstract matters such as verbal behaviour, it might not be an exaggera-

tion to state, as does Bruner, that culture is ‘‘constitutive of mind’’.

The way the present paper is organized reflects the metonymy-

metaphor continuum with the conceptual metonymy organ of speecharticulation stands for speech on the one pole, and the four concep-

tual metaphors on the other. Section 2 focuses on the metonymically

based expressions that fall into three major subtypes depending on thespecific event types encoded in the particular form of interaction between

the speech organ metonymy and particular metaphors. Section 3 deals

with facts and principles of the major conceptual metaphors of verbal

behaviour. The relationship between conventionality and semantic pre-

dictability, between figurativity and emotionality, between universality

and culture-specificity is addressed throughout the analysis. Section 4 ad-

dresses the role of emotion in the metaphorisation of verbal behaviour.

Quantitative data extracted from a questionnaire survey are employedto show the existence of a negativity bias in the a¤ective valence of the

figurative lexicon of verbal behaviour. Section 5 concludes the article by

stating the theoretical implications and setting forth possible tasks for fur-

ther research.

The data are extracted from four di¤erent and functionally comple-

mentary sources: (a) Yao (2000), a standard Mandarin Chinese dictio-

nary, (b) Zhu (2002), a standard Mandarin Chinese dictionary of idioms

and prefabricated expressions, (c) the Chinese language internet searchengine www.baidu.com, and (d) the author’s own native lexical reper-

toire. The dictionaries are the principal sources with regard to the seman-

tics of the expressions being studied. The on-line data are useful insofar as

they provide clues into the lexical status of certain colloquial expressions

that are not included in the dictionaries. The author’s native knowledge

of the lexicon has been helpful in determining the direction of search for

relevant expressions both in the dictionaries and in the on-line resource

specified above. The present dataset consists of a total of 122 items. De-spite the attempt to include as many examples as possible, the dataset is

not intended to be exhaustive and remains to be supplemented by future

explorations.

The spell sound adopted here for the examples is based on pinyin,

the standard pronunciation system used in mainland China. Tonal

markers are omitted. Word-for-word literal glosses are provided in the

parentheses following each example, which proceed a translation of con-

ceptual proximity. The Chinese originals of the data employed in thestudy are provided in Appendix A at the end of this paper, numbered in

correspondence to the numbering of the examples in the text. Details of

the extraction of data for the analysis in section 4 are provided in the

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 247

beginning of that section. The original questionnaire is provided in Ap-

pendix B.

2. Conceptual metonymy of verbal behaviour

The systematic conceptual metonymy of verbal behaviour can be schema-

tised as organ of speech articulation stands for speech. For the sakeof simplicity, I call it the speech organ metonymy. This basic metonymy

has a variety of representations in Chinese depending on the scenes or

event types being encoded. It takes the interaction between the speechorgan metonymy and a supporting metaphor to describe a particular

type of verbal behaviour. Generally, expressions based on the interaction

between the speech organ metonymy and a supporting metaphor fallinto three subtypes: (I) property of speech organ stands for propertyof verbal behaviour, (II) action affecting speech organ stands forverbal action, and (III) effect of a speech organ stands for effectof verbal behaviour. In what follows, we shall consider the subtypes in

turn.

2.1. Property of speech organ as source

To consider speech organs, a look at the mouth is fundamental. So I shall

begin by looking at expressions with the mouth (zui or kou) as a metony-

mic vehicle providing mental access to speech. Consider the compounds

involving zui in (3):

(3) a. zui-ying (mouth-hard) ‘verbally stubborn, unwilling to admit an

obvious mistake’

b. zui-tian (mouth-sweet) ‘marked by a readiness to utter flattering

words’

c. zui-sui (mouth-shattered) ‘annoyingly talkative, garrulous, apt

to nag’d. zui-jin (mouth-tight) ‘unlikely to spread news, able to keep se-

crets’

Like the first two expressions, (3a) and (3b), which I already discussed in

the introductory section as (1a) and (1b), (3c) is not simply metonymic or

metaphorical, but reflects the intertwinement of both conceptual pro-

cesses. More concretely, a certain interactional property of a speechorgan metonymically refers to a property of verbal behaviour that the

organ helps to produce. The description of the interactional property is

metaphorical because sui ‘shattered, broken in pieces’ is taken from the

248 Z. Jing-Schmidt

familiar domain of physical objects in which it depicts the shattered state

of breakable things. In the context set up by the speech organ metonymy,

the loss of physical integrity described by sui signifies the loss of form

and coherence, the resistance to collection, the incessantness and repeti-

tiveness that typify the verbal activity of nagging and the quality of gar-

rulity. Note, however, that sui, unlike English broken which profiles a

damaged state or defect through breaking, does not profile the rather ab-stract concept of damage or defect, but merely depicts the physical scene

that something is fragmental as a result of breaking. In light of the lan-

guage-specific semantic profiling that sets sui apart from broken, the idea

of damage and defect is absent in the imagery underlying zui-sui. This

absence inhibits the inference that, since the mouth enables one to

talk, someone with a ‘‘broken’’ mouth will be unable to talk, an inference

that would have been justified if sui were a true semantic equivalent of

broken.4

The same principle of metonymy-metaphor interaction applies to (3d).

Here, the quality of tightness describes physical objects such as the lid of

a container that prevents leaking or, alternatively, a door or a gate that

can be shut tightly, securely. Metaphorically, it expresses the idea that a

person is trustworthy because he or she doesn’t spread words. Thus, the

combination of the mouth metonymy and the metaphor constituted by

jin ‘tight’ suggests an image of the mouth as a tightly shut physical object

in the context of verbal behaviour. This combination might be thought ofas a conceptual integration or blend. That is, the verbal function of the

mouth as selectively derived from input 1, zui ‘mouth’, and the idea of

prohibited leaking related to an object being tightly shut as selectively

derived from input 2, jin ‘tight’, are projected into a blended space to

yield the distinct meaning of ‘discreet in verbal behaviour and thus

trustworthy’.5

In view of these examples, it is crucial to point out that the physical

domains of texture, taste, configuration, etc. are systems entirely indepen-dent of the domain constituted by the concept of a speech organ. Thus, it

appears plausible that certain ‘‘conventional knowledge’’ (Kovecses 2002)

is required to make sense of the idiosyncratic collocation, say, of the con-

cept of sweet taste and the system of verbal behaviour constituted by the

mouth. It is likely that this conventional knowledge consists of both

knowledge of the physical world and cultural knowledge.

The functional salience of the mouth as a speech organ is also evident

in expressions where the mouth is paired with another body-part. In whatfollows, I explore double metonymies in which the property of the mouth

is contrasted with that of the heart (or the bowel) in the conceptualisation

of a particular language-mind relationship. The body-parts xin ‘heart’

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 249

and fu ‘bowel’ refer metonymically to the mind or intention, as the heart

and the bowel are considered the loci of feelings and thoughts in Chinese

folk psychology. Let us look at the idioms in (4):

(4) a. ku-kou-po-xin (bitter-mouth-grandma-heart) ‘lovingly intended

advice put in unpleasant words’

b. fo-kou-sheng-xin (Buddha-mouth-saint-heart) ‘compassionate in

words and intentions’

c. fo-kou-she-xin (Buddha-mouth-snake-heart) ‘nice talk, vicious

intention’

d. daozi-zui, doufu-xin (knife-mouth, tofu-heart) ‘marked by a ten-dency to utter biting words in spite of a sympathetic disposition’

e. kou-shi-xin-fei (mouth-true-heart-false) ‘verbally agree, but

think the opposite’

f. xin-zhi-kou-kuai (heart-straight-mouth-quick) ‘frank and

straightforward’

g. zui-tian-xin-ku (mouth-sweet-heart-bitter) ‘say good words while

holding malignant intentions’

h. kou-mi-fu-jian (mouth-honey-bowel-sword) ‘say good wordswhile holding malignant intentions’

Expressions (4a), (4b) and (4c) in this category share the form of a juxta-

position of two NPs in which the mouth (N1) and the heart (N2) are each

preceded by a modifier (X), thus X1N1X2N2. In (4a), ‘bitter mouth’ iscontrasted with ‘grandma heart’ to refer metonymically to the contrast

between ‘unpleasant speech’ and ‘loving intention’. The modifier ‘bitter’

is used metaphorically because it prototypically describes taste in the sen-

sual domain. On the other hand, ‘grandma’ is used metonymically in that

a kinship term whose referent is typically associated with loving inten-

tions refers to loving intentions. The modifiers fo ‘Buddha’, sheng ‘saint’,

and she ‘snake’ in (4b) and (4c) are all metonymies in the sense that their

referents are the respective prototypes of ‘mercy’, ‘virtue’, and ‘malig-nancy’. As such they provide mental access to the respective abstract

qualities. In (4d), a sharp utensil, daozi ‘knife’, stands metonymically

for sharpness and a culture-specific food of a soft texture, doufu ‘tofu’, re-

fers to softness. This softness, in turn, is a metaphor for sympathy, be-

cause touch in the sensual domain is mapped into the domain of social

emotion.

Expressions (4e), (4f ), (4g) and (4h) take the structure N1P1N2P2,

where the two body-part nouns are each followed by a predicate (P) todescribe the perceived relationship between verbal behaviour and thought.

(4e) can be seen as a pair of straightforward metonymies where the truth-

fulness of the mouth refers to the truthfulness of verbal behaviour and the

250 Z. Jing-Schmidt

falseness of the heart stands for the falseness of intention. By contrast,

both (4f ) and (4g) contain a metaphorical mapping that is embedded in

the metonymy based on the properties of a speech organ. The adjectival

predications zhi ‘straight’ and kuai ‘quick’ in (4f ) originate in the respec-

tive domains of geometric properties and speed; tian ‘sweet’ and ku ‘bit-

ter’ in (4g) belong to the sensual domain of taste. They are mapped into

the domain of verbal behaviour to refer to frankness in (4f ), deceptiveverbal friendliness and malignant intention in (4g). In (4h), a prototype

of sweet and enjoyable food, mi ‘honey’, is reduced to enjoyability; a cul-

tural prototype of aggressive weapon, jian ‘sword’, is reduced to aggres-

siveness by way of metonymy. This metonymical mapping is embedded

in the main metonymy involving a property of a speech organ as the

source. That is, the honey-like quality associated with the speech organ

stands for the enjoyability of speech produced by that organ. The sword-

like quality associated with the bowel stands for the aggressiveness har-boured in the bowel as the locus of emotion. On the other hand, the

transfer of enjoyability and aggressiveness available in the physical do-

main of food and weapon into the behavioural domain of language and

intention is distinctly metaphorical.

Further examples of the interactional properties of speech organ as

source are found in the following expressions involving the mouth, the

tongue, the lips and the teeth or various combinations of these oral struc-

tures. Consider (5):

(5) a. duo-zui-duo-she (much-mouth-much-tongue) ‘marked by the an-

noying tendency to make unsolicited remarks or general verbal

indiscretion’

b. you-zui-hua-she (oil-mouth-lubricant-tongue) ‘speak in an insin-

cere manner’

c. she-jian-kou-kuai (tongue-sharp-mouth-quick) ‘verbally aggres-

sive’d. chi-kou-bai-she (red-mouth-white-tongue) ‘talking groundlessly,

irresponsibly’

e. chang-she-fu (long-tongue-woman) ‘gossipy woman’

f. du-she (poison-tongue) ‘ability to make hurtful remarks’

g. san-cun-bu-lan-she, liang-hang-ling-li-chi (three-inch-not-rotten-

tongue, two-row dexterous-teeth) ‘eloquence’

h. ling-ya-li-chi (nimble-incisor-dexterous-molar) ‘marked by ver-

bal skill’i. gou-zui-tu-bu-chu-xiang-ya (dog-mouth-spit-not-out-elephant-

teeth) ‘A verbally mean person is unlikely to utter good re-

marks.’

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 251

In (5a), as has been mentioned with regard to (1c), the interactional quan-

titative property of the speech organ, duo ‘much’, refers to the excessive-

ness and indiscretion of verbal behaviour. In (5b), the sense of insincerity

is recoverable from the idiosyncratic metaphorical use of you ‘oil’ and hua

‘lubricant’. These two materials are apt to make things smooth and slip-

pery at once. When it comes to persons, one who is slippery is insincere,

tricky and undependable. The association of slipperiness with trickiness isnot unfamiliar to speakers of English. In (5c), sharpness as an interac-

tional property of the tongue and the mouth stands for aggressiveness of

verbal behaviour produced with the help of these speech organs. Here

again, the use of jian ‘sharp, pointed’ and kuai ‘quick’ is metaphorical

because the proper understanding of these words depends on a cross-

domain transfer from the physical to the verbal.

Compared to (5a), (5b) and (5c), in (5d), the metaphorical meanings ex-

pressed by the interactional properties associated with chi ‘red’ and bai

‘white’ are less predictable. Two metaphors are indicated here. On the one

hand, the colour red describes bareness and emptiness. This metaphor re-

lies on an imagery: ‘red’ is the usual colour of a newborn baby who comes

into the world naked. Thus, chi ‘red’ acquires a polysemous extension,

namely ‘naked’, by way of the birth scene. This extension is metonymic in

nature. As the scene-specific metonymic link between the two senses is re-

moved from the original physical context of birth, chi becomes a general

representation of abstract bareness and emptiness. This is a metaphoricprocess. On the other hand, the white colour, being perceived as the most

colourless colour, is taken as the source for the understanding of plainness,

blankness, emptiness and similar abstract qualities. Together, in the verbal

context defined by the mouth and tongue metonymy, red and white char-

acterise the verbal behaviour of talking irresponsibly, or accusing someone

groundlessly. This example is a perfect illustration of the deep experiential

grounding of seemingly unmotivated expressions.

While the first four examples in (5) represent the metonymy mouthand tongue as speech, (5e) and (5f ) feature the tongue as speech met-

onymy. (5e) is a pejorative name given to a gossipy female. The improper

size of the tongue as an interactional property stands for the excessiveness

of speech that the tongue helps to produce. In (5f ), the venomous prop-

erty of the tongue gives access to the malignant nature of speech meant to

hurt. In the sense that the hazard of poison is partially mapped into the

verbal domain to describe the power of words to hurt, we are dealing

with a metaphor embedded in the metonymy property of speech organfor property of verbal behaviour.

A frequently used idiom in the oral tradition of urban narratives, (5g)

describes ‘eloquence’ or verbal persuasiveness in terms of the skilfulness

252 Z. Jing-Schmidt

of the tongue and the dexterity of the teeth by metonymy. Likewise, the

dexterity of the teeth stands for good verbal skill in (5h). As usual,

the properties of nimbleness and dexterity assigned to the tongue and the

teeth are subjective and interactional.

(5i) is conceptually more complex in that it contains two metonymies

based on interactional properties of a speech organ as source. Here, gou-

zui ‘dog-mouth’ is contrasted with xiang-ya, ‘elephant teeth’, whereby zui

‘mouth’ and ya ‘teeth’ both refer to verbal behaviour per metonymy. The

respective interactional properties signalled by the modifiers gou ‘dog’

and xiang ‘elephant’ are also metonymically derived, as the two animals

are taken as the respective prototypes of meanness and dignity. However,

in the sense that a scenario in the animal domain is used for the under-

standing of a phenomenon in human verbal behaviour, it is certain that

metaphor, too, is at work here.

Closely related to the expressions based on the speech organ meton-ymy are items containing the words sheng ‘voice’, qi ‘air’, qiang ‘accent’,

and diao ‘tone’ or their combinations. Although these words are not

speech organ terms from the perspective of physiology, their referents

are important components of speech articulation from the perspective of

phonetics. Examples in (6), below, exhibit a similar conceptual process,

namely that the interactional property of the physical manner of speech

articulation refers to the property of verbal behaviour.

(6) a. di-sheng-xia-qi (low-voice-down-air) ‘humble-toned in deference

to a superior’

b. ying-yang-guai-qi (yin-yang-anomalous-air) ‘verbally elusive,

ambiguous and marked by a dubious intention’c. kou-qi-da (mouth-air-big) ‘boastful’

d. li-zhi-qi-zhuang (reason-straight-air-strong) ‘talk assertively on

the ground of a strong argument’

e. you-qiang-hua-diao (oil-accent-lubricant-tone) ‘speak in an insin-

cere manner’

Clearly, as (6a) shows, the humbleness of tone that characterises the sub-

missive verbal behaviour of an inferior is made accessible by the meto-

nymical depiction of the properties of low voice and weak air as compo-

nents of the articulation of speech. Imbedded in this metonymy is a

spatial metaphor of social status. Specifically, the notions of di ‘low’ and

xia ‘down’ are used metaphorically because their understanding as signal-

ling inferiority in the present context requires a two-domain mappingfrom spatial perception to social relationship.

Expression (6b) provides a description of a culture-specific experience

of sarcastic verbal behaviour. The interactional properties described by

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 253

yin and yang, the two primordial principles in opposition that govern all

things, are obviously unique to the Taoist cosmology. The ambiguity in

the waxing and waning of yin and yang in the air involved in speech ar-

ticulation signifies the anomalously mixed tone that marks elusive and

ambiguous verbal behaviour. Here, the culture-specificity of the metaphor

does not seem to forbid a straightforward interpretation of the idiom on

account of the probable semantics of the components, though basic cul-tural knowledge is necessary. (6c), too, involves the air in the mouth as a

physical component of speech articulation. In this case, the great physical

force as an interactional property associated with the release of air in

speech articulation stands for verbal exaggeration. Meanwhile, verbal

assertiveness is conceived of as strong air in (6d). (6e) exhibits the same

imagery of slipperiness as (5b) except that the mouth and the tongue are

here replaced by the accent and the tone.

By now, the discerning reader may have noticed that the expressionsbased on the property of speech organ stands for property of verbalbehaviour metonymy exhibit a remarkable syntactic regularity. That is,

they instantiate two major form-meaning pairs, or constructions. One is

the nominal construction X-N, containing a modifier (X) and a modified

entity (N), e.g., you-qiang-hua-diao (oil-accent-lubricant-tone); the other

is the subject-predicate construction N-P, containing a subject noun (N)

and a predicate (P), e.g., zui-ying (mouth-hard) and kou-mi-fu-jian

(mouth-honey-bowel-sword). The speech organ as the metonymic vehicleis the N in both constructions. The modifier (X) and the predicate (P) are

semantically metaphorical in some cases, specifying the interactional

properties being communicated. They are metonymic in other cases, pro-

viding a prototype that typifies the interactional properties to be con-

veyed. This compositionality-based constructional regularity corresponds

to the semantic recoverability of the expressions, although the individual

lexical collocations are largely conventional. Thus, clearly, as Nunberg

et al. (1994) argue, conventionality should not be confused with non-compositionality.

2.2. Action upon speech organ as source of metonymy

Expressions in this subcategory construe verbal behaviour in terms of a

transitive event in which the speech organ is the object being a¤ected by

the transitive action. Thus, we have the metonymy action affectingspeech organ stands for verbal action. Inherent in this metonymy is

the metaphorical mapping from a physical action into a verbal action serv-ing particular social purposes. There are two typical forms. The simple VO

is usually used in everyday contexts and the V1O1V2O2 construction is

used more in literary contexts. Let us first consider the expressions in (7):

254 Z. Jing-Schmidt

(7) a. ding-zui (upward push-mouth) ‘retort to the explicit criticism or

charge made by a superior’

b. dou-zui (fight-mouth) ‘argue, quarrel’

c. du-zui (stu¤-mouth) ‘disallow someone to speak up by bribing

them’

d. cha-zui (stick (vt.)-mouth) ‘chip in, interrupt’

In these expressions, the word zui ‘mouth’ acquires its meaningfulness

only through a metonymical highlighting of the mouth as a speech organ.

The verbal actions of arguing with a superior, quarrelling, and silencing

someone by bribing are invariably accessed via physical actions upon the

mouth as speech organ. The transitive action of ding ‘upward pushing’ in(7a) contains the implicit spatial element ‘upward’ which metaphorically

alludes to a social hierarchy in which a superior is considered ‘up’. This

metaphor enables a further metaphor, namely that an upward bodily

movement is social defiance which, by way of the mouth metonymy, is

understood as defiance in verbal communication. Similarly, dou ‘fight’ in

(7b) constitutes the metaphor argument is war, whereby the physical

action of fighting stands for verbal fight.

In (7c), the strategic practice of bribing someone is understood as thephysical action of stu‰ng someone’s mouth, that is, ‘‘feeding’’ someone

with a bribe. Furthermore, the stu‰ng of a person’s mouth in the literal

sense metonymically entails the immediate result of the action of stu‰ng:

the person with a stu¤ed mouth is physically prohibited from speaking.

This metonymy, however, acquires its relevancy only in the verbal con-

text set up by the speech organ metonymy. The complex construction

of meaning in this case, it seems, involves the creation of a novel space,

e.g., the inference of manipulating someone’s verbal behaviour by givingthem a bribe, which is erstwhile unavailable in du and zui as the input. In

this sense, it may be suitable to invoke the notion of conceptual blending

as an alternative to metaphor-metonymy interaction. In (7d), the verbal

behaviour of interrupting someone’s speech by taking an unjustified turn

of speech is referred to as the physical action of sticking one’s mouth, as if

it were a manually manipulable object, in between someone’s talk.

Clearly, as these examples show, the mouth as a speech organ invaria-

bly acts as the metonymic vehicle via which Chinese speakers understandverbal behaviour. In addition, verbal actions are described as if they were

physical actions. Thus, the metonymy action affecting speech organfor verbal action is not purely metonymic, but relies on a metaphorical

mapping also. The idiom in (8) works by the same principle:

(8) ma-bu-huan-kou, da-bu-huan-shou (scolded-not-return-mouth,

beaten-not-return-hand,) ‘entirely obedient, non-resistant’

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 255

Here, the first half of the idiom describes one’s failure to verbally defend

oneself in terms of returning the mouth as a speech organ. The second

half describes one’s failure to physically defend oneself against physical

assault in terms of returning the hand as the most useful bodily instru-

ment for action. No doubt the mouth and the hand are taken metonymi-

cally to refer to speech and action, respectively. On the other hand, the

choice of the verb huan ‘return’ suggests the metaphor social interac-tion is exchange of objects. Thus, the verb-object collocations representa cardinal metaphor-metonymy interaction. The metaphorical under-

standing of speaking as performing physical actions is also illustrated by

the items in (9) below. These expressions, again, invariably contain at

least one speech organ that serves as the metonymic vehicle. The verbs

preceding the nouns of speech organ, however, are used di¤erently, vary-

ing between the literal, as in (9a), the metonymical, as in (9b), and the

metaphorical sense, as in (9f ).

(9) a. xue-she (imitate-tongue) ‘imitate, repeat what others say’

b. nan-yi-qi-chi (di‰cult-to-open-teeth) ‘having di‰culty in talking

about something’c. jiao-shetou (chew-tongue) ‘gossip’

d. zhang-kou-jie-she (stretch-mouth-knot-tongue) ‘speechless as in

shock’

e. yao-chun-gu-she (sway-lip-pu¤-tongue) ‘attempt to verbally

instigate’

f. gao-chun-shi-she (balm-lip-wipe-tongue) ‘attempt to persuade by

nice talk’

The action of repeating what others say is understood as the action of

imitating other people’s tongue, as in (9a). Opening one’s teeth refers to

the start of a speech, as in (9b). While these two items are essentially met-

onymic, the items in (9c–f ) seem to lean towards the ‘‘metaphoric pole’’

in that they rely more heavily on a two-domain mapping. Consequently,the level of figurativity and a¤ectivity are significantly higher in these

items. The verbal activity of gossiping is made accessible by the depic-

tion of the physical scene of tongue chewing in (9c). The link is enabled

by the perception that gossiping and chewing share certain oral move-

ments involving the activities of the teeth and the tongue. Presumably,

the scene of chewing the tongue is impressionistic and interactional rather

than objective, reflecting a negative attitude towards gossip. The negative

sense probably arises from the incongruity characterising the image ofa gossiping mouth. That is, the teeth are busy doing the wrong thing:

what gets chewed is the tongue instead of food, which would have been

sensible.

256 Z. Jing-Schmidt

Fictive dynamic actions can be observed in the conception of verbal ac-

tions in the three idioms (9d–f ) involving the V1O1V2O2 construction.

Specifically, the imaginary knotting of the tongue indicates the inability

to speak in (9d), the elaborate performance of swaying the lips and pu¤-

ing the tongue metaphorically and hyperbolically describes the verbal ef-

fort to instigate in (9e), and the physical actions of beautifying the lips

and the tongue as speech organs signify the verbal attempt to beautifyone’s speech for the purpose of persuasion in (9f ). Thus, what we encoun-

ter in the conception of verbal behaviour is an insistent imagination of dra-

matic physical scenes involving speech organs. This dramaticity gives rise

to a sense of irony with regard to the verbal behaviours being described.

The expressions in (10), below, show that verbal e¤ort can be con-

ceived of in monetary terms.

(10) a. fei kou-she (spend-mouth-tongue) ‘talk in vain’

b. fei zuipizi (spend-lip/mouth skin) ‘talk in vain’

c. fei-she-lao-chun (spend-tongue-labour-lip) ‘take a verbal e¤ort

to convince’

Here, the e¤ort to talk to convince someone is understood in terms of

spending one’s organs of speech articulation. Thus the metaphor verbaleffort is money, or simply speaking is spending, is embedded in the met-

onymy action affecting speech organ for verbal action.The expressions discussed in this section (with 9a as an exception,

where the verb xue ‘imitate, learn’ is more literal than metaphorical) ex-

hibit an embedment of a metaphor in the metonymy action affectingspeech organ for verbal action. The metaphor can be based on a phys-

ical action that involves the dynamic transaction of bodily energy. Alter-

nately, the metaphor may be based on the familiar experience of financial

transactions. In any case, however, the source action does not occur in re-

ality when a person engages in the target verbal action. It is merely an im-

pression, or imagination, based on our subjective experience of the targetaction in the verbal domain. In this sense, it is important to recognise the

interactional properties of the action being depicted. Here again, a syn-

tactic regularity (V-O) accompanies the semantic consistency of the

expressions. This syntactic regularity reflects the cognitive grammatical

principle that basic constructions encode humanly relevant events (Lako¤

1987; Goldberg 1995).

2.3. E¤ect of speech organ as source of metonymy

In this subcategory, we encounter idioms that conceptualise the e¤ect

of verbal behaviour in terms of what the organs of speech articulation

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 257

accomplish in a physical sense. Thus we have the metonymy effect ofspeech organ for effect of verbal behaviour. Inevitably, the meton-

ymy contains a metaphorical mapping from the physical domain into the

socio-verbal domain. Let us consider the items in (11):

(11) a. zhong kou shuo jin (multitude-mouth-melt-gold) ‘collective crit-

icism is destructive’

b. chi-she-shao-cheng (red-tongue-burn-town) ‘blatant words are

destructive’

c. yi-kou-yao-ding (one-mouth-bite-firm) ‘make a vociferous ac-

cusation’d. xue-kou-pen-ren (blood-mouth-spray-person) ‘ruthlessly attack

someone with false accusations’

e. she-zhan-qun-ru (tongue-combat-multitude-scholar) ‘verbally

combat many scholars at once’

f. chi-ya-wei-huo (molar-incisor-do-harm) ‘words cause harm.’

g. kou-kou-sheng-sheng (mouth-mouth-voice-voice) ‘repeatedly

declare’

In (11a), ‘mouths of the multitude’ metonymically refers to ‘collective

criticism’ and ‘melt gold’ metaphorically expresses the idea of a highly

destructive power. A similar idea is expressed in (11b) where the destruc-

tive potentials of the red tongue metonymically stand for the destructive

potentials of blatant words. The sense of blatancy is derived from chi ‘red,naked’, as has been explained with regard to (5c) in section 2.1. The phys-

ical scene of a town being burned down, however, is a metaphorical

description of abstract destruction.

(11c) and (11d) are expressions of the highly specific verbal practice of

making a false accusation. By means of the metaphorical use of yao-ding

‘bite-firm’, (11c) emphasizes the violent and determined manner in which

the accuser makes the charge. By employing the metaphorical senses of

xue ‘bloody’ and pen ‘spray’, (11d) emphasizes the aggressiveness andruthlessness of the accuser. In both cases the metaphorical imageries are

framed in the metonymy that understands the e¤ect of speech organ as

the e¤ect of verbal behaviour. (11e) is the war metaphor of argument

embedded in the metonymy based on the performance or e¤ect of a

speech organ. In (11f ), the negative consequence of speaking is referred

to as the potential harm done by the teeth as body-parts of speech articu-

lation. (11g) consists of the mouth word, kou, and the voice word, sheng.

Both are metonymic, referring to speech. The reduplication of the twowords for the purpose of expressing ‘repetition’ seems to work metaphor-

ically in the sense of more of form is more of content (Lako¤ and John-

son 1980: 127).

258 Z. Jing-Schmidt

In this section, I have shown that the highly schematic conceptual met-

onymy organ of speech articulation for speech is a central mecha-

nism underlying the Chinese conceptualisation of verbal behaviour.

Referentiality and figurativity (Dirven 2002: 102–105) are evident in the

speech organ metonymy: the speech organ being named cannot be taken

literally. Rather, it is invariably figurative and provides mental access to

speech-related behaviour. This metonymy is realized in three specific sub-types each of which emphasizes a particular aspect of verbal behaviour.

The particularities of the subtypes derive from the particular metaphors

embedded in the basic speech organ metonymy.

It might be worthwhile to observe that this central metonymy interacts

with the embedded metaphors in nontrivial fashions. More specifically,

the successful metaphorical mapping into the abstract domain of verbal

behaviour as target presupposes a metonymical mapping from speech or-

gan onto speech physically produced by the speech organ within the do-main matrix of language. Put otherwise, the speech organ metonymy,

being referential in nature, puts a relevancy constraint on the metaphori-

cal mapping such that the target is restricted to the domain of verbal be-

haviour. On the other hand, the metaphorical mapping, by virtue of its

interactional and expressive force, is responsible for the conceptual rich-

ness that arises from the imagic particulars of the source concepts.

In summary, our analysis of the relevant expressions amount to two

generalisations. First, the conceptualisation of verbal behaviour is em-bodied. Second, the meanings of the idiosyncratic expressions are not en-

tirely opaque, but recoverable and even predictable from the metonymic

and metaphoric senses conveyed by the components. The predictability,

however, is not an all-or-nothing matter but relative and gradient, e.g.,

(4g) kou-mi-fu-jian (mouth-honey-bowel-sword), (5d) du-she (poison-

tongue) and (9a) xue-she (imitate-tongue) may be more readily recovered

than (6b) yin-yang-guai-qi (yin-yang-anomalous-air), (7a) ding-zui (up-

ward push-mouth) and (9f ) gao-chun-shi-she (balm-lip-wipe-tongue).

3. Major conceptual metaphors of verbal behaviour

As well as the conceptual metonymy based on organs of speech articula-

tion, Chinese is rich in conceptual metaphors of verbal behaviour. De-

pending on the concepts or schemata that constitute the source domain,

four conceptual metaphors of verbal behaviour are observed. They are:

(i) verbal behaviour is physical action, (ii) speech is container, (iii)argument is war, and (iv) words are food. Because these metaphors

arise from basic human experience, they are likely to be universal. How-

ever, as we shall see in the forthcoming paragraphs, these conceptual

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 259

metaphors may at times allow culture-specific image-schemata associated

with special a¤ective connotations. In what follows, I shall discuss the

four conceptual metaphors underlying a large number of Chinese expres-

sions of verbal behaviour.

3.1. VERBAL BEHAVIOUR IS PHYSICAL ACTION

The conceptual process underlying this metaphor pertains to the mapping

from physical actions onto social actions of using words in interpersonalinteraction. Importantly, this metaphor is closely related to the meanings(or words) are objectsmetaphor as part of what Reddy (1979: 290) refers

to as the conduitmetaphor. The expressions in (12) illustrate this process:

(12) a. gua-zai-zui-bian (hang-on-mouth-side) ‘habitually or repeat-

edly say something’

b. bu-zu-gua-chi (not-enough-hang-tooth) ‘not worth mentioning’

c. zhi-di-you-sheng (throw-ground-have-sound) ‘making remarksthat produce resonance’

d. yi-tu-wei-kuai (one-spit-make-pleasure) ‘speak up uninhibitedly

to feel good’

e. zhan-ding-jie-tie (chop-nail-cut-iron) ‘speak resolutely’

f. zi-zhen-ju-zhuo (word-pour with measure-sentence-pour with

measure)

In (12a), the verbal behaviour of habitually or repeatedly saying some-thing is conceived of as a physical event of hanging a three dimensional

object on the side of one’s mouth. In this physical domain of a transitive

action, the action of hanging has the e¤ect that the object being hung be-

comes attached to the mouth and remains in that state of attachment. It is

this physical attachment as part of the imagery in the source domain that

gets mapped into the target domain of verbal behaviour to describe the

incessantness with which a certain unit of language is uttered. A similar

process is at play in (12b) where the teeth instead of the mouth participatein the physical scene. In (12c) a resonant verbal expression is described as

a physical object of, presumably, substantial volume, weight and a particu-

lar texture such that it is able to produce a loud sound when thrown on

the ground. Clearly, this mapping entails that words are conceived of as

having ‘‘an existence independent of people and context’’ (Lako¤ and

Johnson 1980: 11) and are capable of generating physical e¤ects. The

need to talk about something is conceived of as a bodily urgency to spit

something out in (12d): something that one feels a great desire to commu-nicate is described as a disturbing object in the mouth. One must spit it

out for the sake of one’s well-being. (12e) describes the resolute manner

in which something is said. Determination and resolution are conceived

260 Z. Jing-Schmidt

of as the physical potency to cut and break something as hard and un-

breakable as nails and iron. (12f ) describes the discreet manner of a cir-

cumspective speaker as a careful physical action of pouring out tea or

wine with exact measure, whereby words and utterances are imaged as

the liquids being measured and dispensed from a container.

The more schematic metaphor verbal behaviour is physical actioninvolving a physical object has a specific instantiation in the metaphorverbal behaviour is manipulation of a musical instrument, illustratedby the idioms in (13):

(13) a. dui-niu-tan-qin (towards-bovine-play-musical instrument) ‘say

things that are beyond the hearer’s ability to understand, cf.

pearls before swine)

b. da-bian-gu (beat-side-drum) ‘to help someone inconspicuously

by saying things in the background’

c. zi-chui-zi-lei (self-blow trumpet-self-beat drum) ‘blow your own

trumpet, boast about oneself ’

d. lao-diao-chong-tan (old-tone-renewed-play) ‘to talk aboutsomething that is already old hat’

It is noteworthy that, in (13a), the lack of intelligence is metonymically

inferable from niu ‘bovine animal’, a typical dull creature. By contrast, astring instrument metonymically gives rise to the inference of sophistica-

tion and good taste. Thus, even in this apparently metaphorical expres-

sion in which talking is understood as playing a string instrument, meton-

ymy is at work in tandem with metaphor.

Apart from the idioms I have discussed, there are a number of lexical

compounds in the colloquial language that encode verbal behaviours met-

aphorically by describing a transitive physical action involving a physical

object. Because of lexical entrenchment due to frequent use, it is possiblethat the physical scenes behind these prefabricated compounds have be-

come ‘‘washed out’’, if not entirely obscure, to native speakers of Chinese.

Consider (14):

(14) a. da-cha (beat-road branch) ‘chip in, interrupt’

b. che-pi (pull-skin) ‘chat, talk rubbish’

c. wa-ku (dig-bitterness) ‘speak sarcastically’

d. chui-niu (blow-bull) ‘boast’

e. pai-ma-pi (pat-horse-ass) ‘toady’

f. po-leng-shui (slosh-cold-water) ‘verbally discourage’

g. huo-xi-ni (mix-thin-mud) ‘say neutral things to dilute the inten-sity of a conflict between other people’

h. fa-lao-sao (let out-prison-urine stench) ‘complain, grumble’

i. kai-men-jian-shan (open-door-see-mountain) ‘speak directly’

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 261

j. dakai-tian-chuang-shuo-liang-hua (open-sky-window-speak-

light-words) ‘talk openly’

k. xin-kou-kai-he (let-mouth-open-river) ‘speak heedlessly’

Syntactically, all of these compounds can be schematised as the transitiveconstruction, i.e., the VO construction. However, some of them describe

semantically intransitive events, as, for examples, (14b), (14c), (14d),

(14h), (14i) and (14j). This apparent mismatch between the syntactic

form and the meaning may at first glimpse suggest that the conventional-

ised metaphors resist an interpretation on account of the respective mean-

ings of the verb and its argument, much in the same way as kick the

bucket which must be treated as an unanalysed whole. However, a closer

examination of these items will correct this initial impression. The verb-noun collocations are analysable and can be shown to have cognitive

motivations despite their high idiosyncrasy. In each case, the semantic

motivation resides in the dynamic scene conjured by the transitive con-

struction. Some scenes are more dramatic and outrageous than others.

In (14a), ‘beating a road branch’ is a figuration of interruption exactly be-

cause of the semantic contribution made by ‘road branch’ in its figurative

sense of deviating from the main road to a side road. In (14h), expressing

grief and discontent is understood via the image that someone opens awindow in the prison to let out the chronic, cumulate odour of urine.

While this imagery might be the height of idiosyncrasy, the constitutive

elements of grief, namely prolonged confinement and intense poignancy,

are made palpable via lao ‘prison’ and sao ‘urine stench’. These two

things may be considered the respective archetypes of confinement and

poignancy. The same semantic recoverability based on constituent input

characterises all the other items in this list, though the degree of semantic

transparency varies from expression to expression.Compared to the expressions in (14), the compounds in (15) are seman-

tically more transparent because the objects of the transitive actions ex-

plicitly name concepts in the domain of verbal behaviour instead of

three-dimensional things. Nevertheless, the transitive verbs per se describe

physical actions such that the verbal behaviours in question are accessed

via a metaphorical mapping.

(15) a. sa-huang (throw-lie) ‘tell a lie’

b. che-huang (pull-lie) ‘tell a lie’

c. zao-yao (manufacture-rumour) ‘start a rumour’

Another type of the conceptual metaphor verbal behaviour is physicalaction involves a transitive action the object of which is the heart. Con-

sider (16):

262 Z. Jing-Schmidt

(16) a. tao-xin (pull out-heart) ‘candidly communicate’

b. jiao-xin (exchange-heart) ‘communicate’

c. tui-xin-zhi-fu (push-heart-put in-bowel) ‘communicate with

mutual trust’

These expressions are based on the interaction between the physicalaction metaphor and a metonymy that employs the heart as a body-

part to refer to thoughts. Thus, the act of communication is conceived of

as physical actions whereby the heart is treated as a manipulable object

that can be displaced or transferred between persons.

A further subtype of the physical action metaphor describes a verbal

act that is conducted upon an implicit human object. The figurativity arisesfrom the fact that the verb being used to describe such an act belongs to the

physical domain where it a¤ects a physical object. Yet regular speakers of

Chinese may not be aware of the underlying metaphorical mapping and

simply learn these expressions as part of the lexicon. Consider (17):

(17) a. ding-zhuang (push upward-hit) ‘verbally insult (a superior)’

b. pang-qiao-ce-ji (side-knock-side-strike) ‘indirectly suggest’

c. hu-you (sway-swing) ‘flatter, toady to’

d. chui-peng (blow-lift) ‘lavishly praise’

e. kai-dao (open-guide) ‘instruct, help to understand’

f. wai-qu (crooked-bend) ‘distort’

g. da-duan (beat-broken) ‘interrupt’

h. jie-lu (pull-bare) ‘reveal, uncover’

The physical and mostly kinetic sense of the actions is largely latent and

may not be accessed by the average language user. Nevertheless, the lex-

ical semantics of these items is not arbitrary, but motivated and cannot beexplained without reference to the conceptual process of a metaphorical

mapping from physical actions to verbal behaviours. For example, in

(17a), verbally insulting someone is understood in terms of the physical

action of upward pushing and hitting someone. Here again, the spatial

element implicit in ding ‘push upward’ signifies relationship in a social hi-

erarchy. In (17b), talking is described as knocking and striking and the

spatial terms pang ‘side’ and ce ‘side’ indicate the abstract indirectness in

verbal interaction. Specifically, spatial periphery is verbal indirectness.The rest of (17) works by the same mechanism of mapping a bodily

action onto a verbal action.

3.2. SPEECH IS CONTAINER

According to Reddy’s (1979: 290) observation, the majority of English

expressions about language instantiate the conduit metaphor of which

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 263

the container metaphor is a significant part. The same conceptual meta-

phor is operative in the Chinese conceptualisation of linguistic expres-

sions and verbal behaviour. The expressions in (18) illustrate this:

(18) a. yan-wai-zhi-yi (word-outside-of-meaning) ‘unsaid but inferable

message’

b. hua-li-you-hua (speech-inside-have-speech) ‘There’s a (hidden)

message in the utterance.’

c. hua-li-hua-wai (speech-inside-speech-outside) ‘direct and indi-

rect message’

d. dakai-hua-xiazi (open-word-box) ‘start to talk excessively’e. shi-hua (filled-word) ‘honest words’

f. kong-hua (empty-word) ‘empty or pretentious words’

g. xian-wai-zhi-yin (string-outside-of-sound) ‘unsaid or hidden

message’

The spatial concepts of li ‘inside’ and wai ‘outside’ in (18a–c) signal that

words or meanings are understood as a container that has an inside and

an outside that can be physically defined. Example (18d) takes the con-tainer metaphor a step further by indicating that words may be imaged

more concretely as a box that can be opened or shut. As containers of

meanings, words may be filled (18e) or empty (18f ). (18g) is related to

the metaphor of containment in a more complex manner. On the one

hand, we have to do with the metaphor talking is playing an instru-ment whereby xian ‘string’ (as of a musical instrument) stands in a part-

whole metonymic relation to a stringed instrument. On the other hand,

the spatial concept of wai ‘outside’ points at the container metaphor.

3.3. ARGUMENT IS WAR

This conceptual metaphor, too, is not unique to Chinese and its near uni-

versality is grounded in the fundamental human experience of conflict of

varying scopes. Conflicts and battles among individuals and groups have

always accompanied the history of evolution and are no doubt one of the

most entrenched experiences in human existence. This experiential basis

accounts for the fact that this metaphor is conventionalised in a multitudeof idioms and compounds in Chinese. As we shall observe in (19), inher-

ent in the war metaphor is the more specific metaphor words areweapons.

(19) a. chun-qiang-she-jian (lip-spear-tongue-sword) ‘disputatious ver-bal exchange’

b. dan-dao-zhi-ru (single-knife-straight-enter) ‘engage in a direct

verbal attack’

264 Z. Jing-Schmidt

c. maotou-zhi-xiang (spearhead-point-to) ‘aim a verbal attack at’

d. hua-feng-yi-zhuan (speech-sharp point of a weapon-one-turn)

‘change the direction of verbal attack’

e. yi-yu-zhong-di (one-utterance-hit-target) ‘hit the spot verbally’

f. chu-kou-shang-ren (exit-mouth-hurt-person) ‘verbally insult’

g. e-yu-shang-ren (evil-language-hurt-person) ‘verbally insult’

h. ren-yan-ke-wei (people-word-worth-fear) ‘words are worth

fearing’i. ti-wu-wan-fu (body-without-complete-skin) ‘completely af-

fected by harsh verbal attacks’

j. yan-ci-ji-lie (word-rhetoric-fierce-intense) ‘speak polemically’

The expressions (19a–d) explicitly name specific weapons as the source ofthe metaphor. (19a) exhibits a complex interaction between the speechorgan metonymy and the weapon metaphor. On the one hand, chun

‘lip’ and she ‘tongue’ refer metonymically to speech; on the other hand,

qiang ‘spear’ and jian ‘sword’ describe the aggressive potency of speech

metaphorically by mapping weapons in the domain of war and battle

onto the domain of argument. While (19b–e) encode language in terms

of a weapon used to attack an opponent in the linguistic battle, (19f–g)

state plainly that words have the potentials of physically wounding a vic-tim and are thus feared (19h). (19i) conceives of the devastating e¤ect of

verbal attacks in terms of the extent to which the body is physically

wounded. (19j), on the other hand, adopts the description ji-lie ‘fierce

and intense’ which is usually used to describe battles.

Similarly, the compounds in (20) describe verbal aggression in terms of

physical aggression that typifies war and battle.

(20) a. ci-er (pierce/stab-ear) ‘biting (remarks)’

b. feng-ci (sarcasm-stab) ‘sarcasm’

c. mo-sha (wipe-kill) ‘deny’

d. peng-ji (blow-strike) ‘vehemently criticise’

e. zhong-shang (hit-wound) ‘verbally defame’

All of these expressions contain at least one morpheme describing a phys-

ical act of aggression, e.g., ci ‘stab’ in (20a–b), sha ‘kill’ in (20c), peng ‘hit,

blow’ and ji ‘strike’ in (20d) and shang ‘wound’ in (20e). Thus, a hostile

remark is described as a sharp object (weapon) that pierces the ear in

(20a). The verbal behaviour known as sarcasm is associated with the ag-

gressive physical act of stabbing, as in (20b). To verbally deny a fact is to

wipe out and even kill that fact, as in (20c). The issuance of criticism isconceived of as a physical act of striking in (20d) and to defame someone

verbally is to wound them physically, as in (20e).

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 265

3.4. LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE FOOD

As the most immediate survival necessity for all living organisms includ-ing humans, food is fundamental to our existence and, as Kass (1999) and

Rozin (1999) show, influences our behaviour in the most profound ways

possible. Thus, it is likely that food constitutes a natural universal con-

ceptual domain that serves as the source of conceptual metaphors. Lako¤

and Johnson (1980: 152) and Kovecses (2002) have discussed the ideasare food metaphor. Kovecses (2002) has talked about the sexual desireis appetite metaphor, the source of which is related to the experientially

basic domain of food. In Chinese, we observe the conceptual potentials offood in the following expressions:

(21) a. tian-yan-mi-yu (sweet-words-honey-speech) ‘exceedingly nice

talks intended to flatter or deceive’

b. hua-bu-dui-wei (language-not-right-flavour) ‘words with somepeculiar hidden message’

c. tun-tun-tu-tu (swallow-swallow-spit-spit) ‘speak with reluctance

and dishonesty’

d. yao-wen-jiao-zi (bite-text-chew-word) ‘write or speak ver-

bosely’

e. ye-ren (choke-person) ‘aggressive (remarks)’

f. sheng-se (raw-puckery) ‘obscure and di‰cult to understand’

g. tian-you-jia-cu (add-oil-add-vinegar) ‘(as a third party) inten-sify a conflict by saying things conducive to an escalation’

The taste of food is mapped onto the agreeability of words in (21a) and

(21b). We further observe mappings that focus on food as physical objectsthat can be swallowed, spit out, bitten or chewed, as in (21c) and (21d),

too hard too coarse to swallow and thus capable of choking the eater, as

in (21e), or too unripe (as of fruit) to be enjoyable or even digestible, as in

(21f ). Related to the metaphor linguistic expressions are food is (21g)

in which the culinary practice of adding seasonings to enhance the flavour

of food is employed to describe a particular verbal behaviour that is in-

tended to intensify a conflict.

3.5. Culture-specific metaphors

Apart from the major conceptual metaphors discussed in the foregoing

paragraphs, we encounter several other metaphors that may not immedi-

ately arise from universal source domains. The three expressions in (22)illustrate the collocation of disagreeable physical temperatures, both cold

and heat, with speech in the conceptualisation of unfriendly or sarcastic

attitude associated with certain hostile verbal acts.

266 Z. Jing-Schmidt

(22) a. leng-yan-leng-yu (cold-speech-cold-language) ‘unfriendly

speech’

b. leng-chao-re-feng (cold-irony-hot-satire) ‘speak with biting

sarcasm’

c. shuo-feng-liang-hua (say-wind-cold-words) ‘speak ironically’

In the background of the metaphor hostile speech is adverse tempera-ture, verbal behaviour marked by a lack of a¤ection, as (22a) shows,

does seem to reflect a more universal metaphor, namely affection iswarmth, or lack of affection is cold. This points to the universal figu-

rative potential of warmth in emotion conceptualisation.

The expressions in (23) utilize the natural weather phenomena of wind

and rain to describe the mobility of unreliable verbal information. Thecirculatory character of the wind and the disseminating character of the

rain seem to be the imageries being mapped onto spreading rumours in

the verbal domain in (23a) and (23b). (23c), by contrast, focuses on the

intentional aspect of the verbal behaviour by construing it as a volitional

transitive action of blowing wind. In addition, zhen-bian ‘pillow side’ is

metonymic in that the typical location of nuptial communication stands

for nuptial communication.

(23) a. feng-yan-feng-yu (wind-speech-wind-talk) ‘gossips, rumours’

b. man-cheng-feng-yu (full-town-wind-rain) ‘a rumour being

spread widely’

c. chui-zhen-bian-feng (blow-pillow-side-wind) ‘engage in pillow

talk in order to influence the spouse’s decision’

The items in (24) have as their common source domain the action of sing-

ing, which apparently gives rise to a negative connotation, though to a

varying degree of negativity:

(24) a. yi-chang-yi-he (one-sing-one-echo) ‘o¤er mutual sympathetic

verbal response’

b. ci-chang-bi-he (here-sing-there-echo) ‘o¤er mutual sympathetic

verbal response’

c. gao-chang-ru-yun (high-sing-into-clouds) ‘propagandise a causeor doctrine’

d. chang-gao-diao (sing-high-tone) ‘carry on propaganda’

e. shuode-bi-changde-hao-ting (speaking-compare-singing-good-to

hear) ‘nice talks that are unaccountable (wa¿ing, empty prom-

ise, or blatant flattery etc.)’

The collaborative performative act of singing and echoing in (24a) and

(24b) emphasizes the elaborated mutual responsiveness characterising a

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 267

conspicuous display of harmony. The underlying metaphor may be

schematised as collaborative verbal performance is collaborativemusical performance. (24c) and (24d) both employ the complex meta-

phor propaganda is singing in high pitch to convey the deliberate e¤ort

involved in propagandising a cause. (24e) is an explicit comparison be-

tween talking and singing whereby talking is said to surpass singing in

sensual agreeability. However, as common sense has it, the opposite isusually true. That is to say, singing is perceived (or at least intended) to

be more pleasant to the ear than speaking. It is precisely this paradox in

the comparative claim that invites the inference that talks that sound

nicer than singing are unaccountable and suspicious. This comparison is

metaphorical because auditory agreeability in the sensual domain is

mapped onto semantic and interpersonal agreeability in the verbal

domain.

As these examples show, the metaphors discussed in this subsection dis-play a higher degree of culture-specificity than those analysed in the pre-

vious subsection, both with regard to the sources being mapped and in

terms of the emotional connotations behind the metaphors. Yet it is clear

that culture-specificity does not contradict the idea of an experiential

basis for the more local metaphors, but reflects a ‘‘di¤erential experiential

focus’’ underlying them, to use Kovecses’ (2005: 246) terms.

To summarize the section on metaphors of verbal behaviour, let us

state the basic propositions that arise from the analysis. Generally, it ap-pears that the concepts that constitute the source domains of all the meta-

phors of verbal behaviour pertain to familiar human experiences that

can be envisaged as physical scenarios, as Semino (2005) points out in

her discussion of English metaphors of speech activity. Some of these ex-

periences are more fundamental to our existence and survival than others.

Concretely speaking, physical actions, food, and self-defence are proba-

bly the most fundamental aspects of human life: we inevitably and rou-

tinely conduct physical actions in everyday life; we depend on food andare familiar with its properties; we are adaptively tuned to the survival

significance of conflicts and battles. Because these experiences determine

our fitness and vitality as living beings, their e¤ects on conceptualisation

are powerful and predictable. Consequently, we draw on these experi-

ences in understanding the more complex and less palpable social experi-

ence of using words in interaction with our relevant others. The sense that

our body is a container, too, is an irreducible physical experience that

influences the way we think of language. Thus, just as many cognitive lin-guists (e.g., Lako¤ and Johnson 1980; Sweetser 1990; Gibbs 1994, 2006;

Grady 1999) have argued, the conventionalisation of conceptual meta-

phors is not arbitrary, but experientially motivated.

268 Z. Jing-Schmidt

Consequently, it is important to note, as Nunberg and his colleagues

have argued in their study of idioms, that conventionality does not equal

arbitrariness and non-compositionality. Rather, there is a substantial se-

mantic recoverability on account of the lexical input that conjures a rich

gestalt of experience. This recoverability is due to the fact that the coining

of the metaphors ‘‘draw[s] on the full richness of our encyclopaedic knowl-

edge of our bodily and cultural experience’’, as Croft and Cruise’ (2004:204) put it. Kovecses (2002: 207–208) speaks of ‘‘conventional knowledge’’

and considers it an important conceptual factor that contributes to the un-

derstanding of idioms. Such knowledge enables the association between

the source and the target such that the image-schematic similarity between

the two domains can be established and novel senses can be created.

From a social psychological perspective, metaphors are expressions of

emotion. The expression of emotion, as most psychologists seem to agree,

is both a communicative and a social strategy. As has been pointed out insection 2 with regard to metaphors embedded in the speech organ met-

onymy, metaphors do not name truth-conditional properties of verbal be-

haviour. To the contrary, they give voice to feelings and beliefs about the

perceived particularities of various socially significant verbal behaviours.

In the sense that feelings and beliefs about verbal behaviour, universal or

culture-specific, are encoded and transmitted through metaphors, the

expressive, interactional and constitutive function of metaphors can be

specified as representing emotions with regard to verbal behaviour. Thisview will be elaborated in the following section.

4. Emotion and the negative metaphor/metonymy

The definitions of emotion are various and controversial. I follow Arnold

(1960: 182) in considering emotion as ‘‘the felt tendency toward anything

intuitively appraised as good (beneficial), or away from anything intui-

tively appraised as bad (harmful)’’, for a working definition. Accordingly,the felt tendency associated with a positive appraisal may be called a pos-

itive emotion and that which is associated with a negative appraisal may

be called a negative emotion. Positive and negative emotions divide the

a¤ective space (Russell 1979). The positivity vs. negativity of an emotion

is known as a¤ective valence.

To measure the overall tendency of the present dataset in terms of af-

fective valence, a questionnaire survey was conducted. The questionnaire

contained the entire dataset adopted in this paper. All 122 items werepresented in isolation. The order of the 122 items was randomised. 50

informants were instructed to rate each item as positive, negative, or

neutral.6 Four informants each left one item unevaluated, giving rise to

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 269

four missing values. The total frequencies of positive, negative and neu-

tral rating are presented in Table 1.

The figures in Table 1 show that the negative rating has the highest to-

tal frequency and the positive rating the lowest. Furthermore, the total

frequency of the negative rating is significantly higher than expected. By

contrast, the total frequency of the positive rating is significantly lower

than expected. The total frequency of the neutral rating is not signifi-

cantly higher than expected. On the whole, the mismatch between the ob-served and the expected frequency is significant with the positive and the

negative rating. That is, significantly more items of the entire set were

significantly more frequently rated negative than positive.7 The strong

asymmetry in the rating points to a negativity bias.

This bias is not alone from a crosslinguistic perspective. A similar ten-

dency has been reported by Simon-Vandenbergen (1995) in her study of

metaphors of linguistic actions in British English. White (1994: 226) points

to a ‘‘preponderance of negative terms’’ in the A’ara lexicon of emotion.Although these are referentially di¤erent from metaphors of verbal behav-

iour, the converging trend is remarkable, especially given the attitudinal

and emotional nature of such metaphors. Simon-Vandenbergen, however,

speaks of ‘‘value judgments’’ instead of emotions. I prefer the notion of

emotion over value judgement in the current context for two important

reasons. First, from an evolutionary psychological perspective, emotion is

a superordinate ‘‘orchestrating’’ program that directs the activities and in-

teractions of various subprograms including value judgement (Cosmidesand Tooby 2000: 93). To use Johnson-Laird and Oatley’s (2000: 459)

words, ‘‘emotions guide our lives’’. And since making value judgments is

part of our lives, it follows that emotions guide value judgments. Secondly,

metaphor does not pertain to the objective conceptual representation of

the external world, but pertains to the attitudinal and a¤ective evaluation

of percepts via recurrent basic bodily experience. Thus, metaphor assumes

an a¤ective basis and is immediately relevant to emotion.

Now what do we make of the negativity bias observed in the meta-phorisation of verbal behaviour? This question is nontrivial, for such a

Table 1. Frequencies of positive, negative and neutral rating

Rating Frequency Percentage

Positive 990 16.2%

Negative 3005 49.3%

Neutral 2101 34.5%

Total 6096 100%

Chi-square ¼ 1002.586; df ¼ 2; p < 0.001

270 Z. Jing-Schmidt

negativity bias must be considered peculiar or marked in the face of

the well-known Pollyanna Hypothesis which claims that positive words

universally outnumber negative words (Boucher and Osgood 1969). To

explain the marked tendency, Simon-Vandenbergen (1995: 112) contends

that linguistic actions that are ‘‘perceived as being ‘out of the ordinary’,

‘extreme’ in one way or another, i.e., ‘too much or too little of some-

thing’ ’’ call for metaphorisation. This statement implies that metaphor-isation is a selective process. Apparently, metaphor is not used to concep-

tualise any and all verbal behaviours, but primarily those that are

perceived as inadequate or negative. Moreover, it appears that metaphor

is not used merely to provide conceptual access to verbal behaviour. In-

stead, it seems to construe subjective experience of verbal behaviour.

However, the recognition of the selective character and the construal

function of metaphor does not explain why there are more negative meta-

phors of verbal behaviour than positive and neutral ones.I will now propose that the predominance of negative metaphors of

verbal behaviour can be explained and predicted (a) on account of the

socio-emotional nature of verbal behaviour and (b) on account of the

basic cognitive-a¤ective principle underlying its conceptualisation via

metaphor as a process of a¤ective information processing. As has been

stated previously, verbal behaviour pertains to the use of language for

the purpose of communication in social interaction. The interpersonal

nature of verbal behaviour determines its socio-emotional significance.Therefore, the conceptualisation of verbal behaviour via metaphorical

representation pertains to the processing of socio-emotional information.

To be more accurate, the metaphorisation of verbal behaviour can be

viewed as an instantiation of socio-emotional information processing

and is consequently subjected to the principled patterns thereof. Bearing

this in mind, let us consider the default pattern of a¤ective information

processing.

In cognitive psychology, it is widely accepted that people do not payequal attention to all the information in their surroundings. Rather, our

attention allocation is a limited capacity process and as such highly selec-

tive (Nosofsky 1986). Hebb (1972: 88) defines attention as sensory selec-

tivity and considers it ‘‘the distinguishing mark of the higher animal’’.

More recently, converging evidence has confirmed that negative social in-

formation has stronger impacts on people than positive and neutral infor-

mation and that the processing of socio-emotional information is auto-

matically biased towards negative events. It has been argued that such abias is in keeping with our general adaptive behaviour that emphasizes

vigilance and self-defence (Baumeister et al. 2001; Rozin and Royzman

2001; Jing-Schmidt 2007).8 In light of the socio-emotional character of

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 271

verbal behaviour and in light of the negativity bias as the default

processing pattern with regard to socio-emotional information, the pre-

dominance of negative metaphors of verbal behaviour as reported by

Simon-Vandenbergen and in the present study is no longer surprising but

seems to have a psychological grounding.

On a sociolinguistic note, the predominance of negatively valenced

metaphors also requires an analytic model that reflects principles of inter-action. Here I shall suggest some foundational ideas underlying such a

model. On the one hand, conventional metaphors are prefabricated and

as such convenient and reassuring. As Matiso¤ (1979: 110) puts it, ‘‘[t]he

security of knowing the right thing to say in a given situation is a precious

commodity’’ (italics in the original). Such security, I shall argue, is strate-

gically appreciable especially in situations where a negative message such

as dismay, contempt, disgust, indignation, anger, etc. needs to be con-

veyed. Metaphorical prefabs fulfil our communicative need to expressnegative emotions not in our own name, but in the name of received wis-

dom, i.e., conventionalised collective emotions. This possibility is part of

what Go¤man (1981: 3–4) calls the ‘‘embedding capacity’’ that gives us

‘‘dramatic liberties’’. Thus, to be able to use negative prefabs is not only

reassuring, but also empowering in that the utterances of the speaking

individual assume a collective frame of emotionality. On the other hand,

White’s idea that the articulation of emotion serves a moral regulatory

function in interaction is highly relevant. Specifically, negative emotionscommunicate moral discontent, which may serve as a motivation to

change undesirable situations and improve social environment.

5. Conclusions

I conclude this paper by emphasizing four points. First, the cognitive pro-

cesses underlying the Chinese conceptualisations of verbal behaviour aremetonymy and metaphor. Metonymy and metaphor form a continuum of

figurativity. At the metonymic pole, we encounter expressions that con-

tain one or more salient bodily components of speech articulation which

refer to speech. On the metaphorical pole, we observe expressions in

which recurrent concrete physical actions, activities and experiences are

mapped onto abstract social behaviours involving the use of language.

Thus, common to both cognitive processes is the embodiment of the con-

ceptualisation of verbal behaviour.Secondly, the metonymy-metaphor continuum is one of figurativity.

Correlating to the continuum of figurativity that extends from metonymy

to metaphor is the continuum of semantic predictability. The speech

272 Z. Jing-Schmidt

organ metonymy is highly schematic and semantically predictable. Com-

pared to this metonymy, the metaphors show an increasing degree of

conventionality and variously lowered degrees of semantic predictability

depending on what aspect of the source domain participates in the map-

ping. However, based on semantic compositionality, the meanings of the

metaphors are more or less recoverable.

Thirdly, many of the Chinese expressions of verbal behaviour can becategorized in terms of universal conceptual metaphors because of the

experientially fundamental nature of their source domains. This said,

however, the particular a¤ective valence inherent in the semantics of an

expression does suggest the reality of a culture-specific ‘‘experiential fo-

cus’’. For this reason, a proper interpretation of the Chinese metaphors

requires a cultural model that accounts for the culture-specific a¤ective

valence.

Finally, the overall distributions of a¤ective valence characterisedcrosslinguistically by a negativity bias may be attributable to the socio-

emotional nature of verbal behaviour and the cognitive-a¤ective patterns

underlying its perception. On this view, the metaphorisation of verbal

behaviour is not only a cognitive phenomenon, but, more accurately, a

cognitive-a¤ective process whereby emotion plays a crucial part in the

conventionalisation of metaphors. By making reference to the larger con-

text of human cognitive-a¤ective behaviour and especially emotion, the

current approach seems to have provided an adequate perspective fromwhich to deal with the phenomenon at hand. The intellectual significance

of this perspective is that it raises important questions for linguists with

regard to the relationship between language, cognition and emotion.

Concretely, it will be a task for future studies to determine to what extent

metaphors concerned with other target domains are related to emotion. It

is hopeful that the answers will not only shed new light on our knowledge

of metaphorical language as a cognitive phenomenon, but will also carry

our understanding of emotion and language a step further.

Received 14 May 2007 University of Cologne, Germany

Revision received 26 October 2007

Appendix A: Examples in Chinese original

(1) a. 嘴硬 b. 嘴甜 c. 多嘴多舌

(2) a. 我们做得不好，得承认，不要嘴硬。

b. 这人虽然本事不大，但是嘴甜。

c. 大家都不言语，偏你多嘴多舌，有你什么事啊?

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 273

(3) a. 嘴硬 b. 嘴甜 c. 嘴碎 d. 嘴紧

(4) a. 苦口婆心 b. 佛口圣心 c. 佛口蛇心 d. 刀子嘴，豆腐心

e. 口是心非 f. 心直口快 g. 嘴甜心苦 h. 口蜜腹剑

(5) a. 多嘴多舌 b. 油嘴滑舌 c. 舌尖口快 d. 赤口白舌

e. 长舌妇 f. 毒舌 g. 三寸不烂舌，两行伶俐齿

h. 伶牙俐齿 i. 狗嘴吐不出象牙

(6) a. 低声下气 b. 阴阳怪气 c. 口气大 d. 理直气壮

e. 油腔滑调

(7) a. 顶嘴 b. 斗嘴 c. 堵嘴 d. 插嘴

(8) 骂不还口，打不还手

(9) a. 学舌 b. 难以启齿 c. 嚼舌头 d. 张口结舌

e. 摇唇鼓舌 f. 膏唇拭舌

(10) a. 费口舌 b. 费嘴皮子 c. 费舌劳唇

(11) a. 众口铄金 b. 赤舌烧城 c. 一口咬定 d. 血口喷人

e. 舌战群儒 f. 齿牙为祸 g. 口口声声

(12) a. 挂在嘴边 b. 不足挂齿 c. 掷地有声 d. 一吐为快

e. 斩钉截铁 f. 字斟句酌

(13) a. 对牛弹琴 b. 打边鼓 c. 自吹自擂 d. 老调重弹

(14) a. 打岔 b. 扯皮(扯淡) c. 挖苦 d. 吹牛 e. 拍马屁

f. 泼冷水 g. 和稀泥 h. 开门见山 i. 打开天窗说亮话

j. 信口开河

(15) a. 撒谎 b. 扯谎 c. 造谣

(16) a. 交心 b. 掏心 c. 推心置腹

(17) a. 顶撞 b. 旁敲侧击 c. 忽悠 d. 吹捧 e. 开导

f. 歪曲 g. 打断 h. 揭露

(18) a. 言外之意 b. 话里有话 c. 话里话外 d. 打开话匣子

e. 实话 f. 空话 g. 弦外之音

(19) a. 唇枪舌剑 b. 单刀直入 c. 矛头指向 d. 话锋一转

e. 一语中的 f. 出口伤人 g. 恶语伤人 h. 人言可畏

i. 体无完肤 j. 言辞激烈

(20) a. 刺耳 b. 讽刺 c. 抹杀 d. 抨击 e. 中伤

(21) a. 甜言蜜语 b. 话不对味 c. 吞吞吐吐 d. 咬文嚼字

e. 噎人 f. 生涩 g. 添油加醋

(22) a. 冷言冷语 b. 冷嘲热讽 c. 说风凉话

(23) a. 风言风语 b. 满城风雨 c. 吹枕边风

(24) a. 一唱一和 b. 此唱彼和 c. 高唱入云 d. 唱高调

e. 说得比唱得好听

Appendix B: Questionnaire

您好!

感谢您在百忙中填答这份问卷!

274 Z. Jing-Schmidt

请您阅读下列词语并判断下列词语的意思是褒义，贬义，还是中性。然

后根据您自己的理解将相应选项前的小圈涂黑，谢谢!

1. 佛口蛇心 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

2. 嘴甜 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

3. 多嘴多舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

4. 伶牙俐齿 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

5. 嘴紧 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

6. 苦口婆心 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

7. 阴阳怪气 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

8. 嘴硬 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

9. 刀子嘴，豆腐心 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

10. 口是心非 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

11. 心直口快 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

12. 膏唇拭舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

13. 骂不还口，打不还手 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

14. 难以启齿 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

15. 油嘴滑舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

16. 舌尖口快 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

17. 赤口白舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

18. 长舌妇 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

19. 扯皮(扯淡) b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

20. 三寸不烂舌，两行伶俐齿 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

21. 嘴碎 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

22. 狗嘴吐不出象牙 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

23. 低声下气 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

24. 佛口圣心 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

25. 口气大 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

26. 理直气壮 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

27. 油腔滑调 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

28. 顶嘴 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

29. 嚼舌头 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

30. 拍马屁 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

31. 插嘴 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

32. 口蜜腹剑 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

33. 学舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

34. 血口喷人 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

35. 扯谎 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

36. 张口结舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

37. 顶撞 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

38. 嘴甜心苦 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

39. 费口舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

40. 掷地有声 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 275

41. 费舌劳唇 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

42. 字斟句酌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

43. 赤舌烧城 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

44. 一口咬定 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

45. 多嘴多舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

46. 舌战群儒 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

47. 齿牙为祸 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

48. 口口声声 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

49. 把...挂在嘴边 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

50. 对牛弹琴 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

51. 费嘴皮子 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

52. 一吐为快 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

53. 斩钉截铁 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

54. 众口铄金 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

55. 不足挂齿 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

56. 打边鼓 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

57. 开门见山 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

58. 老调重弹 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

59. 打岔 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

60. 毒舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

61. 挖苦 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

62. 推心置腹 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

63. 堵(某人的)嘴 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

64. 泼冷水 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

65. 单刀直入 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

66. 自吹自擂 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

67. 打开天窗说亮话 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

68. 信口开河 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

69. 撒谎 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

70. 斗嘴 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

71. 造谣 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

72. 冷言冷语 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

73. 跟(某人)掏心 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

74. 吹牛 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

75. 摇唇鼓舌 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

76. 旁敲侧击 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

77. 忽悠(某人) b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

78. 吹捧 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

79. 开导 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

80. 一语中的 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

81. 打断 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

82. 揭露 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

276 Z. Jing-Schmidt

83. 言外之意 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

84. 言辞激烈 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

85. 话里话外 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

86. 打开话匣子 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

87. 讽刺 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

88. 空话 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

89. 弦外之音 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

90. 唇枪舌剑 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

91. 和稀泥 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

92. 矛头指向(某人) b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

93. 话锋一转 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

94. 歪曲 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

95. 出口伤人 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

96. (话或文章)生涩 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

97. 人言可畏 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

98. 体无完肤 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

99. 话里有话 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

100. 刺耳 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

101. 实话 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

102. 高唱入云 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

103. 冷嘲热讽 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

104. 中伤 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

105. 甜言蜜语 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

106. 话不对味 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

107. 一唱一和 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

108. 咬文嚼字 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

109. (话)噎人 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

110. 恶语伤人 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

111. 添油加醋 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

112. (跟某人)交心 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

113. 抨击 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

114. 说风凉话 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

115. 唱高调 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

116. 满城风雨 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

117. 吹枕边风 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

118. 吞吞吐吐 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

119. 此唱彼和 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

120. 抹杀 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

121. 风言风语 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

122. 说得比唱得好听 b褒义 b贬义 b不褒不贬

再次感谢您的合作!

Chinese metonymies and metaphors 277

Notes

* I thank Ewa Dabrowska and the two anonymous expert reviewers for their comments

and suggestions which contributed to the improvements of this paper. I wish to express

my gratitude to Jing Ting of Harbin Normal University, China, who administered the

questionnaire survey and helped me collect the data employed in section 4. I thank her

and Stefan Th. Gries of UCSB for the help they generously o¤ered me in dealing with

the statistics on which the quantitative analysis in section 4 rests. My thanks also go to

my friend Debra Grant who patiently studied the manuscript and improved my English.

Of course, all remaining errors are my own. Author’s contact address: University of

Cologne, Department of General Linguistics, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Koln.

Author’s e-mail address: zjingsc0@uni-koeln.de

1. Throughout this paper, the term ‘‘Chinese’’ refers to the standard o‰cial language used

in mainland China and Taiwan, known as Mandarin.

2. The following abbreviations are adopted in the relevant glosses in this paper: 1Pl ¼ first

person plural, 2SG ¼ second person singular, RES ¼ resultative, Q ¼ question.

3. An exception has been pointed out to me, by Debra Grant, in the expression ‘Don’t try

to sweet talk your way out of it.’ In general, however, culture-specific food preferences

and culinary experiences may account for the contrastive semantic coloration of sweet-

ness. The European appreciation of confectionery is not only evident in the delight of

the dessert as the culinary highlight. It is also linguistically evident in the idiomatic ex-

pression have a sweet tooth that encodes the favouring of sweetness. More importantly,

the emotional significance of confectionery is such that sweets are powerful symbols of

love and their withdrawal can serve as punishment, thus constituting enormous psycho-

logical and pedagogical consequences. The Chinese are a people known to place great

value on the entree which by virtue of its variety and elaboration inevitably pre-empts

the dessert which is at the most an afterthought. Within this cultural frame, confection-

ery is marginalized, and even despised or considered destructive to a culinary event if

overindulged. In light of this, the word sweet carries very di¤erent connotations in the

two languages.

4. The meaning of broken may be rendered variously as sui ‘shattered’, po ‘damaged but

unshattered’, duan ‘(oblong object) broken in two or more sections’ or huai ‘defect, dam-

aged’, in Chinese. While the first three senses focus on the perceptual features of the

damaged object, the last one emphasizes functional damage. See Chen (2007) for an in-

depth study of the conceptualisation of cutting and breaking events in Chinese.

5. For our example to be considered an instance of conceptual blending, it is essential to

argue against the availability of the quality of being discreet and trustworthy in either

input. It seems to me, however, such availability is not an all-or-nothing matter, but

one of degree, depending largely on how far one wishes to stretch the association with

the input meanings. In our case, something that is tight is unlikely to leak, which allows

the association that it is safe, metaphorically so when it comes to the organ of speech.

6. All the informants are undergraduate students of the Department of Education, Harbin

Normal University, China. Mandarin is the only native language of the informants. The

questionnaire was presented at the beginning of the Fall/Winter semester of 2007.

7. The fact that the total frequency of the neutral rating is slightly higher than expected can

be explained if we take into account the potential weakness of the current questionnaire

design. Because the items are presented out of context, the rating heavily depends on the

informants’ abstract lexical knowledge. This is problematic especially because many

negative emotions are usually associated with behaviour in a specific situation. Thus, in

the absence of context, informants might find it di‰cult to make definite judgment on

278 Z. Jing-Schmidt

the a¤ective valence of a certain item, which may have contributed to the relatively high

frequency of the neutral rating. This is particularly considerable with items that are too

infrequently used in everyday life for informants to know what they mean at all, espe-

cially in isolation. This methodological weakness is acknowledged here and should be

overcome in follow-up research in the future.

8. Details regarding the vast literature on negativity bias are beyond the scope of this

paper. The interested reader may consult Peeters and Czapinski (1989), Skowronski and

Carlston (1989), Pratto and John (1991), Taylor (1991), Caccioppo and Berntson (1994),

Cacioppo et al., (1997, 1999) in addition to the three references in the parentheses.

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282 Z. Jing-Schmidt

Subjects in the hands of speakers:An experimental study of syntactic subject

and speech-gesture integration

FEY PARRILL*

Abstract

Work by Russell Tomlin has shown that there is a close relationship

between the syntactic subject of an utterance and the entity the speaker’s

attention is focused on while the utterance is being formulated, for descrip-

tions of a simple event (Tomlin 1985, 1995, 1997). The experiment pre-

sented in this paper demonstrates that the same e¤ect can be obtained for

a more complex event, and that attention also impacts the spontaneous

hand gestures produced along with speech. The paper shows that both syn-

tactic subject and the information contained in gesture can be manipulated

by changing which entity a speaker is focused on during utterance formula-

tion. This pattern suggests that changes in conceptualization give rise to

changes in both speech and gesture.

Keywords: co-speech gesture, attention, syntactic subject.

1. Introduction

Language researchers must deal with the following very fundamental andvery troublesome question: how do speakers choose between the di¤erent

syntactic structures available in their language when encoding a mental

representation? For instance, why does a person say Mark was scared by

the raccoon rather than the raccoon scared Mark? Within traditional ap-

proaches, these two sentences are assumed to be semantically equivalent,

so why choose one over the other? Researchers tend to agree that such a

choice is driven by a di¤erence in the speaker’s underlying construal of

the situation. (Perhaps the raccoon is more central to the conversation inthe latter case.) There is wide disagreement, however, about the formal

apparatus necessary for describing the relationship between speaker con-

strual and grammatical structure. Some approaches require a series of

Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008), 283–299

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.011

0936–5907/08/0019–0283

6 Walter de Gruyter

translations from one part of the language system to another—from

pragmatics, to semantics, to syntax, for example. Other approaches sug-

gest that syntactic structures can directly reflect the outcome of cognitive

processes. This paper advocates for the latter kind of approach. Specifi-

cally, the paper o¤ers further support for a hypothesized link between

sentence structure and attention. A number of authors have suggested

that attention plays a major role in determining how language users em-ploy grammatical constructions (MacWhinney 1977; Talmy 1996, 2007,

forthcoming; Tomlin 1985, 1995, 1997). In addition, using a simple exper-

imental paradigm (discussed in more detail below), Russell Tomlin has

shown that the element a person’s attention is focused on while she

formulates an utterance is likely to be encoded as the subject of that utter-

ance (Tomlin 1985, 1997). The choice between an active or passive sen-

tence (as in the examples above) thus reflects a di¤erence in the how the

speaker’s attention is deployed.While Tomlin shows that this pattern obtains in a number of lan-

guages, this work is open to certain criticisms. First, Tomlin focuses on a

very simple (transitive) event. Second, psycholinguistic experiments are

particularly vulnerable to the claim that a pattern observed in the

data arises from what participants think they should do in an experi-

ment (sometimes referred to as demand characteristics: Intons-Peterson

1983), rather than from the way that language works under normal

circumstances.The experiment described in this paper provides responses to these two

criticisms. First, a modification of Tomlin’s paradigm will be used to ex-

plore the role of attention in predicting syntactic subject in descriptions of

a very complex (caused motion) event. Second, an additional source of

information will be exploited to support the claim that syntax and con-

ceptualization are linked: the hand gestures that people produce while

they are talking. Because these gestures are packed with meaning that is

directly connected to the meaning of the accompanying speech, they areextremely informative about the relation between language and conceptu-

alization. Because they are not consciously monitored, however, they can

o¤er a more direct path to the speaker’s conceptualization than does

speech.

There are two goals for this paper. The first is to demonstrate a connec-

tion between conceptual structure and grammatical form, along the lines

of Tomlin’s proposal. The paper will show that the e¤ect of attention on

speech Tomlin obtains can be observed for gesture as well. That is, boththe syntactic subject of an utterance and the information encoded in ges-

ture can be manipulated by changing which entity a speaker is focused on

while planning her utterance. Because gesture can provide information

284 F. Parrill

about imagistic aspects of a speaker’s representations (Beattie and Shov-

elton 2002; Goldin-Meadow 2003; Kita 2000; Kita and Ozyurek 2003;

McNeill 1992; Parrill and Sweetser 2004; Sweetser 1998), we can make

more forceful claims about how those representations might be expressed

linguistically. The second goal is to show that speech-gesture patterning

can be manipulated. Previous work on the integration of speech and ges-

ture takes advantage of grammatical di¤erences across languages that arethought to correlate with di¤erences in the information encoded in ges-

ture (Kita and Ozyurek 2003; McNeill and Duncan 2000). This study,

on the other hand, attempts to evoke di¤erent patterns of conceptualiza-

tion for the purposes of linguistic expression (often referred to as thinking

for speaking: Slobin 1987, 1996) within a single language.

In what follows, extremely basic information about the kinds of ges-

tures that occur with speech, and their connection to that speech will be

presented.1 The experimental paradigm Tomlin employs will then be re-viewed, and the modifications necessary to permit an analysis of gesture

will be explained. An experiment replicating Tomlin’s basic findings for

syntactic subject and extending the findings to the domain of gesture will

then be presented.

2. Coordination of speech and gesture

When people talk they typically also produce hand and arm motions, orgestures. These gestures link spaces in front of the speaker’s body to

topics in the discourse, point to elements that are not physically present,

or depict aspects of scenes the speaker is describing. In all such cases,

the gestures produced are very closely connected to the accompanying

speech. Because of this tight connection, many researchers have come to

believe that gesture is part of the language system—that language is not

just speech (or sign), but speech (or sign) plus gesture (Goldin-Meadow

2003; Liddell 2003; McNeill 1992, 2005, 2000; Nunez and Sweetser 2006;Parrill and Sweetser 2004; Sweetser 1998).

Once language has been broadened to include gesture, discovering ex-

actly how the two modalities are coordinated during production presents

a major theoretical problem. In the past few decades, there have been

many significant discoveries on this front (for reviews, see Goldin-

Meadow 2003; Kendon 2004; McNeill 2005). Much of the work that ex-

plicitly examines the encoding of semantic information in the two chan-

nels has focused on iconic gestures (gestures that iconically depict someaspect of an event or scene) produced when the speaker is talking about

motion. There are two reasons for this focus. First, gestures tend to be

very frequent and complex when we speak about motion. Second, motion

Subjects in the hands of speakers 285

is a relatively well-understood semantic domain. The experiment pre-

sented here also involves motion event descriptions, so some of this work

will be briefly reviewed.

2.1. Speech and gesture in descriptions of motion

Motion events can be studied by breaking an event up into a set of com-

ponents, as Talmy (1985) has done. These components (conventionally

placed in small caps) include path (the trajectory of motion), manner (in-

ternal structure of the motion), figure (the moving object), and others.Talmy has examined the ways in which di¤erent languages express these

components, and has sorted languages into two groups based on how

path is encoded. If path is encoded in a satellite (e.g., a prepositional

phrase), the language is referred to as a satellite-framed language. This is

true of English, which typically uses prepositional phrases for path, and

conflates manner and activity in a motion verb (e.g., the ball rolled down

the hill ). Verb-framed languages, on the other hand, have many verbs en-

coding path or direction while manner is encoded in a separate phrase(e.g., Spanish fue a Ibiza nadando, literally ‘he went to Ibiza swimming’).

Interestingly, studies of gesture production in motion event descriptions

reveal that speakers also gesture di¤erently depending on whether their

language is satellite-framed or verb-framed (Kita and Ozyurek 2003; Mc-

Neill and Duncan 2000). Speakers of satellite-framed languages tend to

accompany utterances containing manner verbs with path-only gestures,

unless there is particular focus on manner in the description (McNeill

and Duncan 2000). Figure 1 is an example of an English motion event de-scription exhibiting this typical pattern. The verb (roll ) encodes manner,

while the prepositional phrase (down the street) encodes path. The ges-

ture also encodes path. The studies presented here ask whether this

typical pattern can be manipulated by shifting the speaker’s attention.

Speech: then he’s like [rolling down the street ]. Gesture: speaker’s right

hand moves downward from left to right (path) while left hand holds.

The gesture occurs during the bracketed speech. The peak prosodic

emphasis is in bold. These transcription conventions, which are usedthroughout the paper, are borrowed from McNeill 1992.

3. Linking attention and syntactic subject

People are very likely to gesture when describing a motion event. The

paradigm Tomlin has used to explore the link between attention and syn-tactic subject involves asking participants to describe an event. For this

reason, Tomlin’s paradigm can be adapted for analysis of speech-gesture

coordination.

286 F. Parrill

In Tomlin’s study, participants describe an event as they are watching

it unfold. In this event, two cartoon fish swim towards each other. When

they reach the center of the screen, one fish opens its mouth and swallows

the other. At two points during the scene, an arrow appears above one of

the fish, directing participants’ attention to that fish, as pictured in Figure2. The second appearance of the arrow occurs right before the swallowing

event. Participants are instructed to fix their eyes on the element to which

arrow points.

If attention is directed to the agent fish (the fish doing the eating—in

this case, the grey fish), participants produce an active sentence to

describe the event, such as the grey fish eats the white fish. If attention is

directed to the patient fish (the fish being eaten, as is the case in the

figure), speakers produce a passive sentence, such as the white fish gets

eaten by the grey fish. In other words, the choice between these two

Figure 1. PATH gesture

Figure 2. Stimulus for Tomlin’s experiments (redrawn from Tomlin 1997)

Subjects in the hands of speakers 287

grammatical patterns, the active and the passive, is regulated by atten-

tion. (It should be noted that while English is the focus here, Tomlin has

used this paradigm with a variety of languages: see Tomlin 1997.)

3.1. Adaptation of Tomlin’s paradigm

For the experiment described here, Tomlin’s paradigm is used with a car-

toon motion event. Participants watch a video clip involving two ele-

ments and describe it while it is unfolding. Their attention is directed to

one of the two elements using a visual cue (an arrow). The event used

for Experiment 1 is a short segment from a cartoon (Pierce and Freleng1950). Because this manipulation requires the event to have very specific

properties, the stimulus will be described in a fair amount of detail.

(A complete scene-by-scene description of the cartoon from which the

stimulus comes, as well as a very detailed description of this scene, can

be found in McNeill 1992, pp. 366–374).

The cartoon depicts the antics of a cat and a bird. The cat is attempting

to catch the bird. The bird is on a building window ledge, while the cat

is below on the street. The cat climbs up towards the bird through theinterior of a drainpipe a‰xed to the side of the building. The bird sees

him coming and puts a bowling ball into the mouth of the drainpipe.

The viewer sees the impact within the pipe of the cat and ball colliding.

The cat then emerges from the bottom of pipe with the ball inside his

body—one infers that he has swallowed the ball. Because the street is on

an incline, the ball begins to roll inside the cat, propelling him down the

street. The cat’s legs flail in a circular motion as he rolls, though they do

not touch the ground (thus are not the cause of motion). The event of spe-cific interest for the experiment is the final portion of the scene, where the

cat moves down the street with the ball inside his body, shown in Figure

3. This will be referred to as the target event.

Figure 3. Target event for experiment

288 F. Parrill

This event was used because it meets certain requirements imposed by

the nature of Tomlin’s attention manipulation. First, there are two enti-

ties participating in one event (the ball and the cat). Second, the motion

event components associated with the two entities in the event are separa-

ble. While the cat’s motion involves manner, it also involves a simple

path. The ball’s motion involves a very distinctive rotating manner. A

narrator can potentially encode one, both, or neither of these componentsin gesture. path alone would look like Figure 1. Such a gesture encodes

trajectory, but no explicit manner of motion.2 Examples of very similar

speech accompanied by manner alone and path plus manner gestures

are shown in Figures 4 and 5, respectively. (It should be noted that par-

ticipants also sometimes represent the flailing motion of the cat’s legs in

gesture—such gestures are discussed below in the analysis section.)

Speech: so he’s [rolling down the street ]. Gesture: speaker’s right hand

traces a circular path repeatedly.Speech: then it is [rolling down the hill ]. Gesture: speaker’s left hand

traces a circular path moving downward.

This paradigm also requires the language being spoken (English) to

have a syntactic alternation that allows either of the two elements to

appear as sentence subject. This is possible with the target event. Partici-

pants can use a causative (the ball rolls the cat down the hill ) or an intran-

sitive motion construction (the cat rolls down the hill ) to describe the

event. Finally, it is possible to predict a di¤erence in how participantswill gesture as a function of which element they encode as the subject of

Figure 4. MANNER alone gesture

Subjects in the hands of speakers 289

their utterance. This is because this event has been used for a number of

experiments exploring speech-gesture patterning in motion event descrip-

tions (Duncan 1996; Kita 2000; Kita and Ozyurek 2003; McNeill 1992,

2000, 2005; McNeill and Duncan 2000). This body of research has shown

that the typical way for an English speaker to describe the target event is

to say the cat rolls down the street, and to accompany the verb phrase

with a gesture depicting path (the trajectory followed by the cat), but

not rotating manner (showing the motion of the ball). This typical pat-tern is shown in Figure 1. Knowledge of this typical pattern allowed

attention to be manipulated and predictions to be made about the ways

in which gesture would change.

4. Experimental manipulation of speech-gesture integration

Before discussing the experiment and predictions, it is important to note

that this stimulus di¤ers from Tomlin’s in a number of significant ways.The two fish in Tomlin’s experiments are identical except in color. This

is not true of the bowling ball and the cat, which are di¤erent sizes and

shapes. Second, the visual cue that directs attention to one of the two

fish in Tomlin’s stimulus is extremely carefully timed. It takes about 150

milliseconds for a person to shift attention from one target to another

(Posner and Petersen 1990). In Tomlin’s stimulus, the arrow appears

over the fish 75 milliseconds before the eating event, and the eating event

is very brief (220 ms). This timing ensures that participants will not beable to shift attention away from the entity the arrow is indicating before

Figure 5. PATHþMANNER gesture

290 F. Parrill

beginning to describe the event. Again, this is not the case with the target

event in Experiment 1. The target event lasts 8700 ms. As a result, al-

though the arrow remains on the screen during the entire target event,

participants in this study can shift their attention during their descriptions

of the action. Third, both the agent and the patient in Tomlin’s stimulus

are animate, whereas in the target event, one of the elements in inanimate

(the bowling ball). Animate entities are thought to make better subjects(Bock 1986; Chafe 1976; Tomlin 1997). Finally, the event in Tomlin’s ex-

periment lacks any kind of narrative complexity. In the target event, there

is a fair amount of visual and narrative complexity. One is required to

make inferences about what has happened (e.g., that the cat and ball

have collided, that the cat has swallowed the ball), and each new event is

relatively unpredictable. In summary, much of the careful control built

into Tomlin’s paradigm is lacking here.

4.1. Methods

Thirty University of Chicago students participated in the experiment for

payment. All were native speakers of English. Each arrived at the experi-ment room with a friend who served as a listener during the participant’s

narration. (Participants produce more naturalistic narrations when not

speaking to an experimenter who they may assume has already seen

the stimulus: Parrill, forthcoming.) Each participant watched three one-

minute cartoon clips and described what was happening as the clip un-

folded. At the beginning of the experiment participants were given the

following verbal instructions:

Toward the end of the video, you will see a red arrow on the screen pointing to an

element in the video. When you see the arrow, keep your eyes on the element the

arrow is pointing to. Do not mention the arrow in your description, though. Just

keep describing what’s happening in the clip.

Before watching each clip, participants were reminded of these instruc-

tions. The first two clips were practice clips and will not be discussed fur-

ther. The third (experimental) clip was the bowling ball scene described

above. The stimuli were presented on a laptop, which was placed between

the two participants so that only the narrator could see the screen. The

experimental set-up can be seen in Figures 1, 4 and 5. During the target

event (the cat’s transit down the street), a red arrow flashed either above

or below the cat, as shown in Figures 6a and 6b. These conditions will bereferred to as the cat arrow and ball arrow conditions, respectively. Fif-

teen participants were in the cat arrow condition and fifteen were in the

ball arrow condition. To ensure that the arrow was actually directing

Subjects in the hands of speakers 291

attention to the cat or the ball (not the cat’s head and the cat’s bottom),

participants were explicitly asked during debriefing what they thought the

arrow pointed to, and always responded appropriately (cat in the catarrow condition, ball in the ball arrow condition).

4.2. Predictions

English speakers typically describe this event by saying the cat rolls down

the street, and produce a gesture that depicts path. Participants in the

cat arrow condition are expected to produce just this pattern. That is, be-

cause their attention is directed to the cat, no change from the default

pattern is anticipated. In the ball arrow condition, however, participants

are expected to produce more utterances with the ball as the subject. This

is because their attention has been directed to the ball. They are also ex-pected to produce more rotating manner gestures (with or without a path

component) because the ball exhibits this kind of manner. When there is

particular focus on manner, it tends to appear in gesture (McNeill and

Duncan 2000).

4.3. Analysis

The speech and gesture each participant produced for the target event

was transcribed. Each utterance describing the target event was coded as

having either the cat or the ball as the syntactic subject. Participants’ ges-

tures were sorted into the following categories: gestures depicting rotating

manner (an example of which can be seen in Figure 4), rotating manner

combined with path (shown in Figure 5), path alone (shown in Figure

1), and gestures depicting the manner in which the cat’s legs move as he

rolls (leg manner). The latter gesture always involves two hands, moving

in flapping motions, shown in Figure 7, and is very distinct from the rota-

tion gestures discussed above. No gestures were produced for the target

event that did not contain motion event information.

Figures 6a and 6b. Cat and ball arrow conditions

292 F. Parrill

Speech: His feet are sort of like [not touching the ground ]. Gesture:

speaker’s two hands move up and down.

4.4. Results

Results describing the e¤ect of the manipulation on speech will be pre-

sented first. Interestingly, while directing participants’ attention to the

ball did make them more likely to produce utterances in which the ball

was the subject, the manipulation also made participants in the ball arrowcondition more likely to produce multiple utterances describing the target

event. Table 1 shows the number of ball-subject utterances and cat-

subject utterances produced in the ball arrow and cat arrow conditions.

Participants in the cat arrow condition universally produced one utter-

ance per participant, and the cat was the syntactic subject of all of these

utterances. Participants in the ball arrow condition, on the other hand,

produced an average of 2.4 utterances. For half the utterances produced

in this condition the ball was the syntactic subject.

Figure 7. Gesture depicting MANNER of motion of cat’s legs

Table 1. Number and syntactic subject of utterances

Syntactic subject of utterance

Condition Ball Cat Total

Ball arrow 18 18 36

Cat arrow 0 15 15

Total 18 33

Subjects in the hands of speakers 293

The two groups di¤ered in the number of utterances produced (Mann-

Whitney U ¼ 108, p ¼ 0:001). In order to explore the relationship be-

tween syntactic subject and condition, a chi-square test for independence

was used. A chi-square statistic was calculated based on the first utterance

produced by each participant. The rationale for this analysis is as follows.

If the attention manipulation is successful, participants in the ball arrowcondition should first produce a ball-subject utterance, even if the cat is

the syntactic subject of subsequent utterances. The frequencies of ball-

subject and cat-subject initial utterances are shown in Table 2. A chi-

square test showed that condition had a significant e¤ect on the syntactic

subject of the first utterance produced (w2ð1;N ¼ 30Þ ¼ 15, p < 0:001).

The majority of participants in the ball arrow condition first produced

a ball-subject utterance. Interestingly, the five participants who did not

begin their description of the target event with a ball-subject utterancenever produced one. In other words, the manipulation appeared to have

no e¤ect on those participants.

To explore the e¤ect of the experimental manipulation on the gestures

participants produced, gestures were sorted into those having a rotation

component (rotating manner alone: 9 produced; rotating manner with

path: 2 produced) and those not having a rotation component (path ges-

tures: 16 produced; gestures depicting the manner of motion of the cat’s

legs: 2 produced), as shown in Table 3.Participants in the cat arrow condition never produced gestures in

which rotation was present, while participants in the ball arrow condi-

tion produced an average of .73 rotating manner gestures. The di¤erence

across the two groups approaches significance (Mann-Whitney U ¼ 150,

Table 2. First utterance produced by each participant

Syntactic subject of utterance

Condition Ball Cat Total

Ball arrow 10 5 15

Cat arrow 0 15 15

Total 10 20

Table 3. Hand gestures

Rotation No rotation Total

Ball arrow 11 13 24

Cat arrow 0 5 5

Total 11 18

294 F. Parrill

p ¼ :06). Of the 11 rotating manner gestures, 63 percent accompanied

ball-subject utterances. While these numbers are too small to permit a

meaningful statistical analysis, they suggest a link between syntactic sub-

ject and rotating manner.

In this study, gestures involving rotation were assumed to reflect think-

ing about ball’s motion, not the motion of the cat’s legs. This is because

gestures accompanying speech about the cat’s legs look quite distinct, asnoted above. Further, if rotating manner were associated with the cat,

the results above might be surprising. While the exact significance of a

gesture can only be inferred, the pattern above o¤ers some support for

the starting assumptions of this study.

4.5. Discussion

The attention manipulation influenced which entity participants encodedas the subject of utterances describing the target event. When attention

was directed to the cat, participants uniformly encoded the cat as the sub-

ject of their utterances, following the typical English pattern. When atten-

tion was directed to the ball, however, participants tended to first produce

an utterance with the ball as the syntactic subject, but then to revert to

the typical pattern. An impulse to return to the typical English pattern is

one explanation for the larger number of utterances produced in the ball

arrow condition. That is, participants strongly prefer to describe the eventwith utterances in which the cat is the syntactic subject, and continue to

talk until they have done so.

Why might the cat be the preferred syntactic subject? First, as noted

above, the cat is animate and animate entities make for better syntactic

subjects (Chafe 1994; Tomlin 1995; 1997). Second, the cat is more central

to the overall narrative than is the ball. The cat is a well-known character

and appears in other scenes (making it discourse-old), whereas the ball

appears only briefly. Such factors also make an entity a better candidatefor syntactic subject (Chafe 1994; MacWhinney 1977; Tomlin 1995,

1997).

A second explanation for the larger number of utterances in the ball

arrow condition has less to do with the properties of the cat, and more

to do with the complexity of the motion event. Choosing the cat as the

subject may allow speakers to avoid encoding some of the complexity of

the event. That is, the cat’s trajectory can be described without giving any

detail about the causal source of that trajectory (the ball’s rotation).While space does not permit a full discussion of the speech produced in

this study, it is noteworthy that thirteen of the participants in the cat ar-

row condition described the event by saying he’s rolling down the street.

Subjects in the hands of speakers 295

The other two used the same construction but with the verbs scoot and

run. Such descriptions give very little detail about the real manner of mo-

tion, and might even create a misleading impression of what transpired.

Participants in the ball arrow condition, on the other hand, are cued to

focus attention on the motion of the ball. As a result, they describe the

event in more detail. When participants in this condition selected the ball

as the syntactic subject, they produced a variety of constructions. Whilethe ball’s rolling down the street was most frequent (57%), caused motion

constructions were also used (the ball’s pushing/dragging/rolling him

down the street: 25%), as were descriptions of the ball’s location (the ball’s

in his stomach: 18%).

Variation in the number of utterances produced when describing an

event has previously been noted for speakers of di¤erent languages (Kita

et al. 2005). Such di¤erences are assumed to be a product of the di¤erent

semantic and syntactic resources provided by the language. The currentproject, however, shows that the number of utterances produced is influ-

enced by a speaker’s decisions about what is most important for the

narrative at the moment of utterance formulation, not just by how her

language packages information. That is, these data may inform us about

thinking for speaking within a single language.

The patterns observed also indicate that speech and gesture change in

coordinated ways. Di¤erences in the selection of syntactic subject as a

function of the attention manipulation were associated with di¤erencesin the motion-event components appearing in gesture. Participants pro-

duced rotating manner gestures only in the ball arrow condition, and

tended to produce them with ball-subject utterances. While there is a

large body of work exploring how speech and gesture pattern di¤erently

as a function of the grammatical features of the language spoken, this is

the first systematic manipulation of speech-gesture integration within a

single language.

5. Conclusion

The entity on which a speaker’s attention is focused while she is planning

her utterance shapes both what she says and how she gestures. This holds

true even when the event being described is very complex, thus extending

Russell Tomlin’s work on a simple transitive event. The patterns observed

also indicate that while attention is a powerful force in language produc-

tion, factors such as animacy and discourse relevance also play a centralrole in determining how a person will speak and gesture. These results

have implications for our understanding of the linguistic system as well

as for our understanding of language as a multimodal behavior. They

296 F. Parrill

suggest that changes in conceptualization give rise to changes in both

speech and gesture. It therefore seems prudent to include gesture in our

accounts of the human language system.

Received 16 January 2007 Case Western Reserve University,

Revisions received 24 September 2007 USA

Notes

* I am grateful for extensive and thoughtful comments from the editor of Cognitive

Linguistics and from three anonymous reviewers. Author’s a‰liation: Department

of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University. Author’s e-mail address:

fey.parrill@case.edu.

1. Gestures are also produced in the absence of speech. This paper focuses on a rela-

tively narrow subset of gesture, co-speech gestures. More general discussions of gesture

can be found in Kendon 1981, 2004; Ekman and Friesen 1972; Muller and Posner,

2004.

2. One reviewer suggests that sliding manner of motion and trajectory alone (path) will be

indistinguishable, thus the gesture depicted in Figure 1 could potentially encode manner

as well, just of a di¤erent type (sliding rather than rotating). This distinction happens

not to be important for the study, however.

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Book reviews

Catherine E. Travis, Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study inPolysemy. Series Cognitive Linguistics Research 27. Berlin/New York:

Mouton de Gruyter, 2005, x þ 327 pp., ISBN 978-3-11-018161-6. Hard-

cover EUR 98; US$128

Reviewed by Natalya I. Stolova, Colgate University, USA. Email

3nstolova@mail.colgate.edu4

The recent years have seen an increased interest in the discourse markers

(DMs) employed in the Romance languages. Discourse Markers in Co-

lombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy by Catherine E. Travis is a wel-

come and important contribution to this dynamic field of research. Thismonograph focuses on four Colombian Spanish DMs: bueno (which is

usually rendered into English as ‘well’, ‘ok’, ‘alright’ or ‘anyway’), o sea

(which translates into English as ‘I mean’, ‘rather’ or ‘that is to say’), en-

tonces (which is roughly equivalent to the English ‘so’ or ‘then’) and pues

(which is similar to the English ‘well’, ‘so’, ‘then’). The book is based on

the author’s doctoral dissertation completed at La Trobe University

(Australia).

As Travis points out in the first introductory chapter, most previousaccounts of Spanish DMs choose a pragmatic approach which focuses

on the functions of these markers yet overlooks their meanings. Thus, on

the descriptive level the author’s goal is to determine and explicate the

meanings associated with the aforementioned markers. On the theoretical

level, Travis’s aim is twofold. The first theoretical goal is to test whether

her semantic approach that previously has been applied to lexical and

grammatical items could be extended to DMs. The second theoretical

objective is to provide further insights into the notion of polysemy indiscourse.

Since Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish is a corpus-based study,

in Chapter 2 (‘‘Methodology’’) Travis describes her data collection

Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008), 301–348

DOI 10.1515/COG.2008.012

0936–5907/08/0019–0301

6 Walter de Gruyter

process. The tokens that she analyzes were extracted from the audio re-

cordings of the spontaneous conversational Spanish of the city of Cali

which is situated in south-western Colombia. The recordings were per-

formed by a Cali native research assistant who took part in every conver-

sation. The other 15 participants (10 women and 5 men) from the 21–55

age group included the research assistant’s family, friends, and colleagues.

In order to avoid the ‘‘observer’s paradox’’ Travis herself did not partici-pate in the conversations and was not present when they took place. The

participants were aware that they were being recorded and were told that

the author was interested in politeness in Colombian Spanish. Out of

the 12 hours of recordings collected by the research assistant, Travis ex-

tracted 4 hours 48 minutes worth of conversation (40,900 words; 15,500

intonation units) because of their high acoustic quality. These 4 hours 48

minutes represent 13 conversations that took place in a series of settings

(e.g., university cafeteria, restaurant, a participant’s house, etc.) and cov-ered a range of topics (e.g., food, things to be done around the house,

work, university life, etc.). When the database did not contain a particu-

lar function on which Travis needed to comment she used some examples

from previous studies as well as some examples from novels by contem-

porary Columbian authors.

As many linguistic labels, the term ‘‘DMs’’ is a highly problematic

term. Alternative names such as ‘‘interjections’’, ‘‘particles’’, ‘‘pragmatic

markers’’, ‘‘discourse connectives’’, ‘‘discourse operators’’, ‘‘muletillas’’(literally ‘little crutches’) and ‘‘conectores pragmaticos’’ (‘pragmatic con-

nectives’) have been suggested. As Travis points out (p. 27), such an array

of terms reflects the variety of interpretations about the defining features

of these linguistic elements. Therefore she starts Chapter 3 (‘‘What are

discourse markers?) by surveying the main perspectives on the DMs that

have been proposed up to date: 1) the theoretical approach represented by

such scholars as Deborah Schi¤rin and Bruce Fraser who view DMs as

markers of sequential relations, 2) the Relevance Theory which treatsDMs as carriers of procedural meaning, 3) the Argumentation Theory

which treats DMs as encoding argumentational relations, and 4) the

theory of grammaticalization which focuses on the historical process

through which DMs have emerged. Following this literature review1

the author discusses the formal features of DMs such as prosodic and

syntactic independence, indeterminate semantic scope, use by a primary

speaker, as well as their functional features such as playing a role in con-

textualizing utterances and in speaker-hearer interaction.In the final section of Chapter 3 Travis outlines the theoretical

approach that she chooses to adopt, namely the Natural Semantic Meta-

language (NSM). The NSM, which was originated by Anna Wierzbicka

302 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

in the early 1970s, is an approach to semantic analysis based on reduc-

tive paraphrase using a small collection of semantic primes. The method

of reductive paraphrase consists of breaking semantically complex

concepts/words down into combinations of simpler concepts/words. As

for semantic primes, these are understood as atomic, primitive meanings

present in all human languages. For example, the complex word/concept

‘‘lie’’ can be analyzed in NSM as follows: X lied to Y ¼ X knew it wasnot true / X said it because X wanted Y to think it was true / people

think it is bad if someone does this. According to the NSM, semantic

primes represent elements of linguistic conceptualization and this focus

on conceptualization is what places this theoretical approach within the

broader framework of cognitive linguistics.

Travis starts her analysis in Chapter 4 with the DM bueno (‘well’, ‘ok’,

‘alright’ or ‘anyway’). She groups the 92 tokens of this DM found in her

corpus into six di¤erent functional categories: (1) expressing acceptance,(2) initiating a leave-taking, (3) prefacing a dispreferred response, (4)

marking a reorientation in topic, (5) marking a correction, and (6) intro-

ducing direct speech. These six functions represent four di¤erent mean-

ings. Context in which the marker occurs makes it possible for a single

meaning to encompass several functions. For example, the first meaning

of bueno that Travis identifies can be represented with the following script

(p. 92):

bueno1

1. you said something to me now

2. I think that you want me to say something now

3. I say: ‘‘this is good’’

Based on the context, bueno1 can function as a marker of acceptance as

well as a marker of pre-closing the conversation, as illustrated by exam-

ples (1) and (2), respectively2 (pp. 88; 94–95):

(1) Angela: Julia, ahı le dejamos dos pancakes. . . . Coma --.

Julia:

?

Hah?

Angela: Comase una arepa tambien,

?

oyo?

Julia: Bueno, mijita. Gracias.

Angela: Julia, we’ve left two pancakes for you. . . . Have --.

Julia: Hah?

Angela: Have an arepa as well, OK?

Julia: Bueno, my love. Thank you.

(2) Patricia: Faltan veinte para las tres.

Claudio: Huy, ooh vea, que estoy un rato.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 303

Patricia: Faltan veinticinco.

Claudio: Bueno, mi querida estimada.

Angela: Bueno, Claudio, muchas gracias.

Patricia: It’s twenty to three.

Claudio: Ooh, hey, I’ve been here a while.

Patricia: It’s twenty-five to.

Claudio: Bueno, my esteemed darling.

Angela: Bueno, Claudio, thank you very much.

Bueno in expressing acceptance from example (1) and bueno in initiating a

leave-taking from example (2) constitute the same meaning because in

both cases the marker signals an acceptance of some sort, whether that

of an o¤er of food or that of a conversation closure.

The second meaning of bueno that Travis identifies is labeled ‘‘dispre-

ferred response’’ (p. 101):

bueno2

1. you said something to me now

2. I know that you want me to say something now

3. I say: ‘‘this is good4. I want to say something more about this’’

As can be seen from example (3) (p. 97), its function is to encode the

recognition of the validity of the previous comment or question, while

indicating that the main response is still to follow:

(3) Santi:

?

Sabes como le miden la edad a un arbol?

Angela:

?

Con el carbono catorce?

Santi: Bueno, tambien. No me acordaba de eso.

Santi: Do you know how the age of trees is measured?

Angela: With carbon-14?

Santi: Bueno, that too. I didn’t remember that.

The third meaning (bueno3) which is labeled as ‘‘reorientation’’ plays

the contextualizing role of accepting the prior discourse in order to allow

the discourse to move on (p. 112):

bueno3

1. someone here said something

2. I say: ‘‘this is good

3. someone here can say something else now’’

For instance, in example (4) the interlocutors cannot remember the name

of the beach about which one of them is talking, but since they seem to

304 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

know the beach to which she is referring the DM bueno indicates that the

conversation can carry on (p. 109):

(4) Omar: No me acuerdo como se llama.

Rosario: Bueno.

?

Una vez fuimos alla, llegando unos amigos

alemanes?

Omar: I don’t remember what it’s called.Rosario: Bueno. We went there once, when some German friends

came to visit?

Bueno4 (‘‘correction’’) serves to slightly modify the position that thespeaker has previously expressed (p. 116):

bueno4

1. I said something now

2. I think that someone can say: ‘‘I don’t think the same’’3. I say: ‘‘this is good

4. I want to say something more about this now’’

As can be seen from example (5), the self-correction usually is not triggered

by an objection expressed by one of the interlocutors but rather is moti-

vated by an unexpressed objection that the speaker can foresee (p. 113):

(5) Angela: Alla las olas son mas grandes, el mar es como mas alboro-

tado, me parece a mı. Y la arena -- Bueno, Cartagena no

es clarito,

?

cierto?

Angela: There, the waves are bigger, the sea is like more rough, it

seems to me. And the sand -- Bueno, in Cartagena the sea

is not clear, is it?

The DM in question can also be employed to quote one of the func-

tions identified above. This ‘‘direct speech’’ usage, as illustrated in exam-

ple (6) (p. 118), highlights the fact that the direct speech presented is

drawn from a specific discourse context to which it was responding:

(6) Santi: Por ejemplo, vos te casaste, y tu mama dijo, bueno, les cola-

boro con dos cientos mil pesos mensuales.

Santi: For example, you got married and your mum said, bueno,

I’ll help you out with 200,000 pesos monthly.

Travis argues that all the functions of bueno discussed above are cen-tered around the notion of saying something good about the prior dis-

course, and that this common element derives directly form the adjec-

tive bueno ‘‘good’’. Therefore she treats the DM and the adjective as

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 305

polysemous uses of the one form. She also hypothesizes that on the dia-

chronic level bueno2 and bueno3 represent two independent developments

from bueno1, while bueno4 is a further development of bueno2.

The focus of Chapter 5 is on the DM o sea (‘I mean’, ‘rather’ or ‘that is

to say’). Travis found 93 tokens of o sea in her corpus and classified them

according to five di¤erent functions: 1) clarification, 2) utterance comple-

tion, 3) repair, 4) side comment, and 5) conclusion. The first three func-tions fall under one single meaning captured by o sea1 (p. 141) which refers

to what is meant by a preceding utterance produced by the same speaker:

o sea1

1. I said something with some words

2. I say: ‘‘I want to say something more about this

3. because I want you to know

what I want to say with these words’’

Examples (7) through (9) illustrate the clarification, the utterance comple-

tion and the repair functions of o sea1, respectively (pp. 136; 143; 148–

149):

(7) Sara: Cuando se paga semestral, el pago es por caja. O sea, en

efectivo o en cheque.

Sara: When it’s paid six-monthly, it’s paid to a cashier. O sea, by

cash or by check.

(8) Angela: Pero ya me canso oırlos, o sea, hablar mal de otras

personas.

Angela: But I get sick of hearing them, o sea, speak badly about

others.

(9) Angela: Ella -- Ella me dijo que -- o sea, que le daba miedo.

Angela: She -- She told me that -- o sea, that she was afraid.

In contrast to o sea1 which gives the speaker an opportunity to refor-

mulate something said, or implied, or something he/she is in the process

of expressing, o sea2 introduces a side comment which contains informa-

tion new to the discourse (p. 158):

o sea2

1. someone said something

2. I say: ‘‘I want to say something more about thiswith some words

3. I want you to know what I want to say with

these words’’

306 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Travis sees this use illustrated in example (10) (pp. 151–152) as a further

development of the notion of reformulation:

(10) Santi: que cosas hablara tambien de uno, mi amor.

Angela: Pues, mi amor, o sea, . . . no se trata de atacar, ni denada. Pero, si tu te pones a observar, la misma situacion

se da en t -- en tu casa.

Santi: What would she also say about me, my love.Angela: Pues, my love, o sea, . . . I don’t mean to have a go at

you, or anything. But if you start to observe, the same

situation is found in -- in your house.

O sea3 involves reformulation as well, but in its case the reformulation

expresses a conclusion that can be drawn from prior discourse (p. 163), ascan be seen in example (11) (p. 160):

o sea3

1. someone said something with some words2. I say: ‘‘I can know something because of this

3. I want to say what I can know’’

(11) Javier: Estas llaves,

?

de donde son?

?

de la casa de Roberto?

Santi: Una es de la oficina.Javier: O sea, que --

Santi: [otra es de] donde la casa.

Javier: . . . O sea, que esta—quedo mamando sin llaves de la

oficina hoy. . . .

?

Ahı todos tienen llaves de oficina?

Javier: What are these keys to? To Roberto’s house?

Santi: One is for the o‰ce.

Javier: O sea, que --

Santi: another is for the house.

Javier: . . . O sea, que he’s -- he’s sucking his thumb without o‰ce

keys today. . . . Does everyone there have o‰ce keys?

While, as stated earlier, the DM bueno and the adjective from which it

derives constitute polysemous uses of the one form, the DM o sea and

its etymon (i.e., the combination of o ‘or’ and sea ‘3p.Sg.Pres.Subj.’ of

ser ‘to be’) are, according to Travis, homonymous. As for the historical

evolution of its functions, Travis hypothesizes that the ‘‘clarification’’

function gave rise to the ‘‘utterance completion’’ and the ‘‘repair’’ func-tions, on the one hand’’, and to the ‘‘conclusion’’ function, on the other

hand, and the ‘‘utterance completion’’ and the ‘‘repair’’ uses eventually

produced the ‘‘side comment’’ option.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 307

In Chapter 6 the author takes up the DM entonces (‘so’ or ‘then’).

Travis’ corpus contains 201 tokens of this unit which she groups into five

functional groups. The first two functions (prefacing result and highlight-

ing main clause) illustrated with examples (12) and (13), respectively, are

grouped together under a single meaning entonces1 (p. 186):

entonces1

1. I said something (X)

2. I say: ‘because of X, Y’’

(12) Paula: Tenemos que costarlo nosotros.

Angela: Mhm.

Paula: Entonces, queremos comparar la calidad de trabajo, y el

precio.

Paula: We have to pay for it ourselves.

Angela: Mhm.

Paula: Entonces, we want to compare the quality of the work,

and the price.

(13) Celia: Le digo yo, si usted es una buena -- buena abogada,

entonces, puede tranquilamente trabajar, libre de meterse

con los polıticos, y hacer sus cosas sucias y torcidas.

Celia: I say to her, if you are a good -- good lawyer, entonces, you

can calmly work, without getting involved with politicians,

and doing things that are dirty and corrupt.

The next two functions (prefacing a response and closing a response)

(examples 14 and 15, respectively) fall under entonces2 (p. 206):

entonces2

1. you said something

2. I say: ‘‘I know something because of this

3. because of this I say this: ’’

(14) Santi: . . . Y yo, a esa hora tengo que estar en la empresa para

ver si -- si recupero esta plata de Marıa Elena Gomez.

Angela: No, sı, entonces, yo me voy temprano a la Universidad.

Santi: . . . And I have to be at the company right at the same

time, to see if -- if I can get back that money from Marıa

Elena Gomez.

Angela: No, yes, entonces, I’ll go to the university early.

(15) Fabio: Lo que mas nos gusta hacer a Clara y a mı es eso. Salir a

comer.

308 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Angela: Comelones. Ahı tenemos que salir, entonces. Conoces La

Carbonera?

Fabio: . . . No.

Fabio: What Cara and I most like to do is that. Go out to eat.

Angela: Gluttons. We’ll have to go out some time, entonces. Do

you know The Carbonera?

Fabio: . . . No.

In addition to the two scripts (entonces1 and entonces2) listed above,Travis identifies the third option (p. 222) which corresponds to the func-

tion labeled as ‘‘discourse progression’’ (example 16) (p. 216):

entonces3

1. someone here said something

2. I say: ‘‘because of this, I say this: ’’

(16) Angela: dentro de las cuatro . . . semanas de cualquier grabacion,

que quiero que se borre. . . . Entonces, aquı tenemos que

firmar.

Angela: within four weeks from [the date of ] any recording,

which I wish to be erased. (reading) . . . Entonces, we

have to sign here.

The functions of entonces illustrated above share the notion of markinginformation as a result of prior discourse. Its use as a DM derives from

a consecutive conjunction which itself goes back to a temporal adverb

entonces with the meaning ‘at time that’. Travis argues that the temporal

adverb and the DM are homonyms. She also hypothesizes that the ‘‘pre-

facing result’’ function gave rise to the ‘‘highlighting main clause’’ and

‘‘prefacing a response’’ functions, and that the latter gave origin to the

functions labled as ‘‘closing a response’’ and ‘‘discourse progression’’.

The focus of Chapter 7 is the DM pues (‘well’, ‘so’, ‘then’). Travis findsa total of 219 tokens of this marker in her corpus which she classifies

into seven functional groups: 1) adding information, 2) serving as a focus

device, 3) introducing a repair, 4) prefacing a response, 5) prefacing an

answer, 6) introducing direct speech, and 7) making topic completion.

According to the author, functions 1 through 6 correspond to a single

meanings ( pues1) represented as the following script (p. 267):

pues1

1. someone here said something2. I say: ‘‘because of this I want to say something more

about this’’

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 309

Examples (17) through (22) (pp. 241–242; 249; 262; 264; 271; 276) illus-

trate functions 1 through 6, respectively:

(17) Sara: Esto se puede pagar mensual o semestral o anual.

?

Sı?

Angela: Mhm.

Sara: Pues, cuando se paga semstral o anual, se puede dar

cheque, o en efectvo.

Sara: You can pay this monthly, or six-monthly, or annually.

OK?

Angela: Mhm.

Sara: Pues, when you pay six-monthly or annually, you can

pay by check, or in cash.

(18) Angela: . . . Y cuando ya, pues, tengamos pa’ la nevera, pues,

cambiamos nuestra nevera.

Angela: . . . And when, already, pues, we have [the money] for the

fridge, pues, we’ll change the fridge.

(19) Particia: . . . que estaba tan de m-- pues, tan en furor --Angela: Tan de moda.

Patricia: when it was so -- pues, all the rage.

Angela: So fashionable.

(20) Clara: Mi reloj no quiere trabajar mas.

Angela: Pues, cambiese el reloj, hermana.

Clara: Esta perezoso.

Clara: My watch doesn’t wan to work anymore.

Angela: Pues, get a new watch, sister.

Clara: It’s lazy.

(21) Santi: Ah,

?

es que son varios casetes? . . .

?

Varios casetes tenes

que entregarle?

Angela: Pues, yo creo que por ahı, unos tres, unos cuatro.

Santi: Oh, so it’s several cassettes? . . . Several cassettes that you

have to give her?

Angela: Pues, I think about three or about four.

(22) Nuri: Cuando veo que esa pelada la pierde, le dije, no, pues, dale

una oportunidad.

Nuri: When I saw that girl was going to fail, I said to her

[the coordinator of the course], no, pues, give her an

opportunity.

310 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

The seventh function that Travis identifies (i.e., topic completion) corre-

sponds to the meaning pues2 (p. 283) and is illustrated in example (23)

(pp. 282–283):

pues2

1. someone here said something

2. I say: ‘‘because of this, I said something more about this

now

3. I don’t want to say anything more about this’’

(23) Fabio: Se comunico contigo. Chevere.

Angela: Mhm.

Fabio: Se hicieron amigas, pues.

Angela: Mas o menos.

Fabio: She got in touch with you. Great.

Angela: Mhm.

Fabio: You made friends, pues.Angela: More or less.

On the diachronic level the DM in question derives from Latin POST (a

temporal and spatial adverb meaning ‘after’) which produced the Old

Spanish pues employed as a temporal adverb and as a causal conjunction.

In the contemporary Spanish the former usage has been lost while the

latter one survived and, according to Travis, pues as a causal conjunctionand pues as a DM represent a case of polysemy. As far as the paths of

development responsible for the creation of the multiple functions of

pues, the author hypothesizes that the function labeled ‘‘adding informa-

tion’’ gave rise to the four functions of serving as a focus device, prefacing

a response, prefacing an answer, and making topic completion, while at a

later stage the ‘‘focus device’’ function made possible the evolution of the

‘‘repair’’ one and the ‘‘prefacing responses/answers’’ function created the

one labeled ‘‘direct speech’’.The account provided by Travis makes several important contributions

to the field. First of all, through the application of the NSM approach to

discourse data the author was able to define the DMs making explicit dis-

tinction between their meanings (i.e., the meta-messages independent

from the context) and their functions (i.e., a combination of what is inher-

ent in the markers with what is attributable to the context). As Travis

points out (p. 75), these newly constructed definitions are particularly

valuable for foreign language learners, cross-linguistic studies and re-search on Spanish concerned with the markers’ subtle similarities and dif-

ferences that cannot be grasped when broad functional labels are used.

Furthermore, the study lays ground for further research by identifying a

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 311

series of possible directions for future work. As demonstrated throughout

the book and as stressed by the author in the concluding chapter (pp.

290–293), her findings raise the following issues that await investigation:

the relationship between prosody and function; the distribution of the dif-

ferent functions across the di¤erent markers; a comparison of the contex-

tualizing role of markers across languages and dialects; di¤erences in the

functional distribution in the use of DMs in spoken and written language;pragmatic extensions of DMs cross-linguistically and cross-dialectally,

the insights these elements provide into a specific culture; and the rela-

tionship between the various functions on the diachronic level. In sum,

Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish will be of great interest to the

linguists working within the cognitive approach, to researchers carrying

out corpus-based studies, to scholars interested in DMs, as well as to His-

panists at large.

Notes

1. While overall Travis’ review of literature is very thorough and up to date, her discussion

of the previous studies that treat the Spanish DMs diachronically could have benefited

from references to the following works: Garachana Camarero 1998a, 1998b; Cuenca

1998; Cuenca and Marın 2000; Iglesias Recuero 2000; and Gonzalez Olle 2002.

2. Travis divides all of her examples into intonation units and provides morpho-syntactic

glosses. We omit this information to save space.

References

Cuenca, Maria Josep

1998 Processi di grammaticalizzazione: il caso dei connettivi in catalano e in spag-

nolo. In Ru‰no, Giovanni (ed.), Atti del XXI Congresso Internazionale di

Linguistica e Filologia Romanza (Palermo, 18–23 de septiembre de 1995),

volume II. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 195–204.

Cuenca, Maria Josep and Marıa Jose Marın

1999 Verbos de percepcion gramaticalizados como conectores. Analisis contras-

tivo espanol-catalan. In Maldonado, Ricardo (ed.), Estudios cogniscitivos

del espanol. Revista Espanola de Linguıstica Aplicada. Numero monografico

2000. Logrono/Queretaro: Asociacion Espanola de Linguıstica Aplicada y

Facultad de Lenguas y Letras, UAQ, 215–238.

Garachana Camarero, Marıa del Mar

1998a La evolucion de los conectores contraargumentativos: la gramaticalizacion

de no obstante y sin embargo. In Martın Zorraquino, Marıa Antonia and

Estrella Montolıo (eds.), Los marcadores del discurso. Teorıa y analisis.

Madrid: Arco Libros, 193–212.

1998b La nocion de preferencia en la gramaticalizacion de ahora (que), ahora bien,

antes, antes bien y mas bien. In Cifuentes Honrubia, Jose Luis (ed.), Estudios

de linguıstica cognitiva. 2 volumes. Alicante: Universidad de Alicantes, II:

593–614.

312 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Gonzalez Olle, Fernando

2002 Vamos. De subjuntivo a marcador (con un excurso sobre imos). In Alvarez

de Miranda, Pedro and Jose Polo (eds.), Lengua y diccionarios. Estudios

ofrecidos a Manuel Seco. Madrid: Arco Libros, 117–135.

Iglesias Recuero, Silvia

1999 La evolucion historica de pues como marcador discursivo hasta el siglo XV.

Boletın de la Real Academia Espanola 80(280), 209–308.

Verena Haser, Metaphor, Metonymy and Experientialist Philosophy:Challenging Cognitive Semantics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter,

2005, 286pp., ISBN 3110182831. hb 88.00EUR.

Reviewed by Dominik Lukes, University of East Anglia, England. Email

3d.lukes@uea.ac.uk4

If Cognitive Linguistics was looking to celebrate a quarter of a century ofits existence, it could have done worse than the year 2005, 25 years since

the publication of Metaphors We Live By. It may not have been the first

publication to broach the subject that had been occupying many since

the mid-1970s nor the most comprehensive and detailed examination of

cognitive processes as a whole but it did provide a clarity and single-

mindedness of purpose that changed the linguistic landscape forever.

This work of only seventeen references (its many intellectual debts briefly

and timidly acknowledged in the preface) turned out to be a clarion calland a poster child to many who had harbored doubts about some of the

claims to universality made by formal linguistics, no matter how implicit,

which were then reaching their peak.

And what better way to examine the history of an academic discipline

than with a critical review of some of its key texts? Which is precisely what

Verena Haser set out to do in her passionate challenge to cognitive seman-

tics in general and the work of George Lako¤ and Mark Johnson (Lako¤

and Johnson 1980, 1999 and Lako¤ 1987) in particular. While I agreewith Haser that a careful critique of some of the basic assumptions be-

hind cognitive linguistics is long overdue if the field expects to move

forward, her study fails to provide a compelling enough argument or of-

fer a viable alternative. In the succeeding paragraphs I will briefly outline

her argument, show how and why it fails to achieve its stated purpose and

attempt to o¤er an alternative avenue of critical engagement with these

texts.

Haser’s approach is one of an iconoclast. She claims: ‘‘Anyone at-tempting a critical exposition of Lako¤/Johnson’s approach is treading

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 313

on holy ground.’’ (p. 239) and she approaches her task of a critic with

near revolutionary zeal. She calls her approach ‘‘deconstructivist’’ (p. 2)

but this is merely to allow her to explore every possible avenue of criti-

cism from personal attacks to substantive analysis. As a result a most po-

tent impression a reader gains after a brief exposure to her volume is that

Verena Haser really does not like George Lako¤1 (speaking metonymi-

cally, of course). This is not to minimize the strength of her argumentbut since her dislike comes through so strongly, I feel that in the interest

of full disclosure, I should admit that I rather like George Lako¤ (also

metonymically). I like his work so much that I spent over a year of my

life translating his Women, Fire and Dangerous Things into my native

Czech (published 2006). While this might impair my objectivity it also

gives me the qualification of detailed exposure to Lako¤ ’s text and his

style of argument. I feel justified in making this argumentative detour

since Haser herself admits that her investigation will focus not solely on‘‘Lako¤/Johnson’s claims but also the way they are presented’’ and on

‘‘recurrent structural features of Lako¤/Johnson’s exposition.’’ (p. 4). In

light of this, I also consider it only fair to subject Haser’s own text to the

same treatment.

Haser’s argument proceeds in nine chapters (including an introductory

and a concluding one) and is further supported by an appendix in which

she ‘‘deconstructs’’ Lako¤ (1987)’s style of argument. In chapter 2, she

starts out with a discussion of metonymy, concluding that cognitive lin-guistics has not been able to establish a firm enough distinction between

this concept and that of metaphor. Drawing on research by Glucksberg

and Keysar, she suggests that the di¤erence is that ‘‘with metaphors, as

opposed to metonymies, knowledge of the target concept does not imply

knowledge of the source concept.’’ (p. 51 [original emphasis]) This dis-

tinction, however, only makes sense, if we accept her statement that often

‘‘supposedly typical examples of metonymies are arguably clear instances

of metaphors.’’ (p. 51) She rejects the possibility that if examples suchas ‘‘He is a Judas’’ can be analyzed both as metaphors and metonymies,

the distinction itself is the problem. She insists that it’s important that

‘‘metonymic and metaphoric ingredients can be clearly distinguished

from each other.’’ (p. 49).

Having dealt with metonymy, Haser proceeds to examine the concept

of metaphor itself. She styles the chapter as an assessment of McCawley’s

praise for Metaphors We Live By as an original contribution. Her

1. Haser, of course, examines many of the works written jointly by Lako¤ and Johnson,

but she seems to be particularly badly disposed toward the former.

314 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

conclusion is that ‘‘compelling arguments in Lako¤/Johnson (1980) are

not infrequently conspicuous by their absence.’’ (p. 71) She claims to be

puzzled by the lack of references and acknowledgements in the book and

chastises them for ‘‘ample use of the unfair strategies which they hold are

encapsulated in the argument is war metaphor’’ (p. 71). Her more sub-

stantive argument is focused on the concept of mapping. She claims, for

instance, that ‘‘there is no reason to believe that one and the same similar-ity can explain all the di¤erent mappings from physical falling to more

abstract kinds of falling.’’ (p. 64)

At first glance, chapter 4, may seem like an argumentative non sequitur.

Without preamble Haser plunges into a polemic with Lako¤ and John-

son’s argument against objectivism. However, the spirit of exegetic attack

continues. ‘‘Once again, Lako¤/Johnson’s proposals turn out to be al-

most invariably vague; the authors fail to do justice to opposing views;

their presentation of objectivist tenets is at times patently mistaken.’’(p. 74) She faults them for inconsistencies in their account of objectivism

and concludes that they are fighting a non-existent foe (‘‘It is even ques-

tionable whether any scholar embraces the majority of positions that

Lako¤/Johnson attribute to objectivism.’’ p. 80) which forces them to

‘‘resort to rhetoric’’ (p. 74). To demonstrate her point she mounts a vig-

orous defense of Davidson, who, according to her, had been libeled by

Lako¤ and Johnson as maintaining that meaning and use are indepen-

dent of each other. She presents Davidson’s view as being much moresubtle than Lako¤ and Johnson give him credit for. Lako¤ and Johnson

on the other hand provide an account that is ‘‘incoherent’’, ‘‘vague’’ and

lacking in ‘‘compelling arguments’’ (p. 121–122). Any worthwhile contri-

bution that can be spotted in their work had already been made by

philosophers such as Goodman or Putnam. Overall, Haser concludes:

‘‘Lako¤/Johnson’s criticism of objectivism leaves as much to be desired

as their own contribution to philosophy.’’ (p. 122).

Having thus stripped Lako¤ and Johnson of all intellectual credibility,in chapter 5, Haser proceeds to demolish the experientialist theory of

meaning as outlined in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. ‘‘Lako¤ ’s

suggestions do not provide us with a viable philosophical theory of mean-

ing.’’ (p. 139, my emphasis) because it ‘‘does not explain the nature of

meaning itself ’’ since the ‘‘putative presence of intrinsically meaningful

structures is not a philosophical answer to the questions ‘What is mean-

ing?’ ’’ (p. 141, original emphasis) Haser denies cognitive semantics the

power to distinguish between concepts as simple as Labrador and dog.She also puts forward the claim that the theory runs afoul of Wittgen-

stein’s critique of mental images as a foundation of meaning. I will

argue later that part of the problem with this critique (as with most

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 315

philosophical theories of meaning) lies in the fact that is based entirely on

the meanings of words or at best contrived short phrases rather than real

usage events completely ignoring cognitive/construction grammar’ view

of language where meaning and form are closely interlinked rather than

forming dictionary/pictionary like assignment pairs.

Chapter 6 returns us to a critique of conceptual metaphor theory.

Her conclusion is twofold. First, the conceptual metaphor theory as ex-pounded by Lako¤ and Johnson (1980, 1999) is unoriginal and internally

inconsistent. The inconsistencies lie mainly on the interface between met-

aphorical concepts and metaphorical expressions. Second, the theory, as

proposed, does nothing to answer philosophical questions such as those

posed by Blackburn: ‘‘How [do] we understand words?’’ and ‘‘What does

that understanding consist in.’’ (p. 170–171). ‘‘Conceptualizing some-

thing in terms of another thing by itself does not amount to understand-

ing it in any specific way, since metaphorical definitions can be inter-preted (understood) in various ways.’’ (p. 171) It might be pointed out

here, that this conclusion, relies on the validity of her criticism in the

preceding chapters, which as I will argue below, relies on an essentially

‘objectivist’ view of meaning which according to her does not exist.

Chapters 7 and 8 represent the most substantive portion of Haser’s ar-

gument and attempt to provide a positive alternative to the conceptual

metaphor theory. In chapter 7, she focuses her criticism on the fact that

the selection of target / source domain mapping is largely a matter of aresearcher’s choice: ‘‘various potential source domains of individual met-

aphorical expressions are typically overlapping which shows once more

that source domains, like metaphorical concepts themselves, are probably

a mere construct.’’ (p. 193). She lists a number of potential overlapping

source domains for argument, including: conflict, assuming a stance,

situating sth, etc. concluding that ‘‘every source domain selected is

largely an arbitrary choice.’’ (p. 195) In Chapter 8, she suggests that the

conceptual metaphor theory is insu‰cient to account for the transfer ofmeaning between conceptual domains. Indeed, she claims with an appeal

to Ockham’s dictum, there is no need for positing additional structures

such as conceptual metaphors because metaphorical expressions can be

accounted for by family resemblances. E.g. we do not need a love is a

journey metaphor to be able to understand phrases such as ‘‘our rela-

tionship has been a long bumpy road’’, all we need is a principle akin to

that of family resemblances that allows us to extend the use of phrases

such as ‘‘long bumpy road’’ to all potential metaphorical extensions suchas ‘‘piracy fight’’, ‘‘design process’’, ‘‘stardom’’, etc. (pp. 228–229). This

account, relying on research and its interpretation by scholars such as

inter alia Glucksberg, Keysar and McGlone, is presented as superior to

316 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

that of Lako¤ and Johnson (with some scant acknowledgement of the

work of Gibbs), the latter of which ‘‘involves insurmountable di‰culties,

leading to a psychologically implausible proliferation of metaphorical

concepts.’’ (p. 238) Haser claims that her approach based on family re-

semblances ‘‘is more parsimonious and cognitively more realistic’’ and as

such may not ‘‘only explain links between the senses of di¤erent lexical

items that are used in similar domains [but also] account for similar figura-tive senses of a single lexeme’’ thus possibly providing ‘‘the key to a unified

account of figurative meaning.’’ (p. 238)

It might be slightly unfair to the careful analysis of a large volume of

texts Haser has done, but it appears that her argument can be roughly

reduced to the following bullet points:

1. Lako¤ ’s and Johnson’s view of metaphor is internally inconsistent

and cognitively implausible due to relying on a flawed theory of

meaning; it is inferior to that of Glucksberg and his colleagues.

2. Lako¤ ’s and Johnson’s contributions are not nearly as original and

groundbreaking as others and they themselves claim; they often

ignore prior research or fail to attribute ideas.3. Lako¤ and Johnson often construct non-existent argumentative

foes; most specifically there may not be any thinkers who could be

classified as objectivist.

4. Lako¤ ’s and Johnson’s style of writing uses unfair argumentative

practices, and conceals vagueness and internal inconsistencies.

Let us take each of these points in turn.

Ad 1. On the surface Haser’s critique of experientialism and conceptual

metaphor theory is devastating. And indeed, she points out a number of

true weaknesses of the theory. But despite her insistence at having dealt a

mortal blow to the theory, she remains on the margins of interest for

practicing cognitive linguists.2 Her ferocity and single-mindedness of pur-

pose caused her to miss an opportunity for a truly constructive critiquethat could move the inquiry forward. She claims that the ‘‘major di‰-

culty’’ with Lako¤ ’s and Johnson’s approach is that ‘‘[u]nderstanding a

given target domain in terms of a given source can trigger many di¤erent

conceptions (ways of ‘understanding’) of the target. Thus understanding

cannot simply consist in viewing one thing in terms of another.’’ (p. 244)

This statement is hard to argue with, however, we can certainly quibble

2. It is impossible to address the number of detailed analyses carried out by Haser with a

relatively blunt instrument as this review. As such, I will only deal with some of her

broader statements.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 317

with ascribing such a limited view of metaphor to Lako¤ and Johnson.

They never claim that any one concept can only be understood in terms

of one other concept. However, they do claim that the fact that one con-

ceptual domain is structured in terms of another, with inferential conse-

quences, is significant to our view of human cognition. Haser’s confusion

stems from the fact that she fails to distinguish between language as a

system and language as a process (even in the primitive competence vs.performance sense). As a result, she conflates arguments about online

processing with those about the structure of the conceptual system. Lak-

o¤ and Johnson are concerned primarily with the latter but Haser’s cri-

tique freely moves from one to the other.3 Indeed, her alternative solution

based on family resemblances is nothing but a germinal theory of concep-

tual integration, which of course, is concerned precisely with the problem

of online processing of conceptual domains, including metaphors. Haser

only makes one dismissive reference to blending theory but she would dowell to examine it in more detail, particularly when she faults Lako¤ and

Johnson for conflating ‘‘language and thought’’ or when accusing them of

ignoring Wittgenstein’s warnings against mental images. Actually, she

could have gotten a lot more mileage out of chastising Lako¤ and John-

son for not having a good theory of the role of metaphor in text and evi-

dentiary value of metaphor occurrences for the positing of conceptual

metaphorical structures. As any discourse-aware metaphor analyst can

attest, it is not easy to identify metaphors by careful reading (Cameron2003) let alone automatically based on keywords (Goatly 1997; Musol¤

2005; Lukes 2005, and others) and neither is it clear what can be said

about the metaphorical meaning of a single text containing a particular

metaphor in the absence of other evidence. This lack of a good heuristic

for metaphor identification resulted in a proliferation of metaphors men-

tioned below.

The problem with Haser’s critique of CMT and experientialism is that

it is purely ‘‘philosophical’’. This might seem reasonable given thatLako¤ and Johnson make explicitly philosophical points but by ignoring

the linguistic dimension of their (primarily Lako¤, 1987) enterprise, she

misses a number of important points. She faults experientialism for not

being able to answer a ‘‘philosophical’’ question such as ‘‘How do we un-

derstand words?’’ But this is only a problem if we have a ‘‘philosophical’’

theory of language and meaning. A linguistic theory of meaning requires

3. This critique might seem strange from a linguist committed to a broadly ‘usage-based’

view of language but Haser’s conflations are a result of confusion rather than a commit-

ment to a construction-based view of grammar.

318 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

a much more complex view of linguistic structures including a theory of

compositionality such as that put forth in cognitive and construction

grammars (to which Lako¤ himself devoted considerable space in

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things). If we’re only looking at the meaning

of words and isolated expressions, as philosophers are prone to do, we

miss what language is all about. Moreover, Haser leaves the reader with

the impression that meaning in Lako¤ and Johnson is reduced to meta-phor. She dismisses the much more subtle theory of conceptual frames

or idealized cognitive models as outlined in Lako¤ (1987). It as if the fol-

lowing was never written: ‘‘One of the most robust and far-reaching find-

ings of cognitive linguistics is the phenomenon of framing (Fillmore 1975,

1982) and correlative notions of idealized cognitive models (Lako¤ 1987).

How a person frames a particular situation will determine what they ex-

perience as relevant phenomena, what they count as data, what inferences

they make about the situation, and how they conceptualize it.’’ (Johnsonand Lako¤ 2002: 246) Johnson and Lako¤ ’s statement: ‘‘Embodied real-

ism is not a philosophical doctrine tacked onto our theory of conceptual

metaphor. It is the best account of the grounding of meaning that makes

sense of the broadest range of converging empirical evidence that is

available from the cognitive sciences’’ (Ibid: 249) would also make it

more di‰cult to Haser to make some of her assertions uncontested.

Instead, Haser limits herself to a critique of the feasibility of image

schemas as pre-conceptual structures (arguably one of the more contro-versial aspects of Lako¤ ’s approach) but ignores their potential as an

account of complex concepts. In fact, she never mentions the problem of

compositionality at all. Neither does she discuss the central point of inter-

est in Philosophy in the Flesh, where Lako¤ and Johnson explicitly state

that their main interest lies in reasoning. Although they posit metaphor

as one of the central elements in their ‘‘new’’ philosophy, it stands and

falls with the concept of non-literal embodied meaning rather than the

minutiae of the conceptual metaphor theory.Haser did a lot of reading of Lako¤ and Johnson so it is not surprising

that she set some of their voluminous output aside. But while understand-

able, her omissions are also revealing. She completely ignores (perhaps

understandably for a philosopher) Lako¤ ’s (1996) attempt at applying

his theory of cognitive models to the analysis of the US political dis-

course. Had she paid it more heed, she could have hardly placed such

exclusive emphasis on metaphor in her critique of Lako¤ and Johnson.

It is perhaps fair to point out that Lako¤, Johnson and many others influ-enced by them place metaphor center stage in their inquiries but that is

not what Haser critique is about. She also does not mention (although it

may not have been available to her due to publication deadlines) the new

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 319

afterword Lako¤ and Johnson wrote for the 2003 edition of Metaphors

We Live By. In it, they evaluate the concept of metaphor as metaphorical

itself and discuss the limitations of various conceptual underpinnings

most notably the view of metaphor as domain mapping, which is the

main subject of Haser’s criticism. This may be perhaps the most impor-

tant new perspective on the study of metaphors. If we maintain that

metaphors (or metaphor-like conceptual structures) are partial and com-plex concepts are inevitably metaphor-like, we should perhaps not expect

these concepts to be exempt from this rule and be exhaustive and comply

with classical rules for logical contradiction. And herein lie the limitations

of traditional philosophy that Lako¤ and Johnson primarily argue

against. An objectivist-philosophical approach simply cannot see con-

cepts such as these as valid but will instead waste time in trying to square

circles instead of spending it on substantive analysis. However, while

some of her omissions are understandable, if in my view fatal to her ac-count, others can only be classified as willful. She references Rakova’s

(2002) critique of experientialism as kindred to her own but completely

ignores a debate that took place in the very same issue of Cognitive Lin-

guistics including a rebuttal by Lako¤ and Johnson from which I quoted

above. Is it because many of the points raised in that debate (cf Sinha

2002) provide a counterargument to her claims which she asserts does

not exist?

Furthermore, Haser does not only ignore points raised by her oppo-nents. She cites McGlone (2001)4 as having caused irreparable damage

to the conceptual metaphor theory but ignores a much more conciliatory

paper by Bortfeld and McGlone (2001) o¤ering a ‘‘relativistic account of

metaphor processing’’ which rests on the assumption that ‘‘di¤erent

modes of metaphor interpretation are [ . . . ] operative in di¤erent dis-

course contexts’’ thus explaining why ‘‘people might favor attributional

interpretations of figurative expressions in some circumstances and ana-

logical interpretations in others’’. (p. 75) Bortfeld and McGlone arehoping to reconcile ‘‘competing models’’ of metaphor processing as de-

scribing ‘‘di¤erent points on a continuum.’’ Haser is right in that the

Keysar, Glucksberg et al.’s attributive model of metaphor deserves more

attention from conceptual metaphor theorists (sadly, to my knowledge, it

has received none from Lako¤ and Johnson) but by positing it as the only

possible alternative she commits the same error of judgment of which she

is accusing Lako¤ and Johnson.

4. Chiappe (2003) characterized McGlone’s view as easily identifiable as partisan and one-

sided.

320 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Haser’s objection that ‘‘metaphorical concepts impose an ad hoc com-

partmentalization on the data.’’ (p. 245) carries a bit more weight. This

is mostly a methodological problem, however. Metaphors We Live By

opened the floodgates of conceptual metaphor identification, researchers

behaved and many still do like children in a chocolate factory, flitting

hungrily from one conceptual metaphor to another, often forgetting that

argument is war and ideas are things are merely labels for more com-plex conceptual structures. This led to a proliferation of research that was

too simplistic, relying on Lako¤ and Johnson (1980) and ignoring much

of the subsequent research and refining of the theory. As recently as 2004,

Charteris Black (2004) posited a metaphor politics is religion, based

purely on the presence of key words such as ‘‘mission’’ in his corpus. In

a recent survey of literature on metaphor in education, I discovered that

the vast majority of research limits the foundations of their metaphor

analysis to methodology outlined in Metaphors We Live By (some sec-ond-hand), completely ignoring the conceptual complexity behind meta-

phor. Some of this blame can certainly be laid at the feet of Lako¤ ’s

and Johnson’s more programmatic e¤orts, but Lako¤ ’s own work in

Moral Politics and the appendices of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things,

whatever its other limitations, is much more nuanced and worthy of em-

ulation in the applied context.

As we have seen, Haser does not limit her critique to substantive issues

of an intellectual enterprise in general. At least three quarters of her textare devoted to criticism targeted directly at the work of Lako¤ and John-

son. In the following I will attempt to address some of these points.

Ad 2. Haser is repeatedly puzzled why Lako¤ ’s and Johnson’s

approach has been so compelling and influential, when on her account,

it brings nothing new but confused concepts. What is so revolutionary

about an approach that has had many antecedents (both acknowledged

and unacknowledged) and brings little that is radically new? She makes

a valid point when she points out the limited engagement with past ap-proaches to similar problems exhibited in Lako¤ and Johnson’s work.

Lako¤ and Johnson (1999) purport to undertake an analysis of the his-

tory of philosophy they give phenomenology a short shrift and fail to

mention deconstruction and hermeneutics altogether. Husserl and Fou-

cault are mentioned only in passing and Gadamer or Riceour are

completely ignored which is hard to understand in a book purporting to

present a new philosophy. There is much to be learned from these

thinkers even though I agree with Lako¤ and Johnson that theirapproach was ultimately flawed. Some of their intellectual antecedents

are briefly mentioned in the preface of Metaphors we live by but neither

Lako¤ nor Johnson ever engaged with their work again. However,

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 321

Haser’s puzzlement over the source of the influence of Lako¤ and John-

son’s work stems from a complete misunderstanding of the history of

science. Writers such as Kuhn and Holton have repeatedly demonstrated

that the success of ideas relies more heavily on clarity of purpose than on

completeness and that giving predecessors a short shrift may well be es-

sential for a new paradigm to take hold. If anything, a certain level of

‘‘underspecification’’5 can be beneficial to a scientific enterprise as Keller(2000) demonstrated by her analysis of the use of the term ‘gene’ by prac-

ticing geneticists. Such work also reveals as irrelevant Haser’s argument

that Lako¤ and Johnson’s work should be questioned because few of

their contemporaries or predecessors (such as Putnam) have engaged

with their approach. In fact, if we look closely, this is true of all the great

revolutions in linguistic thought (the same being true of other disci-

plines including physics and biology) including de Saussure and Chom-

sky. Conceptual revolutions rarely expunge all competing perspectives.Rather these coexist alongside them until they either disappear or re-

emerge in another shift.

Ad 3. Just as with her preceding point, Haser’s criticism of Lako¤’s

and Johnson’s propensity for fighting imaginary foes is not entirely with-

out foundation. However, as pointed out above, this is a necessary

feature of all revolutionary reconceptualizations and while it should be

pointed out it is di‰cult to accept it as a justification for rejecting the

theory out of hand. Furthermore, she (along with Leezenberg 2001) areincorrect in their assertion that objectivism as described by Lako¤ and

Johnson does not exist. They are simply looking in the wrong places.

While it may be true that an objectivist subscribing explicitly to all the

tenets of objectivism as ‘caricatured’ by Lako¤ (1987: xii–xiii), particu-

larly among philosophers, might be di‰cult to find, objectivism is rife in

the applied disciplines and popular consciousness underpinning much of

non-philosophical study of the mind. As pointed out above, Haser herself

exhibits certain objectivist commitments in her critique of Lako¤ andJohnson when she assumes that only ideas conforming to Aristotelian

logics can have any validity. This is another reason why Haser fails to

perceive the great appeal Lako¤ and Johnson’s anti-objectivism holds

for many practicing linguists and semanticians. While it is possible to

employ plausible deniability by quoting from the work of philosophers

such as Davidson to show that some their ideas cannot be classified as

objectivist, it is hard to deny that much of the work on grammar and

5. A criticism leveled at Lako¤’s (1987) concept of motivation by Vervaeke and Green

(1997).

322 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

artificial intelligence in the last forty years has been informed by an essen-

tially objectivist view of the mind which, as Robin Tolmach Lako¤ (2000:

6) points out makes it impossible to say ‘‘almost [anything] that might be

interesting, anything normal people might want or need to know about

language.’’

Ad 4. Haser puts much stock by the fact that Lako¤ and Johnson uses

argumentative shortcuts or ‘‘unfair gimmicks’’ (p. 59), as she puts it. Thisline of argument, however, can be rejected out of hand. Accusing an op-

ponent of unfair argumentation is a common trope in academic discourse

and is completely irrelevant to the strength of their case (similar treat-

ments of Chomsky have almost spawned a little industry). I have already

conceded to Haser that Lako¤ and Johnson do not always do justice to

the complexity of ideas of those they construe as their opponents. How-

ever, such approximations have long been the mainstay of academic argu-

ments and it could be argued that without them argument would beimpossible just as language would be impossible without categorization.

But perhaps most devastatingly, if we want to see examples of unfair ar-

gumentative practices, we need to look no further than Haser’s work.

Throughout the book she mixes ad hominem (how else can we classify

expressions such as ‘unfair gimmicks’) attacks with substantive argu-

ments. She repeatedly softens up her targets by denying them credibility

through an accusation of vagueness before she approaches the matter at

hand. Even her use of ‘‘Lako¤/Johnson’’ to refer to her opponentsthroughout the book could be seen as serving to diminish their identity

rather than simply a device to save her some typing. It is no use pretend-

ing that it is possible to present an argument for one’s view without

resorting to shortcuts that the other side will inevitably perceive as ‘‘un-

fair’’. However, it would be foolish and fundamentally dishonest to base

a critique of a body of work purely on the deconstruction of argumenta-

tive practices contained therein. This is neither to accuse Haser of foolish-

ness nor dishonesty but rather to point out how easy it is to fall prey toone’s own strictures.

In conclusion, it is di‰cult to see Haser’s book as anything but a

wasted opportunity. While she points out many areas that would benefit

from further inspection, her unsuccessful attempt to topple the experien-

tialist enterprise as a whole is more likely to obscure rather than eluci-

date the issues that need to have more light shed on them the most.

References

Bortfeld, Heather, and Matthew S. McGlone

2001 The continuum of metaphor processing. Metaphor and Symbol 16, 75–86.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 323

Cameron, Lynne

2003 Metaphor in Educational Discourse. (Advances in applied linguistics.) Lon-

don: Continuum.

Charteris-Black, Jonathan

2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Chiappe, Dan

2003 Review: Understanding figurative language. Metaphor and Symbol 18,

55–61.

Goatly, Andrew

1997 The Language of Metaphors. London; New York: Routledge.

Johnson, Mark, and George Lako¤

2002 Why cognitive linguistics requires embodied realism. Cognitive Linguistics

13, 245–263.

Keller, Evelyn Fox

2000 The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University

Press.

Lako¤, George

1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the

Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1996 Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Lako¤, George, and Mark Johnson

1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western

Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lako¤, Robin Tolmach

2000 The Language War. Berkley/Los Angeles/London: University of California

Press.

Lukes, Dominik

2005 Towards a classification of metaphor use. In Alan Wallington et al. (eds.),

Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Corpus-Based Ap-

proaches to Figurative Language. Birmingham: University of Birmingham,

27–34.

McGlone, Matthew S.

2001 Concepts as metaphors. In Sam Glucksberg (ed.), Understanding Figurative

Language: From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

90–107.

Musol¤, Andreas

2004 Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about

Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rakova, Marina

2002 The philosophy of embodied realism: A high price to pay? Cognitive Linguis-

tics 13, 215–244.

Sinha, Chris

2002 The cost of renovating the property: A reply to Marina Rakova. Cognitive

Linguistics 13, 271–276.

Vervaeke, John, and Christopher D. Green

1997 Women, fire, and dangerous theories: A critique of Lako¤’s theory of cate-

gorization. Metaphor and Symbol 12, 59–80.

324 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Dirk Geeraerts (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin/New

York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006, 485 pp., pb ISBN 978-3-11-019085-4

EURO 24.95; hb ISBN 978-3-11-019084-7 EUR 98.00.

Reviewed by Thora Tenbrink, University of Bremen, Germany. Email

3tenbrink@uni-bremen.de4

This book represents an overview of fundamental issues in Cognitive Lin-

guistics by reprinting ground-breaking articles spanning two full decades

of research (from 1982 to 2000). The collection is intended as a course

reader for students and as a resource for advanced researchers within the

field.

1. Synopsis

Dirk Geeraerts: Introduction—A rough guide to Cognitive Linguistics.

In this introductory chapter, the editor of the Basic Readings collection

pursues to show how the 12 papers in this book belong together and

how they fit into the overall Cognitive Linguistics (CL) landscape. He

does this by using inviting language, directly addressing the reader—‘‘So

this is the first time you visit the field of Cognitive Linguistics, no?’’

(p. 1)—and by discussing key aspects of CL along with the articles thatfocus on these aspects. Most crucially, CL researchers share the assump-

tion that abstract formal descriptions and definitions are not su‰cient to

grasp a concept, a relation, or a structure of any kind; this idea is re-

flected in the book’s articles in various ways. In general terms, CL aims

at accounting for natural language adequately by focusing on its mean-

ing, while considering fundamental aspects of cognition in relation to

their reflections in language. Geeraerts spells out four distinct aspects

of linguistic meaning that are particularly crucial in CL: its potentialto reflect various perspectives, its flexibility, its embodiment (or non-

autonomy), and its intricate relation to usage and experience.

As is typical for introductions in edited books, summarizing the key as-

pects of each paper in the book leads to considerably high density with

respect to the information conveyed in the overview. Geeraerts counters

this by his choice of language type to make reading easier, but is at times

nevertheless fairly challenging in the range of terminology and notions in-

troduced in this very first chapter. Probably at least parts of this chapterare more useful after, not before having dealt intensively with the individ-

ual articles. Generally, the introductory text sometimes seems to be ad-

dressing experts and sometimes total newcomers, which can be confusing.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 325

This aspect may, however, quite accurately reflect an underlying double

purpose of the book in that it subsumes useful resources for readers on

any level of prior knowledge.

Since this chapter does not provide much background information

about the impact of each of the 12 ground-breaking articles in the scien-

tific world, it is best understood together with its companion chapter, the

Epilogue. Here, at the end of the book, the significance of each areasketched in the individual articles is highlighted, and many useful pointers

to further work can be found in which the basic ideas are developed fur-

ther. The Epilogue does not go into much detail with respect to contents

such as, conceivably, partial aspects of each chapter that may have been

disproved by now, or substantiated by empirical evidence. Nevertheless,

this short concluding chapter usefully wraps up what has been presented

in separate articles so far, and puts the individual ideas into the mean-

ingful context of a wider research community. Further informationconcerning current progress in the field can then be accessed in an edited

collection by Gitte Kristiansen et al., which was published simultaneously

with this collection of Basic Readings.

Within the Introduction, CL is presented as a coherent whole that is

manifest in the 12 key notions reflected by the 12 chapters of this book.

This is an appealing and well-founded idea which might usefully have

been elaborated more. Page 19 presents a suggestive ‘‘conceptual map’’

of CL that would have merited more accompanying text. The subsequentpart of the introduction presents an overview of the channels through

which CL is developed further, such as book series, journals, and confer-

ences. While somewhat surprising in an introductory chapter to an edited

book, this overview is actually quite informative even for researchers who

are not total newcomers to the field. Naturally it is only a snapshot of the

current status in the field, but even as such, it may well be welcome even

after decades in order to look back on the developments. The chapter

then concludes by illustrating the place of CL within the overall linguis-tics discipline—a non-trivial task as assessing the relative importance of

specific research directions is never straightforward. The author neverthe-

less succeeds in providing an insightful impression of how CL contributes

to our understanding of language as a whole, and what this might imply

concerning its further investigation.

Chapter 1: Cognitive Grammar. Ronald W. Langacker: Introduction to

Concept, Image, and Symbol.

This concise summary of Langacker’s well-received theory has its rightful

place within this book, though it gives the naive beginner a somewhat

326 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

rough start. The chapter starts with complex theoretical considerations

and gradually becomes a bit easier to grasp by the extensive use of exam-

ples and illustrations. Nevertheless it remains extremely dense with

respect to information content, and its train of thought is certainly not

designed to introduce newcomers to the field. Rather, it provides a con-

densed insight into a full-fledged cognition-based grammatical theory.

The sheer complexity of this theory poses a high challenge for the readeron any level of proficiency. True beginners in CL will be in trouble if this

is really the first chapter they encounter (as seems to be suggested by the

ordering of articles within the book). For more advanced readers, how-

ever, this chapter is a necessity and cannot be ignored in its impact in

the field. Langacker’s theory explicitly opposes generative approaches to

grammar, claiming that all grammatical constructs meaningfully reflect

underlying cognitive structures. Even superficially similar sentences like

the pair ‘‘John gave the book to Mary’’ vs. ‘‘John gave Mary the book’’,which (according to transformational approaches) are derived from a

common deep structure, reflect systematically di¤erent conceptualizations

of the same scene. Langacker illustrates such concepts by using schematic

depictions that highlight ‘‘profile’’ and ‘‘base’’, ‘‘trajector’’ and ‘‘land-

mark’’, to name some key notions in his framework. Cognitive structures

systematically vary on several dimensions, such as domain, level of specif-

icity, scale and scope, perspective, and relative salience of substructures.

Based on such arguments, Langacker sharply criticizes approaches thatimpose further abstract, not conceptually or semantically motivated for-

mal structures on language in a grammatical description. Instead, he sets

out to explain grammatical units on the basis of their cognitive motiva-

tion, using mechanisms of integration and composition on phonological

and semantic levels.

Chapter 2: Grammatical construal. Leonard Talmy: The relation of

grammar to cognition.

Like Chapter 1, this chapter presents basic ideas and concepts in a fash-

ion rather too dense for newcomers. Unlike Chapter 1, this chapter is not

a summary of a full-fledged theory, but rather a sub-part of a theory or

broader approach toward understanding cognitive aspects involved and

reflected in language. Other aspects of this approach are spelled out in

Talmy’s other manifold publications, most coherently so in his two vol-

umes (2000: Toward a Cognitive Semantics). In the present article, Talmyfocuses on the distinction between lexicon and grammar. He discusses in

detail how particular concepts (or classes of concepts) are expressed in

grammar (exemplarily, in English, though Talmy claims the generalized

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 327

underlying procedures to be universal) while other kinds of concepts can

only be expressed by the lexical level of language. In particular, grammar

systematically reflects qualitative (relative, topological) concepts, while

quantitative (metric, absolute) measures need to be conveyed by particu-

lar lexical items. He then shows how particular notions are conceptual-

ized in systematic ways but can be converted into a di¤erent category.

For instance, while there is a systematic conceptual di¤erence betweenbounded and unbounded entities (objects/events and mass/action), each

instance can be construed as belonging to a di¤erent category, as in ‘‘he

slept for an hour’’ in which a conceptually unbounded activity is pre-

sented as bounded. Similar e¤ects occur with other conceptions with

respect to dimension, plexity, and dividedness; together, they constitute a

complex system that is illustrated in a useful schematization on page 84.

Further systematic e¤ects concern degree of extension (both bounded

and unbounded entities have a certain extent), pattern of distribution(e.g., some actions occur only once, others in a ‘‘multiplex’’ fashion, like

‘‘breathe’’), perspectival mode (how the speaker chooses to present the

entity linguistically), and others. All of these specific e¤ects fit into four

broader ‘‘imaging systems’’ (p. 96/97) that encompass also other aspects

of Talmy’s approach as presented elsewhere. Talmy concludes by propos-

ing that there are shared conceptual structures that may di¤er concerning

particulr aspects between the domains, but in general, together reflect the

nature of human cognition across conceptual domains. While Talmy’sproposal of strictly di¤erentiating between grammar and lexicon may be

somewhat surprising at this place (other non-formalistic approaches tend

to stress the similarities and fuzzy boundaries between both, as expressed,

for instance, by the term ‘‘lexicogrammar’’, Halliday 1994: 15), his line

of argument is nevertheless convincing. Specifically his analysis of the

concepts conveyed by grammar (vs. the lexicon) in a simple sentence on

page 75f. is quite illustrative. In general, the same is true for Talmy’s

very far reaching and insightful account of systematic conceptualizationprocesses and the procedures of conversion that come along with them.

However, the presentation of parallels between space and time seems

problematic. These two domains di¤er in many substantial respects

(some of which can also be found in Talmy 2000; for a systematic com-

parison of how concepts of space and time are reflected in grammar and

usage see Tenbrink 2007); here Talmy refers only to a subpart of their in-

terrelationship but presents the idea of parallelism between them in very

general terms. A case in point concerns the conversion between objectsand events: While events can straightforwardly be presented as objects

(as in ‘‘John gave me a call’’; p. 78), the reverse is not, as Talmy claims,

as easily the case. Although a similar e¤ect can be observed if an object is

328 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

presented as part of a process (or event): ‘‘It hailed in through the win-

dow) (p. 79), this is not quite the same e¤ect as construing an event as

such (rather than part of it) as an object. Obviously, Talmy concentrates

here on the similarities, rather than the di¤erences, between conceptual

structures and conversion processes. The example just given shows that

there may be systematic limitations and di¤erences that would be worth-

while attending to (as Talmy himself indicates towards the end of thechapter).

Chapter 3: Radial network. Claudia Brugman and George Lako¤:

Cognitive topology and lexical networks.

This chapter builds on one of the most famous M.A. theses ever written,

namely, Brugman’s (1981) detailed and innovative study of ‘‘over’’. Here,

the most crucial findings are summed up and discussed in light of the con-troversy between cognitive topological and more formal, feature-based

approaches to semantics. The particular preposition ‘‘over’’ is interesting

because of its highly polysemous semantic structure that encompasses

both a broad range of truly spatial senses that are somehow meaningfully

interrelated with each other, plus a further range of metaphorical exten-

sions that are derived more or less directly from particular spatial senses.

While such a richness in semantic structure has seldom been evidenced for

other lexical items, a fair amount of generalizations can be drawn from aclose analysis of this particular one, highlighting basic facts about human

cognition and its reflection in lexical semantics. The approach of provid-

ing a basic image-schema that is extended systematically to capture de-

rived senses has since then been extensively applied in other work. While

focussing strictly on the interpretation of ‘‘over’’ (rather than, more than

exceptionally, providing a broader range of exemplifications), the article

mentions many crucial issues in CL more or less in passing. It usefully

makes explicit some of the major underlying assumptions that are oftenimplicitly taken for granted: for instance, that there are two levels of se-

mantic structure—a structure for each single meaning of a term, and a

structure with respect to the meaningful interrelationships between all of

these meanings. Another basic aspect that often remains implicit concerns

the non-predictability of semantic structure and the notion of ‘‘motiva-

tion’’ that explains why we can analyze meaningful structure—contra

arbitrariness—without assuming underlying processes of determinism. In

addition, the chapter succeeds in illustrating the value and cognitive real-ity of topological representations, and thus provides a strong argument

against formal approaches that presuppose arbitrariness in semantic rela-

tionships. Altogether, this chapter conveys a multitude of fundamental

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 329

messages and is in this respect no less dense in information content than

the first two articles. However, basic aspects of the analysis of ‘‘over’’ can

be grasped by newcomers even without fully comprehending the intention

behind the more general discussions o¤ered here. Here, the extensive

usage of notational conventions (that enable abbreviated conveyance of

condensed content) such as ‘‘ABV.NC.X.P’’ for ‘‘above/non-contact/

extended/along a path’’ is rather challenging (though explained and mo-tivated well enough).

Chapter 4: Prototype theory. Dirk Geeraerts: Prospects and problems of

prototype theory.

Unlike the previous chapters, this contribution does not introduce or

summarize any basic notion (for this purpose, an early article by Eleanor

Rosch might have been expected here). Rather, it presents an integratedoverview of the various phenomena that have been studied under the um-

brella of ‘‘prototype theory’’. The chapter is valuable in highlighting the

most crucial assets of that general notion. It distinctly works out a num-

ber of basic features associated with the idea of prototype, and it points in

a useful dense fashion to a range of crucial publications. Apart from the

ideas that are widely discussed in the associated papers, Geeraerts further-

more points to a number of aspects that are less well known in the area.

Among them is the necessary distinction between polysemy and prototypestructure, which need to be carefully separated as they capture di¤erent

aspects of the semantics of a lexical item. Furthermore, the author illus-

trates convincingly how di¤erent lexical items may have di¤erent seman-

tic structures and thus fit either more or less to the notions of prototype

theory. Therefore not all words can be analysed and described in the

same way; care must be taken to account for the systematic di¤erences

in lexical analysis. On another level, the theory itself exhibits a prototyp-

ical structure. The notions associated with it are meaningfully intercon-nected. Also, the general idea encompasses various contributions and

approaches that fit more or less prototypically to the central notions.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of how cognition and the real

world both can be conceptualized as fuzzy or neat; concepts can be de-

scribed in either way, yielding more or less descriptive adequacy; further-

more, scientific notions should themselves not be fuzzy as such. It could

be added, in this train of thought, that one of the most central aims of

science is to capture neatly what is, in everyday life, typically only treatedin fuzzy ways—even, and especially, notions and relations that are inher-

ently fuzzy themselves. In other words, science aims at capturing and

describing fuzziness in a neat way.

330 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Chapter 5: Schematic network. David Tuggy: Ambiguity, polysemy, and

vagueness.

This is a nice, brief, fairly easily readable article with a clear message,

one that is useful for anyone concerned with notions of ambiguity (poly-

semy) or underspecification (here vagueness). As with the other chapters,it is useful to draw on prior knowledge with respect to these well-

discussed notions, otherwise the impact of the message (the presented

model) itself would be hard to assess. The model presented here builds

extensively and straightforwardly on previous findings, such as prototype

notions and Langacker’s theory. These building blocks are now put to

use to highlight the conceptual relationship between ambiguity and

vagueness: two notions that are clearly distinguishable for some concepts,

such as ‘‘aunt’’ (which is vague because it has one united sense, parent’ssister) versus ‘‘bank’’ (which is ambiguous because of its polysemy),

while di‰cult to apply for others (such as ‘‘paint’’ which has many re-

lated context-bound senses). Tuggy proposes a model which accounts

for these problems via the notion of saliency. For some lexical items,

the uniting sense is salient, while for others, it is fairly remote; for still

others, both the uniting sense and the subcases are salient, which opens

up the possibility of conceptualizing them either as vague or as ambigu-

ous. Thus, there is no clear-cut distinction between the two notions,but a cline, with varying degrees of salience enhancing either one of the

interpretations.

Chapter 6: Conceptual metaphor. George Lako¤: The contemporary

theory of metaphor.

Anybody not familiar with the theory of conceptual metaphor should

definitely turn to this chapter (if they decide not to start with the more

popular book source, Lako¤ & Johnson 1980). This chapter sums up themain aspects of the theory and relates it, on the one hand, to metaphor in

poetry (where the classical interpretation of ‘‘metaphor’’ originates), and

on the other hand, to the broader scientific context, highlighting its signif-

icance and the impact within the field of cognitive science in general

terms. Also, it purposively counters a number of earlier assumptions in

regard to the notion of metaphor, thus attacking previous assumptions

of ‘‘literal’’ interpretations of language as a norm. In fact, Lako¤ claims

that metaphorical expressions are pervasive in language to the extent thatit is only in relation to concrete physical experience that literal language

is more common than metaphor. He outlines how metaphorical pro-

cesses govern lexical polysemy, how they combine systematically to yield

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 331

consistent conceptual patterns, how they influence semantic change, and

how novel specific metaphors are put to use in relation to the more gen-

eral conceptual notions behind them. Through the extensive use of illus-

trative examples, the reader gets thoroughly familiarized with the general

conception. In accounts such as these, there is always a certain danger of

focussing on the phenomena under discussion to such a high degree as to

neglect their boundaries. In the present case, many interesting cases ofmetaphorical processes are described in relation to fundamental concep-

tions such as time, causality, event structure, love, and many others. An

interesting counterpart of this study would be an investigation of those

cases which could not be explained on the basis of metaphor, building

on their own conceptual structures. This idea fits well within Lako¤ ’s

theory in that he explicitly points out that conceptual metaphors are per-

vasive but nevertheless not predictable: they are grounded in experience,

but the metaphoricalprocesses could have taken a di¤erent path. Further-more, not all aspects of a broad conceptual target domain (such as

‘‘time’’) are linguistically or conceptually derived in some way or other

from a source, or even a bundle of sources (see also Tenbrink 2007).

Thus, it remains an important future goal for metaphor theory to de-

velop a concrete model of the specific extent to which metaphorical

processes have explanatory force, in relation to other processes of lexical

development.

Chapter 7: Image schema. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Herbert L.

Colston: The cognitive psychological reality of image schemas and their

transformations.

This article presents a broad and detailed literature review establishing

the relationship between empirical research in Cognitive Psychology, and

the central notion of ‘‘image schema’’ within Cognitive Linguistics. As

such, it is not an introduction to the notion of image schema (contraryto what the editor’s chapter title might be taken to suggest), although

the idea is sketched su‰ciently for the main argument. More impor-

tantly, the article follows up on one of Lako¤ ’s major claims and mes-

sages (also to be found emphatically at the end of the previous chapter)

namely, that the approach Cognitive Linguistics takes is fundamentally

interdisciplinary. The article carefully spells out what this might mean

in detail, showing how previous evidence from a di¤erent direction

can be interpreted to support the linguistic theories. Also, it highlightsdirections of meaningful future research combining the disciplines in a

fairly concrete way, illustrating how basic ideas within CL could be

validated experimentally. Much of these suggestions are still valid: the

332 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

interdisciplinary relations could still be reinforced much more strongly in

targeted research.

Chapter 8: Metonymy. William Croft: The role of domains in the

interpretation of metaphors and metonymies.

In this highly theoretical chapter, Croft establishes a number of system-atic aspects in relation to the occurrence and interpretation of metaphors

and metonymies. His idea is to account for the di¤erentiation between

these two notions on the grounds of the underlying domains: Roughly,

in metaphorical language, there is a mapping between two di¤erent do-

mains, while metonymy highlights particular aspects within a domain.

Croft’s approach to the notion of domains builds on Langacker’s idea of

a ‘‘profile on a base’’, which relates to concepts that are presupposed by a

specific concept. Thus, an ‘‘arc’’ presupposes a ‘‘circle’’; the ‘‘circle’’, onthe other hand, is itself defined relative to two-dimensional space, i.e., it

can also be a profile on a base. Thus, concepts are part of a complex do-

main structure with a limited number of ‘‘basic’’ domains which do not

presuppose anything else. Here, the technical usage of ‘‘abstract’’ (vs.

‘‘basic’’) for concepts based on other concepts may be confusing, since

the more common (related) usage of ‘‘abstract’’ (vs. ‘‘concrete’’) is also

used fairly often within approaches to (conceptual) metaphor. In the

sense used here, ‘‘time’’ is a basic domain; while in other accounts timeis often described as (more) abstract (than space, motivating the system-

atic mapping from space to time). Here, the bridge to Lako¤’s notion of

conceptual metaphor is the idea that the two domains being compared in

metaphor are the underlying basic domains of the specific concepts

involved. In metonymy, there is a mapping within one domain matrix,

though the processes involved may be fairly intricate. A further step in

Croft’s approach then involves the introduction of yet another phenome-

non, namely, relationality: in ‘‘Mara sings’’, the subject is nonrelationalbut the predicate is relational; therefore, ‘‘sings’’ is here dependent while

‘‘Mara’’ is autonomous. This notion of (relative) dependency is then dis-

cussed in the light of possible mappings and highlightings in metaphor

and metonymy. In this way, this approach goes in the direction of explor-

ing systematically where metaphorical and metonymical interpretations

can be expected or not, working towards indicating the boundaries of

these phenomena within the use of language in general. It remains unclear

(also taking into account Geeraerts’ pointers to further reading in the Ep-ilogue, in which he mentions a di‰culty in operationalizing the notion of

‘‘domains’’) in how far this (complex but intuitively appealing) theoretical

framework has been substantiated and integrated in subsequent work.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 333

Chapter 9: Mental Spaces. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner:

Conceptual integration networks.

This rather lengthy chapter establishes a framework in which the notion

of metaphorical transfer is generalized to a major conceptual principle,

namely, blending. Drawing upon a broad variety of evidence, the authors

propose a number of systematic and generalizable features of this princi-

ple. They explain how the mind manages to merge diverse conceptual

‘‘spaces’’ together in order to develop new ideas or ways of describing

concepts, i.e., to construct meaning. This happens primarily through the

three basic operations of composition, completion, and elaboration, eachof which are defined briefly. In order to develop this framework the au-

thors provide intuitive schematic depictions, and they rely on a limited

number of examples which they re-use time and again to illustrate their

classifications. A number of competing governing principles (somewhat

confusingly called ‘‘optimality’’ principles) serve to explain in what ways

a blending may or may not be successful. Altogether, the article intro-

duces a broad range of theoretical notions and ideas; manageable for the

reader because the authors do not (in contrast to some other contribu-tions in this book) presuppose prior knowledge, and the re-use of the

same examples provides a sense of coherence. Nevertheless, to my mind

the article could have profited from a broader presentation of evidence

rather than merely referring to the fact (plus reference to a website)

that the theoretical framework builds on much more than is discussed

explicitly here. While some of the proposed principles do not necessarily

strike the reader as inevitable or fundamental, and some details of the

framework seem hard to verify or substantiate, the general idea is never-theless both important and convincing. In fact, after being introduced to

the cognitive principle of blending, it may become hard to see why one

has not recognized such a basic and widespread phenomenon clearly

before.

Chapter 10: Frame Semantics. Charles Fillmore: Frame semantics.

This fairly short, comprehensible piece is one of the few articles in the

book that I’d recommend unhesitatingly to student newcomers without

requiring much prior knowledge. As Fillmore himself points out it is en-

tirely ‘‘pre-formal’’ and descriptive in a way that allows the unsophisti-

cated reader to grasp the author’s main point quickly and intuitively.

The article suggests analyzing the semantics of a language against thebackground in which it has developed. (For the purpose of presenting

this point, section 2—which basically gives a historical overview on the

idea’s development—could easily have been omitted; it might in e¤ect be

334 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

more disturbing than enlightening for newcomers.) Any lexical item can

only be understood fully if the community in which it is used, and some-

times a rather specific part or aspect of that community, the ‘frame’, is

known. Fillmore provides many illustrative examples for this idea, and

he evaluates the more fundamental claims of ‘frame semantics’ in the

light of a number of basic topics within the field of semantics, such as

taxonomies or presupposition. However, since the article does not gointo much detail in any of these directions, it remains up to the reader to

determine what kind of impact such a view on semantics could have in

linguistic theory. In Geeraerts’ Epilogue, however, the information is

provided that Frame Semantics builds the basis of a corpus-based online

dictionary.

Chapter 11: Construction Grammar. Adele E. Goldberg: The inherent

semantics of argument structure: The case of the English ditransitive

construction.

This fairly early work by one of the major proponents of Construction

Grammar starts out from a discussion of another paper dealing with

ditransitive constructions. Goldberg makes a point of the fact that Con-

struction Grammar, in contrast to that alternative account, does not

require idiosyncratic semantic explanations for specific verbs that may

occur in a particular construction. Instead, the (abstract) grammaticalconstruction itself is associated with a specific meaning. In the case of

the English ditransitive, this meaning is fairly specific; it involves a notion

of transfer between a volitional agent and a willing recipient. This basic

meaning has a number of systematic extensions, which are accounted

for, on the one hand, by principles of integration of the construction and

the lexical items that fill it, and on the other hand, by metaphorical trans-

fer (of the basic construction sense) much like the kind of metaphorical

transfer known for lexical items. The article is well-written and compre-hensive and may well serve as an introduction to Construction Grammar

(being more like a case study, it was certainly not intended as such),

although the motivating contrast to the earlier paper may have become

redundant by now.

Chapter 12: Usage-based linguistics. Michael Tomasello: First steps

toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition.

This chapter falls somewhat out of the general scope in that it treats a

specific approach to language (usage-based theory) not with respect

to adult language (like the other chapters), but with respect to child

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 335

language acquisition. This choice is well-motivated since, as Tomasello

points out, it is specifically crucial in language acquisition to take usage

into account to a much higher degree than has been done so far. Usage

explains how children start out by producing item-based structures that

are re-used and gradually expanded and reproduced creatively. In doing

this they rely heavily on what they have heard adults use in contexts and

with communicative intentions that they understand. This idea can bedeveloped further to account for patterns in adult language; partly, the

findings developed in the present chapter already provide a sound back-

ground for some other accounts in the present book (e.g., frame seman-

tics). This chapter reads like an overview chapter on child language

acquisition (though, to become a true one, relationships to other func-

tion-based theories such as Halliday 1975 would need to be established),

yet it introduces a new view on language that is highly appealing and

motivating to pursue further in various directions. Some of these aresketched by Geeraerts in his useful Epilogue chapter.

2. General evaluation

This book is specifically designed to introduce newcomers to the field of

Cognitive Linguistics, as well as to serve as a handbook for more ad-

vanced scientists. It brings together a broad range of articles by highly

renowned researchers, each of which is central in some way or other forone particular basic notion in this field. This endeavour in itself is highly

laudable, given the high diversity in this research area and the lack of one

singular central figure or ground-breaking work that could count as the

fundamental core of Cognitive Linguistics. In this book, the various di-

rections taken in this field are systematically brought together and dis-

cussed with respect to their relationship to each other as well as their im-

pact within the wider area. The articles cover the most important aspects

of the field. Only a few areas come to mind that could considered as miss-ing; for instance, the issue of universals as opposed to variability across

languages is barely touched. A CL approach to this issue involves study-

ing cognitive principles as a basis for universal principles of language.

Though some ideas in this direction are expressed in Talmy’s article, the

general approach and corresponding evidence could have been repre-

sented directly by a central article. Examples in this direction are Dan

Slobin’s work on ‘thinking for speaking’, Lera Boroditsky’s findings on

time concepts in relation to language, or other work related to Neo-Whorfianism. A key concept related to this research direction would be

the notion of iconicity and motivation as addressed, for example, by Hai-

man (1980).

336 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Potential readers should be aware that true beginners in this particular

field will meet with a challenge in terms of scientific and informational

density. Students of Linguistics using this book need to bring in a fair

amount of previous experience with linguistic theories. Also, introductory

books like Ungerer & Schmid (1996, second edition: 2006) or the recent

one by Evans and Green (2006) would be a very helpful preparation for

understanding the basic readings in this collection, since many of the ar-ticles were originally written not for students but for highly sophisticated

scientific discourse. Thus, the fact that this book presents itself as ‘‘de-

signed for an introductory course in Cognitive Linguistics’’, as stated on

the book cover, should not mislead towards expectations of easy reading

(with a number of exceptions as hinted above). Nevertheless, it remains

a useful source of basic readings which can be put to valuable use by

teachers of CL who are ready to provide their students with the required

guidance throughout the journey suggested by the book. Particular careshould then be taken to sort out how the various notions highlighted

(though not necessarily introduced ‘‘from scratch’’) throughout the book

fit together and how they relate to each other, since many of the basic

ideas cross over the particular chapters, in spite of their being assigned a

single keyword each by the editor. A fair share of such relationships are

insightfully spelled out in the editor’s introductory chapter, which is gen-

erally a useful overview article (not only) for beginners. In general terms,

this book provides basic reading for everyone involved in scientific inves-tigation in some particular area within the wider diversified field of CL.

In this sense, it brings in a high potential to ‘‘keep the field together’’, so

to speak, working against the danger inherent in any kind of (otherwise

welcome) diversification: namely, the lack of coherence yielding not one

convincing unified theory, but a conglomeration of nice ideas that on

may or may not take seriously in individual thinking.

To sum up, although the book might have profited from an extra round

of proofreading, this collection may be highly recommended. It o¤ers

– a selection of indispensable readings for students who have had a first

textbook-based acquaintance with CL and who are now ready to con-

front the primary literature;

– an integrated view of the field that will not only help newcomers but

even more experienced cognitive linguists to see how the various key

notions and the corresponding domains of investigation within CL

hang together;– a set of highly useful practical tips about CL, together with a compre-

hensive collection of pointers to further literature, which will act as an

eye-opener even for advanced researchers.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 337

References

Brugman, Claudia

1981 Story of over. M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley.

Evans, Vyvyan and Melanie Green

2006 Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.

Haiman, John

1980 The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation. Language 56(3),

515–540.

Halliday, Michael A. K.

1975 Learning How to Mean. Explorations in the Development of Language.

London: Edward Arnold.

1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold.

Kristiansen, Gitte, Michel Achard, Rene Dirven, and Francisco J. Ruiz Mendoza (eds.)

2006 Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. Berlin/

New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lako¤, George and Mark Johnson

1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Talmy, Leonard

2000 Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tenbrink, Thora

2007 Space, Time, and the Use of Language: An Investigation of Relationships.

Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jorg Schmid

2006 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. Second edition. (First published in

1996.) London/New York: Longman.

Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (in Canada and USA).

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (in Europse and the rest of the

world), 2006, 830 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-1832-3. £24.99.

Reviewed by Rene Dirven, Mechelen, Belgium. Email 3rene.dirven@pandora.be4

This introduction to CL is in many respects a remarkable book, and in

some respects even an excellent book. It presents itself as a course book,

whose 23 chapters are structured in 4 parts. Part I o¤ers an overview of

the cognitive linguistics enterprise, Part II deals with cognitive semantics

(largely lexical semantics), Part III discusses various cognitive approaches

to grammar, and Part IV is a brief concluding chapter. As the authorssay, the book can be handled in a 12-week seminar either on cognitive

semantics, or else on cognitive grammar. Logically speaking, a two-

semester course could then cover the whole book. As such it is better

338 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

seen (and perhaps also called in its subtitle) ‘‘an advanced introduction,’’

keeping the middle, as it does, between the shorter type of introductions

such as Ungerer and Schmid (1996, 22006), Dirven and Verspoor (1998,22004), or Lee (2001), and the more specialised type such as Taylor

(2002) or Croft and Cruse (2003), or the highly specialised handbook by

Geeraerts and Cuyckens (2007).

Alternatively, given its length and wide scope, Cognitive Linguistics: An

Introduction (henceforward CLAI) could also be seen—though it is not

intended to be—as a kind of pocket encyclopedia of cognitive linguistics.

Indeed, one of the most specific roles and functions CLAI could serve is

that of a reference work for any major strand within CL and for any con-

ceptual or descriptive tool developed in it. This ‘‘looking-up’’ function is

inherent to any reference work of this size (but if this function were to be

strengthened in a later edition, this would of necessity require a far more

detailed index of at least twice as many keywords). This more general ref-erence function covering all possible strands within CL could hardly be

fulfilled by the specialised introductions like Taylor (2002), which mainly

concentrates on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, nor by Croft and

Cruse (2003), with its emphasis on typology and construction grammar,

nor by the more specialised information provided by the authors compe-

tent in one given area as in the CL handbook by Geeraerts and Cuyckens

(2007).

A brief survey of the main topics dealt with in the three parts of CLAIreinforces this potentially encyclopedic character. Part I deals in its four

chapters with basic themes such as: knowing a language (Ch. 1), CL as-

sumptions and commitments (Ch. 2), universals and variation (Ch. 3),

and language in use (Ch. 4). In Ch. 1 knowing a language is related to

the two basic functions of language, i.e., the symbolic and the interactive

ones. The order in Ch. 2 is the reversed one of what the title says: first

come the cognitive commitments and then the assumptions. Ch. 3 applies

the notions of universals and variation not only to language, but also tothought and experience. In Ch. 4 the notion of language in use is related

to knowledge of language, language change, and language acquisition.

What is somehow puzzling, not only in Ch. 2, but also in the two other

chapters, is that the internal order of the various sections would look far

more natural, if reversed. Indeed, what naturally comes first, normally

serves as the basis for what comes later. Thus experience comes before

thought, and thought before language. Similarly, language use starts o¤

as language acquisition, results in language knowledge and may undergoor cause language change. What is perhaps lacking here is a clear sense of

direction: a cognitive bottom-up approach instead of remnants of a gen-

erative top-down way of thinking about language.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 339

Part II (Ch. 5–13) deals with various inroads into cognitive semantics,

and Part III (Ch. 14–22) with the various strands in cognitive grammar.

This macro-structure of CLAI may have di¤erent motivations. On the

one hand, it may be a reaction against the absolute primacy of syntax

over semantics in generative grammar, but this would somehow contra-

dict CLAI’s explicitly stated intention (p. 781) of building bridges be-

tween the two paradigms. On the other hand, this macro-order may alsosay much about how the authors themselves see the internal relations

within CL by giving priority to Lakovian or other semantic concerns

over the various grammatical approaches such as Langacker’s Cognitive

Grammar, or the various versions of construction grammar. (Here and

throughout this review, upper cases stand for a specific strand, and lower

case for generic uses of terms). Still other, e.g., pedagogic factors may

favour the macro-order chosen: the demands put on the audience by se-

mantic models may be less stringent than those required by grammaticalmodels. Last but not least, the authors may also express their own prefer-

ential thought patterns by following the given order. Anyway, though

wholly or partially decided upon unconsciously, such orderings speak

volumes.

The single chapters of Part II deal with the main semantic insights de-

veloped in CL. Ch. 6, ‘‘Embodiment and conceptual structure,’’ focuses

on Johnson’s image schemas and Talmy’s notion of conceptual structure.

Ch. 7. ‘‘The encyclopedic nature of meaning representation,’’ focuses notonly on the contrasts between the generative ‘dictionary view’ of meaning

and the CL encyclopedic view, but also on that between Fillmore’s Frame

Semantics (linking it to findings in cognitive psychology) and Langacker’s

theory of domains. Chapters 8–10 reflect (and partly reinforce the picture

of ) Lako¤ ’s dominance in cognitive semantics. Ch. 8, ‘‘Categorisation

and idealised cognitive models,’’ compares the classical approach to

meaning in terms of semantic features to the revolutionary findings by El-

eanor Rosch’s Prototype Theory, most emphatically propagated by Lak-o¤ and also extended by his Idealised Cognitive Model (ICM) theory.

Ch. 9, ‘‘Metaphor and metonymy,’’ compares the traditional view that

figurative language use is primarily a matter of language with Lako¤ &

Johnson’s cognitive view that metaphor is primarily a matter of thought,

as suggested by the adjective in ‘conceptual metaphor’ and Conceptual

Metaphor Theory. Also extensively discussed are Grady’s (1997a, b) no-

tion of ‘primary metaphor’, the extension of the notion of ‘conceptual’ to

apply to metonymy in the term conceptual metonymy, introduced by Ko-vecses & Radden (1998), and Radden & Kovecses (1999), and the interac-

tion of metaphor and metonymy, mainly referring to Barcelona (2000),

but not to newer insights such as those developed in Bartsch (2002) or

340 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Geeraerts (2002). Ch. 10, ‘‘Word meaning and radial categories,’’ allows

the authors to present a much improved version of Lako¤ ’s radial net-

work, as developed in Tyler and Evans (2001) and drawn up on the basis

of strict criteria. Part II’s last two chapters present Fauconnier’s analysis

of the on-line construction of meaning in discourse. Ch. 11, ‘‘Meaning

construction and mental spaces,’’ opposes the truth-conditional approach

in formal semantics to Fauconnier’s own Mental Space Theory, explain-ing the creation of mental spaces or small package of information for

each discourse referent, thus enabling discourse participants to keep track

of the various referents at any point in the discourse. Mental Space

Theory is not limited to reference, but also explores the tense-aspect-

modality systems serving the grammatical functions of perspective, view-

point, epistemic distance and grounding. The last concept, which can

directly be linked to Fauconnier’s notion of ‘base space’, is however not

discussed by the authors here, but it is only associated with Langackerlater in the book (p. 575). Mental Space Theory is also at the basis of

Fauconnier & Turner’s metaphor theory, discussed in Ch. 12 as ‘‘Concep-

tual blending.’’ According to Fauconnier and Turner, the source domain

is not just mapped onto the target domain as in Lako¤ & Johnson’s Con-

ceptual Metaphor Theory, but both domains are input spaces, which, via

the generic space containing their common elements, are blended or inte-

grated into the blend, which may also contain new emergent meaning,

not present in the input spaces. At the end of the chapter (p. 440), theauthors state that Conceptual Blending Theory cannot completely replace

Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but the question is whether that has ever

been Fauconnier and Turner’s intention. As shown by Grady et al.

(1999), the models of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual

Blending Theory are to be seen as complementary to each other rather

than as rivals. Ch. 13, ‘‘Cognitive semantics in context,’’ contrasts cogni-

tive semantics with truth-conditional semantics and with Relevance

Theory. Though the former contrast is quite a legitimate one, the treat-ment of the latter as CL’s opposite is certainly too strong. Though the

authors admit that Relevance Theory is more consonant with CL

(p. 465), they fail to see that the relevance principle, just like that of

salience or any other perceptual or conceptual principle, is an exquisite

cognitive tool in itself, o¤ering an explanatory motivation for a large

number of phenomena in language use.

Part III, ‘‘Cognitive Approaches to Grammar,’’ contains fewer points

of divergence and will therefore also be treated more briefly. It is orga-nised in a way remarkably parallel to that of Part II. As was seen, Part

II is structured around CL scholars and their main semantic theories, with

three central chapters on Lako¤’s ideas, preceded and followed by some

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 341

other major CL inroads into semantics. Similarly, Part III has three cen-

tral chapters mainly exposing Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar ideas,

preceded by a chapter on Talmy and Langacker, and followed by two

chapters on construction grammar, one on Kay & Fillmore’s version of

it and one on Goldberg’s, Croft’s and Bergen’s versions. Thus the major

cognitive grammar models are all discussed, but it is neither clear by itself

nor explained why Fillmore’s type of construction grammar, which is tobe situated somewhere halfway between the generative and cognitive

worlds of thought, is given so much space and attention, or reversedly,

why Goldberg’s fully cognitive Construction Grammar or Croft’s Radical

Construction grammar is not analysed more extensively and centrally,

more or less on a more equal footing with Langacker. One also wonders

why (in view of their followings) lesser strands in cognitive grammar such

as Hudson’s Word Grammar or Nuyts’s Cognitive-Functional Approach

or even RRG (Role and Reference Grammar) are not discussed in thesame vein as the other strands. If ever the encyclopedic potential of

CLAI were to be exploited, these would certainly deserve priority. Let’s

now look at the various chapters in Part III.

Ch. 14, ‘‘What is a cognitive approach to grammar,’’ deals with the

common assumptions and principles of cognitive grammar such as the

symbolic nature of grammar, its usage-based nature (and acquisition),

the concept of grammar as an inventory of symbolic units, and the con-

ceptual unity of lexicon and grammar, conceived as a continuum. Ch.15, ‘‘The conceptual basis of grammar,’’ explores both Talmy’s and

Langacker’s cognitive models. Talmy’s Conceptual Structuring System

Model comprises the four subsystems of configurational structure, atten-

tion, perspective, and force dynamics. Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar is

conceived as a network model, which is specified in great detail in the

next three chapters. Chapters 16, 17, and 18 focus on word classes, con-

structions, and tense, aspect, mood, and voice, respectively. The distribu-

tion of the attention paid to the various versions of construction grammaris, as already stated above, bizarre and the opposite of what one would

expect. Ch. 19 ‘‘Motivating construction grammar’’ is completely devoted

to the partly generative and partly cognitive model of Kay & Fillmore’s

construction grammar model, whereas the fully cognitive ‘construction

grammar’ versions, i.e., Goldberg’s Construction Grammar, Croft’s

Radical Construction Grammar, and Bergen & Chang’s Embodied Con-

struction Grammar are packed together in Ch. 20, ‘‘The architecture of

construction grammars.’’ Although Goldberg’s Construction Grammaris dealt with in more detail (underlying assumptions, applicability to

verb argument structure, interaction between single verbs and construc-

tions, and the organisation of constructions in constructional networks),

342 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

the newest views of Goldberg’s are not represented yet. Instead of a com-

parison between Fillmore and Langacker, one would also very much

have preferred a comparison between Goldberg and Langacker (and their

attempts to come closer to each other’s views), certainly when facing the

comparison between Goldberg and the other two construction grammar

versions, which, though equally relevant, may still be less conspicuous.

Before coming to a concluding part or chapter, CLAI’s Part III still o¤erstwo highly interesting chapters. Ch. 21, ‘‘Grammaticalisation,’’ links

CL to diachronic linguistics in its three main approaches: Heine’s Meta-

phorical Extension Approach, Traugott’s Invited Inferencing Theory and

Langacker’s Subjectification Theory. In Ch. 22, ‘‘Cognitive approaches to

grammar in context,’’ the term context is taken in the sense of ‘a (chang-

ing) scientific paradigm,’ although that qualification would be too strong

for what is discussed. It is rather a comparison than a confrontation of

paradigms. The cognitive approach is, in a final bridge-building e¤ort,compared to generative and functional-typological accounts. Here one

cannot but be astonished about this obsession to compare and oppose

CL to generative and other approaches. In a way, this may be condi-

tioned by the general climate of a generative predominance in the

Anglo-American world, where cognitive linguistics is not yet as fashion-

able as it is in many other parts of the world. However, a new paradigm

like CL cannot become strong nor independent by eternally defining and

redefining itself vis a vis competing paradigms. The idea of buildingbridges between the various paradigms, which is part of the authors’

dream, will at best remain a one-way road anyway, and more likely than

not, end up in a dead-end street. In Part IV or Ch. 23, ‘‘Assessing the cog-

nitive linguistic enterprise,’’ the authors consider the fact that CL tries to

integrate language and thought as its greatest achievement, but here the

more encompassing term cognition might be more appropriate than

thought, since it embraces both the perceptual and the conceptual facul-

ties, or—to speak in ontological terms—the body and the mind. It is thisbody-in-the-mind logic that, according to the authors, makes cognitive

linguistics attractive to neighbouring disciplines in the humanities and

also in the social sciences. The strong emphasis on the embodied nature

of cognition and language may be ‘‘reopening channels of investigation

into language and mind that take into account embodiment, experience

and usage while remaining firmly committed to the mentalist approach’’

(p. 778).

As this last vista confirms, on the whole the book leaves a very strongimpression, which cannot be diminished by the critical remarks above nor

by those that will follow below. The great strength of CLAI is that it of-

fers a lucid, coherent and substantial synthesis of the most important

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 343

strands in CL, as laid down in the major publications by cognitive lin-

guists. The crucial question therefore is how reliable the various CL in-

sights and constructs are represented and to what extent the two authors

of this pocket encyclopedia o¤er a wide enough overview of CL. The an-

swer to the first question is decidedly positive, but the answer to the sec-

ond question is more complex and depends very much on the question

whether linguistics is seen as a theoretical discipline or also as an appliedone. Seen from this wider viewpoint, CLAI is to be characterised as an

extensive overview of the whole theoretical field of cognitive linguistics,

and one that does not take notice of the very wide field of applications

in the interdisciplinary exchange between CL and neighbouring disci-

plines. A large part of this exchange, though not all of it, has now been

overviewed and spelled out in Kristiansen et al.’s (2006) collective volume

Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. One

field of application is the ‘‘dialogue between cognitive linguistics andanthropological linguistics, thus emphasizing the cultural core of language

and the linguistic core of culture.’’ Another field of application of CL is

language pedagogy, where a long tradition of empirical research can be

enriched by the motivational potential of a cognition- and usage-based

approach. A further field is multimodal communication, focussing either

on the contrast or else on the interaction between verbal and other modes

of conceptual self-expression. The former finds application in signed lan-

guages and the latter in media studies, e.g. in the exploration of the roleof visual metaphors. Still another major field is cognitive poetics, which

applies cognitive tools to literary text worlds, thus trying to break down

the wall between linguistics and literary studies. A last interdisciplinary

field covered in Kristiansen et al. is computer linguistics, spelling out the

conditions that CL has to fulfil in order to make it testable for compu-

tational experimentation. This list is far from exhaustive and could be

further exemplified by interdisciplinary explorations such as cognitive

sociolinguistics, cognitive translation studies, cognitive discourse studiesand cultural studies, which may also be cross-mapped internally.

Of course, this enumeration of possible fields of interdisciplinary appli-

cation of CL is not meant as a critique of CLAI, but rather as a reminder

that the field of CL is not only its own ‘‘theoretical’’ world, but comprises

a much wider area of investigation. In that sense, the enumeration just

points to the fact that we must make allowance for a number of unavoid-

able gaps in an encyclopedic book like the present one. In fact, a second

volume covering all the applications in interdisciplinary exchange wouldbe a logical next step. Only, it could hardly be composed by two authors

alone, but would require a whole team. This also demonstrates the tour

de force accomplished by the two authors of CLAI. On the whole, and

344 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

limiting oneself to theoretical cognitive linguistics, one cannot but admire

the careful selection of the most representative CL authors and the in-

sightful characterisations of their work.

We will finish o¤ by briefly pointing out what we think to be ‘avoid-

able’ gaps or shortcomings. Some of the not so coincidental or more

‘systematic’ gaps must be pointed out anyway, but again they do not

basically diminish the great esteem in which we hold the book. One suchgap—almost an Anglo-American general phenomenon—is the under-

representation of non-Anglo publications. Either merely mentioned as

bibliographical references (which is not a real measuring stick) or totally

missing in the index are scholars such as John Barnden, Renate Bartsch,

Dirk Geeraerts, Theo Janssen, Tanja Kuteva, Kurt Queller, Francisco

Ruiz de Mendoza, Klaus-Uwe Panther, Ted Sanders, Arie Verhagen,

Anna Wierzbicka and Jordan Zlatev. Although sometimes references to

publications by these authors are made, they may appear in a ratherstrange context, as for example Wierzbicka, who is only named in the

context of a discussion of Katz and Fodor’s feature semantics.

Another gap in the book relates to the philosophical background

against which CL must be seen. Obviously, the philosophical roots and

background of CL are not a major concern in the authors’ minds. Thus

the term phenomenology (see Geeraerts 1985) is not present in the index,

but this is a critique that rather addresses Lako¤ and also Johnson. In

Lako¤ (1987) the philosophical outlook underlying CL is claimed to beexperiential realism, or experientialism, but it is nowhere clarified what

philosophy this experientialism is based on. Geeraerts (1985: 355) clearly

reveals that the CL approach goes in the direction of Merleau-Ponty’s in-

terpretation of phenomenology, which holds that ‘‘consciousness is pres-

ent in the corporal experience of the world.’’ Here in a nutshell we find all

the basic epistemological tenets of CL: its realism, its experientialism, its

embodiment and its embodied mind. In contrast to this philosophical

blank, the psychological background of CL has a much better fortune:Gestalt psychology is already mentioned on p. 65, and further richly illus-

trated in a number of principles. But again the roots of Gestalt psychology

itself are not historically situated and thus, just like Lako¤ ’s experiential-

ism, seems to stem from nowhere. There is no background link neither

to its anti-Wundt or anti-molecular character nor to its philosophical

implications.

A last point concerns, not so much a gap, but the way of formulat-

ing things, e.g. about the notion of image schema and its relation toembodiment. In the authors’ view (p. 46), image schemas are ‘‘rudimen-

tary concepts like contact, container and balance, which are meaning-

ful because they derive from and are linked to human pre-conceptual

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 345

experience: experience of the world directly mediated and structured by

the human body.’’ The problem is of course: what can we understand by

‘‘a rudimentary concept’’ and when does a rudimentary concept become a

non-rudimentary one? Much of the trouble could be avoided here by not

pinning oneself down on the conceptual status of the experience and using

a term like ‘‘pre-conceptual configuration,’’ as Johnson himself regularly

does, or ‘‘pre-conceptual patterns,’’ as Hampe (2005: 1) shows to be acurrent term. Further down the authors say that ‘‘embodied concepts of

this kind can be systematically extended to provide more abstract con-

cepts.’’ At this point one cannot but wonder whether there is any di¤er-

ence between a ‘‘rudimentary’’ concept and an ‘‘embodied’’ concept? Still

on the same page we find the term ‘‘fundamental concept’’ in the state-

ment ‘‘abstract concepts like love are structured and therefore under-

stood by virtue of the fundamental concept container.’’ Apart from

the cumulative terminological load, this statement can also be easily mis-interpreted as if love were a container. Love can be a struggle, a fight, or

even war, but it is never understood as a container. What is left out of

sight here is another conceptual projection, i.e., that states are conceived

of as locations such that be in love (with someone) is structured as

‘‘being in one place with someone.’’ But love itself is not seen nor under-

stood as a container. That so much terminological overload could be

avoided is shown by a quotation from Jean Mandler, still on p. 46: ‘‘the

image schema is more than a spatio-geometrical representation. It is a‘theory’ about a particular kind of configuration, in which one entity is

supported by another entity that contains it.’’ Not only do we find here

the above-suggested term configuration for ‘image schema,’ but we can

also infer from this definition that such configurations are not mere

bodily experiences, but also imply a functional dimension added by a per-

ceiving and conceiving human consciousness. Or to conclude, we can

only understand what embodiment means if we see this human body as

a ‘‘conscious body.’’ Paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, we could say that an‘‘em-bodied’’ mind presupposes an ‘‘en-minded’’ body.

References

Barcelona, Antonio (ed.)

2000 Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective.

(Topics in English Linguistics 30.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Barcelona, Antonio

2000 On the plausibility of claiming a metonymic motivation for conceptual

metaphor. In Barcelona, Antonio (ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the

Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter,

31–58.

346 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Bartsch, Renate

2002 Generating polysemy: Metaphor and metonymy. In Dirven, Rene and Ralf

Porings (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast.

Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 49–74.

Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse

2004 Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dirven, Rene and Marjolijn Verspoor (eds.)

2004 Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Second edition. (First

published in 1998.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Evans, Vyvyan

2004 The Structure of Time: Language, Meaning and Temporal Cognition.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Geeraerts, Dirk

1985 Paradigm and Paradox. Explorations into a Paradigmatic Theory of Meaning

and its Epistemological Background. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

1993 Cognitive semantics and the history of philosophical epistemology. In

Geiger, Richard A. and Brygida Rudzka Ostyn (eds.), Conceptualizations

and Mental Processing in Language. (A Selection of Papers from the First

International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Duisburg 1989.) Berlin/

New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 53–79.

2002 The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in composite expressions.

In Dirven, Rene and Ralf Porings (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in

Comparison and Contrast. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 435–

465.

Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.)

2007 Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press

Grady, Joseph

1997a Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes, Depart-

ment of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley: Ph.D. dissertation.

1997b THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS revisited. Cognitive Linguistics 8, 267–

290.

Grady, Joseph, Todd Oakley and Seana Coulson

1999 Conceptual blending and metaphor. In Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. and Gerard

J. Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:

John Benjamins, 101–124.

Hampe, Beate (in cooperation with Joseph E. Grady) (eds.)

2005 From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. (Cog-

nitive Linguistics Research 29.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kovecses, Zoltan and Gunter Radden

1998 Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9,

37–77.

Kristiansen, Gitte, Michel Achard, Rene Dirven and Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza (eds.).

2006 Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. (Appli-

cations of Cognitive Linguistics 1.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lee, David

2001 Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Radden, Gunter and Zoltan Kovecses

1999 Towards a theory of metonymy. In Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Gunter Rad-

den (eds.), Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:

John Benjamins.

Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008) 347

Taylor, John

2002 Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans

2001 Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of ‘over’. Lan-

guage 77, 724–765.

Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jorg Schmid

2006 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. Second edition. (First published in

1996.) London/New York: Longman.

348 Book reviews Cognitive Linguistics 19–2 (2008)

Introduction

ARNE ZESCHEL*

One of the central tenets of Cognitive Linguistics is its fundamentally

usage-based orientation: language is seen as an inventory of dynamic

symbolic conventions (constructions) whose organisation is constantly

updated by (and hence adapting to) language use (Langacker 2000).Such usage-based, ‘‘emergentist’’ views of language are also found in re-

cent work outside Cognitive Linguistics in the narrower sense: for in-

stance, there is experimental evidence from various sources that shared

symbolic communication systems can indeed emerge (on the interper-

sonal level) and be learned (on the individual level) in a data-driven, self-

organising manner that does not require substantial language-specific

stipulations (be it in humans or machines).1 This is not to deny that

many aspects of the usage-based language model are still underspecifiedand have the status of assumptions rather than established facts. How-

ever, there is currently a commendable trend within Cognitive Linguistics

to put its programmatic appeal to the usage-based hypothesis to the test:

more and more studies set out to evaluate specific predictions of the

approach in di¤erent domains against appropriate experimental and/or

corpus data, thereby contributing to a successive refinement of the overall

model and helping to put it on a sound empirical footing (cf. Tummers

et al. 2005 as well as the papers in Gries and Stefanowitsch 2006 andGonzalez-Marquez et al. 2007 for recent overviews and applications).

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 349–355

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.013

0936–5907/08/0019–0349

6 Walter de Gruyter

* Author’s e-mail address: zeschel@uni-bremen.de. I am grateful to Kerstin Fischer, Anatol

Stefanowitsch and Felix Bildhauer for comments.

1. For the spontaneous emergence of novel symbolic communication systems among

humans, cf. Galantucci (2005); for the emergence of shared linguistic communication

systems (construction grammars) among cognitive robots, cf. Steels (2005); for over-

views of the usage-based approach to child language acquisition, cf. Tomasello (2003)

and Goldberg (2006); for unsupervised machine learning of a Langacker-style natural

language construction grammar, cf. Solan et al. (2005).

The papers in this special issue (which has grown out of a theme session

on ‘‘Constructions in Language Processing’’ held at the 2nd International

Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association in Munich

in October 2006) all represent this line of research, with a focus on con-

structionist perspectives on (human) language processing and its rela-

tionship to the linguistic representations that speakers extract from their

experience.The issue opens with a study of island e¤ects in English clausal com-

plement constructions by Ben Ambridge and Adele Goldberg (‘‘The island

status of clausal complements: evidence in favor of an information struc-

ture explanation’’). The authors compare the classical subjacency account

of constraints on filler-gap relations (Chomsky 1973) with an item-based

analogical approach (in which acceptability is a function of semantic

distance to a stored prototype) and their own proposal, in which ease of

extraction depends on the target’s degree of ‘‘backgroundedness’’ in dis-course (a principle which they refer to as ‘‘BCI: backgrounded constitu-

ents are islands’’). Ambridge and Goldberg substantiate their hypothesis

with the results of two questionnaire studies, suggesting that the e¤ects

investigated are best interpreted as a pragmatic anomaly reflecting the

fact that a constituent cannot be at the same time backgrounded and

focused. The authors conclude that the possibility of combining two con-

structions in production is influenced by the information-structural prop-

erties of the constructions involved (among other things).Unbounded dependency constructions in English are also the topic of

the second study, ‘‘Questions with long-distance dependencies: A usage-

based perspective’’ by Ewa Dabrowska. In contrast to Ambridge and

Goldberg, Dabrowska is concerned with how the acceptability of dif-

ferent types of WH-questions with long-distance dependencies can be

predicted from their similarity to an assumed prototype rather than from

general semantic/pragmatic principles: departing from the observation

that naturally occurring instances of this construction tend to be highlystereotypical, she suggests that they are not derived by abstract rules but

by modifying (or, in comprehension: by comparing a given target to)

a stored low-level schema of the format WH do you think/say S-GAP?

Dabrowska presents evidence for the predicted prototypicality e¤ects

from an acceptability judgment experiment and points to possible inter-

pretations of the obtained results in terms of both strongly item-based/

analogical models and a hybrid architecture that also represents abstract

schemas alongside specific exemplars.Similar to the first two contributions, the third and fourth paper in the

volume both deal with the same linguistic phenomenon, but with a di¤er-

ent focus and with di¤erent aims. In my own contribution (‘‘Lexical

350 Arne Zeschel

chunking e¤ects in syntactic processing’’), I report an experiment on syn-

tactic ambiguity resolution that seeks to probe the psychological reality

and processing relevance of partially schematic prefabs (i.e., the kinds

of low-level schemas that speakers are assumed to store in usage-based

Construction Grammar). The results of the experiment indicate that

global complementation preferences applying to a given verb ‘‘at large’’

(i.e., considering its entire usage spectrum) may be overridden by conflict-ing evidence for specific syntagmatic chunks in which this verb occurs.

These results are interpreted as support for the usage-based view that

such structures may have independent memory storage even when they

are fully predictable, and that such representations are furthermore privi-

leged over more abstract (i.e., lexically unfilled) constructions in language

processing.

Dealing with the same phenomenon (i.e., garden path e¤ects resulting

from a specific type of local syntactic ambiguity in English), Daniel

Wiechmann’s paper ‘‘Initial parsing decisions and lexical bias: Corpus

evidence from local NP/S-ambiguities’’ has a more methodological focus.

The author presents a corpus-linguistic approach to assessing verbal com-

plementation preferences in terms of collostruction strength using the

method of Distinctive Collexeme Analysis (DCA; Gries and Stefano-

witsch 2004). Using a balanced corpus, both verb-general and (verb-)-

sense-specific associations with di¤erent complementation patterns are

computed for 20 verbs and related to on-line measures of processing di‰-culty from an earlier reading experiment with these verbs (Hare et al.

2003). The results confirm the hypothesis that sense-specific associations

(as determined by the DCA) are a better predictor of processing preferen-

ces/di‰culties than form-based associations. Moreover, the author sug-

gests that the observed correlation between the corpus-derived predictions

and Hare et al.’s experimental findings indicates that collostruction

strength is a valid approximation of constructional association strength

on the psychological plane.Holger Diessel ’s study ‘‘Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis

of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English’’ is devoted to

aspects of production again. The author discusses a range of factors that

influence speakers’ choice of the positioning of adverbial clauses relative

to the matrix clause in di¤erent languages, with special attention to one

of these motivations, iconicity of sequence (i.e., the iconic encoding of

prior events in preposed clauses and posterior events in postposed

clauses). Diessel’s study reveals that the ordering of temporal adverbialclauses in English is significantly a¤ected by iconicity of sequence, which

is viewed as a processing principle geared at avoiding structures that are

di‰cult to plan and to interpret. In a second step, the author uses logistic

Introduction 351

regression analysis to integrate the observed e¤ect into a more com-

prehensive model of processing constraints on clause order in complex

sentences which also includes factors such as clause length, syntactic com-

plexity and pragmatic import. The resulting picture is a model in which

speakers seek to balance multiple constraints on their constructional en-

coding options in order to minimise overall processing load.

Though concerned with yet a di¤erent aspect of language process-ing, Martin Hilpert’s study ‘‘New evidence against the modularity of

grammar: Constructions, collocations and speech perception’’ is again

interested in the psychological status and processing relevance of en-

trenched exemplars of a given construction. However, the overall thrust

of Hilpert’s argument is di¤erent from that of other papers in the issue

which are concerned with item-based e¤ects in language processing: by

showing that the phonemic categorisation of a synthesised ambiguous

sound (located somewhere on a continuum between two phonemes) canbe biased in either direction by embedding it in an appropriate colloca-

tional ‘‘carrier phrase’’, the study documents syntactic top-down e¤ects

on word recognition that are di‰cult to reconcile with strictly serial-

modular theories of language processing. Hilpert provides evidence that

the observed e¤ect applies immediately (i.e., at the level of auditory input

processing), which implies that it cannot be explained by appealing to

‘‘late feedback’’ between modules. Instead, the author argues that fre-

quent word combinations have psychological reality as independent unitsof linguistic knowledge, and that lexical and syntactic aspects of language

processing are not plausibly attributed to separate (i.e., ‘‘informationally

encapsulated’’) mental modules.

Like Hilpert’s study, the final contribution addresses a famous tenet

of linguistic theories that are decidedly non-emergentist: in ‘‘Negative

entrenchment: A usage-based approach to negative evidence’’, Anatol

Stefanowitsch presents a new perspective on the so-called ‘‘no negative

evidence’’ problem that figures prominently in nativist accounts of lan-guage acquisition. The author contrasts di¤erent strategies for overcom-

ing the problem that have been proposed in the literature and then

presents a new approach that builds on the notion of ‘‘negative entrench-

ment’’: if speakers keep track of how often a particular simplex element

or feature occurs in the input, Stefanowitsch argues, such information

could be used to form subconscious expectations as to how often it should

co-occur with other elements or features in the language if there were

nothing in the grammar to prevent this. Learners could thus distinguishabsences in the input that are statistically significant from those that are

merely accidental, with continued non-occurrence of statistically expected

combinations resulting in their growing ‘‘negative entrenchment’’. The

352 Arne Zeschel

author backs up his proposal with the results of a pilot study which sug-

gests that corpus-derived scores of negative entrenchment are a better pre-

dictor of experimental (un)acceptability judgments than corpus-derived

measures of constructional pre-emption (i.e., one of the other mechanisms

discussed in the literature that are assumed to compensate for the lack of

explicit negative evidence).

In sum, the papers collected in this special issue demonstrate manyinteresting prospects of combining a usage-based approach to grammar

with suitable empirical methodologies: the contributions fill empirical and

methodological gaps on the constructionist research agenda (Wiechmann;

Diessel), they put important assumptions of the hypothesised model to

the test or extend it in novel ways (Zeschel; Hilpert; Stefanowitsch), they

reframe classical issues in grammatical theory from a usage-based per-

spective (Ambridge and Goldberg; Dabrowska; Stefanowitsch), and they

challenge more general claims about the properties of language and cog-nition that rest in part on questionable arguments from theoretical lin-

guistics (Hilpert). At the same time, there are a number of important

issues on which not all contributors might agree (such as the scope and

explanatory status of item-based approaches to language processing and

representation; cf. Abbot-Smith and Tomasello 2006). However, this

should only encourage further empirical investigation of these issues, and

future research can of course only benefit from the fact that relevant dif-

ferences are clearly articulated rather than glossed over.That said, readers may wonder how it is that one particular strand of

this research is not featured in this special issue at all – i.e., usage-based

work in computational linguistics. Clearly, statistical approaches to

natural language processing share important assumptions of usage-based

theories of language, and particular models might thus provide a useful

empirical touchstone for hand-crafted reconstructions of e.g., construc-

tion learning processes (cf. Bod, in press). Moreover, moving beyond

the purely statistical aspects of language and language processing, thetransition from traditional computational modelling to experiments with

embodied robotic agents that learn to associate linguistic signs with

aspects of their sensory-motor experience (e.g., Dominey and Boucher

2005; Steels and Kaplan 2002; Sugita and Tani 2005) provides a wealth

of further interesting possibilities for investigating some of the very key

concerns of Cognitive Linguistics from a new perspective (cf. also Zlatev

and Balkenius 2001). However, it is beyond the scope of this special issue

to map out points of contact between these two research communities.For the moment, then, su‰ce it to acknowledge that usage-based ap-

proaches to language are gaining more and more currency also in neigh-

bouring disciplines, and that the increasing integration of appropriate

Introduction 353

methodologies from linguistics, cognitive psychology and computer sci-

ence promises many interesting perspectives for future research on the

cognitive instantiation of language.

Universitat Bremen, Germany

References

Abbot-Smith, Kirsten, and Michael Tomasello

2006 Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic

acquisition. The Linguistic Review 23, 275–290.

Bod, Rens

in press Constructions at work or at rest? Cognitive Linguistics.

Chomsky, Noam

1973 Conditions on Transformations. In: Anderson, Stephen R., and Paul

Kiparsky (eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, Rinehart

& Winston, 232–286.

Dominey, Peter F. and Jean-David Boucher

2005 Developmental stages of perception and language acquisition in a perceptu-

ally grounded robot. Cognitive Systems Research 6, 243–259.

Galantucci, Bruno

2005 An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems.

Cognitive Science 29, 737–767.

Goldberg, Adele E.

2006 Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Gonzalez-Marquez, Monica, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson and Michael J. Spivey (eds.)

2007 Methods in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gries, Stefan Th. and Anatol Stefanowitsch

2004 Extending collostructional analysis: a corpus-based perspective on ‘alter-

nations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1), 97–129.

Gries, Stefan Th., and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.)

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Introduction 355

The island status of clausal complements:Evidence in favor of an information structure

explanation

BEN AMBRIDGE and ADELE E. GOLDBERG*

Abstract

The present paper provides evidence that suggests that speakers determine

which constructions can be combined, at least in part, on the basis of the

compatibility of the information structure properties of the constructions in-

volved. The relative ‘‘island’’ status of the following sentence complement

constructions are investigated: ‘‘bridge’’ verb complements, manner-of-

speaking verb complements and factive verb complements. Questionnaire

data is reported that demonstrates a strong correlation between acceptabil-

ity judgments and a negation test used to operationalize the notion of

‘‘backgroundedness’’. Semantic similarity of the main verbs involved to

think or say (the two verbs that are found most frequently in long-distance

extraction from complement clauses) did not account for any variance; this

finding undermines an account which might predict acceptability by analogy

to a fixed formula involving think or say. While the standard subjacency

account also does not predict the results, the findings strongly support the

idea that constructions act as islands to wh-extraction to the degree that

they are backgrounded in discourse.

Keywords: island constraints; constructions; sentence complements; man-

ner of speaking verbs; factive verbs; bridge verbs.

1. Introduction

Imagine the President was given an incriminating top secret FBI file

about a person who worked closely with him. Watching him storm out

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 357–389

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.014

0936–5907/08/0019–0357

6 Walter de Gruyter

* We are grateful to Ewa Dabrowska, Mirjam Fried, Jon Sprouse, Mike Tomasello and

Robert Van Valin for comments on an earlier draft. We are also grateful to Blazej Gal-

kowski and to Ewa Dabrowska for discussion about the Polish facts. This work was sup-

ported by an NSF grant to the second author: NSF 0613227. Correspondence addresses:

Ben.Ambridge@liverpool.ac.uk, adele@princeton.edu.

of the room, the people gathered may well wonder who the report was

about. And yet they could not formulate the question as follows:

(1) *Who did he just read the report that was about _?

As this example illustrates, even when questions appear to be semanti-

cally appropriate, there are constraints on what can count as a question.

Where do such constraints come from? The question has been at the heart

of linguistic theorizing for decades. Many researchers assume that the an-

swer must lie in a system of innate linguistic knowledge that is built on

purely formal principles that are specific to language, since it is not di‰-

cult to come up with contexts in which ill-formed questions would seem

to be semantically appropriate as in the example just given (e.g., Chom-sky 1973; Ross 1967; Pinker and Bloom 1990).

In this paper we compare the viability of the following proposals: a) a

formal ‘‘subjacency’’ account, b) an account that predicts acceptability to

be determined by semantic comparison to a high-frequency formula, and

c) the hypothesis that discourse properties of the constructions involved

determine the relative acceptability of long-distance dependencies.

1.1. Filler-Gap constructions

WH-questions typically involve a constituent that appears in a position

other than its canonical position. We refer to the displaced constituent as

the filler (indicated by italics), and the place where the constituent would

appear in a simple sentence, the gap (‘‘_’’). In this way, we can avoid the

common terminology that the filler is ‘‘extracted’’ from the site of the gap

and ‘‘moved’’ to the front of the sentence, since we do not assume that

there is any actual movement (see e.g., Ambridge et al. 2006, 2008a; Sagand Fodor 1994; Van Valin 1993; for non-movement accounts of simple

and complex question formation). An example of a question filler-gap

construction is given in (2):

(2) Who did she think he saw _?

Relative clauses and topicalizations are other types of filler-gap con-

structions as in (3) and (4):

(3) I met the man who I think you saw _. (relative clause)

(4) Whitefish and bagels, she served _ (topicalization)

Ross (1967) first observed constraints on filler-gap relations. Certain

syntactic constructions are ‘‘islands’’ to such relations: in particular, they

358 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

may not contain the gap.1 Syntactic islands include complex noun

phrases, subjects, adjuncts, complements of manner-of-speaking verbs

and complements of factive verbs as illustrated below.

Judgments in the case of complex NPs and subject islands are more

robust, and less dependent on context, than in any of the latter three in-

stances. Exploring these subtle di¤erences in judgments requires us to

look in a more detailed way at the discourse functions of each of the con-structions involved. We return to this issue of graded judgments below.

1.2. Subjacency

How should constraints on filler-gap constructions be accounted for?Since Chomsky (1973), the dominant view has been that constraints on

filler-gap constructions arise from a ‘‘subjacency’’ constraint: namely

that the gap cannot be separated from the filler by two or more ‘‘bound-

ing nodes’’, where S and NP are defined to be bounding nodes.2 Subja-

cency is a parade example of a constraint that has been claimed to be for-

mal and specific to language: part of ‘‘universal grammar’’ (Newmeyer

1. The ‘‘island’’ metaphor was based on the idea that the filler moved from the gap posi-

tion to the front of the sentence. Islands refer to constituents from which a filler cannot

move.

2. NP and S are considered bounding nodes in English. NP and S 0 appear to be bounding

nodes in Italian (Rizzi 1982) and S, S 0 and NP appear to be bounding nodes in Russian

(Freidin and Quicoli 1989). That is, Italian speakers can apparently extract out of WH-

complements, while Russian speakers can only extract out of main clauses.

Table 1. Classic examples of ‘‘Island’’ constraints

*Who did she see the report that was about _?

(cf. She saw the report that was about x)

Complex NPs

(both noun complements and relative

clauses)

*Who did that she knew _ bother him?

(cf. That she knew x bothered him)

Subjects

??What did she leave the movie because they

were eating _?

(cf. She left the movie because they were eating x)

Presupposed adjuncts

??What did she whisper that he saw _?

(cf. She whispered that he saw x)

Complements of manner-of-speaking

verbs

??What did she realize that he saw _?

(cf. She realized that he saw x)

Complements of factive verbs

The island status of clausal complements 359

1991). The subjacency account predicts that complex NPs, subjects and

all adjuncts should be islands.

At the same time, the subjacency account predicts that gaps within

clausal complements should be acceptable since only one bounding node

(S) intervenes between the filler (who) and the gap (_). This prediction in

fact holds when the main verb is a semantically light (‘‘bridge’’) verb of

saying or thinking (including think, say, believe) (cf. 5):

(5) Who did she think that he saw _?

However, while gaps within the complement clauses of bridge verbs

are, as predicted, acceptable, the subjacency account does not explain

why gaps within the complements of manner of speaking verbs or factive

verbs should be less than fully acceptable, since the syntactic structures

appear to be the same (Erteschik-Shir and Lappin 1979; Ross 1967).

(6) ??Who did she mumble that he saw _?

Manner of speaking verb complement

(7) ??Who did she realize that he saw _?

Factive verb complement

The natural solution for a syntactic account is to argue that the syntac-

tic structures are not actually the same. In fact it has been suggested that

the complements of manner of speaking verbs are adjuncts, not argu-

ments (Baltin 1982). This idea is supported by the fact that the clausalcomplement is optional:

(8) She shouted that he left.

(9) She shouted.

Since adjuncts are predicted to be islands on the subjacency account,

this move predicts that clausal complements of manner of speaking verbs

should be islands. However, clausal complement clauses are restricted to

appear with a fairly narrow set of verbs including verbs of saying andthinking; this restrictiveness is a hallmark of arguments, not adjuncts.

Moreover, (9) does not convey the same general meaning as (8) insofar

as only (8) implies that propositional content was conveyed; the change

of basic meaning when omitted is another hallmark of arguments. In ad-

dition, direct object arguments can replace clausal complements (e.g., 10),

and yet it would be highly unusual to treat a direct object as an adjunct:

(10) She shouted (the remark).

Finally, the possibility of treating the complement clause as an adjunct

clearly does not extend to factive verbs, since their clausal complements

are not generally optional (cf. 11–12).

360 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

(11) She realized that he left.

(12) ??She realized.

Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1971) suggest a di¤erent solution to account

for the island status of clausal complements of factive verbs. They suggest

that factive clausal complements contain a silent the fact rendering theclausal complements part of a complex NP (as in 13).

(13) She realized the fact that he left.

This analysis predicts that the complement clauses of factive verbsshould be as strong islands as overt NP complements, since expressions

such as (14) and (15) would be structurally identical:

(14) *Who did she realize the fact that he saw?

(15) ??Who did she realize that he saw?

Intuitively, however, (14) is less acceptable than (15). Moreover, posit-

ing a silent the fact phrase to account for the ill-formedness of examples

like (15) is ad hoc unless a principled reason can be provided for not pos-

iting a silent NP (e.g., the idea) in the case of bridge verbs which readily

allow extraction.

(16) *Who did she believe the idea that he saw?(17) Who did she believe he saw?

To summarize, if, in fact, the syntax is the same and only the lexical

semantics di¤ers, subjacency does not predict variation in judgments

across di¤erent verb classes. The complement clauses must be reanalyzed

as either adjuncts or parts of complex NPs (to our knowledge, it has not

been proposed that they could be subjects, but that would be the otheroption), but each of these possibilities raises issues that would need to be

addressed for the proposed alternative analyses to be convincing.

1.3. A possible direct-analogy account

Other researchers have emphasized that long-distance filler-gap construc-

tions are exceedingly rare in spoken corpora. Dabrowska (2004) and Ver-

hagen (2006) both observe that the only long-distance filler-gap expres-

sion to occur with any regularity at all are specific formulas with theverb think or say (WH DO you think/say S)?

Dabrowska notes that of a total of 49 long-distance filler-gap construc-

tions produced by five children in CHILDES corpora, all but two were

The island status of clausal complements 361

instances of these formulas. Dabrowska notes further that 96 percent of

adult’s long-distance filler-gap constructions in the Manchester corpus

also involve the main verb think or say (2004: 197).

Verhagen (2006) likewise observes that in both English and Dutch cor-

pora, questions out of main verb complements are almost uniformly in-

stances of the formula, WH do you think S? or, in the case of Dutch,

WH denk-pron2nd dat?. In a search of the English Brown corpus of writtentexts, Verhagen finds that 10 out of 11 examples of long-distance filler-

gap constructions involved the verb think; in a search of a Dutch news-

paper 34 out of 43 long-distance filler-gap constructions likewise involved

the verb denken (‘think’).

Dabrowska (2004, this issue) reports sentence judgment studies in

which she compared judgments on instances of the WH do you think/say

S? formula with variations of the formula. Her study demonstrates that

questions of the form WH do you think S? are judged to be more gram-matical than questions that instead involve auxiliaries (will or would ) or

a di¤erent verb (suspect, claim, swear, believe) or that include an overt

complementizer that.3 See also Poulsen (2006) for similar findings for the

verb denken (‘think’) in Dutch. One might quibble with certain aspects of

Dabrowska’s study; for example, half of the questions used as stimuli

involved the verbs think or say, and it is possible that the repetition led

subjects to give those instances higher ratings due to a general fluency

e¤ect (see e.g., Jacoby et al. 1989). In addition, we know that stringsthat contain more frequent words tend to be judged as more acceptable,

all other things being equal (Ambridge et al. 2008b; Featherston 2005;

Keller 2000; Kempen and Harbusch 2003, 2004; Schuetze 1996); yet the

high frequency do was compared with the low frequency would, and the

high frequency think was compared with lower frequency verbs. Nonethe-

less, simply given the high frequency of WH do you think S? and WH do

you say S? it seems reasonable to accept that these templates may be

stored, as Dabrowska, Verhagen and Poulsen suggest.Both Dabrowska (this issue) and Verhagen (2006) go further, however,

and argue that other instances of long distance dependency questions are

judged by analogy to a fixed high-frequency formula, WH do you think

S?. Verhagen (2006), for example, suggests that ‘‘Instances that do not

conform to [the formulaic question], can be seen as analogical extensions

from this prototype. . . . invented sentences exhibiting ‘‘long distance WH-

movement’’ will be worse, the more they deviate from the prototype’’.

3. Dabrowska (this issue) finds no significant e¤ect for changing the second person subject,

you, to a proper name, and the auxiliary must agree with the subject, so the stored for-

mulas may be the more general WH DO NP think S? and WH DO NP say S?

362 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

Dabrowska (this issue) likewise suggests that in order to produce ques-

tions such as What does she hope she’ll get?, i.e., questions that do not

fit the stored WH do you think S? template, speakers must adapt the

template, substituting she for you, hope for think, and does for do.

Bybee (2007) interprets usage-based theories to claim that grammatica-

lity ¼ familiarity, with general semantic or pragmatic constraints playing

little role. She states, ‘‘Under the usage-based notion that lack of gram-maticality is lack of familiarity, the oddness of these sentences [island vio-

lations] can be said to be in part due to the fact that one rarely hears such

combinations of structures’’ (2007: 695).

If this view were extended to all constructions and combinations of

constructions, it might be suggested that all of our knowledge of gram-

mar is essentially item-based. What appear to be generalizations or novel

combinations of constructions, would on this view simply be one-shot

analogies on memorized formulaic expressions.Few researchers have actually defended a purely exemplar based model

of linguistic knowledge, as usage-based models are not normally inter-

preted in this way. In particular, usage-based models espoused by Lan-

gacker (1988), Tomasello (2003) and Goldberg (2006) emphasize that

speakers form generalizations over instances as they record specific

instance-based knowledge (see also Murphy 2002 for a similar view

of non-linguistic categorization). Dabrowska (2004: this issue) and Verha-

gen (2006) in fact, likewise take a moderate position, allowing that gener-alizations are often formed for constructions that are exemplified by a

wide variety of examples in the input. Dabrowska has argued, for exam-

ple in the case of other constructions, that ‘‘early usage is highly stereo-

typical and . . . development proceeds from invariant formulas through in-

creasingly general formulaic frames to abstract templates’’ (2004: 200,

emphasis added). Verhagen (2006) also notes that higher type frequency

of examples will lead to more abstract representations (see also Bybee

1985, 1995).Still the question of whether we generalize beyond the exemplars is

highly relevant to the present case in which the vast majority of attested

examples instantiate only one or two relatively concrete types. We may

grant that these types, namely the formulas WH do you think S? and

WH do you say S? are likely to be stored, given their high frequency

and the judgment data collected by Dabrowska (this issue). The question

raised by Dabrowska, Verhagen and Poulson’s work is: is this all

speakers have? Or, instead, is there evidence for a more abstract general-ization about the function of long distance dependency constructions that

enables us to combine the clausal complement and question constructions

on the fly?

The island status of clausal complements 363

1.4. Backgrounded Constructions are Islands (BCI) account

Several researchers have argued that the constraints on filler-gap con-structions are best accounted for in terms of certain discourse properties

of the constructions involved. A fundamental insight of this perspective

is the observation that the gap generally must fall within the potential

focus domain of the sentence (Erteschik-Shir 1979; Erteschik-Shir 1998;

Takami 1989; Deane 1991; Van Valin 1993, 1995; Van Valin and LaPolla

1997).4 That is, the constituent in which the gap exists (i.e., the constitu-

ent containing the canonical position for the filler) must be within the

part of the utterance that is asserted; it cannot be presupposed or other-wise ‘‘backgrounded’’. Presuppositions of a sentence are revealed by a

classic negation test: presuppositions are implied by both the positive

and negative form of a sentence. In accordance with this observation,

notice that all of the constructions in Table 1, with the exception of

manner of speaking verb complements, convey presupposed information.

This is indicated in Table 2: i.e., the negation of the sentences in Table 1,

just like their positive counterparts, imply the propositional content

expressed by the island. Thus these island constructions do not expressthe assertion of a sentence: they are not part of the focus domain.5

4. Van Valin’s (1995) account suggests that the potential focus domain is defined structur-

ally: that all direct daughters of direct daughters of the illocutionary force operator are

within the potential focus domain. This account, like the subjacency account above, re-

quires an appeal to other factors to explain the fact that the complements of manner of

speaking and factive verbs are not fully acceptable since they are within his structurally

defined potential focus domain (being direct daughters of direct daughters of the illocu-

tionary force operator). A Gricean explanation has been o¤ered for manner of speaking

verbs (Van Valin 1997), but complements of factive verbs are predicted to be acceptable.

In its favor, the ‘‘direct-daughters’’ proposal is aimed at predicting which constructions

are non-backgrounded so that each construction need not be investigated on a case-by-

case basis.

5. In interpreting sentential negation, care must be taken not to place focal stress on any

constituent. Contrastive or metalinguistic negation can negate content expressed within

Table 2. Islands involve non-assserted (here presupposed) information

Complex NPs

1. She didn’t see the report that was about him.

! The report was about him.

Sentential subjects

2. That she knew it didn’t bother him.

! She knew it

3. She didn’t leave the movie after they ate it ! They ate it.

4. She didn’t realize that he saw the roses. ! He saw the roses.

364 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

Presupposition is a special case of non-assertion: what is presupposed is

taken for granted by both the positive and negated version of a sentence.

Another type of non-assertion is also revealed by the negation test, but is

distinct from presupposition in that neither the embedded proposition nor

its negation is implied by either the positive or the negated form of the

sentence. Complements of manner-of-speaking verbs involve this type of

non-assertion:

(18) She shouted that he left.

implies neither He left nor He didn’t leave.

(19) She didn’t shout that he left.implies neither He left nor He didn’t leave.

That is, normally a manner of speaking verb is used when the manner

of speaking and not the content of the complement clause is the main

assertion of the clause:

(20) She didn’t mumble that he left.

Natural interpretation: She didn’t mumble the content.

Notice that in a context in which the manner of speaking can be taken

for granted, the complement clause can be interpreted as asserted. For ex-

ample, in a game of whisper-down-the-alley, main clause negation can be

interpreted as negating the lower clause:

(21) I didn’t whisper that the horse was green.

Natural interpretation: That the horse was green is not what I whis-

pered. (e.g., I whispered that the house was clean)

As predicted by the information structure account, in this context, a

gap within the complement clause is much improved:

(22) What did you whisper that the house was?

Thus we see that when the complements of manner-of-speaking verbsare not within the focus domain (i.e., not construed to convey the main

assertion of a sentence), they are islands to extraction. In special con-

texts where they are construed to be within the focus domain, their island

status is noticeably mitigated. Thus the notion of ‘‘potential focus

domain’’ is clearly relevant to island constraints, as many have noted for

a long time (see references above).

islands, but then this type of negation can be used to negate anything at all, including

pronunciation or choice of lexical items, (She didn’t realize that he saw the ROSES, she

realized that he saw CARNATIONS!).

The island status of clausal complements 365

At the same time, the potential focus domain does not capture the rel-

evant facts perfectly. Subject complements are not within the focus do-

main, as they (or their existence) are presupposed:

(23) The king of France is bald.

! There is a king of France.

(24) The king of France isn’t bald.! There is a king of France.

And yet the entire subject argument is available for questioning:

(25) Who is bald?

The subject argument is not within the focus domain,6 but it plays a

special role in the information structure of a sentence in that it generally

serves as the primary topic. In order to allow for the fact that (entire) sub-ject arguments are available to serve as gaps, despite their not being with-

in the focus domain of a sentence, Goldberg (2006: 135) formulates the

generalization as follows:

§ Backgrounded constituents may not serve as gaps in filler-gap

constructions.

(Backgrounded constructions are islands: BCI)

Backgrounded constituents are defined as constituents that are neither

the primary topic nor part of the focus domain of a sentence. Elements

within clausal subjects are backgrounded in that they are not themselves

the primary topic, nor are they part of the focus domain. Relative clauses,

noun complements, presupposed adjuncts, parentheticals, and active di-

transitive recipients are also not part of the focus domain of the clause

and are therefore backgrounded (cf. Goldberg 2006). In this way, the ac-

count correctly predicts that a wide range of constructions should all beislands to long-distance dependency relations.

The restriction on backgrounded constructions is motivated by the

function of the constructions involved. Elements involved in unbounded

dependencies are positioned in discourse-prominent slots. It is pragmati-

cally anomalous to treat an element as at once backgrounded and

discourse-prominent.

We have seen that the BCI predicts that complements of factive verbs

should be islands, since, by definition, the complements of factive verbs

6. Subject arguments may be within the focus domain in a limited type of sentence-focus

construction (Lambrecht 1994). This construction requires special sentence accent on

the subject argument and occurs with a restricted set of mostly intransitive verbs.

366 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

are presupposed and are therefore backgrounded. The complements

of manner-of-speaking verbs are also predicted to be islands except

in special contexts in which the manner is taken for granted. But as

noted above the judgments of illformedness in these cases are somewhat

subtle. While factive verbs more strongly presuppose the content of their

complement clauses, it is not obvious that they are stronger islands than

manner-of-speaking verbs, though this is what the BCI hypothesis pre-dicts. Complements of semantically ‘‘light’’ bridge verbs (e.g., say, think)

are predicted not to be islands, as these ‘‘neutral’’ verbs are generally

used to introduce a complement clause containing the foregrounded

information.

2. Testing the hypotheses

In this paper we set out to investigate the following questions: a) Do judg-

ments relating to the negation test correlate with judgments concerning

island status as the BCI account predicts? b) Do judgments concerning

island status correlate with similarity of the main verbs involved to theverbs think and say as the direct-analogy proposal would predict?

We decided to restrict our investigation to one particular filler gap

construction: long-distance WH-extraction from clausal complements.

This allowed us to control for overall sentence length and complexity,

as ratings were obtained for di¤erent verbs in exactly the same syntactic

pattern. Four verbs were chosen from each of three classes of clausal-

complement-taking verbs:7

a. factive verbs (realize, remember, notice, know)

b. manner-of-speaking verbs (whisper, stammer, mumble, mutter)

c. bridge verbs (say, decide, think, believe)

2.1. Di¤erence scores

As described in detail in the methods section, we collected acceptability

ratings for both WH-questions and the corresponding declarative state-

ments. We used as our measure of acceptability of the WH-question a

7. We originally additionally included four whether-complement taking verbs, but these are

treated as fillers in the analysis that follows. The authors have (currently unpublished)

data which suggests that subjects treat whether as being intermediate between a com-

plementizer and a WH-word.

The island status of clausal complements 367

di¤erence score (or dispreference for question-form score) calculated by

subtracting the rating for each WH-question from the rating for the cor-

responding declarative statement, averaging across all subjects for each

item. For example, the number assigned to measure the dispreference for

‘‘extraction’’ in Who did Pat stammer that she liked? was arrived at by

subtracting subjects’ rating of this sentence from their rating of the corre-

sponding declarative sentence, Sara stammered that she liked Dominic.This allows us to control for any general (dis)preferences that participants

might have for particular VERBþCOMP combinations. Such (dis)prefer-

ences might be expected to occur on the basis of simple frequency (e.g.,

sentences containing say that might be rated as more acceptable than sen-

tences containing stammer that, regardless of whether they are interroga-

tive or declarative) and/or the extent to which certain verbs felicitously

introduce complement clauses (again in both declaratives and interroga-

tives). Indeed, in the present study, for example, declarative sentences ofthe form NP said that S received a mean rating of 5.9 out of 7, while sen-

tences of the form NP stammered that S received a mean rating of 4.7.

The finding that subjects give lower ratings of acceptability to sentences

containing low frequency strings when other factors are held constant is

well attested in the literature (see references cited earlier). Using di¤erence

scores ensures that our dependent measure reflects the extent to which

participants consider particular WH-extraction questions to be ungram-

matical, controlling for the frequency of particular lexical strings. Thehigher the di¤erence score, the higher the dispreference for the WH-

question form (i.e., the higher the di¤erence score, the stronger the island

to extraction).

2.2. Negation test

A central goal of the study was to investigate whether the extent to which

a complement clause is backgrounded correlates with its resistance to

WH-extraction. As a measure of backgrounding of the complementclause, the negation test was used. The degree to which a clause C is con-

sidered backgrounded varies inversely with the extent to which main

clause negation implies that C itself is negated. To determine scores on

the negation test, we simply asked native speakers to judge the extent to

which main clause negation implied that the subordinate clause was ne-

gated. For example, subjects judged the extent to which sentences like

that in (26) implied (27) on a seven point scale:

(26) She didn’t think that he left.

(27) He didn’t leave.

368 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

Clearly (26) does not strictly entail (27), but it does imply it to some ex-

tent (as the judgments collected confirm). The negation test has the virtue

of being a well-motivated, objective and independent measure. This test is

intended to predict what is in the focus domain generally. For present

purposes, the BCI predicts a correlation between the negation test and ac-

ceptability of the long distance dependencies, at least to the extent to

which negation test judgments di¤er for particular verbs.

2.3. Similarity judgments

In order to determine whether semantic analogy to the verbs think or say

play a role in acceptability judgments, we used both human and auto-

matic calculations of semantic similarity. For the human judgment data,

we created a second questionnaire to investigate verbs’ similarity to think

and say. For the automated calculation, we used Latent Semantic Analy-

sis (Deerwester et al. 1990). The similarity judgments are discussed in sec-

tion 6.

3. Predictions

3.1. Predictions of the BCI hypothesis

To recap, the BCI hypothesis predicts that the greater the extent to which

sentential negation implies negation of the complement clause, the lesser

the extent to which the complement clause is backgrounded, and hence

the weaker the island. That is, the higher the negation-test score, the

higher the predicted acceptability of the related WH-question, and thelower the di¤erence score. Thus the BCI hypothesis predicts a significant

negative correlation between negation-test and di¤erence scores.

3.2. Predictions of subjacency account

A purely syntactic subjacency account would expect all structurally iden-

tical sentences to behave identically, and thus would predict no systematic

di¤erences across semantic verb classes. The proposals to treat comple-

ments of manner of speaking verbs as adjuncts and complements of

factive verbs as part of complex NPs were argued to be problematic.

However, if either of these analyses is correct it would predict that the

constituent in question is an island to extraction. It is well-known that is-

land status is somewhat variable, but no particular gradience of judg-ments is predicted on this account. That is, there is no reason to expect

that grammaticality judgments should correlate in any systematic way

with judgments on the negation test.

The island status of clausal complements 369

3.3. Predictions of a direct analogy account

Another possibility is that acceptability judgments (di¤erence scores)are based on semantic similarity to a fixed formula involving the verb

think or say (WH do you think/say S?). Dabrowska (this issue) found

that judgments on questions involving the second person subject you

were not significantly di¤erent from those with a proper name, so we

might generalize the template to WH DO NP think/say S? where ‘‘DO’’

is capitalized to indicate that its form is determined by agreement with

the subject argument. Our stimuli all contain past tense did and not do

or does; this di¤erence from the fixed formula is controlled for acrossitems. Our stimuli all contain the complementizer that so this di¤erence

from the fixed formula is also controlled for across items. The key dif-

ference among our items is the main verb involved. The direct-analogy

account would thus seem to predict that there should be a negative corre-

lation between di¤erence scores and scores of similarity of the main verbs

involved to think or say: the more similar a verb is to think or say, the less

di¤erence there should be between the acceptability of a question and the

acceptability of its corresponding declarative.

4. Questionnaire #1: acceptability ratings and negation test

The first questionnaire collected acceptability judgments and judgmentson a negation test. Similarity judgments were collected in a separate ques-

tionnaire (see section 6).

4.1. Method

4.1.1. Participants. Participants who filled out the acceptability/

negation-test questionnaire were 71 naıve undergraduate and graduatestudents from Princeton University (mean age 19;6), all of whom were

monolingual English speakers. None of the participants were linguistics

majors and few if any had any background in linguistics. Participants re-

ceived $5 for their participation during a questionnaire day.

4.1.2. Design. For each of twelve verbs, each participant rated the

grammatical acceptability of a WH-question and a declarative statement

—both containing a complement clause, and performed a negation-test-

judgment task (see Materials section). The verb (class) was manipulatedas a within-subjects factor with 12 levels for a correlation analysis,

and three levels ( factive, manner of speaking, bridge; with four verbs in

each class) for a factorial analysis. Counterbalance-version (six di¤erent

370 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

versions of the questionnaire were used) was manipulated as a between-

subjects factor.

4.1.3. Materials. Each participant completed a two-part question-

naire; the first part consisted of judgments of grammatical acceptability

for WH-questions and declarative statements; the second part consisted

of judgments about the extent to which main clause negation implied ne-

gation of the complement clause.

Acceptability judgments of WH-questions featuring WH-extraction

from a clausal complement clause as in (A) were collected:

A) What did [NP1] [VERB1] [[that] [NP2] [VERB2]]?(e.g., Whati did Jess think that Dan liked ti?)

VERB1 was one of the 12 experimental verbs: realize, remember, no-

tice, know; whisper, stammer, mumble, mutter; say, decide, think, believe.

NP1 and NP2 were one of 12 female or 12 male proper names respec-

tively, while VERB2 was the past tense of one of 12 transitive verbs (ate,

bought, built, drew, fixed, found, knew, liked, made, needed, opened, pulled,

read, threw, took, wanted ).

Six di¤erent versions of the questionnaire were created. For each ver-

sion, sentences were generated at random using the template in (A).8

Acceptability judgments of declarative statements of the form given in

(B) were also collected:9

B) [NP1] [VERB1] [that] [[NP2] [VERB2þAPPROPRIATE NP]]

(e.g., Danielle thought that Jason liked the cake)

8. The actual sentence for each of the 12 experimental verbs (though not the structure of

the sentence) di¤ered across all six versions. For example, the experimental verb realize

occurred in the sentence What did Ella realize that Adam threw? in Version 1, What did

Trinity realize that Andy drew? in Version 2, and so on. This was to guard against the

possibility of our findings being distorted by item e¤ects.

9. Again, VERB1 was one of the 12 experimental verbs (this time in past tense form). As

for questions of the form in (A), the declarative statements were generated at random

using this template, and di¤ered across the six versions of the questionnaire. VERB2

was selected from the same list of 12 verbs used for the questions, each paired with an

appropriate NP (ate the chips, bought the groceries, drew the picture, fixed the computer,

found the keys, knew the secret, made the dinner, needed the map, pulled the car, read the

book, threw the ball, wanted the chocolate). NP1 and NP2 were selected from two further

lists of 12 female and 12 male names (i.e., each name never appeared more than once

throughout the study). This was to avoid explicitly highlighting to the subjects the for-

mal relationship between each WH-extraction question and its equivalent declarative.

The island status of clausal complements 371

For each of the six questionnaire versions, the 24 items in part one of

the questionnaire—12 WH-questions and 12 declarative statements—

were presented in a di¤erent pseudo-random order, with the stipulation

that no two verbs from the same verb class ( factive, manner of speaking,

bridge) were presented consecutively.

Negation test judgments. The second part of the questionnaire consisted

of negation test judgments that were designed to indicate the extent towhich sentential negation was interpreted as implying negation of (i.e.,

having scope over) the clausal complement. Each negated complex sen-

tence (e.g., Maria didn’t know that Ian liked the cake) was paired with a

negated simple sentence corresponding to the complement clause of the

complex declarative (e.g., Ian didn’t like the cake). For each of the six dif-

ferent questionnaire versions, the complex þ simple negated declarative

sentence pairs were presented in a di¤erent pseudo-random order, with

the stipulation that no two pairs involving verbs from the same class ( fac-

tive, manner of speaking, bridge) were to be presented consecutively.

These items (see Sentence C below for an example) were created using

an additional set of 12 female names (NP1s) and male names (NP2),

along with the same lists of VERB1s and VERB2þAPPROPRIATE

NPs as in the declarative statements from Part 1:

C) [NP1] didn’t [VERB1] [that] [NP2] [VERB2þAPPR. NP]

[NP2] didn’t [VERB2þAPPR. NP]

e.g., Maria didn’t know that Ian liked the cake.

Ian didn’t like the cake.

Again, the items generated for each verb di¤ered across each of the six

di¤erent versions of the questionnaire with regard to the NPs used.

4.1.4. Procedure. Subjects completed the questionnaire in written

form, and were given only printed instructions.

For Part 1 ( judgments of grammatical acceptability), these instructionsstated:

Please rate each of the sentences below for how acceptable you find

them. 7 ¼ Perfect (completely acceptable), 1 ¼ Terrible (completelyunacceptable).

Please indicate your response by drawing a circle around the appropri-

ate number as shown in the examples below. Please judge the sentences

only on how acceptable you find them (and not, for example, whetherthe event they describe is plausible or implausible, good or bad etc.).

Acceptability is a sliding scale and not a yes/no judgment—people

tend to di¤er in their judgments of how acceptable sentences are.

372 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

For Part 2 (negation test judgments), these instructions stated:

Here, you will be given two statements. Your task is to decide the ex-tent to which the first statement implies the second statement. Consider

the example sentence pairs in A–C below:

(A) Bob left early. Bob didn’t leave early.

The first statement strongly implies that the second statement is NOTtrue, so in this case you would circle the 1, as shown above.

(B) Bob left the party early. Bob left the party.

This time, the first statement strongly implies that the second statementIS true, so this time, you would circle the 7 as shown above.

(C) Bob might leave the party late. Bob left the party early.

This time, the first statement neither implies nor does not imply the sec-

ond statement, so here you would circle the 4 as shown above.

We are interested in what average people typically imply with their

everyday statements. Bearing these examples in mind, please rate the

pairs below for the extent to which the first statement implies thatthe second statement is true. That is, if you heard a person say [State-

ment 1], to what extent would you assume that they are implying

[Statement 2].

5. Results and discussion

Di¤erence scores, raw scores (ratings for questions and declaratives), and

negation-test scores can be found in Table A1 (Appendix).

5.1. Preliminary analysis

A preliminary analysis of variance with mean di¤erence scores (prefer-

ence for declarative over WH-extraction question) as the dependentvariable and verb-type ( factive, manner of speaking, bridge) and counter-

balance version as within-subjects variables was conducted to investigate

the e¤ect of counterbalance version. This variable was not associated with

any significant main e¤ects or interactions. Subsequent analyses therefore

collapsed across all six di¤erent questionnaire versions. The data—raw

scores, di¤erence scores and negation test scores—were also checked for

normality of distribution (for each verb individually, and collapsed into

the three verb-type categories). Although data in some conditions dis-played skew and kurtosis, all subsequent analyses yielded the same pat-

tern of results with raw and (log) transformed data. We therefore report

results for untransformed data only.

The island status of clausal complements 373

5.2. Analyses of variance

In order to investigate the role of verb classes, we conducted an analysisof variance for di¤erence scores and negation test scores separately, at the

level of verb classes ( factive, manner of speaking, bridge). That is, for

each subject, the di¤erence score for—for example—factive verbs repre-

sents the mean of that subject’s di¤erence scores for realize, remember,

notice and know (and the same for negation-test scores).

These analyses were conducted to investigate (a) whether subjects gave

significantly higher ratings of grammatical acceptability (looking at dif-

ference scores) for certain classes of complement-taking verbs than othersand (b) whether participants’ negation-test judgments mirrored (i.e., pre-

dicted) these acceptability ratings. These data are shown in Figure 1 and

Figure 2 respectively (and also in Table A1; see Appendix).

Figure 1. Mean negation test scores. Higher scores indicate less backgrounding of the com-

plement clause

Figure 2. Mean di¤erence (dispreference-for-extraction-question) scores. Higher scores indi-

cate greater ungrammaticality of the question form (relative to the corresponding

declarative)

374 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

As predicted by the BCI hypothesis, the increase in di¤erent scores is

paralleled by a decrease in negation-test scores (recall that the BCI hy-

pothesis predicts a negative correlation between our negation-test and

di¤erence-score measures).

A one-way within-subjects ANOVA with the independent variable

of verb-type ( factive, manner of speaking, bridge) and the dependent

variable of di¤erence score yielded a significant main e¤ect of verb-type(Fð2;70Þ ¼ 27:01, p < 0:001, h2

p ¼ 0:28). Post hoc tests revealed that fac-

tive verbs yielded the strongest islands (i.e., highest di¤erence scores;

M ¼ 2:06 places on the 7-point scale; SE ¼ 0:16). Manner-of-speaking

verbs (M ¼ 1:74, SE ¼ 0:15) yielded the next strongest islands, with (as

their name implies) bridge verbs forming the weakest islands (M ¼ 0:97,

SE ¼ 0:13). All comparisons were significant at p < 0:001 with the excep-

tion of that between factive and manner-of-speaking verbs, which was

marginally significant at p ¼ 0:056.A one-way within-subjects ANOVA with the independent variable of

verb-type ( factive, manner of speaking, bridge) and the dependent vari-

able of negation-test score also yielded a significant main e¤ect of verb-

type (Fð2;70Þ ¼ 49:27, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:41). Factive verbs yielded the

lowest negation test score (i.e., highest backgrounding of the complement

clause; M ¼ 1:90, SE ¼ 0:13), then manner-of-speaking verbs (M ¼ 2:75,

SE ¼ 0:15), then bridge verbs (M ¼ 3:35, SE ¼ 0:14), with all compari-

sons significant at p < 0:001.In summary, the results of these two ANOVAs provide considerable

support for the BCI hypothesis. Factive verbs—which, as a class, are

rated as strongly backgrounding the complement clause (as measured by

the negation test)—form the least acceptable WH-extraction questions.

Bridge verbs—which, as a class, are rated as only weakly backgrounding

the complement clause—form the most acceptable WH-extraction ques-

tions, with manner of speaking verbs in-between the two.

In order to quantify the negative correlation between the di¤erencescores and the judgments on the negation test, we additionally performed

a correlational analysis on the data. The correlational analysis is a¤ected

by within-verb-class correlations as well as correlations between verb

classes, so it is a more sensitive measure.

5.3. Correlation analysis

We entered into the correlation analysis the mean negation-test scoreand the mean di¤erence score, pooling across all subjects (see Lorch

and Myers 1990). What our analysis lacks in power—having only 12

datapoints—it makes up for in reliability, as each point includes scores

The island status of clausal complements 375

from 71 participants. A scatterplot of this correlation is shown in Figure

3.

This analysis revealed that the mean negation test score was a highly

significant (negative) predictor of mean di¤erence score (r ¼ �:83,

p ¼ 0:001), accounting for over two thirds of the observed variance

(R2 ¼ 0:69).10 The correlation of |.83| is strikingly high, as perfect corre-lations (þ/�1) are almost non-existent when distinct measures are used.

Separate measures of the same thing, e.g., mean length of utterance

(MLU) at 28 months, have been found to correlate in the .75–.80 range

(Bates and Goodman 1997).

5.4. Any role for subjacency?

The subjacency account clearly does not predict the pattern of results

found in the present study. In particular, subjacency does not predict

any distinctions based on the semantic class of the verbs involved without

Figure 3. Correlation between di¤erence scores (dispreference for question scores) and nega-

tion test scores

10. Mean negation test score was also a significant (positive) predictor of mean rating of

acceptability for the extraction question (r ¼ 0:58, p < 0:05), accounting for approxi-

mately one third of the observed variance (R2 ¼ 0:34). Thus although, as we have ar-

gued, di¤erence scores constitute a more appropriate measure of (un)acceptability than

raw scores, our finding of a significant association between backgrounding and the ac-

ceptability of WH-extraction questions does not hinge on using di¤erence scores.

376 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

stipulation. Manner of speaking complements and factive complements

would require reanalysis as adjuncts or parts of complex NPs as outlined

above in order to predict their relative ill-formedness vis a vis semantically

light verbs. Such analyses would require independent support, of course,

or risk being ad hoc; moreover, even if reanalysis into adjuncts and

complex NPs is granted, it does not predict the strong correlation

found between di¤erence judgments and judgments on the negation test.Moreover, subjacency does not predict the fact that questions from

complements of the verb think (and say) are judged to be particularly

well-formed.

5.5. ‘Think’ and ‘say’ questions as stored formula

As Figure 3 illustrates, the present study replicates Dabrowska’s (2004,

this issue) findings that WH-questions with think and say are rated assomewhat more acceptable than such questions with other verbs (think is

significantly more acceptable than all other verbs besides say and decide

at p < 0:05 by paired t-test; say is more acceptable than all other verbs

except think, believe, decide and stammer). At the same time, the gramma-

ticality judgments do not provide unambiguous evidence for formulaic

status since the semantic properties of think and say predict that they

should be favored. To demonstrate that speakers judge WH-extraction

questions with think and say to be more acceptable than would be pre-dicted given their semantics, it would be necessary to show that scores

for these items fall well below the regression line. Generally a di¤erence

of 1.96 standard deviations is accepted as indicating outlier status and

neither say nor think meet this criterion. Although say is 1.62 standard

deviations below the regression line, and thus farther from the regression

line than most of the other verbs, it does not meet this criterion for outlier

status; neither is it the closest to being classified as an outlier (mutter is

judged 1.65 SDs worse than would be predicted given its negation testscore). Moreover, acceptability of the WH-extraction question is pre-

dicted better by the negation test for think than for any other verb (at

only �0.28 SDs below the regression line).

The BCI generalization goes some way toward explaining why the

same verbs, ‘‘think’’ and ‘‘say’’, are more likely to appear in long-distance

dependency constructions than other verbs cross-linguistically: their se-

mantics motivates their discourse properties which in turn motivate their

distribution (recall that e.g., Dutch denken ‘‘think’’ shows a tendency tobe used frequently in filler-gap constructions (Verhagen 2006); and cf. dis-

cussion of Polish ‘‘say’’ below). The idea that think is used with special

discourse properties is buttressed by the idea that clauses with the main

The island status of clausal complements 377

verb think are often cited as in some sense ‘‘monoclausal’’ (Lako¤ 1969;

Thompson 2002; Verhagen 2006). An indication that say is likewise often

used to foreground the information in the complement clause comes from

the fact that the verb say has been known to grammaticalize into a com-

plementizer (Haspelmath 1989).

Thus although we agree that the forms WH DO NP think S? and WH

DO NP say S? are likely to be stored (due to their high frequency), thepresent study does not provide evidence that this is necessarily the case,

as their well-formedness may be due to their semantics. To demonstrate

that WH-extraction questions with think and say are necessarily stored

as templates, one might turn to on-line comprehension time measures

which may be more likely to reveal formulaic status than acceptability

judgments (cf. Wonnacott et al. 2008). The following section investigates

the stronger claim that these high-frequency formulas are used as the

basis of direct semantic analogy when other WH-questions with thesame form are at issue.

6. Questionnaire #2: Semantic similarity

As noted at the outset, the direct-analogy proposal claims that the ques-

tions WH DO NP think S? and WH DO NP say S? constitute semantic

prototypes, and that the grammatical acceptability of other such ques-

tions may vary as a function of their semantic similarity to these proto-

types. In order to test this possibility, we investigated whether semantic

similarity of each verb to think (or say) accounted for any of the observed

variance in di¤erence scores.

6.1. Method

6.1.1. Participants. 12 naıve undergraduate and graduate students

(11 from Princeton and one from the University of Liverpool) (mean

age 22.5) filled out semantic similarity questionnaires. None of them had

taken part in the first study and as before, none of the participants were

linguistics majors, and few if any had any background in linguistics. Par-ticipants received $7 each.

6.1.2. Design. Participants rated the semantic similarity of say and

think (and—as a control—four other verbs used in the main study) toeach of the 11 remaining verbs (see Materials section). The control verbs

allow us to determine whether semantic similarity to think/say in particu-

lar predicts the di¤erence scores from the first study better than semantic

378 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

similarity to an arbitrary verb that is not claimed to form part of a se-

mantic template (e.g., remember). Each subject received one of six di¤er-

ently ordered versions of the questionnaire in order to guard against pos-

sible order-e¤ects.

6.1.3. Materials. In order to give semantic similarity the strongest

chance of predicting the acceptability of question forms, we asked

speakers to judge the similarity of the verbs as they appeared in questions.

We used yes/no questions because judgments on WH-questions would

have been confounded by variation in acceptability, which may have in-fluenced speakers’ similarity ratings in unforeseen ways. Participants filled

out a questionnaire containing items such as the following:

How (dis)similar are the following verbs to think, in the context

A. Did you think that Mary needed the map?

Did you decide that

Mary needed the map?

Meanings are

very di¤erent

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meanings are

very similar

Did you say that Mary

needed the map?

Meanings are

very di¤erent

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meanings are

very similar

Did you whisper that

Mary needed the map?

Meanings are

very di¤erent

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meanings are

very similar

The verbs think, say, remember, notice, stammer and mumble were usedin target questions as think is in the question in A above. For each target

verb, similarity ratings were requested for each of the other 11 verbs (re-

alize, remember, know, whisper, mutter, decide, and believe in addition to

those used in the target sentences).

6.1.4. Procedure. Subjects completed the questionnaire in written

form, and were given only printed instructions:

Your task in this study is to rate verbs for how similar in meaning they

are to another verb (as it is used in a particular sentence). For example,

consider the sentence

John saw the man.

You might decide that—in this context—‘‘spotted’’ means something

very similar to ‘‘saw’’, in which case you would circle the 7 as shown

below:

The island status of clausal complements 379

John spotted

the man.

Meanings are very

di¤erent

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meanings are very

similar

You might also decide that—in this context—‘‘kicked’’ means some-

thing entirely di¤erent to ‘‘saw’’, in which case you would circle the 1,

as shown below:

John kicked

the man.

Meanings are very

di¤erent

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meanings are very

similar

Finally, you might decide that—in this context—the meaning of‘‘watched’’ is not very similar to that of ‘‘saw’’, but it is not very di¤er-

ent either, in which case you would circle the 5 as shown below:

John watched

the man.Meanings are verydi¤erent

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meanings are verysimilar

6.2. Results and discussion

The second questionnaire aimed to determine whether there was evidence

for the idea that think or say WH-extraction questions were used as the

basis for an analogy when judging the well-formedness of such questions

with other main verbs. We therefore entered into a correlation analysis,

for each verb (except think itself ), the score representing the semantic

similarity of this verb to think (predictor variable) and the mean di¤er-ence score from the first study (outcome variable). A separate correlation

analysis was performed for semantic similarity to say, and also to each of

the four ‘‘control’’ verbs in the same way. The mean semantic-similarity

to think (and say) scores are shown in Table A1 (Appendix).

The semantic-similarity judgment data failed to show a significant

correlation with the judgment data for well-formedness of questions (i.e.,

di¤erence scores). The correlations did not approach significance for sim-

ilarity to either think (r ¼ 0:08, p ¼ 0:79) or say (r ¼ 0:17, p ¼ 0:62), (or,indeed, for any of the four control verbs: remember, notice, stammer

or mumble). Indeed, the small and non-significant correlations for think

and say were in the opposite direction to that predicted by the analogy

account.

Relatively few subjects (12) were involved because preliminary analysis

showed that judgments were highly reliable across participants. Each in-

dividual participant’s judgments were significantly correlated with the

380 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

mean scores collapsing across all participants at p < 0:01. Note also that

because we used mean scores pooled across participants, the power of

the statistical test is una¤ected by sample size. The validity of our analysis

(as well as its power to detect e¤ects) is demonstrated by systematic find-

ing of significant correlations between similarity scores. For example,

similarity-to-think scores were significantly (negatively) correlated with

similarity-to-say scores r ¼ �0:741, p < :02). In fact, judgments ofsimilarity to all target verbs (say, think, remember, notice, stammer and

mumble) were intercorrelated at p < 0:05 or better, with one exception

(similarity-to-notice and similarity-to-stammer: r ¼ �:586, p ¼ 0:075).

Perhaps participants were basing their similarity judgments on some

sort of conscious strategy that was not relevant to the implicit similarity

judgments that might be used on the analogy proposal. To test for this

possibility, we also calculated similarity scores using an on-line automatic

similarity calculator, Latent Semantic Analysis (Deerwester et al. 1990).11

As before, since a higher LSA score indicates greater semantic similarity

to think (or say), and a lower di¤erence score indicates a higher rating of

grammatical acceptability, a negative correlation between LSA and mean

di¤erence score was predicted.

The analysis found that LSA semantic similarity of the verbs to say did

not involve a significant correlation (r ¼ �0:02, p ¼ 0:96). Similarity to

think was also not a significant predictor of mean di¤erence score; in fact

there was again a small non-significant correlation in the opposite direc-tion to that predicted (r ¼ 0:11, p ¼ 0:75).

Another potential correlation we considered involved determining, for

each verb, the maximum similiarity score to either the verb think or the

verb say. That is, if we assume that two distinct formulas are stored,

WH DO NP say S? and WH DO NP think S? then judgments may be de-

termined by a comparison between a target verb and whichever formula

it is semantically closest to. We therefore calculated the correlation be-

tween the di¤erence scores and the array of scores determined by the fol-lowing formula:

Max (similarity-of-verbi-to-say, similarity-of-verbi-to-think)

for i a {realize, remember, notice, know, whisper, stammer, mumble,

mutter, decide, believe}.

However, neither the judgment scores of similarity nor the LSA

similarity scores correlated significantly with the di¤erence scores by this

11. See http://lsa.colorado.edu/ (texts denoted ‘‘General Reading up to 1st Year

College’’).

The island status of clausal complements 381

measure either (r ¼ �0:17, p ¼ 0:64; r ¼ 0:45, p ¼ 0:19, respectively).

The correlation with LSA scores is of a fair size (r ¼ 0:45), but it is

in the opposite direction to that predicted by the direct analogy account.

Recall that di¤erence scores are smaller to the extent that the question

form is relatively well-formed. If judgments were based on semantic

analogies to the fixed formulas, there should be a negative, not a positive

correlation.Thus, whichever way it is analyzed, by similarity to say or to think or

to their combination, and according to either human judgment data or to

the automatic LSA similarity calculation, semantic similarity to say or

think is a poor predictor of judgment data. The direct-semantic analogy

proposal fails to account for the data.

7. Conclusion

In conclusion, the BCI hypothesis (or an information structure account

more generally) has been shown to be an excellent predictor of the island

status of clausal complements. Participants’ negation-test judgments wereable to predict over two-thirds of the variance associated with their dis-

preference-for-WH-extraction-question scores. As this correlation is also

not expected nor easily explained on a purely syntactic account, this find-

ing lends strong support to the idea that the discourse function of the con-

structions involved plays a critical role in island phenomena.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a thorough comparison

of the BCI and subjacency, but there are many other generalizations that

the BCI accounts for without additional stipulation that subjacency doesnot (see Goldberg 2006). The first two predictions were considered in the

present study.

1. Complements of manner-of-speaking verbs and factive verbs are

islands.2. Grammaticality judgments should correlate with the degree of ‘‘back-

groundedness’’, when length and complexity are held constant.

3. Direct replies are sensitive to islands (Morgan 1975).

4. Exclamative ah! is sensitive to islands (James 1972).

5. The active recipient argument of ditransitive, as a secondary topic,

resists being a gap, while the passive recipient argument of a ditransi-

tive, as a primary topic, is free to be a gap.

6. Presentational relative clauses are not always islands.7. Definite relative clauses are stronger islands than indefinite relative

clauses.

8. Parentheticals are islands.

382 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

There is ample evidence that general processing constraints play a role

in island violations (and their amelioration) (cf. e.g., Ellefson and Chris-

tiansen 2000; Gibson 1998; Kluender and Kutas 1993). In particular,

several factors including length, definiteness, complexity, and interference

e¤ects (involving similar referents between filler and gap) have been

shown to play a role. As the present experiment controls for these factors,

we can see that information structure constraints play an independentrole in addition to e¤ects of processing.

Judgments on filler-gap constructions involving the complement clause

of the main verb think (and say) were judged to be significantly more

acceptable than those involving most other main verbs, as Dabrowska

(2004, this issue) has also found. The BCI hypothesis actually predicts

that these verbs should be preferred on semantic grounds—the accept-

ability judgments correlate well with the negation test scores—so other

data are needed to confirm that a fixed formula is stored (but, again, wetake the idea that such formulas are stored to be quite plausible).

On the other hand, the possibility that all filler-gap expressions involv-

ing complement clauses are judged by direct analogy to the formulaic

expression with think or say was not supported by the data. Neither the

human similarity judgment scores nor the automated LSA similarity mea-

sure correlated with the acceptability data. This finding argues against a

strong version of item-based grammar in which acceptability judgments

are necessarily determined by one-shot analogies to well-learned formu-laic patterns.

In general, we must be careful when appealing to frequency in the input

data as an explanation for linguistic generalizations. The explanation may

be question-begging unless an account is o¤ered as to why there should be

cross-linguistic generalizations about the nature of the input, as there are,

at least to some extent, in the case of island constraints. We must ask, why

is the input the way it is? An account that appeals to information structure

provides an answer to this question: speakers avoid combining con-structions that would place conflicting constraints on a constituent, such

as requiring it to be at once backgrounded and discourse-prominent.

At the same time, certain cross-linguistic di¤erences do exist. As noted

above (n. 4), Russian allows gaps only in main clauses, whereas Italian

appears to allow long distance dependencies somewhat more freely than

English. Insofar as backgroundedness is a matter of degree, languages

appear to select di¤erent cut-o¤ points in how backgrounded a constitu-

ent may be while containing a gap (cf. Erteschik-Shir 1973; Fodor 1991for similar suggestions). Languages di¤er as to the location of the cut-

o¤ point, but all languages seem to prefer extraction out of non-

backgrounded constituents.

The island status of clausal complements 383

One further intriguing piece of evidence that suggests that convention-

ality (item-based learning) plays a role in addition to the information

structure generalization comes from the fact that there are some cross-

linguistic di¤erences in which verbs within the class of bridge verbs are

most likely to allow extraction from their complement clause. According

to Cichocki (1983), the Polish verb mowic (‘‘say’’) allows extraction from

its finite complement clause while other verbs, including myslec (‘‘think’’),do not.12 At the same time, there are certain intriguing di¤erences in how

Polish myslec and English think are used that deserve further explora-

tion.13 In any case, say, like think, is a light verb which allows its com-

plement clause to be foregrounded (as evidenced by the present negation

test scores). Thus, while the relative di¤erence between Polish’s ‘‘think’’

and ‘‘say’’ is not necessarily predicted by the BCI account, the following

more general prediction is made: we do not expect to find any language in

which a factive verb or a manner-of-speaking verb is more likely to allowextraction from its complement clause than a light verb of thinking or

saying.

There is a vast and growing amount of evidence that speakers are

aware of detailed statistical patterns in the input. We in no way wish to

deny this. Certainly, speakers’ inventories of constructions are learned by

generalizing over instances, and the generalizations are often statistical in

nature. The e¤ects of statistics in the input are also clearly relevant to lan-

guage processing (cf. e.g., other papers in this issue).

12. We thank Ewa Dabrowska and Blazej Galkowski for confirming the preference for

extraction with Polish say over think, although Dabrowska notes that even extraction

out of say complements is not fully grammatical in Polish (p.c. 20 March 2007 and

2 May 2007, respectively).

13. Galkowski (p.c. 2 May 2007) observes that Polish myslec cannot be used as a hedge to

assert the content of the subordinate clause the way English think can be, when there is

main clause negation. He suggests that a more elaborate context in which the thought

processes of the subject argument are at issue is required for the following type of ex-

ample.

Nie mysle ze (on) zjadł tego hamburgera.

Not think-1sg that he eat-3sg-past this/the hamburger

‘I don’t think he ate the hamburger’

For example, Galkowski o¤ers the following context: ‘‘[My grandpa with Alzheimer’s

can’t be trusted to eat the food I leave for him. So when I see the plate is empty, I don’t

think he ate the hamburger. I’d rather look for it under his bed.] So the emphasis is on

thinking’’—BG (p.c. 2 May 2007). Insofar as the focus is on the main verb think and

not the complement clause, the information structure account would predict that ex-

traction from the complement clause should be dispreferred, as it is.

384 B. Ambridge and A. Goldberg

Yet constructions are combined to form actual expressions, and it

seems unlikely that every possible combination of constructions is some-

how stored in advance. The present studies undermine the position that

the felicity of combination is always determined by semantic comparison

with a relatively concrete, fixed formula. They also undermine any purely

structural account such as subjacency. Rather, the current findings sup-

port a view of grammar in which speakers determine which constructionscan be combined, at least in part, on the basis of the information struc-

ture properties of the constructions involved.

Received 21 May 2007 University of Liverpool, UK

Revision received 21 December 2007 Princeton University, USA

Appendix

Table A1 shows, for each verb (class), mean ratings of grammatical

acceptability (and corresponding standard deviations) for questions and

declarative sentences, di¤erence scores, negation-test scores, and human/

latent semantic analysis similarity-to-think scores).

Table A1. Raw data

Verb

(class)

Di¤erence

Score

Question Declarative Negation

test score

Judged

similarity

to

think-say

LSA

similarity

to

think-say

Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD

Realize 2.17 1.75 4.13 1.76 6.30 1.14 1.54 1.12 4.58–3.00 0.49–0.41

Remember 1.76 2.25 4.27 1.94 6.03 1.36 2.20 1.74 2.67–2.42 0.55–0.50

Notice 1.72 1.70 4.45 1.77 6.17 1.40 2.18 1.72 3.08–2.25 0.38–0.30

Know 2.61 1.85 3.82 1.84 6.42 1.28 1.68 1.27 4.50–3.42 0.70–0.63

Whisper 1.92 1.96 3.99 1.81 5.90 1.57 2.63 1.55 1.58–4.75 0.28–0.33

Stammer 1.30 2.19 3.41 1.75 4.70 1.82 2.75 1.69 1.50–4.75 0.15–0.27

Mumble 1.79 2.10 3.96 1.78 5.75 1.48 2.69 1.65 1.42–4.67 0.11–0.20

Mutter 1.96 2.05 3.90 1.97 5.86 1.53 2.93 1.61 1.83–3.92 0.14–0.25

Say 0.89 2.06 5.04 2.00 5.93 1.66 2.90 1.48 2.08–N/A 0.62–N/A

Decide 1.07 1.85 4.73 1.82 5.80 1.59 3.11 1.59 4.33–2.42 0.34–0.28

Think 0.62 1.64 5.28 1.64 5.90 1.71 3.94 1.80 N/A–3.42 N/A–0.62

Believe 1.28 1.95 4.86 1.78 6.14 1.40 3.44 2.01 5.83–2.33 0.52–0.51

Factives 2.06 1.33 4.17 1.43 6.23 1.05 1.90 1.07

Manner of

speaking

1.74 1.25 3.81 1.30 5.55 1.20 2.75 1.26

Bridge 0.96 1.13 4.98 1.42 5.94 1.21 3.35 1.21

The island status of clausal complements 385

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The island status of clausal complements 389

Questions with long-distance dependencies:A usage-based perspective

EWA DABROWSKA*

Abstract

Attested questions with long-distance dependencies (e.g., What do you

think you’re doing?) tend to be quite stereotypical: the matrix clause

usually consists of a WH word, the auxiliary do or did, the pronoun you,

and the verb think or say, with no other elements; and they virtually never

contain more than one subordinate clause. This has lead some researchers

in the usage-based framework (Dabrowska 2004; Verhagen 2005) to hy-

pothesise that speakers’ knowledge about such constructions is best ex-

plained in terms of relatively specific, low level templates rather than gen-

eral rules that apply ‘‘across the board’’. The research reported here was

designed to test this hypothesis and alternative hypotheses derived from

rule-based theories.

Keywords: Usage-based model; long-distance dependencies; unbounded

dependencies; acceptability judgment experiment; prototype

e¤ects.

1. Introduction

Questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies

(henceforth LDDs) have played an important role in the development of

syntactic theory, especially in the generative framework. Such structures

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 391–425

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.015

0936–5907/08/0019–0391

6 Walter de Gruyter

* This study was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number

AH/F001924/1). I would like to thank Adele Goldberg, Marcin Szczerbinski and two

anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Mike Pin-

combe for help with data collection. Address for correspondence: School of English Lit-

erature, Language and Linguistics, University of She‰eld, She‰eld S10 2TN, United

Kingdom. E-mail: e.dabrowska@shef.ac.uk.

are interesting because they exhibit a dependency between a ‘‘filler’’ in the

main clause and a ‘‘gap’’ in a subordinate clause, as in example (1). The

dependencies are frequently referred to as ‘‘unbounded’’, as, in principle,

there can be any number of clauses intervening between the filler and the

gap, as illustrated by (1d) and (1e).

(1) a. What will John claim that you did ? (Culicover 1997: 184)b. Which problem does John know (that) Mary solved ?

(Ouhalla 1994: 72)

c. Whom do you believe that Lord Emsworth will invite ?

(Haegeman 1991: 342)

d. Who did Mary hope that Tom would tell Bill that he should

visit ? (Chomsky 1977: 74)

e. Which problem do you think (that) Jane believes (that) Bill

claims (that) Mary solved ? (Ouhalla 1994: 71)

It is noteworthy, however, that attested questions with LDDs are very

di¤erent from these constructed examples, as illustrated by the following

examples from the spoken part of the British National Corpus:

(2) a. And how do you think you’d spell classical like do you like clas-

sical music? (FMG 725)

b. Why’d why do you think why do you think it is that therewasn’t that motivation? (FY8 201)

c. What is it and why do you think it looks like that? (JJS 882)

d. What do you think Brian’ll say? (KE1 256)

e. What did they say it meant? (KD0 622)

These ‘‘real life’’ LDD questions are much more stereotypical than the

sentences in (1). The textbook examples contain a variety of matrix sub-

jects and verbs and di¤erent auxiliaries; most of them also contain anovert complementizer and two involve a dependency over more than one

intervening clause. In the corpus sentences, in contrast, the matrix subject

is usually you, the matrix verb think or say, and the auxiliary do; there are

no other elements in the matrix clause, no complementizer, and only one

complement clause. In fact, almost 70 percent of the LDD questions with

finite complement clauses in the spoken part of the BNC have the form

WH do you think S-GAP? or WH did NP say S-GAP?, where S-GAP is

a subordinate clause with a missing constituent. Most of the remainingquestions are minimal variations on these patterns: that is to say, they

contain a di¤erent matrix subject or a di¤erent verb or a di¤erent auxil-

iary or an additional element like an adverbial or complementizer. Only

392 E. Dabrowska

6 percent depart from the prototype in more than one respect (Dabrow-

ska in press a; see also Dabrowska 2004 and Verhagen 2005).1

This has lead some researchers in the usage-based framework (Dab-

rowska 2004, Verhagen 2005) to hypothesise that speakers’ knowledge

about such constructions is best explained in terms of relatively specific,

low level templates—WH do you think S-GAP? and WH did you say S-

GAP?—rather than in terms of abstract rules and principles of the typeproposed by formal linguists (see, for example Cheng and Corver 2006;

Chomsky 1977; Levine and Hukari 2006).2 Declaratives with verb com-

plement clauses, in contrast, are much more varied—the main clauses

take di¤erent subjects, auxiliaries and verbs, and often contain additional

elements (Dabrowska in press a; Verhagen 2005)—as a result of which

language learners develop more general representations for this construc-

tion in addition to lexically specific templates for frequent combinations

such as I think S, I don’t think S, I mean S.However, conclusions about speakers’ mental representations based on

the fact that a particular structure is rare or not attested at all in a corpus

are problematic, since this could be merely a result of sampling. Even

with a large and balanced corpus, sentences which are perfectly compati-

ble with speakers’ mental grammars may be unattested simply because

they are pragmatically implausible. In short, while restricted patterns of

usage are suggestive, they do not license strong conclusions about mental

representation: the observational data need to be corroborated by experi-mental studies.

According to the usage-based proposals put forward by Dabrowska

and Verhagen, prototypical LDD questions are produced simply by in-

serting new material into the appropriate slots in a pre-existing template.

Non-prototypical LDD questions such as What does she hope she’ll get?

require additional work, since the speaker has to adapt the template—in

this case, substitute she for you and hope for think, and modify the auxil-

iary so that it agrees with the subject. To be able to do this, the speakerwould have to construct a proportional analogy such as the one in (3),

1. I am using the term ‘‘prototype’’ as it is usually used in linguistics: to refer to an ideal-

ised typical instance. Many natural categories are centred around a prototype, in the

sense that other instances are assimilated in the category on the basis of their perceived

similarity to it (cf. Lako¤ 1987; Langacker 1987). The properties of prototypical instan-

ces are thus shared by most other members of the category.

2. The term ‘‘construction’’ is used in this paper to refer to any grammatical pattern found

in any language: thus expressions such as ‘‘constructions with long-distance dependen-

cies’’ should not be taken as implying that such patterns necessarily have any mental

reality. I will use the terms ‘‘template’’ and ‘‘schema’’ to refer to speakers’ mental repre-

sentations of these patterns.

Questions with long-distance dependencies 393

where semantic structure is represented in CAPITALS and phonological

structure in italics:3

(3) YOU THINK SHE WILL GET SOMETHING: WHAT?

is to What do you think she’ll get?

as SHE HOPES SHE WILL GET SOMETHING: WHAT?

is to ???

To solve this problem, the speaker needs to establish correspondences

between the relevant parts of semantic and phonological structure:

YOU ¼ SHE, therefore the target expression will have the phonological

form corresponding to SHE, namely she, in place of the phonologi-

cal form corresponding to YOU, namely you, and so on. This requires

knowledge about linguistic categories (the speaker must know what can

be substituted for what), the internal structure of the source expression,i.e., YOU THINK SHE WILL GET SOMETHING: WHAT?/What

do you think she’ll get? (so that he/she knows where to substitute it), and

about agreement (the auxiliary needs to agree with the new subject). A

listener or reader, of course, would have to use the phonological forms

of source and target, plus an understanding of the relationships between

their constituent parts, to construct a semantic representation of the

target.4

If speakers don’t have a ready-made template for non-prototypicalquestions and have to extrapolate from existing knowledge in the manner

described above, such sentences will require extra e¤ort to produce and

understand (which should translate into longer processing times) and

should be judged to be less acceptable than more prototypical variants.

Both of these predictions can be tested experimentally; the present paper

is devoted to testing the second one.

An acceptability judgment experiment, of course, can only provide in-

direct evidence about sentence processing, and hence is less clearly rele-vant to the subject of this special issue than, for example, a study which

compared reading times or the time taken to respond to a sentence. On

3. For ease of expositions, I have assumed that the source expression for the analogy is an

actual expression rather than the template; but this need not be the case.

4. Reliance on analogy and schema use are not as di¤erent as it might at first seem. As

Langacker points out, applying analogy requires the speaker to apprehend an abstract

commonality between the source and target forms; and the abstract commonality, of

course, is what would be captured by the schema (Langacker 2000: 60; see also Dabrow-

ska 2008). Furthermore, repeated use of analogy will result in the ‘‘abstract commonal-

ity’’ being entrenched until it becomes a linguistic unit in its own right. The critical dif-

ference between the two processes, then, is whether the relevant knowledge is retrieved

from memory or created ‘‘on the fly’’.

394 E. Dabrowska

the plus side, an acceptability judgment study is easier to conduct (since it

doesn’t require any special apparatus) and hence it is a sensible first step

when investigating a syntactic construction. Furthermore, many linguists

would argue that it provides more useful evidence about the nature of

speakers’ underlying linguistic representations, or ‘‘competence’’ (cf.

Wasow and Arnold 2005), and hence, perhaps, will be less likely to be

dismissed as ‘‘mere performance’’.Of course, judging the acceptability of a sentence is a type of perfor-

mance, and, like other types of performance, can be influenced by a vari-

ety of factors: plausibility, complexity, fatigue, mode of presentation, and

so on. This raises an obvious problem for an analyst trying to interpret

the results. The solution to the problem, however, is not—as some lin-

guists have suggested—to give up attempts to study speakers’ judgments

experimentally, but to control as many confounding factors as possible,

and be cautious in interpreting the results.

2. Experimental design

Dabrowska (2004) reports on a preliminary study showing that speakers

rate prototypical LDD questions such as Where do you think they sent the

documents? and What did you say the burglars stole? as more acceptable

than questions which had lexical subjects, a main verb other than think

or say, and an auxiliary other than do (e.g., Where will the customers

remember they sent the documents? What have the police revealed the

burglars stole?). There was no corresponding e¤ect for declaratives. It is

not clear, however, whether the di¤erence in speakers’ judgments wasdue to the choice of subject, verb, or auxiliary, or some combination

of these factors. The experiment described in this paper was designed to

investigate how each of these three factors individually contributes to

speakers’ judgment. It will also examine two additional grammatical fac-

tors: the presence or absence of a complementizer and the number of

clauses intervening between the WH word and the gap, as well as the

e¤ects of plausibility and syntactic complexity.

In the experiment, native speakers of English completed a written ques-tionnaire in which they were asked to rate the acceptability of LDD ques-

tions of varying degrees of prototypicality. There were seven experimental

conditions:

1. Prototypical LDD questions (WH Prototypical): These had the formWH do you think S-GAP? or WH did you say S-GAP?;

2. LDD questions with lexical matrix subjects (WH Subject);

3. LDD questions with auxiliaries other than do (WH Auxiliary);

Questions with long-distance dependencies 395

4. LDD questions with matrix verbs other than think or say (WH Verb);

5. LDD questions with overt complementizers (WH Complementizer);

6. LDD questions with ‘‘very long’’ dependencies, i.e., with an addi-

tional complement clause (WH Long);

7. Unprototypical LDD questions (WH Unprototypical): These had a

lexical subject, an auxiliary other than do, and a main verb other than

think or say, an overt complementizer, and an additional complementclause.

The questionnaire also contained two types of control sentences.

Grammatical controls were declarative versions of the LDD questionsconstructed by replacing the WH word with a noun phrase or a preposi-

tional phrase (and adding a conjunction: see below). Ungrammatical

controls involved four types of structures: that trace violations (*That),

sentences involving a dependency reaching into a complex NP (*Com-

plexNP), negative sentences without do support (*Not), and negative sen-

tences with double tense marking (*DoubleTn). Examples of each type of

sentence are provided in Table 1; a complete list of all sentences used in

one version of the questionnaire is given in the Appendix.

3. Predictions

3.1. General rules

If speakers have the competence attributed to them by generative lin-

guists, and if their grammaticality judgments are a more or less direct re-

flection of this competence, then we could expect the following prediction

to hold:

Prediction 1: Grammatical sentences should receive ratings close to 5;

ungrammatical sentences should be rated about 1.

3.2. General rules þ processing and pragmatics

Prediction 1 is unrealistic, since it is well known that speakers’ judgments

are influenced by factors such as complexity and plausibility, just like any

other kind of performance. In particular, sentences involving filler-gap

dependencies are computationally more demanding since the filler must

be held in memory while the rest of the sentence is being processed (cf.

Frazier and Clifton 1989; Hawkins 1999; Kluender and Kutas 1993); and

sentences involving a dependency over more than one clause are particu-larly di‰cult. Furthermore, since it is rather odd to assert what the ad-

dressee thinks or says (and perfectly natural to ask about these things),

we might expect an interaction between construction type and the lexical

396 E. Dabrowska

properties of the matrix subject: specifically, speakers may assign low rat-

ings to declaratives with second person subjects, but accept the corre-

sponding interrogatives.Taking processing demands and pragmatics into consideration, one

might make the following predictions:

Prediction 2: WH questions (WH) will receive lower ratings than the

corresponding declaratives (DE):

DE Protototypical > WH Prototypical

DE Subject > WH Subject

Table 1. Examples of sentences used in the experiment

Condition Example

1. WH Prototypical What do you think the witness will say if they don’t intervene?

2. WH Subject What does Claire think the witness will say if they don’t

intervene?

3. WH Auxiliary What would you think the witness will say if they don’t

intervene?

4. WH Verb What do you believe the witness will say if they don’t

intervene?

5. WH Complementizer What do you think that the witness will say if they don’t

intervene?

6. WH Long What do you think Jo believes he said at the court hearing?

7. WH Unprototypical What would Claire believe that Jo thinks he said at the court

hearing?

Grammatical controls

1. DE Prototypical But you think the witness will say something if they don’t

intervene.

2. DE Subject And Claire thinks the witness will say something if they don’t

intervene.

3. DE Auxiliary You would think the witness will say something if they don’t

intervene.

4. DE Verb So you believe the witness will say something if they don’t

intervene.

4. DE Complementizer So you think that the witness will say something if they don’t

intervene.

5. DE Long So you think Jo believes he said something at the court

hearing.

6. DE Unprototypical Claire would believe that Jo thinks he said something at the

court hearing.

Ungrammatical Controls

*That *What did you say that works even better?

*Complex NP *What did Claire make the claim that she read in a book?

*Not *Her husband not claimed they asked where we were going.

*DoubleTn *His cousin doesn’t thinks we lied because we were afraid.

Questions with long-distance dependencies 397

DE Verb > WH Verb

DE Auxiliary > WH Auxiliary

DE Complementizer > WH Complementizer

DE Long > WH Long

DE Unprototypical > WH Unprototypical

Prediction 3: WH questions involving very long dependencies (WH

Long, WH Unprototypical) should receive lower ratings

than WH questions involving dependencies over just one

clause boundary (all other WH conditions). The corre-

sponding declaratives should be rated equally acceptable,since they do not involve long distance dependencies.

WH Prototypical, WH Subject, WH Verb, WH Auxiliary,

WH Complementizer > WH Long, WH Unprototypical

Prediction 4: Declaratives with lexical subjects and complement-taking

verbs will receive higher ratings than declaratives with sec-

ond person subjects. There will be no corresponding e¤ect

for interrogatives.

DE Subject > DE Prototypical

3.3. Usage-based models

According to the usage-based hypothesis, speakers store lexically specific

templates corresponding to frequent combinations they have encountered

in their experience such as WH do you think S-GAP? and WH did you say

S-GAP? If this hypothesis is correct, prototypical LDD questions (i.e.,those that fit one of these templates) should be rated as more acceptable

than non-prototypical questions. There should be no corresponding dif-

ferences in the acceptability of declaratives, or the relevant di¤erences

should be smaller.

It was also hypothesised that speakers construct non-prototypical LDD

questions on analogy with prototypical questions, by adding elements or

substituting a di¤erent item in a particular position in a template. Since

some elements may be more easily substitutable than others, di¤erentsubstitutions may result in di¤erent degrees of acceptability. We know

from language acquisition research that children learn to substitute new

items into nominal slots relatively early; the ability to substitute verbs

into slots emerges later, and auxiliary substitutions are later still (Dab-

rowska and Lieven 2005; Lieven et al. 2003, Tomasello et al. 1997). The

most likely explanation for this finding is that nominals are autonomous

units which can be defined independently of the constructions they occur

398 E. Dabrowska

in, while verbs are non-autonomous in the sense that their descriptions

must make reference to the entities participating in the relationship they

designate—in other words, these entities are part of the verb’s profile (cf.

Langacker 1987: 298¤ ). Likewise, tensed auxiliaries, as grounding predi-

cations (cf. Langacker 1991: 193¤ ), conceptually presuppose the events

that they ground—designated by the verb plus its arguments. It follows

that nominals should be more easily substitutable than verbs, which inturn should be more easily substitutable than auxiliaries.

Prediction 5: Prototypical LDD questions will receive higher ratings

than questions with lexical subjects, which will be more

acceptable than questions with matrix verbs other than

think or say; questions with auxiliaries other than do will

be judged least acceptable.

WH Prototypical > WH Subject > WH Verb > WH

Auxiliary

Finally, LDD questions containing overt complementizers and ‘‘very

long’’ dependencies are also less prototypical, in that both contain an ex-

tra element (the complementizer or an additional clause). It is not clear

whether inserting an extra element is more or less di‰cult than substitu-

tion; however, we can make the following predictions:

Prediction 6: LDD questions without overt complementizers will receive

higher ratings than questions with that:

WH Prototypical > WH Complementizer

Prediction 7: LDD questions with very long dependencies (i.e., depen-

dencies reaching over more than one intervening clause)

will be judged less acceptable than questions with shorter

dependencies, but more acceptable than unprototypical

questions (since the latter contain a very long dependency

as well as lexical substitutions).

WH Prototypical > WH Long > WH Unprototypical

4. Method

4.1. Stimuli

4.1.1. Experimental sentences. The experimental sentences were con-

structed by combining a ‘‘sentence stub’’ with a completion consisting of

either a complement clause and an adverbial clause or two complement

Questions with long-distance dependencies 399

clauses (see below). The stubs for the WH Prototypical condition were as

follows:

(4) a. What do you think . . .

b. Where do you think . . .

c. What did you say . . .

d. Where did you say . . .

The stubs for the non-prototypical sentences were constructed bychanging or adding the relevant element. Thus, in the WH Subject condi-

tion, you was changed to a proper name (and a third person ending was

added to the auxiliary so that it agreed with the subject); in the WH Aux-

iliary condition, do was changed to will or would; in the WH Verb condi-

tion, think was replaced with believe or suspect and say with claim or

swear; in the WH Complementizer condition, an overt complementizer

(that) was added after the verb; and in the WH Unprototypical condition,

all of the above changes were made.5

The completions for conditions 1–5 consisted of a four word comple-

ment clause followed by a four-word adverbial clause, e.g.,

(5) (What do you think) the witness will say

(stub) (first complement clause)

if they don’t intervene?(adverbial clause)

The completions for sentences with very long dependencies (i.e., condi-

tions 6 and 7) consisted of a two-word complement clause followed by a

pronominal subject, verb, and a four-word prepositional phrase, e.g.,

(6) (What do you think) Jo believes

(stub) (first complement clause)

he said at the court hearing?

(second complement clause)

Thus, all experimental sentences without complementizers were 12

words long and contained three clauses, with seven words intervening be-

tween the WH word and the gap. Sentences with complementizers were13 words long, with 8 words between the WH word and the gap.

There were two versions of the questionnaire, and two sets of comple-

tions. In version 1, the stubs were combined with completion set 1 in con-

5. Throughout this paper, I use the term non-prototypical to refer to questions which di¤er

in some respect from the prototypical instances of the construction, and the term unpro-

totypical to refer to questions which di¤er from the prototype in all relevant respects.

400 E. Dabrowska

ditions 1, 3, 5 and 7 and with completion set 2 in conditions 2, 4, and 6;

in version 2, the stubs were combined with completion set 1 in even-

numbered conditions and with completion set 2 in odd-numbered

conditions.

4.1.2. Grammatical controls. The grammatical control conditions were

constructed by supplying appropriate lexical material for the WH word inthe appropriate position in the clause; in addition, a conjunction (so, and,

or but) was added at the beginning of declaratives corresponding to inter-

rogatives with the auxiliary do: for example, the declarative counterpart

of

(7) What do you think the witness will say if they don’t intervene?

was

(8) But you think the witness will say something if they don’t intervene.

This was done so that the interrogative sentence and the corresponding

declarative control contained the same number of words; it also made the

declarative sentences sound more natural. (It is somewhat odd for a

speaker to assert what the addressee thinks or said; adding the conjunc-

tion makes the sentence pragmatically more plausible because it conveys

the impression that the speaker is either inferring the addressee’s beliefs

from his or her words, contrasting them with those of another person, orclearing up an apparent misunderstanding).

4.1.3. Ungrammatical controls. The ungrammatical control conditions,

like the experimental sentences and the grammatical controls, contained

subordinate clauses. Half of the ungrammatical sentences were declara-

tive and the other half interrogative. That-trace sentences (*That) con-

tained an overt complementizer immediately before a gap in the subject

position:

(9) *What do you think that probably got lost during the move?

(10) *Who do you think that will turn up in the evening?

In Complex NP sentences (*ComplexNP) the matrix clause contained a

complement-taking noun (claim, fact, rumour, hypothesis) followed by a

complement clause with a gap, e.g.,

(11) *What did Claire make the claim that she read in a book?

(12) *Where did you discover the fact that the criminals put the car ?

In Negatives without do support (*Not), the matrix clause contained a

negated verb but no auxiliary, with tense being marked on the main verb:

Questions with long-distance dependencies 401

(13) *Her husband not claimed they asked where we were going.

Finally, in declaratives with double tense/agreement marking (*Dou-

bleTn), the matrix clause contained a third person subject and a negated

verb, and agreement was marked on the auxiliary as well as on the mainverb:

(14) *The girl doesn’t remembers where she spent her summer holidays.

The same ungrammatical controls were used in both versions of the

questionnaire. There were four sentences in each condition, giving a total

of 16 ungrammatical controls.

4.1.4. Constructing the questionnaire. The test sentences were divided

into four blocks, each containing one sentence from each of the seven

experimental and eleven control conditions. The order of the sentenceswithin each block was random.

A full list of the sentences used in version 1 of the experiment is given

in the Appendix.

4.2. Participants

38 second and third year literature students from the School of English at

the University of Newcastle participated in the experiment. All were na-

tive speakers of English.

4.2.1. Procedure. Participants were asked to complete a written ques-

tionnaire and were given the following instructions:

The questionnaire is part of a study of speakers’ intuitions about En-

glish sentences. It is not an intelligence test or a grammar test.

Please indicate how acceptable/unacceptable you find each of the fol-

lowing sentences by choosing a number on a scale from 1 (very bad)

to 5 (fine). Read the sentences carefully, but do not spend too much

time thinking about them: we are interested in your initial reaction.

Do not go back and change your responses to earlier sentences.

The instructions were followed by two examples for which ratings were

provided:

(15) Will the girl who won the prize come to the party?

(16) Did the man who arrive by train is my cousin?

The first was given a rating of 5 and the second 1. These examples were

provided in order to anchor the participants’ ratings. Thus, in essence, the

402 E. Dabrowska

participants’ task was to decide whether the sentences in the questionnaire

were more like 1, more like 5, or in-between.

The questionnaires were distributed after a lecture and took 10–15

minutes to complete. Participants were randomly assigned to one version

of the questionnaire, with about half completing each version.

5. Results and discussion

5.1. Grammatical v. ungrammatical sentences

The mean acceptability ratings for all conditions are given in Table 2. Forclarity, the same information is presented visually in Figure 1, where the

bars corresponding to each experimental condition have been arranged

from highest to lowest. Although the mean rating for all grammatical

sentences combined (3.67) was considerably higher than for the ungram-

matical controls (1.98), there is no sharp contrast between grammati-

cal and ungrammatical sentences. What we have instead is a continuum

of acceptability ratings ranging from 4.3 for prototypical WH ques-

tions to 1.3 for negatives without do support, with the other sentencetypes occupying various intermediate points. The four ungrammati-

cal sentence types cluster at the lower end of the continuum; however,

the acceptability ratings for unprototypical LDD questions were not

Table 2. Acceptability ratings for all conditions

Condition Mean Std. Deviation

WH Prototypical 4.31 0.63

WH Subject 4.25 0.59

WH Verb 3.93 0.71

WH Auxiliary 3.23 0.83

WH Complementizer 3.84 0.84

WH Long 3.85 0.76

WH Unprototypical 2.54 0.75

DE Prototypical 3.57 0.85

DE Subject 4.00 0.63

DE Verb 3.74 0.78

DE Auxiliary 3.49 0.66

DE Complementizer 3.53 0.79

DE Long 3.89 0.75

DE Unprototypical 3.14 0.90

*That 2.50 0.75

*DoubleTn 2.41 0.95

*ComplexNP 1.69 0.56

*Not 1.31 0.49

Questions with long-distance dependencies 403

significantly di¤erent from those for that-trace and double-tense sentences

(WH Unprototypical v. *that: tð37Þ ¼ 0:26, p ¼ 0:798; WH Unprototyp-

ical v. *DoubleTn: tð37Þ ¼ 0:70, p ¼ 0:486), although they were higher

than those for the other two ungrammatical control conditions (WH Un-prototypical v. *Complex NP: tð37Þ ¼ 6:15, p < 0:001; WH Unprototyp-

ical v. *Not: tð37Þ ¼ 8:81, p < 0:001). Thus, the pure competence gram-

mar prediction that grammatical sentences will receive ratings close to 5

and ungrammatical sentences will be rated about 1 is clearly false.

5.2. Grammatical sentences

A preliminary analysis of the participants’ ratings for the grammatical

sentences was conducted using a construction (2) � prototypicality

(7) � version (2) ANOVA. The analysis revealed a significant main

e¤ect of prototypicality, Fð6; 216Þ ¼ 49:82, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:58, and a

prototypicality � construction interaction, Fð6; 216Þ ¼ 15:14, p < 0:001,

h2p ¼ 0:30. No other e¤ect or interaction was significant. Since there was

no significant e¤ect of version, and no interaction between version and

any of the other factors, the results for the two versions were collapsed

in all further analyses.

Figure 1. Mean acceptability ratings for all conditions

Note: Grey bars correspond to questions; white bars correspond to declaratives

and striped bars to ungrammatical controls. Error bars represent 95 percent confi-

dence intervals.

404 E. Dabrowska

5.2.1. Processing cost of dependencies: Questions v. declaratives. Pre-

diction 2 was that LDD questions will receive lower ratings than the cor-

responding declaratives because they involve displaced constituents. Thisprediction was not confirmed: there was no significant e¤ect of construc-

tion. Instead, as indicated above and shown in Table 3, we have an inter-

action between construction type and lexical content, with prototypical

LDD questions, questions with lexical subjects, and questions with overt

complementizers being judged significantly more acceptable than the cor-

responding declaratives. (Note that the significance levels reported in

Table 3 and elsewhere in this paper have not been corrected for multiple

comparisons: since the hypothesis tested predicts that all the relevantcomparisons should be significant, using the Bonferroni adjustment or

an equivalent method would not be appropriate.)

The interrogative sentences, particularly in the WH Prototypical condi-

tion, contained some frequent bigrams (what do, do you, you think): these

occur with a frequency of 6433, 27602, and 9901 respectively in the Brit-

ish National Corpus. This could be partly responsible for the fact that

interrogatives were rated as more acceptable than the corresponding

declaratives in most conditions. However, as shown in Table 4, there isno strong relationship between the number of frequent bigrams and ac-

ceptability ratings of WH questions (i.e., questions containing more

high-frequency bigrams are not necessarily more acceptable) or the num-

Table 3. Testing prediction 2

Prediction Mean SD t-test

value

p value Prediction

confirmed?

WH Prototypical

<DE Prototypical

4.31

3.57

0.63

0.85

5.234 <0.001 77

WH Subject

<DE Subject

4.25

4.00

0.59

0.63

2.859 0.007 77

WH Complementizer

<DE Complementizer

3.84

3.53

0.84

0.79

2.149 0.038 77

WH Verb

<DE Verb

3.93

3.74

0.71

0.78

1.644 0.109 7

WH Long

<DE Long

3.85

3.89

0.76

0.75

0.452 0.654 7

WH Auxiliary

<DE Auxiliary

3.23

3.49

0.83

0.66

1.950 0.059 7

WH Unprototypical

<DE Unprototypical

2.54

3.14

0.75

0.90

5.882 <0.001 3

Note: 3 indicates that a prediction has been confirmed; 7 indicates that a prediction has

not been confirmed; 77indicates a significant di¤erence in the opposite direction.

Questions with long-distance dependencies 405

ber of frequent bigrams and the advantage for questions over declaratives(questions containing more high-frequency bigrams are not necessarily

better than the corresponding declaratives). Furthermore, bigram fre-

quency cannot explain the interaction between construction type and

verb or between construction type and complementizer (see below), since

the words immediately preceding and following the verb and the comple-

mentizer were the same in both the declarative and the interrogative var-

iants. In fact, for sentences with complementizers, bigram frequency

makes precisely the wrong predictions. In the WH Prototypical and DEPrototypical conditions, the main clause verb (think or say) was followed

by the pronoun they or we or the determiner the, while in the WH Com-

plementizer and DE Complementizer conditions, it was followed by the

complementizer that. The mean frequency of the bigrams think the, think

they, think we, say the, say they, say we in the British National Corpus is

2539, while the mean frequency of the bigrams think that and say that is

9473. Thus, if acceptability ratings were simply a reflection of bigram fre-

quency, sentences with complementizers should receive higher ratingsthan sentences without them. (The mean frequency of the bigrams that

they, that the and that we is even higher: 59333.) However, as we will see

in section 5.2.4, the ratings for WH questions with complementizers were

Table 4. Frequent bigrams in WH questions

Condition Mean Di¤erence

score*

Frequent

bigrams

WH Prototypical 4.31 0.74 what do

do you

you think

WH Complementizer 3.84 0.31 what do

do you

you think

WH Subject 4.25 0.25 what do

WH Verb 3.93 0.19 what do

do you

WH Long 3.85 �0.04 what do

do you

you think

WH Auxiliary 3.23 �0.26 you think

WH Unprototypical 2.54 �0.60

* Di¤erence scores were computed by subtracting the rating of the declarative control from

the rating of the interrogative sentence.

406 E. Dabrowska

considerably lower than for the prototypical variants, while there was no

di¤erence in the acceptability of the corresponding declaratives.

5.2.2. Processing cost of ‘‘very long’’ dependencies. According to pre-

diction 3, WH questions containing ‘‘very long’’ dependencies, i.e., de-

pendencies spanning two clause boundaries, should receive lower ratings

than questions containing dependencies across just one clause boundary,whilst the corresponding declaratives should be rated equally acceptable,

since they do not involve a filler-gap dependency. This prediction was

evaluated by comparing the mean ratings for questions with ‘‘very long’’

dependencies (WH Long and WH Unprototypical) and the correspond-

ing declaratives and for questions containing dependencies over one

clause boundary (WH Prototypical, WH Subject, WH Verb, WH Auxil-

iary, WH Complementizer) and the corresponding declaratives. The rat-

ings were analyzed using a 2 � 2 ANOVA with the within-participantsfactors of construction type (WH question, declarative) and complemen-

tation (1 clause, 2 clauses). This revealed a main e¤ect of complementa-

tion, F ð1; 37Þ ¼ 50:44, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:58, indicating that sentences

containing two complement clauses were judged as less acceptable than

sentences containing one complement clause and one adverbial clause.

This was qualified by a construction � complementation interaction,

Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 34:14, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:48 (see Figure 2). Post-hoc compari-

sons showed that WH questions with very long dependencies were judgedsignificantly worse than questions with long dependencies: tð37Þ ¼ 9:62,

Figure 2. Construction type � complementation interaction (All conditions)

Questions with long-distance dependencies 407

p < 0:001. For declaratives, the corresponding di¤erence approaches sig-

nificance: tð37Þ ¼ 1:87, p ¼ 0:070. This suggests that processing di‰culty

had the predicted e¤ect on acceptability ratings.

However, comparisons of ratings for each of two ‘‘very long’’ depen-

dency questions with each of the ‘‘long’’ dependency conditions suggests

a slightly more complex picture. As shown in Table 5, WH Long items

were judged significantly worse than WH Prototypical and WH Subject

items, and unprototypical questions were judged significantly worse thanall other WH questions. However, there was no significant di¤erence be-

tween WH Long and WH Verb items or between WH Long and WH

Complementizer (indeed, the latter received slightly higher ratings), and

questions with a modal auxiliary were judged significantly worse than

WH Long sentences. Since the declarative versions of unprototypical

LDD questions were also judged to be less acceptable than the other de-

clarative sentences (see Table 6), the low acceptability ratings for the un-

prototypical sentences may be partially due to the lexical content of thesentences. Thus, although the existence of very long dependencies may

have an e¤ect on acceptability, this can only account for some of the ob-

served di¤erences.

Table 5. Testing prediction 5 (Questions)

Prediction Mean SD t-test

value

p value Prediction

confirmed?

WH Prototypical

>WH Long

4.31

3.85

0.63

0.76

4.67 <0.001 3

WH Subject

>WH Long

4.25

3.85

0.59

0.76

3.63 0.001 3

WH Verb

>WH Long

3.93

3.85

0.71

0.76

0.62 0.539 7

WH Auxiliary

>WH Long

3.23

3.85

0.83

0.76

4.13 <0.001 77

WH Complementizer

>WH Long

3.84

3.85

0.84

0.76

0.11 0.910 7

WH Prototypical

>WH Unprototypical

4.31

2.54

0.63

0.75

14.17 <0.001 3

WH Subject

>WH Unprototypical

4.25

2.54

0.59

0.75

15.36 <0.001 3

WH Verb

>WH Unprototypical

3.93

2.54

0.71

0.75

11.29 <0.001 3

WH Auxiliary

>WH Unprototypical

3.23

2.54

0.83

0.75

5.73 <0.001 3

WH Complementizer

>WH Unprototypical

3.84

2.54

0.84

0.75

9.38 <0.001 3

408 E. Dabrowska

5.2.3. Pragmatics. Prediction 4 stated there should be an interaction

between construction type and the lexical properties of the matrix subject:

declaratives with lexical subjects should receive higher ratings than de-

claratives with second person subjects, but there should be no correspond-

ing di¤erence for questions. To test this prediction, a 2 � 2 ANOVA

with the within-participants factors of construction (WH question, de-

clarative) and subject (second person, lexical). The analysis showed thatthe predicted interaction did indeed occur: F ð1; 37Þ ¼ 14:82, p < 0:001,

h2p ¼ 0:29 (see Figure 3); the main e¤ect of construction was also signifi-

cant, Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 25:01, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:40. Further analysis confirmed

that declaratives with lexical subjects were judged more acceptable than

declaratives with second person subjects: tð37Þ ¼ 3:92, p < 0:001. The

ratings for interrogatives with lexical subjects were marginally lower

than for interrogatives with second person subject, but the di¤erence was

not statistically significant: tð37Þ ¼ 0:91, p ¼ 0:368.

5.2.4. Prototypicality e¤ects. According to the usage-based hypo-

thesis, any modification of the LDD template should result in lower

Table 6. Testing prediction 3 (Declaratives)

Prediction Mean SD t-test

value

p value Same as

question?

DE Prototypical

DE Long

3.57

3.89

0.85

0.75

3.10 0.004 7

DE Subject

DE Long

4.00

3.89

0.63

0.75

1.22 0.230 7

DE Verb

DE Long

3.74

3.89

0.78

0.75

1.45 0.156 3

DE Auxiliary

DE Long

3.49

3.89

0.66

0.75

3.89 <0.001 3

DE Complementizer

DE Long

3.53

3.89

0.79

0.75

3.68 0.001 7

DE Prototypical

DE Unprototypical

3.57

3.14

0.85

0.90

3.22 0.003 3

DE Subject

DE Unprototypical

4.00

3.14

0.63

0.90

6.74 <0.001 3

DE Verb

DE Unprototypical

3.74

3.14

0.78

0.90

4.31 <0.001 3

DE Auxiliary

DE Unprototypical

3.49

3.14

0.66

0.90

2.99 0.005 3

DE Complementizer

DE Unprototypical

3.53

3.14

0.79

0.90

3.17 0.003 3

Questions with long-distance dependencies 409

acceptability ratings for interrogative sentences but have no e¤ect (or a

much smaller e¤ect) on declaratives. In other words, usage-based theories

predict an interaction between construction type and lexical content.

As we have just seen, although there is a significant interaction between

construction type and the lexical properties of the subject, this is best in-terpreted as reflecting pragmatic implausibility of second person declara-

tives with think and say. Substituting a lexical subject for you in questions

did not result in a significant reduction of acceptability, although there

was a small di¤erence in the predicted direction. This suggests that the

LDD template does not specify the subject—although it is also possible

that the processing cost of NP substitution is too small to be revealed by

an acceptability judgment task.

The relationship between construction type and the other four factors(verb, auxiliary, complementizer, and the number of complement clauses)

was investigated by means of four additional 2 � 2 ANOVAs (see

Table 7) followed up by t-tests. All the interactions were as predicted

by the usage-based account. There was a significant interaction between

construction type and verb (see Figure 4): changing the matrix verb

in a LDD question results in significantly lower acceptability ratings

(tð37Þ ¼ 3:23, p ¼ 0:003); changing the verb in the corresponding declar-

ative, on the other hand, results in a slightly more acceptable sentence,although the di¤erence is not statistically significant (tð37Þ ¼ 1:45,

p ¼ 0:155). There was also an interaction between construction type and

auxiliary (see Figure 5): replacing do or did with the modal auxiliary will

Figure 3. Construction type � subject interaction

410 E. Dabrowska

or would made the interrogatives less acceptable (tð37Þ ¼ 8:26,

p < 0:001), while adding the same auxiliaries in declaratives had no e¤ect

on ratings (tð37Þ ¼ 0:56, p ¼ 0:578). The size of the interaction betweenconstruction type and complementizer (Figure 6) was somewhat smaller,

although it was also in the predicted direction: adding an overt com-

plementizer had no e¤ect on declaratives (tð37Þ ¼ 0:44, p ¼ 0:666) but

Table 7. ANOVA results

E¤ect/Interaction Test statistics

Construction (WH, DE) � verb (think/say, believe/suspect/claim/swear)

Construction Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 8:28, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:34

Construction � verb Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 13:81, p ¼ 0:002, h2p ¼ 0:27

Construction (WH, DE) � auxiliary (do/did, will/would )

Construction Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 7:30, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:17

Auxiliary Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 47:06, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:56

Construction � auxiliary Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 22:06, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:37

Construction (WH, DE) � complementizer (none, that)

Construction Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 21:15, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:36

Complementizer Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 13:29, p ¼ 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:26

Construction � complementizer Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 6:68, p ¼ 0:014, h2p ¼ 0:15

Construction (WH, DE) � complementation (1 clause, 2 clauses)

Construction Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 12:59, p ¼ 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:25

Construction � complementation Fð1; 37Þ ¼ 5:82, p < 0:001, h2p ¼ 0:42

Note: Only significant main e¤ects and interactions are listed in the table.

Figure 4. Construction type � verb interaction

Questions with long-distance dependencies 411

resulted in lower ratings for interrogatives (tð37Þ ¼ 3:77, p ¼ 0:001).6

Finally, there is a significant interaction between construction type and

complementation: adding a second complement clause between the filler

and the gap makes the interrogative less acceptable while the correspond-

ing declarative is more acceptable (see Figure 7; for pairwise compari-

sons, see Table 5). (Note that this analysis compares just the WH Proto-

typical and WH Long conditions and their declarative counterparts, i.e.,

sentences which are most closely matched lexically. The analysis in sec-tion 5.2.2 contrasted questions with ‘‘very long’’ dependencies, i.e., WH

Long and WH Unprototypical, with questions containing dependencies

spanning just one clause, i.e., WH Prototypical, WH Subject, WH Verb,

WH Auxiliary, and WH Complementizer.)

The usage-based model adopted here also predicts a particular order in

the acceptability of non-prototypical LDD questions: specifically, LDD

questions with a lexical subject should be more acceptable than questions

with a non-prototypical matrix verb, which in turn should be more

6. We know from the psycholinguistic literature that overt complementizers facilitate pro-

cessing, presumably because they signal the presence of a subordinate clause and thus

help the processor to avoid garden path e¤ects: for instance, sentences with complement

clauses introduced by a complementizer are read faster than sentences without comple-

mentizers, even when the main clause verb has a strong preference for clausal comple-

ments (Trueswell et al. 1993, Holmes et al. 1989). Thus the presence of the complemen-

tizer e¤ect for questions provides strong evidence in favour of lexical storage of the

whole construction.

Figure 5. Construction type � auxiliary interaction

412 E. Dabrowska

acceptable than those with a non-prototypical auxiliary. As shown in

Tables 8 and 9, these predictions have also been confirmed. (Table 8

also shows the results of pairwise comparisons relevant for testing other

usage-based predictions for the sake of completeness.)Although the model made no specific predictions about the relative size

of the e¤ect of the other manipulations, it is interesting to see how they

compare to lexical substitutions in the subject, verb and auxiliary slot.

Figure 6. Construction type � complementizer interaction

Figure 7. Construction type � complementation interaction (‘‘Prototypical’’ and ‘‘Long’’

sentences only)

Questions with long-distance dependencies 413

As can be seen from Figure 1, the e¤ects of adding a complementizer and

of adding an additional complement clause are about the same as that of

changing the matrix verb. The mean acceptability ratings for WH Verb,

WH Long and WH Complementizer sentences were 3.93, 3.85, and 3.84

respectively; none of the di¤erences between these conditions was statisti-cally significant (WH Verb v. WH Complementizer: tð37Þ ¼ 0:71,

p ¼ 0:484; WH Verb v. WH Long: tð37Þ ¼ 0:62, p ¼ 0:539; WH Com-

plementizer v. WH Long: tð37Þ ¼ 0:11, p ¼ 0:910).

Table 8. Testing predictions 5, 6 and 7 (Questions)

Prediction Mean SD t-test

value

p value Prediction

confirmed?

WH Prototypical

>WH Subject

4.31

4.25

0.63

0.59

0.91 0.368 7

WH Subject

>WH Verb

4.25

3.93

0.59

0.71

3.32 0.002 3

WH Verb

>WH Auxiliary

3.93

3.23

0.71

0.83

4.96 <0.001 3

WH Prototypical

>WH Complementizer

4.31

3.84

0.63

0.84

3.77 0.001 3

WH Prototypical

>WH Long

4.31

3.85

0.63

0.76

4.69 <0.001 3

WH Long

>WH Unprototypical

3.85

2.54

0.76

0.75

10.51 <0.001 3

Table 9. Testing predictions 5, 6 and 7 (Declaratives)

Prediction Mean SD t-test

value

p value Same as

question?

DE Prototypical

DE Subject

3.57

4.00

0.85

0.63

3.92 <0.001 7

DE Subject

DE Verb

4.00

3.74

0.63

0.78

2.85 0.007 3

DE Verb

DE Auxiliary

3.74

3.49

0.78

0.66

2.26 0.030 3

DE Prototypical

DE Complementizer

3.57

3.53

0.85

0.79

0.44 0.666 7

DE Prototypical

DE Long

3.57

3.89

0.85

0.75

3.10 0.004 7

DE Long

DE Unprototypical

3.89

3.14

0.75

0.90

8.44 <0.001 3

414 E. Dabrowska

5.3. Why are ‘‘real life’’ LDD questions so stereotypical?

Why are questions with long distance dependencies so stereotypical? One

possible explanation is o¤ered by Verhagen (2005). Verhagen observes

that the propositional content of most complementation constructions is

expressed by the subordinate clause; the main clause normally just signals

epistemic stance (see also Thompson 2002), i.e., it invites the hearer toadopt a particular subjective perspective on the object of conceptualiza-

tion. The greater the ‘‘distance’’ between the onstage conceptualizer (i.e.,

the subject of the main clause) and the ground (in the sense of Langacker

1987), the more di‰cult it is to construe the main clause as an epistemic

marker (as opposed to a prediction in its own right). Verhagen argues

that this distance is minimal when the conceptualizer is the first person

(in declaratives) or the second person (in interrogatives), when the verb

is relatively generic, and when there are no other elements qualifying theverb; it follows that the matrix clause in LDD questions will normally

contain a second person subject, a relatively non-specific verb such as

think and say, and no additional constituents.

A di¤erent, but not necessarily incompatible, explanation for restric-

tions on questions and other constructions with long distance dependen-

cies is proposed by Goldberg (2006). Goldberg argues that di¤erences in

acceptability arising as a result of the use of di¤erent main clause verbs

can be explained by appealing to a general principle which she calls BCI,which states that backgrounded constituents are islands. The gap in a

filler-gap dependency construction must occur within the ‘‘potential focus

domain’’; the constituent containing the gap cannot be backgrounded.

Since complements of factive verbs and manner of speaking verbs (as

well as complex NPs, sentential subjects, and presupposed adjuncts) are

backgrounded, they cannot participate in filler-gap constructions.

An experimental study by Ambridge and Goldberg (this issue) provides

some empirical support for this proposal. Participants in this experimentcompleted two tasks. In the first task, they rated the acceptability of WH

questions with long distance dependencies (e.g., What did Jess think that

Dan liked?) and the corresponding declaratives (e.g., Daniele thought that

Jason liked the cake). In the second task they were presented with a ne-

gated sentence containing a verb complement clause (e.g., Maria didn’t

know that Ian liked the cake) and asked to judge to what extent it implied

the negation of the complement clause (Ian didn’t like the cake): this mea-

sured the extent to which speakers judged the information in the subordi-nate clause to be presupposed, and thus backgrounded. The main finding

was that, as predicted by the BCI hypothesis, there was a very strong neg-

ative correlation between responses on the negation test and ‘‘di¤erence

Questions with long-distance dependencies 415

scores’’ computed by subtracting the acceptability rating of the questions

from those of the corresponding declaratives, and a weaker negative cor-

relation between responses on the negation test and acceptability ratings.

It remains to be seen whether BCI can also explain other restrictions

on LDD questions documented in this study: the fact that they strongly

disprefer main clause verbs other than think or say (not just factives

and manner-of-speaking verbs), auxiliaries other than do, and comple-mentizers, and that in real life (as opposed to the examples found in the

linguistic literature) they virtually never involve a dependency spanning

more than one clause.

Thus we have two independent proposals explaining why particular

lexical variants of LDD questions may be preferred or dispreferred in us-

age. A central claim of usage-based approaches is that mental grammars

are shaped by usage patterns: it is thus not surprising that speakers de-

velop strong lexically specific templates for LDD questions and possiblyfail to develop more abstract representations of these constructions.

6. Conclusion

The most striking result of the experiment reported here is the existence of

strong prototypicality e¤ects for LDD questions. Prototypical instances

of this construction, i.e., those which fit one of the templates postulated

on the basis of corpus research (WH do you think S-GAP?, WH did you

say S-GAP?) were judged to be the most acceptable of all sentences. De-

partures from the prototype (use of a di¤erent auxiliary or verb in the

matrix clause, addition of a complementizer or an extra complement

clause) resulted in lower acceptability ratings. Crucially, there was no cor-

responding e¤ect on declaratives, so the di¤erences in grammaticality

cannot be attributed simply to the properties of the lexical items used in

the experiment. Acceptability also depended on the type of substitution

required: nominals are apparently easier to substitute than verbs, whichin turn were easier than auxiliaries.

The participants’ judgments were also influenced by pragmatic consid-

erations: declaratives with lexical subjects (DE Subject, e.g., So Steve said

the children could stay here when their father returns) were judged to be

more acceptable than declaratives with second person subjects (DE Pro-

totypical, e.g., So you said the children could stay here when their father

returns). This e¤ect, however, was fairly small in comparison with the

purely lexical e¤ects.Adding an additional complement clause also reduced the acceptability

of the questions (and had the opposite e¤ect on declaratives). This could

be attributed to the greater processing demands posed by the increased

416 E. Dabrowska

syntactic distance between the filler and the gap, since the filler must be

held in working memory while the pre-gap part of the sentence is being

processed. However, questions with very long dependencies (with two

clause boundaries intervening between the filler and the gap) were not

consistently judged to be less acceptable than questions involving depen-

dencies across only one clause boundary; and the e¤ect of adding an ad-

ditional complement clause was no bigger than that of adding a comple-mentizer or changing the matrix verb. Thus, appealing to prototypicality

e¤ects provides a more parsimonious explanation for these findings. This

is not to say that the processing demands of holding the filler in memory

have no e¤ect on processing—but the costs may be relatively small com-

pared the e¤ects of prototypicality.7

Interestingly, unprototypical LDD questions—those with a comple-

mentizer, an additional verb complement clause, a lexical subject, a

modal auxiliary, and a verb other than think or say in the main clause—were judged to be just as bad as that-trace violations and sentences with

double tense/agreement marking (though better than sentences involving

‘‘extraction’’ out of a complex NP and negatives without an auxiliary).

This is consonant with the results of two acceptability experiments con-

ducted by Kluender and Kutas (1993). In their first experiment, in which

participants were required to provided speeded categorical acceptability

judgments, LDD questions were accepted only 54 percent of the time. In

the second experiment, participants rated acceptability on a scale from 1to 40, and could take as much time as they wished to make the judgment.

The mean acceptability rating for LDD questions was 19—significantly

higher than that for WH island variations, but much lower than those

for Y/N questions containing complement clauses. Kluender and Kutas

conclude that the low acceptability of LDD questions is attributable to

the processing demands of holding the filler in working memory. How-

ever, since their stimuli were quite di¤erent from prototypical LDD ques-

tions (they all contained overt complementizers and non-prototypicalverbs; some also had lexical subjects or auxiliaries other than do), it could

also be explained by appealing to their unprototypicality.

So what does the presence of prototypicality e¤ects in acceptability

judgments about LDD questions—in particular, those due to the lexical

7. Acceptability judgment and ease of processing are of course two di¤erent things, al-

though they tend to be correlated: other things being equal, sentences which are di‰cult

to process tend to be judged less acceptable (cf. Fanselow and Frisch 2006; Frazier and

Clifton 1989; Kluender and Kutas 1993). Note, too, that unprototypical LDD questions

contain more dysfluencies than prototypical instances of the construction (Dabrowska

forthc.), which also suggests that they are more di‰cult to process.

Questions with long-distance dependencies 417

properties of the sentences, since these are easier to interpret—tell us

about speakers’ mental representations of this construction? It has long

been acknowledged, of course, that the choice of lexical items in a sen-

tence a¤ects speakers’ acceptability judgments. In the generative tradi-

tion, this is usually regarded as a confound: the presence of a particular

word can make an otherwise well-formed sentence unacceptable, which

could lead the analyst to draw incorrect conclusions about grammar; lex-ical e¤ects, therefore, are something that should be ‘‘controlled for where

possible, discounted when encountered’’ (Featherston 2005: 702). In this

case, however, we are dealing with the opposite situation: LDD questions

are fully acceptable only with particular lexical content. This suggests

that they are more like a constructional idiom than a fully general con-

struction. In other words, questions with long-distance dependencies are

conventional units with an unusual form (a WH word at the beginning

of the main clause associated with a gap in a subordinate clause) and aspecialized meaning: the unit WH do you think S-GAP? is used to inquire

about the speakers’ opinion about the content of the subordinate clause

(What do you think he wantsQ ‘‘In your opinion, what does he want?’’);

and WH did you say S-GAP? is used when addressee already gave the

speaker the relevant information but the speaker does not remember

(When did you say he came?Q ‘‘You’ve already told me when he came,

but please tell me again’’.)8 The non-prototypical uses are rather like

what Moon (1998) calls ‘‘exploitations’’ of idioms exemplified by expres-sions such as throw in the moist towelette (constructed on analogy with

throw in the towel ) or use an earthmover to crack a nut (cf. use a sledge-

hammer to crack a nut). Once all the lexical content has been changed

(cf. the WH Unprototypical condition), it is no longer possible to identify

the motivating construction, and hence the sentence is judged as un-

acceptable.9 Alternatively, one could argue that when processing unpro-

totypical LDD questions, speakers have to fall back on more abstract

schemas (the mental analogues of the WH question construction and thecomplementation construction), and that the low acceptability ratings for

8. It is interesting to note that the CollinsCobuild English Language Dictionary (Sinclair

1987: 1519) lists the use of think in long-distance questions as a separate sense of the

verb.

9. With most idioms, substituting di¤erent lexical items for every word would result in ex-

pressions which are still judged acceptable, provided they make sense semantically: for

example, taking use a sledgehammer to crack a nut as the model, one could construct

perfectly acceptable phrases such as do a headstand to impress a neighbour and tickle an

earthworm to amuse the children. This is possible because speakers have fully general

schemas for the transitive and the infinitival construction.

418 E. Dabrowska

such sentences reflect the di‰culty of combining highly complex and

abstract schemas.

At this point one may wonder why the possibility that speakers have

lexically specific knowledge about LDD questions has not even been con-

sidered by most syntacticians in spite of the fact that these constructions

have been so intensively studied for several decades. The short answer is

that the possible existence of lexical e¤ects was not regarded as theoreti-cally interesting—so although there are a number of experimental studies

of LDD constructions (see, for example, Cowart 1997; Frazier and Clif-

ton 1989; Kluender and Kutas 1993), to my knowledge, nobody has sys-

tematically investigated the e¤ect of lexical content on speakers’ linguistic

intuitions about them.10 A second reason is that linguists tend to rely on

their own intuitions—and linguists’ intuitions about LDD questions may

be systematically di¤erent from those of ordinary speakers. Dabrowska

(in press b) shows that linguists tend to judge unprototypical LDD ques-tions as considerably more acceptable than that trace violations and sen-

tences with double tense marking, and not much worse than prototypical

questions. This could be a reflection of their theoretical commitments (the

belief that instances of ‘‘the same’’ construction should be equally gram-

matical), but it could also be a result of di¤erences in linguistic experi-

ence. Many linguists spend a considerable amount of time constructing

examples of the structures they are interested in and reading papers con-

taining such constructed examples.11 Since LDD questions have been theobject of very intensive research, it is likely that linguists (or at least lin-

guists who work on LDD constructions, or discuss them with their stu-

dents) have been exposed to more instances of this construction than

most ordinary language users, and, crucially, the instances they have en-

countered are much more varied, as demonstrated by the examples in (1).

10. There is some work on lexical e¤ects on acceptability judgments in basic argument

structure constructions: see Theakston 2004, Ambridge et al. in press. In both studies,

speakers judged argument structure violations with high frequency verbs (e.g., *I

poured you with water) as less acceptable than argument structure violations with low

frequency verbs (e.g., *I dribbled teddy with water); the authors explain this by appeal-

ing to the higher entrenchment of the pattern with the frequent verb. Ambridge et al.

(2008) also found that fully grammatical sentences with high frequency verbs were

judged slightly more acceptable than sentences with low-frequency verbs, although the

di¤erence was very small (for adults, 4.82 v. 4.76; the authors do not indicate whether

or not it was statistically significant).

11. Note that constructing examples for a linguistic paper (or for one’s students to analyse)

is a very di¤erent kind of activity from ordinary language use: it is conscious and delib-

erate, and relies on metalinguistic and/or general problem-solving abilities rather than

normal linguistic routines.

Questions with long-distance dependencies 419

As a result, they are much more likely to develop more general represen-

tations of these constructions, and accept unprototypical instances of

them.12

Received 11 April 2007 She‰eld University, UK

Revision received 18 December 2007

Appendix: List of sentences used in version 1 of the experiment

Experimental sentences

Prototypical LDD question (WH Prototypical)

What did you say the family should know before they go there?

What do you think they decided to do when they got home?Where did you say they hid the treasure when they found out?

Where do you think the children could stay when their father returns?

LDD question with lexical subject (WH Subject)

What did Steve say we bought for Alice when we visited her?

What does Claire think the witness will say if they don’t intervene?

Where did Andy say the young man went after they found her?

Where does Paul think we put the documents after he saw them?

LDD question with a di¤erent verb (WH Verb)

What did you claim we bought for Alice when we visited her?

What do you believe the witness will say if they don’t intervene?

Where did you swear the young man went after they found her?

Where do you suspect we put the documents after he saw them?

LDD question with a di¤erent auxiliary (WH Auxiliary)

What will you say the family should know before they go there?

What would you think they decided to do when they got home?

Where will you say they hid the treasure when they found out?

Where would you think the children could stay when their father returns?

LDD question with an overt complementizer (WH Complementizer)

What did you say that the family should know before they go there?

What do you think that they decided to do when they got home?

Where did you say that they hid the treasure when they found out?

12. For other work suggesting that linguists’ judgments may be systematically di¤erent

from those of ordinary speakers, see Spencer 1973 and Bradac et al. 1980. See also

Hiramatsu 1999 and Snyder 2000 for experimental studies of ‘‘syntactic satiation’’, a

phenomenon whereby sentences which were initially judged ungrammatical become

increasingly acceptable as a result of repeated exposure.

420 E. Dabrowska

Where do you think that the children could stay when their father

returns?

LDD question with an additional subordinate clause (WH Long)

What did you say Eve claimed we bought during our first visit?

What do you think Jo believes he said at the court hearing?

Where did you say Mike swore he went after the evening performance?

Where do you think Phil suspects we were during the last war?

Unprototypical LDD question (WH Unprototypical)

What will Steve believe that Jo thinks they did with their old furniture?

What would Claire claim that Eve said they know about the whole a¤air?

Where will Andy suspect that Phil thinks they stayed during the school

holidays?

Where would Paul swear that Mike said they were during the afternoon

session?

Grammatical control sentences

‘‘Prototypical’’ declarative (DE Prototypical)

And you think the children could stay here when their father returns.

But you think they decided to do something when they got home

So you said the family should know everything before they go there.

So you said they hid the treasure somewhere when they found out.

Declarative with lexical subject (DE Subject)

And Claire thinks the witness will say something if they don’t intervene.

But Steve said we bought something for Alice when we visited her.

So Andy said the young man went home after they found her.So Paul thinks we put the documents back after he saw them.

Declarative with a di¤erent verb (DE Verb)

And you swore the young man went home after they found her.

But you suspect we put the documents back after he saw them.So you believe the witness will say something if they don’t intervene.

So you claimed we bought something for Alice when we visited her.

Declarative with a di¤erent auxiliary (DE Auxiliary)

You will say the family should know everything before they go there.

You will say they hid the treasure somewhere when they found out.

You would think the children could stay here when their father returns.

You would think they decided to do something when they got home.

Declarative with an overt complementizer (DE Complementizer)

And you said that the family should know everything before they go

there.

Questions with long-distance dependencies 421

But you think that the children could stay here when their father returns.

So you said that they hid the treasure somewhere when they found out.

So you think that they decided to do something when they got home.

Declarative with an additional subordinate clause (DE Long)

And you think Phil suspects we were here during the last war.

But you said Mike swore he went home after the evening performance.

So you said Eve claimed we bought something during our first visit.

So you think Jo believes he said something at the court hearing.

‘‘Unprototypical’’ Declarative (DE Unprototypical)

Andy will suspect that Phil thinks they stayed here during the school

holidays.

Claire would claim that Eve said they know everything about the whole

a¤air.

Paul would swear that Mike said they were here during the afternoon

session.

Steve will believe that Jo thinks they did something with their oldfurniture.

Ungrammatical control sentences

that trace sentences (*that)

What did you say that will kill cockroaches but not ants?

What do you think that probably got lost during the move?

Who did you say that ate the spinach your mother cooked?

Who do you think that will turn up in the evening?

Sentences with extraction from a complex NP (*ComplexNP)

What did Claire make the claim that she read in a book?

What did Paul hear the rumour that I found in my garage?

Where did you discover the fact that the criminals put the car?

Where did you put forward the hypothesis that all the weapons were?

Negatives without do support (*Not)

Her husband not claimed they asked where we were going.

The manager not implied you knew what they were doing.The teacher not suspected she remembered where that woman lived.

Your sister not believed I forgot what he had done.

Declaratives with double tense marking (*DoubleTn)

His cousin doesn’t thinks we lied because we were afraid.The girl doesn’t remembers where she spent her summer holidays.

The mother doesn’t knows Julia was absent from school today

Your brother doesn’t believes the man is telling the truth.

422 E. Dabrowska

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Questions with long-distance dependencies 425

Lexical chunking effectsin syntactic processing

ARNE ZESCHEL*

Abstract

Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has

shown that subjects’ processing decisions are influenced by a variety of het-

erogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the

discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investi-

gates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: e¤ects of syn-

tagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab)

whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about

linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-

ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between

a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing

collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of cor-

pus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experi-

ment. The results show a significant increase in processing di‰culty from a

collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condi-

tion. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic

templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar

may impinge on speakers’ online processing decisions during sentence

comprehension.

Keywords: Sentence processing; prefabs; usage-based model.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 427–446

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.016

0936–5907/08/0019–0427

6 Walter de Gruyter

* I am grateful to Anatol and Benjamin Stefanowitsch for programming the experimental

software and supplying it to me. Many thanks also to Ewa Dabrowska, Stefanie Wul¤

and Kathryn Allan for running parts of the experiment. Earlier versions of this paper

were presented at DGKL/GCLA 2 in Munich and ICLC 10 in Krakow. I would like to

thank the audiences for discussion and useful comments. Finally, I am grateful for the

very helpful suggestions of two reviewers for Cognitive Linguistics which have signifi-

cantly improved the quality of the paper. All remaining errors are mine. Contact Ad-

dress: Universitat Bremen, Fachbereich 10, Postfach 33 04 40, 28334 Bremen, Germany.

Author e-mail: zeschel@uni-bremen.de.

1. Introduction

Research on language processing has shown that comprehenders havetemporary di‰culties with the interpretation of locally ambiguous sen-

tences like those in (1):

(1) a. The criminal confessed his sins harmed too many people. (Ray-

ner and Frazier 1987)b. The thief searched by the police had the missing weapon.

(Trueswell 1996)

c. The complex houses single and married students and their fami-

lies. (Jurafsky 1996)

Whereas it is widely assumed that such di‰culties provide valuable

cues as to how the underlying processing system is organised, there is as

yet no general consensus about the factors that account for the observed

di‰culties (cf. Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995 for an overview). Most

consonant with usage-based approaches to language are so-called

constraint-based models of the ambiguity resolution process which argue

for an immediate interaction and rapid integration of di¤erent informa-tion sources: in contrast to syntax-centered two-stage models, these ap-

proaches are non-modular and accord central importance to matters of

usage frequency and psychological entrenchment, both assumptions that

are well in keeping with central tenets of cognitively oriented versions of

Construction Grammar (Bybee 2006; Goldberg 2006; Langacker 2000).

The present paper adds to this research by evaluating the role of a fac-

tor that has received comparably little attention in the literature so far,

viz. potential e¤ects of collocational chunking on the ambiguity resolu-tion process. Focusing on the so-called ‘‘DO/SC’’ (sometimes also called

‘‘NP/S’’) ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is temporarily ambiguous

between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause (cf. 1a),

initial evidence from a self-paced reading experiment is presented which

suggests that complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envi-

sioned in usage-based Construction Grammar impinge on subjects’ syn-

tactic processing decisions.

2. A usage-based perspective on sentence processing

One of the foundational assumptions of usage-based approaches is that

linguistic knowledge is heavily redundant, with abstract schemas coexist-ing with specific instances of the relevant type that have independent unit

status themselves (provided they are su‰ciently entrenched). From a

processing perspective, this raises the following question: if there are sev-

428 A. Zeschel

eral elements in the constructicon that could be invoked as the categoris-

ing structure for a given target expression, then which of these will actu-

ally be chosen? The question is important since di¤erent candidates may

warrant di¤erent predictions as to how the utterance will unfold further,

meaning that the choice of a particular candidate structure at the expense

of others may have consequences for later processing decisions.

As indicated in the introduction, traditional psycholinguistic ap-proaches to sentence processing can be broadly distinguished into two

types of models. Prototypical instances of the first type are serial and

modular: such models assume that parsing decisions are initially guided

by considerations of syntactic complexity alone, and that attachment am-

biguities are resolved through general heuristics such as ‘‘minimal attach-

ment’’ and ‘‘late closure’’ without recourse to non-syntactic information

unless the initial analysis fails, in which case the parser has to backtrack

and reanalyse (Ferreira and Clifton 1986; Frazier 1987; Frazier and Fo-dor 1978). The second class of models is typically parallel and interactive:

here, comprehenders are assumed to employ constraints from a variety

of di¤erent sources from the outset, with several di¤erent analyses com-

peting for selection (e.g., MacDonald et al. 1994; Trueswell et al. 1993;

Trueswell et al. 1994).

Langacker (2000) sketches a usage-based perspective on the selection of

linguistic categorising structures that is compatible with models of the lat-

ter type. Specifically, Langacker assumes that only a single categorisingstructure will be selected in the end, and that the choice of this element is

influenced by three types of factors: entrenchment (i.e., relative degree of

resting activation and routinization of the competing alternatives), con-

textual priming (plausibility within the present discourse context) and

overlap (degree of structural similarity with the specific target at hand).

While the first two of these three factors have been extensively studied

in the ambiguity resolution literature (cf. e.g., Cuetos, Mitchell and Cor-

ley 1996; Jurafsky 1996; Pickering, Traxler and Crocker 2000; Trueswell1996 on aspects of frequency and entrenchment; Garnsey et al. 1997;

Hare et al. 2003, 2004; Tanenhaus et al. 2000; Trueswell et al. 1994;

Wiechmann, this issue on semantic fit and contextual plausibility), the

third factor, ‘‘overlap’’, has received considerably less attention.

The present paper addresses this factor, with ‘‘overlap’’ understood as

similarity of the target to a larger composite structure that is hypothesised

to have psychological unit status and which could thus be invoked as a

single categorising structure holistically. A possible explanation for therelative neglect of this question in previous research is that issues of syn-

tax and sentence processing are not commonly thought about in terms of

prefabricated formulae because they are seen as the provenance of free

Lexical chunking e¤ects 429

and unrestricted combinatoriality in language, with highly general syntac-

tic rules being the most salient manifestation of what Sinclair (1987) has

called the ‘‘open-choice principle’’ in language. As a consequence, sen-

tence processing is usually assumed to involve an incremental build-up

from atomic units rather than an amalgamation of more or less complex

structures that may already be retrieved en bloc. As indicated above,

however, usage-based approaches assume that speakers do indeed memo-rize such internally complex chunks (regardless whether they are predict-

able or not), and that the generalisations that speakers extract from struc-

turally similar elements in their repertoire (e.g., VP ! V NP as a

generalisation over e.g., ask a question, hit the post, pull strings etc.) are

in fact epiphenomenal (in the sense that they are merely implicit in a set

of stored exemplars, cf. Langacker 2000). Prefabricated chunks of various

grain sizes thus play an important role in the model, and it seems reason-

able to hypothesise from here that they are also relevant for processing.So far, there has been little experimental work on this issue, even

though it has not remained unnoticed: for instance, Elman et al. (2004)

mention the possibility that formulaic sequences such as Mr. and Mr.

Smith proudly announce . . . may induce processing biases that di¤er from

that of the verb as viewed ‘‘in isolation’’ (here: a DO-preference in spite

of the overall SC-preference of announce). Apart from such potentially bi-

asing e¤ects of prior context, i.e., preverbal material, one would also ex-

pect the attachment of the ambiguous noun phrase to be sensitive to theconcrete lexical identity of its head: specifically, encountering an NP that

is a direct object collocation of the respective verb should privilege a DO-

analysis of the developing structure, even if the verb in isolation otherwise

favours SC. Moreover, one would expect that any additional syntagmatic

cues for this reading should increase the hypothesised e¤ect.

Arguably, aspects of entrenchment, contextual plausibility and overlap

may be di‰cult to disentangle in practice: what is frequent in the input is

usually frequent for a good semantic reason, and individual frequentcombinations are of course likely to be stored. Hence, it can be expected

that collocating nouns in VN-sequences occur in this position more fre-

quently than expected, that they will allow a semantically coherent inter-

pretation and that the entire sequence may in fact be stored as a prefab.

Nevertheless, habitual co-occurrence is still not the same as semantic

plausibility. Specifically, one can expect routinized co-occurrences to be

semantically plausible for some reason or other, but not necessarily vice

versa (i.e., there are all sorts of things that can be plausibly confessed,but not all of the corresponding nouns are habitual collocates of the verb

confess). This is where the present study comes in: the experiment re-

ported in section 3 attempts to tease apart e¤ects of contextual plausibil-

430 A. Zeschel

ity on the one hand and overlap on the other hand by comparing the

processing of putative prefabs to the processing of presumably non-stored

VN-sequences that contain a close semantic variant of the collocating

noun.

To my knowledge, there is no previous research on the influence of col-

location e¤ects on syntactic processing in the sense outlined above. On a

more general level, however, there is experimental evidence that compre-henders do indeed use latent statistical cues from the linguistic context to

speed up comprehension. For instance, McDonald and Shillcock (2003)

present eyetracking evidence that transitional probabilities between verbs

and nouns a¤ect gaze duration in reading, concluding that ‘‘the brain

is able to draw upon statistical information in order to rapidly estimate

the lexical probabilities of upcoming words: a computationally inexpen-

sive mechanism that may underlie proficient reading’’ (McDonald and

Shillcock 2003: 648). The present study combines corpus-linguistic andexperimental methods to investigate whether such information also influ-

ences syntactic processing, and how possible chunking e¤ects of this type

relate to item-based preferences pertaining to the verb when viewed in

isolation.

3. Prefabs in sentence comprehension

E¤ects of syntagmatic lexical chunking on syntactic processing were in-vestigated in a self-paced reading experiment. Subjects read di¤erent

types of locally ambiguous sentences that ultimately turned out to involve

sentential complementation. Target items were of three types:

– stimuli that could not be said to privilege a DO-analysis due to lexical

chunking e¤ects because they did not involve a collocating VN-pair at

all (even though the respective noun was a near-synonym of the collo-

cating noun and hence semantically plausible)

– stimuli that supported a transitive DO-analysis before the disambigu-

ation region by involving a DO-collocating noun, yet no additional

pointers to the ultimately wrong DO-analysis (i.e., the ‘‘core’’ of the

hypothesised DO-prefab alone)– stimuli that strongly supported a transitive DO-analysis before the

disambiguation region by involving a DO-collocating noun and addi-

tional preverbal cues for the collocating DO-chunk (i.e., a hypothe-

sised complex prefab)

Suitable stimuli were constructed on the basis of a number of corpus-

linguistic pretests. These pretests departed from a list of 16 SC-biased

verbs that were taken from an earlier study (Garnsey et al. 1997) and

Lexical chunking e¤ects 431

explored potentially interesting DO-uses of these items in the British

National Corpus (BNC).1 In the first step, each verb was concordanced

in all relevant forms, and frequency counts for nouns occurring at posi-

tions R-1 and R-2 were summed. For each verb, the list of co-occurring

nouns was then sorted for frequency and the top three VN-pairs were

concordanced anew, this time with a larger span of up to five words in

between verb and noun in order to also capture instances involving e.g.,disjuncts and modification. Finally, three VN-collocations from the re-

sulting concordances were chosen that looked promising for present con-

cerns.2 The target items of the present study thus selected were the three

combinations admit � defeat, believe � luck, and prove � worth.

It was ensured that the non-collocating combinations in the first condi-

tion were nevertheless attested in naturally occurring English text (if not

in the BNC, then at least on .uk sites on the web). Examples of such near-

synonymous combinations are given in (2):

(2) a. Davids proved his value for the Ajax team again.

http://gov-certificates.co.uk/birth/certificate/Edgar_Davids

(last accessed 25 January 2008)

b. Tories can’t ever admit losing without stamping their feet up

and down and howling and bawling ‘not fair’, ‘not fair’.

http://chat.thisislondon.co.uk/london/threadnonInd.jsp?forum=18&thread=220080

(last accessed 25 January 2008)

c. Darren Moore could scarcely believe his fortune when he

headed gently in amid a motionless Hull defence.

http://football.guardian.co.uk/Match_Report/0,72111,00.html

(last accessed 25 January 2008)

3.1. Corpus-linguistic pretests

3.1.1. Methods. Association strength computations for the presumed

collocations were calculated in the form of a covarying collexeme analysis

(Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005) in order to apply a measure that is sensi-

tive to syntactic structure. In other words, only those occurrences of e.g.,

admit followed by defeat (within a certain preset span) were counted as a

1. In the study by Garnsey and colleagues, SC-biased items were defined as verbs that oc-

curred with sentential complements at least twice as often as with NP direct objects (as

determined by a sentence completion task).

2. Suitable items had to be both relevantly frequent and permit a substitution of the noun

with a non-collocating close semantic variant for the collocationally neutral condition.

432 A. Zeschel

relevant hit in which the noun was actually the direct object of the verb.

This was necessary because the very existence of the ambiguity illustrates

that mere (near-) adjacency of two words in a sequence does not say any-

thing about the structural relations between these items. For instance, in

the following hits for queries of the type [V] . . . w5 . . . [N], the supposedly

DO-collocating noun is not a direct object of the verb:

(3) a. . . . Dowens admitted the defeat left him a little flat . . . [BNC

A9U]

b. Nobody but a fool who believes his luck lies around the corner

could . . . [BNC ART]

c. Pieces which have proved to be of enduring worth have passed

. . . [BNC FPY]

Covarying collexeme analyses permit the identification of significant

associations between words in di¤erent slots of one and the same gram-

matical construction. Unfortunately, the method requires either a parsed

corpus or extensive manual post-editing of the data. Since the BNC is

not syntactically annotated and balanced parsed corpora such as ICE-

GB are much too small to investigate the comparably rare bigrams that

are at issue here, samples had to be drawn for the figures that could notbe exhaustively coded by hand.3 Specifically, these were the frequencies

of

– the target verb co-occurring with all other nouns in the transitive

construction– the target noun co-occurring with all other verbs in the transitive

construction

– the transitive construction in the corpus at large

Table 1 illustrates the actual calculation of these values on the example

of admit � defeat. The plain format figures in the table were obtained di-rectly from the corpus/corpus samples, the italicized ones were arrived at

by subtraction (see below):

To begin with, the frequency of [admit defeat ]transitive in the upper left

cell (58) was obtained by syntactically analysing the 62 raw hits of the

3. Samples were evenly distributed across the corpus; samples for verbs reflected the pro-

portions of the four di¤erent inflected forms in the overall concordance. The detailed

figures are as follows (total corpus frequency in brackets): admit (11,283)–372 coded

sample tokens; defeat (with noun tag: 3476)–346 tokens; believe (34,559)–380 tokens;

luck (3180)–343 tokens; prove (14,593)–374 tokens; worth (3194)–343 tokens; transitive

construction (3,747,626)–384 tokens (see note 5).

Lexical chunking e¤ects 433

corpus query. The frequency of [V-admit defeat ]transitive in the lower left cell

was obtained by analysing a sample of 346 examples out of the 3,476 to-

tal occurrences of defeat that are tagged as a noun in the BNC.4 Specifi-cally, I first identified the number of hits in this sample in which defeat

functioned as the direct object in a transitive construction (77); second,

the proportion of transitive direct object uses in the sample was extrapo-

lated to the overall population of nominal defeat (774); third, the number

of hits for [admit defeat ]transitive was subtracted from this figure, thus giv-

ing the estimated number of transitive constructions consisting of a verb

other than admit and defeat as the direct object (716). The same proce-

dure was applied in order to arrive at the estimated number of tokensfor [admit N-defeat]transitive (2065). The figure in the lower right cell (all

transitive constructions in the BNC which have neither admit in the V-

slot nor defeat in the N-slot) was arrived at in two steps: first, the figures

for [admit N]transitive and [V defeat ]transitive (i.e., the known row and column

totals) were subtracted from the total number of transitive constructions

Table 1. Input figures for admit � defeat

Noun N in the

transitive Cxn

All other nouns

(þtransitive)

Totals

Verb V in the transitive Cxn [admit defeat]trans

58

[admit N-defeat]trans

2065

2123

All other verbs (þtransitive) [V-admit defeat]trans

716

[V-admit N-defeat]trans

3,744,787

3,745,503

Totals 774 3,746,852 3,747,626

4. For the noun worth in prove ones’s worth, it was not possible to adopt this approach

since the BNC tagging was unusually inaccurate here: as it turned out, the vast majority

of occurrences of worth with a nominal tag were not in fact nouns but wrongly classified

adjectives (uses of the type X is worth Y ) . In order to address this problem, the follow-

ing procedure was applied: first, the proportion of nominal uses of worth was estimated

by manually analysing a sample of 373 tokens out of the overall 12,381 occurrences of

the word (17.96 percent), thus giving an estimated 2224 nominal instances of worth in

the entire corpus. On the basis of this figure, it was then possible to calculate the number

of nominal observations that had to be analysed in order to estimate the proportion of

transitive object uses among these 2224 tokens (328 examples). Finally, I began to ana-

lyse the complete concordance for worth (all tags) until I had identified 328 nominal to-

kens and then assessed how many of these featured worth as the head of the direct object

constituent in a transitive construction (106), a figure that was then extrapolated to the

overall population (thereby giving 32.32 percent or 719 tokens).

434 A. Zeschel

in the BNC, thus giving the last missing row- and column totals.5 Once

these were in place, the figures for [admit N-defeat]transitive and [V-admit de-

feat ]transitive could be subtracted from these results, thereby giving the val-

ue in the final missing cell. On the basis of the completed table, it was

then possible to calculate the expected frequency of [admit defeat ]transitive

in the BNC (0.4) and to evaluate the di¤erence between the observed and

the expected value.Once association strengths were calculated in this manner, all attesta-

tions of the three target items in the BNC were subject to a detailed man-

ual coding of their syntagmatic context profile within a span of efive

words (with the verb as node). Full manual post-editing was applied for

two reasons: first, the POS-tagging of the BNC is not 100 percent reliable,

so that the co-occurrence figures obtained from automatically generated

collocate lists are not necessarily correct.6 Second, even if tagging were

100 percent reliable, automatically generated collocate lists would stillremain an imperfect approximation of the grammatical co-occurrence

properties of the investigated items because they do not take syntactic

structure into account. For instance, admit defeat is often found with

5. The number of transitive constructions in the BNC was estimated by drawing a sample

of 384 verb tags, counting the number of transitive constructions in the sample (141) and

extrapolating its proportion to the overall number of verb tags in the corpus (giving an

estimated 3,747,626 out of 10,206,300 verb tags in total). This is essentially the approach

advocated by Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003) who bootstrap argument structure con-

struction frequencies from verb frequencies, an intuitively appealing yet admittedly less

than perfect operationalisation since there is not a 1 : 1 correspondence between verb

tags and argument structure constructions (for instance, an expression like I really

shouldn’t have eaten that manifests a single transitive construction, yet contains three

items that would receive a verb tag in the BNC). While certain refinements of this mea-

sure would have been easy to implement (such as an exclusion of all modal verbs), this

would not have been possible for other problematic cases such as auxiliary uses of do

and have or light verb uses of e.g., go in serial verb constructions. Since it would have

been unprincipled to exclude only some of the potentially problematic cases, I simply

took the total number of verb tags in the corpus. Coding-wise, constructions were

counted as transitive i¤ the main verb occurred with two arguments and the second ar-

gument was a direct object that could be passivized. Mood was ignored, meaning that

examples like He was hit by a truck were coded as transitive. Finally, examples were

counted as transitive as soon as the relevant clause was transitive, regardless whether

the sampled verb tag itself did in fact belong to the transitive main verb or to an auxil-

iary.

6. For instance, of the 58 hits for admit/admits/admitted/admitting . . . (w5) . . . defeat in

which defeat is actually the direct object of the verb, 20 have the infinitive marker to

(tagged ‘‘T01’’) in position L-1. However, a look at the lexical co-occurrence statistics

shows that the marker to actually appears 25 times in this position, with five occurrences

(20 percent) erroneously tagged as a preposition (‘‘PRP’’) instead.

Lexical chunking e¤ects 435

adverbs such as finally or never that typically (4 a, b)—though not always

(4 c, d)—occur immediately before the verb:

(4) a. . . . the man who believed this would never admit defeat . . .

[BNC CAW]

b. . . . she finally admitted defeat when . . . [BNC BP4]

c. Some people never do admit defeat. [BNC G3D]

d. . . . but was finally having to admit defeat and . . . [BNC G3D]

It would of course be desirable to quantify co-occurrences with such

elements in the same way in which the association strength between theverb and the noun was quantified, i.e., using standard collostructional

methods by assessing the association of each item in the string with the

constructional slot in question. On the other hand, these methods are

only applicable to the constitutive slots of a given construction, which

makes it di‰cult to accommodate optional elements such as e.g., negators

or adverbial adjuncts. As a result, behavioural profiles were identified in a

more informal way that relied on raw frequency of co-occurrence instead

(giving observations of the type ‘‘X percent of the instances of admit de-

feat involve negation’’, ‘‘X percent involve an aspectual adverb such as

finally’’ etc.). Combining di¤erent such observations, lexico-grammatical

context profiles were identified through detailed manual annotation of 58

relevant (i.e., transitive direct object) hits for admit � defeat, 77 observa-

tions of believe � luck, and likewise 77 instances of prove � worth.

3.1.2. Results. The results of the association strength computations are

reported in Table 2 (values indicate probability of error that the associa-

tion is non-chance as computed by the Fisher-Yates exact test, cf. Stefa-

nowitsch and Gries 2003, 2005 for discussion):

Regarding the syntagmatic periphery of the hypothesised chunks, the

following templates (comparable to the ‘‘compound lexical items’’ pro-

posed in Sinclair 1996) emerged from the corpus pretests:

(5) a. admit � defeat

NP þ (ADV) þ ({OBLIGATION}) þ ADMIT þ defeat

Table 2. Association strengths of the three VN-bigrams

Bigram admit � defeat believe � luck prove � worth

p 2.51e-101*** 5.69e-125*** 4.12e-171***

436 A. Zeschel

b. believe � luck

NPi þ {ABILITY} þ NEG þ BELIEVE þ POSSi þ(good/bad ) þ luck

c. prove � worth

({POSS./TRANSFER}) þ NPi þ (DET chance to) þPROVE þ POSSi þ worth

As for the notation, elements in brackets are optional and elements in

curly brackets represent semantic categories with variable lexical encod-

ing. Hence, (5.a) indicates that transitive DO-uses of admit defeat consist

of a subject NP that is typically followed by a particular kind of adverb

(usually an aspectual one like finally, eventually or never, but there arealso some manner items like reluctantly), followed by an element signal-

ling OBLIGATION (typically have to, but also must, be forced to etc.),

followed by a form of admit, followed by the direct object noun defeat.

In the case of believe � luck, the subject of believe is commonly followed

by an element signalling ABILITY (typically can), followed by a negative

element such as not, hardly or scarcely, followed by a form of believe, fol-

lowed by a possessive pronoun that is coreferential with the subject, fol-

lowed by the direct object luck. The dominant usage pattern for transitiveprove � worth is a little more complex since the bigram is typically em-

bedded in an infinitival construction in which the referent of an NP is

said to have (or be given) a chance (opportunity etc.) to prove his or her

worth in a particular respect (or to the benefit of a certain third party).

Some representative examples of each pattern are given in (6)–(8):

(6) a. . . . the man who believed this would never admit defeat. [BNC

CAW]b. Despite soldiering on for three days she finally admitted defeat

when . . . [BNC BP4]

c. . . . but was finally having to admit defeat and accept powerless-

ness. [BNC G3D]

(7) a. Juliet couldn’t believe her luck. [BNC JY0]

b. He could hardly believe his bad luck though . . . [BNC CEP]

c. . . . she fitted so exactly that Wycli¤e could scarcely believe his

luck. [BNC GWB](8) a. . . . and we are giving him the chance to prove his worth as a

footballer. [BNC K5A]

b. . . . he will not feel the need to prove his worth, either to himself

or . . . [BNC GVF]

c. . . . had an extended early opportunity to prove his worth as . . .

[BNC BN9]

Lexical chunking e¤ects 437

Using the templates in (5), it was now possible to construct appropriate

stimuli for the following reading experiment.

3.2. Reading experiment

3.2.1. Subjects. 35 participants took part in the experiment. Subjects

were students at the Universities of Bremen, She‰eld, Salford and Mich-

igan.7 All participants were native speakers of English. Further demo-

graphic characteristics such as sex and age were not recorded since theywere not deemed relevant for the purpose at hand. Subjects were not

paid for participation in the experiment.

3.2.2. Materials. The experiment was conducted on standard personal

computers with Microsoft Windows XP operating systems. Stimuli were

presented using ‘‘Self Paced Reading Projector’’ from experimentalSuite0.9 beta for Windows, a custom-made stand-alone application pro-

grammed with Macromedia Director.

Subjects were seated at the screens and presented with eight short texts

about the Football World Cup 2006 followed by a timed yes-no compre-

hension question. Texts 4, 6 and 8 contained the actual test items in dif-

ferent orders, with the remaining texts serving as distractors. In the target

items, critical passages were preceded by one to three sentences establish-

ing an appropriate discourse context, followed by the sentence containingthe critical passage, followed by one or two additional sentences before

the comprehension question. Texts were designed to be as ecologically

valid as possible by assembling them (as far as possible) from pieces of

real-life British sports reporting. As an illustration, the set of experimen-

tal stimuli for prove � worth is reproduced below:

After the first two matches, Brazilian superstar Ronaldo was criticised a lot for

being overweight, slow and lacking determination. Coach Carlos Alberto Parreira

stayed stubbornly loyal, though, promising his centre forward a place in the start-

ing line-up for the next match.

a. ‘‘Ronaldo will prove his value for the team . . .

b. ‘‘Ronaldo will prove his worth for the team . . .

c. ‘‘Ronaldo will get a chance to prove his worth for the team . . .

7. Subjects had to be drawn from this wide geographic range because it had proved di‰-

cult to find enough native speaker participants among students in Bremen alone at the

time of investigation. However, since regional linguistic di¤erences between subjects can

be assumed to be irrelevant for the task at hand, this was not deemed problematic.

438 A. Zeschel

has been downplayed by the media. He is an exceptional player, and I am very

confident that he will score today’’. Ronaldo repaid Parreira with two goals

against Japan that led his team to the knockout stages and equalled Gerd Muller’s

all-time record of 14 world cup goals.

The stimulus sets used for the other two verbs are included in the Ap-

pendix. Subjects were given printed instructions which read as follows:

You are taking part in an experiment on text comprehension. You will read a

number of short texts, each followed by a short statement relating to their content

that you are asked to qualify as either right or wrong.

The texts are presented on a word by word basis. The current word is presented in

the middle of the screen. Pressing SPACE will advance the presentation to the

next word, replacing its predecessor, until the end of the text is reached.

You can determine the pace of the presentation yourself. It is important that you

pay attention to details, so simply take as much time as you need for a careful

reading of the texts. Crucially, it is not possible to go back to earlier words.

At the end of each sentence, the string ‘‘þþþ’’ is displayed. When you are ready

for the next sentence, press SPACE to move on. When you have reached the end

of a text, the string ‘‘???’’ is displayed in the middle of the screen.

When you get to the ‘‘???’’ prompt, please place one finger each on the keys ‘‘cur-

sor left’’ and ‘‘cursor right’’. Pressing either key will prompt the test statement to

appear in the middle of the screen. Please indicate whether the statement matches

the contents of the preceding text as quickly as possible by either pressing ‘‘cursor

right’’ (YES) or ‘‘cursor left’’ (NO).

After your response, the procedure is repeated for the next text until the end of the

experiment is reached.

The experiment is not a quiz. All the information that you need for a correct re-

sponse is supplied in the texts.

The first text is for training. Please pause after you have responded to the first test

statement. The instructor will ask you if there is still anything unclear about the

procedure before the experiment begins.

3.2.3. Procedure. Words were presented one at a time in 48 point yel-

low font in the middle of a blue screen. Subjects advanced the presenta-

tion by pressing the space bar. Comprehension questions were answered

by pressing either the key ‘‘cursor left’’ (‘‘no’’) or ‘‘cursor right’’ (‘‘yes’’).

Subjects were told that the first text was for training. Once subjects had

responded to the first comprehension question, the experimenter ensured

that the overall procedure was clear to them and left them to complete the

rest of the experiment unsupervised. Each subject saw each of the three in-vestigated verbs only once, in one of the three conditions outlined above.

Lexical chunking e¤ects 439

3.2.4. Results. Reading times were compared at the second word of

the disambiguation region (e.g., been in the stimulus set reproduced in

3.2.2) in order to compensate for spillover e¤ects. Following suggestions

by Ferreira and Clifton (1986), length-adjusted residual reading times

were computed for each subject and then related to degree of collocativity

in an analysis of variance. Residual reading times were obtained by com-

puting linear regression analyses for each subject’s reading performanceon words of di¤erent lengths (in number of characters including punctua-

tion) with number of characters as the explanatory variable and reading

time as the dependent variable. Data from the training run and all sen-

tence-final words were excluded. Reaction times faster than 100 ms and

slower than 2500 ms were treated as missing data (0.93 percent). A sin-

gle-group t-test on the regression coe‰cients for all subjects revealed that

both the intercept and the linear component were significantly di¤erent

from zero ( p < 0:001***) (cf. Lorch and Myers 1990). After computingthe regressions, residuals were obtained by subtracting the predicted read-

ing time for a given word from subjects’ actual reading time for this word.

Hence, positive residuals indicate slower and negative residuals faster

processing of a given word than predicted by the regression. The residuals

for all critical words in all three conditions (all VN-sequences were ana-

lysed together) were then submitted to an analysis of variance that indi-

cated a significant e¤ect of collocation (Fð2;102Þ ¼ 5:5716, p < 0:01**).

Figure 1 presents the results in graphical form:

Figure 1. ANOVA results

440 A. Zeschel

3.3. Discussion

As predicted, Figure 1 shows a uniform increase in mean residual reading

time from the syntagmatically non-biasing over the biasing to the

strongly DO-biasing condition. Somewhat unexpectedly, mean residual

reading times for critical words in the non-biasing condition were slightly

shorter than reading times for other words of the same length. Eventhough it is di‰cult to explain why words in a potentially garden-pathing

position were processed slightly faster than other experimental words of

the same length (small as the di¤erence may be), this result is in keeping

with earlier findings that the three investigated verbs are indeed biased to-

wards sentential complementation, i.e., there is clearly no indication of a

processing di‰culty at the critical position in this condition. The mean in-

crease in processing di‰culty in the collocating condition is likewise only

slight, but nevertheless suggests that the presence of the collocating nounalone already works against the isolated verb bias towards sentential

complementation. As expected, the most marked deviations from pre-

dicted reading times are found in the complex prefab condition with a

mean increase of almost 200 ms. These results can be taken as an indica-

tion that speakers do not merely memorize particular collocations of a

given verb (which is uncontroversial), but that these units are at least in

some cases more profitably viewed as syntagmatically complex chunks

rather than as simple bigrams, and that such larger prefabs may also in-fluence on-line syntactic processing decisions during comprehension.

Nevertheless, the present results are but a first indication that needs to

be interpreted with caution. To begin with, the study did not contain an

unambiguous baseline condition with an overt complementiser (e.g., Ro-

naldo will prove that his worth for the team has been downplayed by the

media) as is usually included in studies of syntactic ambiguity resolution.

That way, verbs could be investigated in three collocationally di¤erent

conditions that could be directly compared without markedly boostingthe number of experimental subjects. Irrespective of the collocation/

chunking issue, however, it is well documented that the basic ambiguity

e¤ect is more pronounced for some verbs than for others, which intro-

duces a potentially confounding factor that should be controlled for in

possible follow-ups. Likewise, questions remain as to the precise defini-

tion of the complex prefabs in condition 3 and the extent to which they

can be directly compared across verbs. As indicated in section 3.1.1, it is

at present unclear how the collostructional methodology developed forclearly delimited constructions such as [V NP] could be extended to larger

idiom chunks with fuzzy boundaries of the type in (5) whose formal spec-

ifications gradually shade o¤ into mere semantic preferences. Finally, the

Lexical chunking e¤ects 441

overall operationalisation of degree of syntagmatic attraction in terms of

discrete levels such as ‘‘non-collocation’’ vs. ‘‘collocation’’ vs. ‘‘complex

prefab’’ is certainly an imperfect approximation of what in reality is

clearly a continuum.

All in all, however, the significant increase in mean residual reading

time from condition 1 to condition 3 is a promising indication that future

research in this direction may be worthwhile. Moreover, all three verbsshow a uniform increase in reading time between the non-collocating

and the collocating condition which suggests that the observed e¤ect is

not due to ‘‘contextual priming’’ in the sense of section 2 alone: since the

non-collocating nouns in condition 1 are a consistently weaker cue for the

DO-analysis than their synonymous variants in the collocating condition,

the increase in reading time is obviously not due to semantic factors.

Likewise, the di¤erence in mean residual reading time between the collo-

cating and the complex prefab condition cannot be accounted for by ap-pealing to increased semantic plausibility of the DO-analysis in the latter

case. Instead, the results support Langacker’s (2000) assumption that

‘‘overlap’’ between stretches of the input and complex preassembled cate-

gorising structures is a relevant processing factor in its own right.

4. Implications

The results of the present study suggest that speakers retain memory for a

variety of syntagmatic context features associated with the di¤erent usagepatterns of a given verb, and that accumulating syntagmatic evidence for

patterns of this type may override otherwise dominant parsing biases at-

taching to the verb ‘‘in isolation’’. These findings are consistent with the

usage-based hypothesis that

lower-level schemas, i.e., structures with greater specificity, have a built-in advan-

tage in the competition with respect to higher-level schemas. Other things being

equal, the finer-grained detail of a low-level schema a¤ords it a larger number of

features potentially shared by the target (Langacker 2000: 16).

On the procedural level, it seems plausible to assume that this is indeed

a relevant factor that influences ‘‘pattern capture’’, i.e., the question

which candidate out of the initial activation set the system will actually

settle to in the end. Functionally, a bias towards concreteness also hasclear advantages: since speakers/hearers store whatever is su‰ciently fre-

quently encountered and hence both communicatively and cognitively

routinized, accumulating evidence for a particular chunk of this type

442 A. Zeschel

means that there is a good chance that the corresponding analysis will

prove the correct guess again and thus serves to relieve (or rather bypass)

further processing load probabilistically.

Coming back to the question raised in the beginning (‘‘if there are sev-

eral elements in the constructicon that could be invoked as the categoris-

ing structure for a given expression, then which of these candidates will

actually be chosen?’’), the following answer would be consistent bothwith the general bottom-up orientation of usage-based models and the

empirical results presented above: all else being equal, hearers/readers

will choose the most concrete potential categorising structure that is con-

sistent with the currently identified input, to the e¤ect that (more) abstract

schemas will only be invoked as a kind of last resort where a more con-

crete standard of comparison is not available. It remains for future re-

search to show whether this more specific hypothesis can be corroborated,

and how the di¤erent factors that were found to influence syntactic ambi-guity resolution should be weighted. For the moment, su‰ce it to say that

lexical chunking e¤ects of the type investigated in this study do seem to

be one of these factors, a result that is well in keeping with usage-based

assumptions about the kinds of linguistic representations that speakers

store and retrieve in processing.

Received 29 November 2007 Universitat Bremen, Germany

Revision received 25 January 2008

Appendix

Stimulus Set A: prove � worth

After the first two matches, Brazilian superstar Ronaldo was criticised a

lot for being overweight, slow and lacking determination. Coach CarlosAlberto Parreira stayed stubbornly loyal, though, promising his centre

forward a place in the starting line-up for the next match.

a. ‘‘Ronaldo will prove his value for the team . . .

b. ‘‘Ronaldo will prove his worth for the team . . .

c. ‘‘Ronaldo will get a chance to prove his worth for the team . . .

has been downplayed by the media. He is an exceptional player, and I amvery confident that he will score today’’. Ronaldo repaid Parreira with

two goals against Japan that led his team to the knockout stages and

equalled Gerd Muller’s all-time record of 14 world cup goals.

Lexical chunking e¤ects 443

Stimulus Set B: admit � defeat

England did not live up to the high expectations at home, and for most ofthe time, coach Sven Goran Eriksson seemed obstinate in his decision to

ignore what was happening right before his eyes. In an interview after the

disastrous penalty shoot-out against Portugal, Eriksson still continued to

act as if he could scarcely believe that his time was up: oddly, he spoke of

how ‘‘we still have the team to reach the final’’.

a. Eriksson and his team admitted losing on penalties again . . .b. Eriksson and his team admitted defeat on penalties again . . .

c. Eriksson and his team finally had to admit defeat on penalties again

. . .

was particularly tragic- ‘‘We practised penalties so much, I really don’t

know what more we could do about it’’, the Swede said.

Stimulus Set C: believe � luck

Hosts Germany turned out to be one of the positive surprises of the tour-

nament. When their team was grouped with Costa Rica, Poland and Ec-

uador in last december’s draw,

a. the German fans did not believe their fortune in the draw . . .

b. the German fans did not believe their luck in the draw . . .

c. the German fans could hardly believe their luck in the draw . . .

would take them anywhere past the first knock-out round, and surely no-

body expected Jurgen Klinsmann’s team to beat an opponent like Argen-

tina. Five matches into the cup it was 5–3 to Germany on penalties and itlooked like nothing could keep them from storming into the final.

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446 A. Zeschel

Initial parsing decisions and lexical bias:Corpus evidence from local NP/S-ambiguities

DANIEL WIECHMANN*

Abstract

Recent research in sentence comprehension suggests that lexically specific

information plays a key role in on-line syntactic ambiguity resolution. On

the basis of an analysis of the local NP/S-ambiguity, the present study of-

fers a corpus-based approach to sentence processing that supports this view.

However, it is proposed that the relevant information used to recover the

syntactic structure of an incoming string of words is not retrieved from indi-

vidual verbs but from a more fine-grained level of form-meaning pairings

that distinguishes di¤erent verb senses. The investigation proceeds in two

steps: First, verb-general and sense-specific preferences for nominal and

sentential complementation are induced from corpus data and compared us-

ing odds ratios as a measure of association. Second, correlation analyses

are performed that relate the computed coe‰cients of association to read-

ing time latencies from a recent self-paced moving window experiment

(Hare et al. 2003). The results corroborate the view that individual verb

senses, rather than individual verbs, guide initial parsing decisions.

Keywords: parsing; lexical guidance; local syntactic ambiguity; distinc-

tive collexeme analysis.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 447–463

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.017

0936–5907/08/0019–0447

6 Walter de Gruyter

* I would like to thank Stefan Th. Gries, Holger Diessel and two anonymous reviewers for

discussion and valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining weak-

nesses are, of course, my fault alone. Also, I would like to thank Stefanie Wul¤ for shar-

ing her ICE-GB isomorphic BNC sample with me. Finally, special thanks to Mary Hare

for providing me with the original reading time data of the study reported in Hare et al.

(2003). Correspondence address: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Friedrich

Schiller Universitat Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany. e-mail: daniel.wiechmann@uni-jena.de.

1. Introduction

Comprehending a natural language sentence is a complex process involv-ing numerous sub-processes below and above the sentence level such as

recognizing words, resolving anaphoric relationships, recognizing figura-

tive language, establishing discourse coherence, and various kinds of in-

ferencing. However, one of the most central tasks is the analysis of the

syntactic structure of the signal, i.e., parsing. In languages like English,

which are morphologically comparatively poor, a perceived string of

words is likely to allow for more than one way of combining lexical units

into larger syntactic structures, which may give rise to local syntactic am-biguities during on-line processing.

One of the best-studied local syntactic ambiguities involves the alterna-

tion between nominal and sentential complements. In this ambiguity, a

post-verbal NP cannot be straightforwardly interpreted with respect to

the grammatical role that it plays in the sentence since it could either

function as the direct object of the preceding verb or as the subject of an

embedded clause:

(1) a. Inspector Clousseau revealed [NP Dreyfuss’ intentions].

b. Inspector Clousseau revealed [S[NP Dreyfuss’ intentions] were

indeed diabolic].

Using ambiguities of the type in (1) as an example, the present study

investigates a particular hypothesis as to how such ambiguities are re-

solved in on-line sentence comprehension. Specifically, what is at issue is

the assumption that the process involves probabilistic subcategorization

preferences that are associated with individual senses of a given verb.Corpus-linguistic evidence in support of this hypothesis is presented and

compared to recent experimental results from a self-paced reading study

(Hare et al. 2003). With regard to linguistic model-building, the study ar-

gues that conceptions of subcategorization preferences should make refer-

ence to a quite fine-grained level of representation, i.e., the individual

senses of a verb. Methodologically, it is argued that such preferences can

be appropriately estimated by means of quantitative corpus-linguistic

methodologies.

2. The verb sense guidance hypothesis (VSGH)

Early research in the field of sentence comprehension was dominated bythe view that the human comprehension system employs a two-stage se-

rial mechanism with di¤erent processes operating on each stage (Fodor

1978): the initial stage uses syntactic category information only and

448 D. Wiechmann

adopts very general parsing heuristics (like ‘‘minimal attachment’’ or

‘‘late closure’’) to recover syntactic structures. When the mechanisms of

the initial phase fail to detect the correct structure, the parser employs a

backtracking mechanism to reanalyze the string. In this second stage, in-

formation from several sources (e.g., semantic or discourse pragmatic

properties) is integrated into the structure-building process.

As syntactic theories put more and more emphasis on lexical represen-tations (cf. Chomsky 1970; Jackendo¤ 1975), psycholinguistic research,

too, supplied more and more evidence for a parsing mechanism that is

guided by lexically specific information. In ‘‘lexical guidance’’ accounts

of sentence comprehension (Ford et al. 1982; Mitchell 1994), it is com-

monly assumed that particular lexical items, most notably verbs, exhibit

individual preferences for possible subcategorization patterns and that

these preferences enable the comprehension system to anticipate likely

structural continuations. Such accounts predict that sentences should beeasy to process if a verb’s structural expectations are met, and harder to

process if such expectations are violated. Consequently, these accounts

predict that the sentences in (2) di¤er significantly in terms of processing

di‰culty:

(2) a. Inspector Clousseau suspected Sir Charles Litton was the

phantom.

b. Inspector Clousseau remembered Sir Charles Litton was the

phantom.

c. Inspector Clousseau suspected Sir Charles Litton all along.

d. Inspector Clousseau remembered Sir Charles Litton only vaguely.

Specifically, 2a and 2d should be easier to process than 2b and 2c, re-

spectively, because the structural continuations are in accordance with the

preferences of the verbs in these examples: remember is biased towards

nominal complements, whereas suspect prefers sentential continuations.

There is compelling evidence for such a lexically driven parsing mecha-nism, which I will only briefly sketch here: Fodor (1978) predicted that a

verb’s preference for transitive or intransitive complementation could in-

fluence the initial parsing decision of whether a gap should be postulated

after the verb. Ford et al. (1982) generalized Fodor’s ideas and claimed

that each verb has associations of di¤ering strengths to all its possible

subcategorization frames. These strengths reflect a combination of verb

frequency and contextual factors and are exploited to build up expec-

tations that are used in parsing. Ford et al. tested this hypothesis in ano¤-line experiment in which subjects were asked to make a forced choice

between two possible interpretations of an ambiguous sentence. It could

be shown that a set of subcategorization preferences could be used to pre-

Initial parsing decisions 449

dict subjects’ choices. Although Ford and colleagues did not test for fre-

quency e¤ects themselves, it was later shown that the biases assumed in

their study corresponded to frequencies in the Brown corpus (Jurafsky

1996). Clifton et al. (1984) tested the approach by using the frequency

norms collected by Connine et al. (1984) and showed that these fre-

quencies could be used for predicting di¤erences in processing di‰culty.

Tanenhaus et al. (1985) demonstrated that fronted direct objects resultedin longer reading times for verbs with a transitive bias, but not for verbs

that preferred intransitive use. Trueswell et al. (1993) used a cross-modal

naming paradigm to show that frequency-based subcategorization prefer-

ences are relevant for on-line disambiguation. MacDonald et al. (1994)

reported that the lexical bias e¤ect was also detectable with main verb/

reduced relative clause ambiguities. Jennings et al. (1997), in an exten-

sion of Trueswell et al. (1993), used a similar cross-modal naming ex-

periment and focused on an alleged design flaw in that experiment: upto this point, previous studies had binned the verb-preferences into just

two classes (high and low frequency). Jennings and colleagues demon-

strated a correlation between the strength of the bias and reading time at

the target word such that the stronger the bias, the larger the advantage

they found in naming latency for the preferred over the non-preferred

continuation.

However, it has been suggested that verb-specific preferences are not

quite fine-grained enough: many verbs can express di¤erent meaningswhich in turn may be associated with di¤erent argument structure config-

urations. Consider the examples in (3):

(3) a. Peter VP [V admitted NP [his ex-girlfriend] PP [to the club]].b. Peter VP [V admitted S [NP [his ex-girlfriend] was hotter than his

current one]].

c. Peter VP [V admitted NP [his error]].

The verb admit in (3a) roughly means ‘grant entry’ and takes NP ob-jects only, whereas in (3b) and (3c) it means roughly ‘acknowledge to

be true’ and can take either nominal or sentential complements. Recent

studies have therefore addressed the possibility that subcategorization

preferences are in fact sense-contingent: Argaman and Pearlmutter (2002)

showed that verbs and their derived nominals—which presumably share a

number of semantic features—have similar subcategorization probabil-

ities. This suggests that the semantic properties of a verb influence its sub-

categorization choice. Hare et al. (2003) conducted a self-paced movingwindow experiment to investigate this possibility. They found increased

reading times in cases in which the structural expectation after the crucial

NP was not met, concluding that ‘‘[r]eaders were influenced by structural

450 D. Wiechmann

expectations contingent on verb sense’’ (Hare et al. 2003: 294; see also

Hare et al. 2004). This hypothesis can be formulated as follows:

§ Verb Sense Guidance Hypothesis (VSGH)

Each conventionalized verb sense carries probabilistic information ex-

pressing its bias for possible argument structure configurations. This in-formation is used to guide early parsing decisions.

The present study investigates whether the VSGH can be corroborated

from a corpus-linguistic point of view. It is divided into two parts: First, a

distinctive collexeme analysis (henceforth DCA; Gries and Stefanowitsch

2004) is conducted to assess form-based and sense-contingent preferences

for 20 verbs in a balanced 17 million words sample of the British Na-

tional Corpus (BNC). This analysis supplies for each verb (sense) an as-sociation score expressing the degree to which a given verb form or verb

sense prefers one of the two relevant complementation patterns. Second,

these results are compared with experimental findings from the self-paced

reading study reported in Hare et al. (2003) by computing correlation

analyses for the results of the DCA and the reading-time deltas measured

by Hare and colleagues.

3. Form-based vs. sense-contingent preferences

There are two ways of estimating lexical preferences: they can either be

assessed experimentally, e.g., by means of sentence completion tasks

(e.g., Garnsey et al. 1997) or sentence production tasks (e.g., Connine et

al. 1984), or via corpus investigation.1 Both methods exhibit di¤erent

strengths and weaknesses: experimental techniques permit the investiga-

tion of a single factor in isolation by allowing the researcher to control,

in principle, all known factors that are not addressed in a given design.

By contrast, corpus data usually consist of samples of naturally occurringlanguage that is embedded in real-life communicative situations and thus

influenced by a multitude of factors which cannot easily be identified.

However, the naturalistic quality of corpus data is also what makes them

so attractive: experimental settings can easily produce linguistic artifacts

that are detached from the constraints of normal discourse. For instance,

since the meaning of the sentences to be produced is largely irrelevant,

participants in sentence completion tasks might prefer short variants

1. Garnsey and colleagues used a proper name followed by a verb as in ‘‘Debbie remem-

bered ’’ and asked subjects to complete this fragment. In Connine et al. (1984), sub-

jects were presented with a verb and were asked to write down a sentence containing

that verb.

Initial parsing decisions 451

over longer ones simply to minimize their e¤ort. However, in real life sit-

uations speakers are of course bound to their communicative intentions

and must thus use forms which are appropriate for the speech act to be

performed. Given these respective strengths and weaknesses of experi-

mentally and corpus-derived norms, it appears obvious that they should

be employed in a complementary way. Nevertheless, as has been pointed

out elsewhere (cf., e.g., Tummers et al. 2005), it is necessary to engagein rigorous, quantitative methodologies to make full use of the corpus-

linguistic potential.

3.1. Assessing form-based preferences

3.1.1. Method. The present study employs a variant of ‘‘collostruc-

tional analysis’’ (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003 for detailed discus-

sion), a family of collocational techniques that was developed to inves-

tigate the relationship between syntax and lexis. Formulated in the

framework of construction grammar (Goldberg 1995; Lako¤ 1987), it ad-

dresses the interaction of linguistic signs of various levels of abstraction,e.g., lexical items and abstract argument structure constructions. The

degree of association between such constructions—i.e., metaphorically,

the ‘‘glue’’ between these units—is referred to as their ‘‘collostruction

strength’’. One of the variants of this method, ‘‘distinctive collexeme anal-

ysis’’, employs the general logic of the approach to compare a given

word’s relative attraction to a set of constructional variants in which this

item can occur. In other words, it o¤ers a way to measure a verb’s relative

preference for a given set of complementation options. In the presentstudy, these alternatives are the nominal and the sentential complementa-

tion pattern that compete in the resolution of NP/S-ambiguities. As re-

gards the lexical items to be investigated in these constructions, the study

covers all of the 20 verbs used in the reading experiment by Hare and col-

leagues (i.e., acknowledge, add, admit, anticipate, bet, claim, confirm, de-

clare, feel, find, grasp, indicate, insert, observe, project, recall, recognize,

reflect, report and reveal ), each of which can occur with both nominal

and sentential complements.The data were extracted from a balanced 17 million word sample of the

British National Corpus which was compiled to be isomorphic to the

British component of the ICE corpus.2 Of interest were all instances of

these verbs that are immediately followed by a noun phrase. The study is

restricted to past tense forms of the verbs and lexical rather than prono-

minal NPs (pronominal realizations of the relevant NP were excluded be-

2. For detailed information about the properties of that corpus cf. Nelson (1996).

452 D. Wiechmann

cause they are formally marked for case and thus do not give rise to NP/

S-ambiguities).3

As expected, the investigated verbs had markedly di¤erent frequenciesin the corpus. In order to attain a data set of manageable size, the follow-

ing procedure was applied:

– for verbs with a token frequency greater than 3,000, a random 10%

sample was extracted

– for verbs with a token frequency between 300 and 3,000 a random

sample of 300 items was extracted

– for verbs with a token frequency lower than 300, all occurrences wereextracted

This gave a set of 4,960 data-points which was then coded for the

grammatical role of the post-verbal NP by hand. The labels ‘‘NP’’ and

‘‘S’’ were used to indicate nominal and sentential complementation, re-

spectively. Cases that could not be assigned to either of these two catego-

ries received the label ‘‘other’’.

Having extracted and coded the data, they were submitted to the DCAin order to compute association strengths between a given verb and the

two syntactic patterns. The figures that were required for this calculation

are given in Table 1.

Required figures include the observed frequencies of verb V in either of

the two constructions (O11, O21) as well as the observed frequencies of

these constructions occurring with other verbs (O12, O22). The labels

R1, R2 and C1, C2 stand for row and column totals and N denotes over-

all frequency, i.e., O11 þ O12 þ O21 þ O22. Given these frequencies, therelative attraction between verbs and the two constructions in question

can be computed. Generally speaking, candidate measures of the prop-

erty of interest (association strength) compare the observed distribution

with the expected distribution under the assumption of statistical indepen-

dence and evaluate how much evidence the observed distribution provides

Table 1. Input distributions

verb V other verbs

nominal OBJ O11 O12 R1

sentential OBJ O21 O22 R2

C1 C2 N

3. The analysis was restricted to past tense forms because Hare et al. (2003) used these

forms in their experiment as well.

Initial parsing decisions 453

against this assumption. On closer inspection, however, it is far from triv-

ial to determine exactly what measure is best suited to adequately express

degrees of association between linguistic units (cf. Evert 2004; Wiech-mann in press).4 Following Gries (2006), the present study makes use of

a ‘‘discounted’’ odds ratio to express collostruction strength, because a)

this measure approximates the results of more accurate measures (such

as exact hypothesis tests) fairly well, and b) in contrast to such other mea-

sures, its estimation of the relationship in question is less dependent on

sample sizes.5

3.1.2. Results. Table 2 and Figure 1 present the results of the DCA,specifically the preference of a given verb for NP-complementation. The

4. Evert (2004) provides a comprehensive overview of measures proposed in the computa-

tional and corpus-linguistic literature and discusses their mathematical properties and

areas of application. Wiechmann (in print) evaluates 47 scores of di¤erent mathematical

types against their performance to predict eye-tracking data reported in Kennison

(2001).

5. The ‘‘discounted’’ variant of the odds ratio adds 0.5 to each factor in order to avoid in-

finite values.

Table 2. Verb preferences for nominal complements

Verb form-based bias

(log odds ratios)

confirm �3.66

feel �2.04

anticipate �1.35

recall �1.20

acknowledge 0.11

reflect 0.27

bet 0.30

reveal 0.38

claim 0.59

recognize 0.64

indicate 0.89

insert 1.30

observe 1.38

grasp 1.40

project 1.40

add 2.22

declare 2.36

admit 2.62

report 3.38

find 4.28

454 D. Wiechmann

left column in Table 2 lists the investigated verbs and the right column

specifies the corresponding association strength coe‰cients, i.e., the re-

spective (logarithmically scaled) odds ratios. These express the degree to

which a given verb prefers one of the two patterns: the higher the score,

the stronger the preference for NP-complementation. Negative values in-

dicate that a verb is biased towards sentential complementation.

3.1.3. Discussion. Figure 1 reveals that the investigated verbs di¤er no-ticeably with regard to their structural preferences. Only four of the 20

verbs (confirm, feel, anticipate, recall ) do in fact show a preference for

sentential complementation. All remaining verbs have at least a tendency

to prefer nominal complements. The overall preference for nominal com-

plementation of these 20 verbs reflects a general or ‘‘global’’ tendency of

English to favor simple monotransitive patterns. Other things being

equal, comprehenders are thus more likely to expect NP continuations,

simply because the global transitivity bias acts on the comprehension sys-tem even before the verb is being perceived. Consequently, verbs must ex-

hibit rather strong preferences for sentential complementation to counter

this e¤ect.

Figure 1. Verb preferences

Initial parsing decisions 455

3.2. Assessing sense-contingent preferences

3.2.1. Method. Di¤erent senses of the investigated verbs were identi-fied in a lexical database, WordNet 2.0, which was also used in Hare et

al.’s (2003) study.6 Each of the 4960 items in the data set was assigned to

the sense that was considered to provide the ‘‘best fit’’ relative to the list

of senses proposed in WordNet.7

To give an example, there were 656 occurrences of [ find NP] in the

data. 608 tokens of these involve nominal complementation and 48 in-

stances involve sentential complementation. A semantic subclassification

of these uses revealed that 210 instances out of the 608 nominal tokensare instantiations of sense 1 (FIND1) in WordNet, which is described as

‘‘verb of possession; come upon after searching’’. Sense FIND1 does not

occur with sentential complements. This contrasts with sense FIND2,

glossed as ‘‘come to believe on the basis of emotions, intuitions, or indef-

inite grounds’’ in WordNet, which is instantiated 180 times in the sample

and has 137 occurrences in the nominal and 43 occurrences in the senten-

tial pattern. The remaining tokens of find realize yet other senses of the

verb, for which as many as 16 distinct senses are distinguished in Word-Net (however, FIND1 and FIND2 are the most frequent and semanti-

cally di¤erent ones and account for roughly 60% of the data).

Having classified the data in this manner for all 20 verbs, the syntactic

preference of a given verb sense could then be estimated by submitting the

distributional information to a second DCA. For each verb two senses—

namely the ones that fit the semantics of Hare et al.’s context sentences—

were contrasted.

3.2.2. Results. Table 3 presents the odds ratios expressing the sense-

contingent collostruction strengths:

As above, positive scores indicate a preference for nominal comple-

mentation and negative values indicate a preference for sentential

complementation.

6. WordNet was compiled by a group of psycholinguists at Princeton University in 1985—

and elaborated ever since—as an attempt to investigate lexical memory. For more infor-

mation on WordNet, cf. Fellbaum (1998).

7. The assignment of WordNet senses to a large set of novel examples is not unproble-

matic, because the sense distinctions in WordNet are very fine-grained. As a result a certain

degree of misclassification had to be accepted. Note, however, that the most important

semantic distinction concerns very coarse-grained contrasts: Hare and colleagues chose

senses from WordNet in such a way that ‘‘[f ]or each of the 20 verbs, we identified two

senses that appeared to be su‰ciently distinct, that we believe are known to undergrad-

uates, and that allow di¤erent subcategorization frames according to WordNet’’ (p. 285).

456 D. Wiechmann

Figure 2 presents the results for both form-based and sense-contingent

preferences in graphical form.

3.2.3. Discussion. The results show that form-based and sense-contingent preferences may di¤er both quantitatively, i.e., in terms of as-

sociation strength (cf. e.g., bet or reveal ), and qualitatively, i.e., in terms

of the preferred pattern at large (cf. e.g., admit or confirm). The fact that

the subcategorization preferences are di¤erent for di¤erent meanings ex-

pressed by a given verb form corroborates the position advocated in

Hare et al. (2004) that psychological models and, consequently, experi-

mental protocols using subcategorization preferences should take verb

senses into account. However, in order to assess their relevance for as-pects of on-line processing, it is necessary to compare these o¤-line data

to appropriate experimental observations.

3.3. Comparing corpus-based and experimental findings

In order to test whether the employed method, distinctive collexeme anal-

ysis, can be fruitfully applied to estimate speakers’ on-line processingpreferences, the computed association scores were compared with the

reading time latencies of the individual items observed by Hare and

colleagues.

Table 3. Form-based vs. sense-contingent preferences

Verb form-based sense1 sense2

confirm �3.66 �1.63 �3.22

feel �2.04 �2.15 �0.96

anticipate �1.35 �0.21 �2.55

recall �1.20 �0.35 �1.22

acknowledge 0.11 �0.35 1.76

reflect 0.27 �1.82 1.57

bet 0.30 �4.38 1.39

reveal 0.38 0.38 0.21

claim 0.59 �0.53 1.53

recognize 0.64 �0.91 1.61

indicate 0.89 �0.25 0.91

insert 1.30 0.93 0.79

observe 1.38 0.98 1.33

grasp 1.40 �0.07 0.85

project 1.40 �0.73 2.39

add 2.22 1.27 �0.98

declare 2.36 �0.75 �0.39

admit 2.62 1.08 0.87

report 3.38 �1.47 �1.04

find 4.28 �0.02 �1.04

Initial parsing decisions 457

Before I present the results, it will be helpful to provide a more detaileddescription of the experiment in question. As indicated, the study was de-

signed to test whether a verb’s sense-contingent subcategorization bias is

exploited during on-line processing, specifically for the resolution of tem-

porary NP/S-ambiguities. Participants were asked to read two sentences:

a context sentence and the actual target sentence, which incorporated the

investigated verb and always involved a sentential continuation. The con-

text sentences were designed so as to evoke a scenario compatible with one

of two maximally di¤erent senses of the verb under investigation.8 Havingread the context sentence first, the participants then read through the test

sentence, which was presented one word at a time. As an illustration, con-

sider the stimulus set for the verb find in (4) and (5) (crucial NP italicized):

(4) Condition 1a. The intro psychology students hated having to read the assigned

text because it was boring.

Figure 2. Form-based vs. sense-contingent preferences

8. The properties of the context sentence were controlled for not directly priming the rele-

vant syntactic patterns themselves, i.e., they did neither involve a NP V S nor a NP V

NP structure.

458 D. Wiechmann

b. They found the book was written poorly and di‰cult to

understand.

(5) Condition 2a. Allison and her friends had been searching for John Grisham’s

new novel for a week, but yesterday they finally were successful.

b. They found the book was written poorly and were annoyed that

they had spent so much time trying to get it.

Hence, having read up to the investigated verb in the target sentence,

subjects were predicted show a disposition to interpret this verb as instan-tiating the sense that is compatible with the scenario conveyed by the con-

text sentence, i.e., they should expect an S-continuation once found has

been read in (4) and an NP-continuation in (5). The authors predicted a

context by ambiguity interaction in the disambiguation region (DR) and,

in fact, the strongest ambiguity e¤ect could be measured at the second

word of that region (i.e., at written in the above example). In other words,

an S-biasing context sentence (as in condition 1) should lead to relatively

shorter reading times at the second word of the disambiguation region(DRPOS2) of the S-target sentence. Conversely, an NP-biasing context (as

in condition 2) should lead to increased reading times at DRPOS2 of the S-

target sentence. Averaged across verbs, these predictions were fulfilled.

The present study investigates whether the relevant preferences can be

quantified using the collostructional methodology introduced in section

3.1.1. To that end, the sense-contingent preferences as expressed by dis-

counted odds ratios were compared with the reading time latencies at the

second word of the disambiguation region. If collostruction strength is infact a good predictor of the relevant biases, it is expected that there is a

correlation between collostruction strength and reading time latency. In

other words: the stronger the association with nominal complementation,

the greater the ambiguity e¤ect should be. Conversely, a negative correla-

tion is expected if reading time deltas are compared with preferences for

sentential complementation, the pattern that was consistently employed

in the experimental study by Hare and colleagues.

3.3.1. Method. Correlational analyses were conducted between the

computed association scores (discounted odds ratios) and the reading

time latencies at DRPOS2 both on the level of lexical form and lexical

meaning using Spearman’s rank order correlation.9

9. All statistics were calculated with the R statistics package version 2.2.1.

Initial parsing decisions 459

3.3.2. Results. The analysis revealed a significant negative correlative

relationship between sense-contingent preferences and reading time for

the second word of the disambiguation region (Spearman’s rho ¼�0:3136; p < 0:05*): the weaker a sense’s preference for sentential com-

plementation, the greater the ambiguity e¤ect when this pattern is en-

countered. No such correlation could be observed for form-based prefer-

ences and reading time latencies (Spearman’s rho ¼ 0:1172; p ¼ 0:471).

4. Discussion

The present study has provided corpus-linguistic evidence for the exis-

tence of detailed sense-specific probabilistic information that is associated

with particular lexical forms and that appears to guide the human lan-

guage comprehension system upon resolving local syntactic ambiguities.In particular, the employed method of distinctive collexeme analysis as

well as the selected association strength measure of discounted odds ratios

were shown to provide a useful means for inducing the observable biases

from corpus data.

Nevertheless, some qualifications are in order: First, although verb

sense-specific preferences seem to play an important role in guiding com-

prehenders’ syntactic analysis of a sentence, there are many other factors

that are known to influence the ambiguity resolution process, too (cf.MacDonald 1997 for an overview; see also Zeschel, this volume). Fur-

thermore, nothing in the present study excludes the possibility that the

relevant expectations are in fact encoded on a more general level (i.e., a

level of semantically coherent verb classes) rather than stored separately

for particular senses of individual verbs.

However, wherever these preferences are encoded, the observed results

tie in nicely with central tenets of usage-based approaches to language.

First, usage-based models (Langacker 1988) predict a connection betweenstatistical patterns in the input (to be approximated by studying large-

scale balanced corpus data) and the mental representations that are built

up in response to speakers’ linguistic experience. Second, usage-based ap-

proaches to grammar are construction-based by capitalizing on the no-

tion of form-meaning pairings. The present study has presented evidence

in support of the idea that a particular type of such form-meanings pair-

ings (i.e., the association between syntactic complementation patterns and

particular lexical meanings) indeed plays a role in determining the distri-bution of verbs with di¤erent senses across grammatical constructions

and also seems to influence comprehenders’ on-line processing decisions

when confronted with syntactic ambiguities involving these items.

460 D. Wiechmann

One recent addition to the family of usage-based theories is Embodied

Construction Grammar (Bergen and Chang 2005). Bryant (2003, 2004)

has provided a parsing component for this approach, called constructional

analyzer. On this approach, parsing is an analysis process which takes an

input utterance in context and determines the set of constructions that are

most likely to be responsible for it. The advantage of a construction-

based parser is that ‘‘[ . . . ] constructions carry both phonological andconceptual content, [and] a construction[al] analyzer [ . . . ] must respect

both kinds of constraint’’ (Bergen and Chang 2005: 172). Constructions

and their constraints are regarded not as deterministic but as fitting a

given utterance and context to some quantifiable degree. Bryant suggests

that constructions and their constraints could be associated with connec-

tion weights. The present paper is sympathetic to such a conception of

language and suggests that these connection weights can be inferred

from collostruction strengths.

Received 20 March 2006 Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena,

Revision received 1 May 2007 Germany

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Initial parsing decisions 463

Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-basedanalysis of the positioning of temporal

adverbial clauses in English

HOLGER DIESSEL*

Abstract

Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and pre-

sented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by

competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and se-

mantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the

e¤ect of the iconicity principle on the positioning of temporal adverbial

clauses. The iconicity principle predicts that the linear ordering of main

and subordinate clauses mirrors the sequential ordering of the events they

describe. Drawing on corpus data from spoken and written English, the pa-

per shows that, although temporal clauses exhibit a general tendency to fol-

low the main clause, there is a clear correlation between clause order and

iconicity: temporal clauses denoting a prior event precede the main clause

more often than temporal clauses of posteriority. In addition to the iconicity

principle, there are other factors such as length, complexity, and pragmatic

import that may a¤ect the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. Using

logistic regression analysis, the paper investigates the e¤ects of the various

factors on the linear structuring of complex sentences.

Keywords: iconicity; temporal adverbial clauses; constituent order; com-

peting motivations; logistic regression.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 465–490

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.018

0936–5907/08/0019–0465

6 Walter de Gruyter

* I would like to thank Karsten Schmidtke, Daniel Wiechmann, and especially Beate

Hampe for many helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are, of course,

mine. Contact address: University of Jena, Institut fur Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Ernst-

Abbe-Platz 8, 07743 Jena, Germany. Author’s email address: holger.diessel@uni-jena.de.

1. Introduction

Adverbial clauses are subordinate clauses that are combined with a mainclause in complex sentences. As can be seen in examples (1) to (4), in

English the adverbial clause may precede or follow the associated main

clause. This raises the interesting question of what motivates the sequen-

tial ordering of main and subordinate clauses. When does the adverbial

clause precede the main clause and when does it follow it?

(1) If it’s a really nice day, we could walk.

(2) I’d quite like to go to Richmond Park because I was reading about it

in this novel.

(3) When you get a tax rebate, you get the money back after about a

year, don’t you?(4) Weigh up all these factors carefully before you commit yourself to

the manoeuvre.

1.1. Competing motivations for the positioning of adverbial clauses

In a recent paper, Diessel (2005) argued that the ordering of main and ad-

verbial clauses is motivated by functional and cognitive pressures from

three sources: (1) syntactic parsing, (2) discourse pragmatics, and (3) se-

mantics. Drawing on Hawkins’ (1994, 2004) processing theory of constit-

uent order and complexity, he shows that adverbial clauses are easier toprocess, and thus more highly preferred, if they follow the main clause.

According to Hawkins, the human processor prefers linear structures

that allow for fast and easy access to the recognition domain. The recog-

nition domain is defined as the string of linguistic elements that must be

processed and kept in working memory until the parser has accessed all

immediate constituents of a phrase once the mother node of the phrase

has been recognized.

Complex sentences consist of two clauses functioning as the immediateconstituents of a bi-clausal structure, which is organized by the subordi-

nate conjunction creating the mother node Scomplex that dominates the

complex sentence construction (cf. Hawkins 1994: 360). If the adverbial

clause follows the main clause, the subordinate conjunction establishes

the Scomplex-node right after the main clauses has been processed and be-

fore the adverbial clause is accessed, which means that the two immediate

constituents of the complex sentence can be attached to their mother node

(i.e., Scomplex) as soon as this node is constructed. In contrast, if the adver-bial clause precedes the main clause, the subordinate conjunction estab-

lishes the Scomplex-node right at the beginning of the bi-clausal structure,

which means that the human parser first has to process the adverbial

466 H. Diessel

clause before the second immediate constituent, i.e., the main clause, can

be attached to Scomplex. Complex sentences with an initial adverbial clause

thus have a longer recognition domain (5a) than complex sentences with

final adverbial clauses (cf. 5b and cf. Diessel 2005). If the human pro-

cessor prefers complex sentences with final adverbial clauses, one has to

ask what motivates the occurrence of initial adverbial clauses. Why do

speakers prepose adverbial clauses if complex sentences with final adver-bial clauses are easier to parse?

(5) a. [ When . . . . . . . . . ]SUB [ . . . . . . . . . . . ]Main recognition domain

b. [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]Main [ when . . . . . . ]SUB recognition domain

One factor that motivates the preposing of adverbial clauses is theirpragmatic function. A number of studies have argued and presented evi-

dence that the discourse function of an adverbial clause varies with its po-

sition relative to the main clause (cf. Chafe 1984; Diessel 2005; Ford

1993; Givon 1990: 846–847; Ramsay 1987; Thompson and Longacre

1985; Thompson 1985, 1987; Verstraete 2004). If the adverbial clause fol-

lows the main clause it tends to provide new information, or else func-

tions as an afterthought; but if the adverbial clause precedes the main

clause, it serves to organize the information flow in the ongoing discourse.As Chafe (1984), Givon (1990: 846–847), and others have argued, initial

adverbial clauses provide a guidepost for the interpretation of subsequent

clauses; they are often used at the beginning of a new paragraph or a new

turn to organize the transition between discourse topics. In other words,

the occurrence of initial adverbial clauses is motivated by particular dis-

course-pragmatic functions. Complex sentences containing initial adver-

bial clauses can be seen as particular constructions that speakers use to

stage information, i.e., to lay a thematic foundation for the following dis-course (cf. Ford 1993: Ch 3; Givon 1990: 846–847; Thompson 1987; Ver-

straete 2004).

However, this general orientation function of initial adverbial clauses

does not explain why certain semantic types of adverbial clauses occur in

initial position more readily than others. In addition to syntactic parsing

and discourse pragmatics, we thus have to consider the meaning of com-

plex sentences to account for the sequential ordering of main and subor-

dinate clauses. In the literature, the following major semantic types of ad-verbial clauses are usually distinguished: temporal clauses, indicating a

temporal relationship between two events; conditional clauses, expressing

a condition or prerequisite for the realisation of the main clause event;

Iconicity of sequence 467

causal clauses, providing a cause or reason for the proposition expressed

in the main clause; result clauses, referring to the result or consequence of

the main clause event; and purpose clauses, denoting the goal or purpose

of the activity expressed in the main clause (see Quirk et al. 1985: Ch 12

for a detailed discussion of the various semantic types of adverbial

clauses).

Using corpus data from both spoken and written genres, a number ofstudies have demonstrated that temporal, conditional, causal, result, and

purpose clauses tend to occur in di¤erent positions relative to the main

clause (cf. Altenberg 1984; Biber et al. 1999: 820–825; Diessel 1996,

2005; Ford 1993; Quirk et al. 1985: Ch 12; Ramsay 1987). To simplify,

conditional clauses usually precede the main clause, temporal clauses are

commonly used both before and after the main clause, and causal, result,

and purpose clauses predominantly follow the associated main clause.

Interestingly, the same positional patterns have also been observed inmany other languages across the world. Investigating the distribution of

adverbial clauses in a representative sample of the world’s languages,

Diessel (2001) identified two common cross-linguistic patterns. There are

languages in which all adverbial clauses precede the main clause, unless

they are extraposed (e.g., Japanese), and there are languages in which

the positioning of adverbial clauses varies with their meaning (e.g., Pun-

jabi). In the latter language type, conditional clauses usually precede the

main clause, temporal clauses exhibit a mixed pattern of pre- and post-posing, and causal, result, and purpose clauses commonly follow the as-

sociated clause (see also Hetterle 2007).

1.2. Iconicity of sequence

Another factor that seems to influence clause order is iconicity. The no-

tion of iconicity comprises two basic types, diagrammatic iconicity, whichis concerned with structural (or relational) similarities between the sign

and the referent, and imagic iconicity, which is concerned with substantial

similarities between the sign and the referent (e.g., sound symbolism). The

notion of diagrammatic iconicity has been used in various functional and

cognitive explanation of linguistic structure (cf. Croft 2003: Ch 4.2;

Dressler 1995; Fenk-Oczlon 1991; Givon 1985, 1991; Haiman 1980,

1983, 1985, 1994, 2006; Haspelmath forthc.; Itkonen 2004; Jakobson

1965[1971]; Plank 1979; Tabakowska et al. 2007; Taylor 2002: 45–48).The general idea ‘‘behind [diagrammatic] iconicity is that the structure of

language reflects in some way the structure of experience’’ (Croft 2003:

102); but this general notion of iconicity subsumes a wide variety of dif-

468 H. Diessel

ferent meanings.1 In this paper, I concentrate on a particular subtype of

diagrammatic iconicity, iconicity of sequence, which refers to the sequen-

tial ordering of linguistic elements in discourse and complex sentences.

Note that this kind of iconic motivation cannot be explained by fre-

quency of occurrence (cf. Haspelmath 2008) or e¤ort reduction (cf. Hai-

man 2006) as other types of iconicity.

There are a number of studies suggesting that clause order in complexsentences is usually iconic. For instance, Lehmann (1974) and Haiman

(1978, 1983) argued that conditional clauses tend to precede the main

clause because conditional clauses refer to an event that is conceptually

prior to the one expressed in the main clause; Greenberg (1963 [1966])

proposed that purpose clauses follow the main clause because they denote

the intended endpoint or result of the activity expressed in the associated

clause (cf. Schmidtke in press); and Clark (1971) argued that after-clauses

precede the main clause more often than before-clauses, because after-clauses refer to an event that occurs prior to the one in the main clause,

whereas before-clauses refer to a posterior event (cf. Diessel 2005).

While all of these studies suggest that iconicity of sequence is an impor-

tant determinant of the linear structuring of complex sentences, it must be

emphasized that the distributional properties of certain semantic types of

adverbial clauses are not consistent with the iconicity principle. In partic-

ular, the positioning of causal clauses violates the iconicity of sequence.

Although causes and reasons are conceptually prior to the e¤ect ex-pressed in the main clause, causal clauses tend to occur sentence-finally

(cf. Altenberg 1984; Diessel 2001, 2005; Ford 1993: Chs 3–4; Hetterle

2007). Across languages, causes and reasons are commonly expressed in

constructions that follow the semantically associated clause, suggesting

that iconicity of sequence is not relevant for the positioning of causal

clauses. Diessel (2006) argues that the tendency of causal clauses to follow

the main clause is motivated by the fact that causal clauses are primarily

1. In a recent review of the literature, Haspelmath (2008) identified eight di¤erent sub-

types of (diagrammatic) iconicity: (1) iconicity of quantity (greater quantities are

expressed by more linguistic structure), (2) iconicity of complexity (more complex

meanings are expressed by more complex forms), (3) iconicity of cohesion (semantic

cohesion is reflected in structural cohesion), (4) iconicity of paradigmatic isomorphism

(one meaning, one form in the system), (5) iconicity of syntagmatic isomorphism (one

form, one meaning in the clause), (6) iconicity of sequence (sequences of form match

sequences of experiences), (7) iconicity of contiguity (semantically associated elements

occur adjacent to each other), and (8) iconicity of repetition (repetition in linguistic

form reflects repeated experiences).

Iconicity of sequence 469

used to back up a previous statement that the hearer may not accept or

may not find convincing.

Moreover, while the positioning of conditional clauses is consistent

with the iconicity of sequence, there is an alternative explanation for their

distribution. Conditional clauses precede the main clause because they de-

note a hypothetical situation, providing a conceptual framework (or men-

tal space) for the interpretation of subsequent clauses (cf. Dancygier 1998;Dancygier and Sweetser 2000; Lehmann 1974). If the conditional clause

follows the main clause, the hearer may at first misinterpret the preceding

main clause as a factual statement. Since the revision of a previous utter-

ance increases the processing load, there is a strong motivation to place

conditional clauses before the main clause (cf. Diessel 2005). Thus, it

seems that the iconicity principle is not immediately relevant for the posi-

tioning of causal and conditional clauses.

Moreover, one might hypothesize that iconicity of sequence, which de-notes the temporal dimension of experience, primarily concerns the order-

ing of temporally related clauses. Previous studies suggest that temporal

clauses denoting a prior event precede the main clause more often than

temporal clauses of posteriority (cf. Clark 1971; Diessel 2005). But al-

though iconicity of sequence has been widely discussed in the literature,

it has never been systematically investigated. It is the purpose of this

study to fill this gap. Using corpus data from spoken and written English,

the paper presents the first quantitative analysis of the positioning of tem-poral adverbial clauses to systematically investigate the e¤ect of the icon-

icity principle on clause order.

2. Analysis

The analysis concentrates on five types of temporal clauses marked by the

subordinating conjunctions when, after, before, once, and until. The five

conjunctions have been chosen for two reasons: first, they are among the

most frequent temporal conjunctions in English, and second, they are se-

mantically especially interesting for the purpose of this study.

When-clauses are interesting because when is the only temporal con-

junction in English that does not specify the temporal sequence betweenmain and adverbial clauses. As can be seen in examples (6) to (8), when-

clauses denote situations that can occur prior, posterior, or simultane-

ously to the one expressed in the main clause.

(6) We shall make up our mind when the IMF has reported. [prior](7) They had already made breaches in the defensive wall of sand [ . . . ]

when the order came. [posterior]

(8) I did cook occasionally, when they were out. [simultaneous]

470 H. Diessel

The four other conjunctions are interesting because they form semantic

pairs: after and before describe a temporal sequence of two events from

reverse perspectives (cf. 9–10). After-clauses refer to an event that pre-

cedes the one expressed in the main clause, whereas before-clauses refer

to a posterior event. The iconicity principle would thus predict that

after-clauses precede the main clause more frequently than before-clauses.

(9) a. After her father died, of course, Isabel’s trust fund included

quite a substantial holding in the company. [prior]

b. I put Emily back in her own bed, after she’d fallen asleep.

[prior]

(10) a. Before the debt crisis set in, Brazil was enjoying growth rates of

7 percent per year. [posterior]

b. The heat [ . . . ] from the sun is retained by the earth for a while,

before it’s radiated away. [posterior]

Quirk et al. (1985: 1082) point out that after- and before-clauses are not

generally converses of one another. Both clause types have special uses in

which the two constructions have di¤erent meanings. For instance, a

complex sentence with a before-clause referring to a non-factual (or coun-

terfactual) situation does not have the same meaning as the correspond-

ing complex sentence with an after-clause (cf. 11–12); but constructions

of this type are rare (examples 11–12 are the only counterfactual before-clauses in the entire database).

(11) a. An Asian man [ . . . ] triggered the alarm before I could stop

him.

A I could stop an Asian man, after he triggered the alarm.

(12) a. Before he could move in for the tackle, Hughes had driven the

ball high past Grobbelaar from 25 yards.

A He could move in for the tackle, after Hughes had driven theball high past Grobbelaar from 25 yards.

Once and until parallel after and before: an adverbial clause introduced

by once refers to a prior event, whereas an adverbial clause marked by un-

til denotes a posterior situation. However, once and until di¤er from after

and before in that they introduce adverbial clauses that are telic: once in-

dicates a designated starting point of the situation expressed in the main

clause and until marks its endpoint (cf. 13–14).

(13) a. Once the problem became clear, policy was tightened. [prior]

b. We’ll be pretty busy once our course gets back into full swing.[prior]

(14) a. Until I’d spoken to William Davis I’d no idea that the monar-

chy was the only bright spot on our horizon. [posterior]

Iconicity of sequence 471

b. There should be no further cuts in interest rates, until the un-

derlying rate of inflation begins to tumble. [posterior]

Note that all five conjunctions can have non-temporal meanings (cf.

Quirk et al. 1985: 1078–1086). When-clauses may have a conditional in-

terpretation, after-clauses are sometimes interpreted with a causal conno-

tation, before-clauses can express a purpose or goal, once-clauses are

often conditional, and until-clauses may express a combination of time,

purpose, and result. However, these non-temporal semantic features are

not or only weakly grammaticalized; they usually emerge as conversa-tional implicatures from the interpretation of temporal clauses in the dis-

course context.2

2.1. Study 1

2.1.1. Methods. The analysis is based on data from the British Com-ponent of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). The ICE-GB

corpus consists of 1 million words compiled from a wide variety of spo-

ken and written genres. The corpus is tagged and includes detailed infor-

mation about syntactic structure. For this study, I randomly selected 200

when-clauses, 200 after- and before-clauses (100 after and 100 before), and

200 once- and until-clauses (100 once and 100 until ). Half of the data

come from spoken discourse, the other half come from written genres.

The study is restricted to finite adverbial clauses and disregards participleconstructions and gerunds. After the initial search, I excluded all adver-

bial clauses that were not relevant for the purpose of the current investi-

gation. Specifically, I excluded adverbial clauses that are inserted into the

main clause (cf. 15) and adverbial clauses that do not occur with an asso-

ciated main clause (cf. 16).

(15) And the reason for that before you ask me was that uhm everybodywas confusing my brain.

(16) Uhm half an hour after I leave probably.

Moreover, I excluded adverbial clauses that are related to the main

clause at the speech act level (cf. Hengeveld 1989). There were, for in-

stance, several before-clauses that speakers used as independent speech

acts to coordinate the interaction between the speech participants (cf.17–18).

2. In some uses, the non-temporal meanings have been conventionalized as in I would vote

for Kennedy before I vote for Bush; but constructions of this type are rare.

472 H. Diessel

(17) Now before you . . . uhm . . . break into groups and look at the re-

sults of the two analyses and try and see what’s going on . . . any

sort of questions?

(18) Uhm well before we get into the detailed discussion of all of this

have you got something else Mary?

Since adverbial clauses of this type do not describe a sequence of two

related events, they were disregarded. Table 1 shows the frequency of the

five conjunctions after the irrelevant items were excluded.

All sentences were manually coded for two features: (1) the position of

the adverbial clause relative to the main clause (initial ADV-clause vs. fi-

nal ADV-clause), and (2) the conceptual order of main and adverbialclauses (prior ADV-clause vs. posterior ADV-clause vs. simultaneous

ADV-clause). The data were separately coded by the author and a

student assistant; intercoder reliability was very high, with almost 100

percent.

2.1.2. Results. The majority of temporal clauses follow the main

clause. Overall, there are 166 initial and 404 final adverbial clauses in the

data, i.e., 70.9 percent of the temporal clauses follow the main clause andonly 29.1 percent precede it. Figure 1 shows the proportions of initial and

final adverbial clauses expressing a prior, posterior, or simultaneously oc-

curring event. As can be seen in the graph, 53.9 percent (N ¼ 119) of the

prior adverbial clauses precede the main clause, 22.2 percent (N ¼ 36) of

the simultaneous adverbial clauses are preposed, and only 5.9 percent

(N ¼ 11) of the posterior temporal clauses are placed before the associ-

ated main clause. There is thus a clear correlation between conceptual

order and linear structure: temporal clauses denoting a prior event pre-cede the main clause more often than temporal clauses denoting a simul-

taneously occurring event, which in turn are more frequently preposed to

the main clause than temporal clauses of posteriority. A 2 � 3 w2-analysis

Table 1. Raw frequencies

Spoken Written Total

when 94 95 189

after 47 50 97

before 41 46 87

once 48 50 98

until 49 50 99

Total 279 291 570

Iconicity of sequence 473

revealed that the association between conceptual order and linear struc-

ture is significant (w2 ¼ 185:13, df ¼ 2, p < 0:001).

While there is a preference for an iconic clause order, it must be em-

phasized that a significant number of complex sentences violate the icon-

icity of sequence. If we disregard adverbial clauses referring to a simulta-

neously occurring event, there are 295 complex sentences with iconic and113 complex sentences with non-iconic clause orders, i.e., 27.7 percent of

the temporal clauses examined in this study violate the iconicity principle.

Interestingly, complex sentences containing initial adverbial clauses are

more consistent with the iconicity principle than complex sentences con-

taining final adverbial clauses. As can be seen in Figure 2, if the adverbial

clause precedes the main clause, 91.5 percent (N ¼ 119) of all sentences

are iconic, but if the adverbial clause follows the main clause, only 63.3

percent (N ¼ 176) exhibit an iconic ordering (w2 ¼ 35:25, df ¼ 1,p < 0:001).

Since the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses varies with the sub-

ordinate conjunction, I also examined the positional patterns of individ-

ual types of temporal clauses. As can be seen in Table 2, when-clauses

tend to follow the main clause: 51 when-clauses precede the main clause

and 138 when-clauses occur after it. The majority of the when-clauses de-

note a situation that occurs simultaneously to the one expressed in the

main clause. As can be seen in this table, there are 26 prior when-clauses,162 simultaneous when-clauses, and only 1 posterior when-clause.

The positioning of the when-clause correlates with the conceptual or-

der: 57.7 percent of the prior when-clauses precede the main clause, but

Figure 1. Conceptual order and linear structure

474 H. Diessel

only 22.3 percent of the simultaneously occurring when-clauses are pre-

posed. Leaving aside the one posterior when-clause, a 2 � 2 w2-analysis

revealed a significant association between linear structure and conceptual

order (w2 ¼ 14:26, df ¼ 1, p < 0:001), confirming the hypothesis that

clause order is iconic.

Like when-clauses, after- and before-clauses tend to occur at the end of

a complex sentence. As can be seen in Table 3, there are 151 final andonly 33 initial after- and before-clauses in the data. Of the initial subordi-

nate clauses, 27 are introduced by after and only 6 are introduced by be-

fore. A 2 � 2 w2-analysis revealed a significant association between clause

Figure 2. Clause order and iconicity

Table 2. When-clauses—conceptual order and linear structure

Linear order Prior Simultaneous Posterior Total

Initial 15 36 0 51

Final 11 126 1 138

Total 26 162 1 189

Table 3. After- and before-clauses—conceptual order and linear structure

Linear order after before Total

initial 27 6 33

final 70 81 151

Total 97 87 184

Iconicity of sequence 475

order and clause type (w2 ¼ 13:66, df ¼ 1, p < 0:001), suggesting that the

conceptual order expressed by after and before influences the ordering of

main and the subordinate clauses. Note, however, that complex sentences

with initial adverbial clauses are more often iconic than complex sen-

tences with final adverbial clauses: 81.8 percent (N ¼ 27) of the sentences

with initial after- and before-clauses are iconic, but only 53.6 percent

(N ¼ 81) of the sentences with final adverbial clauses are consistent withthe iconicity of sequence (w2 ¼ 8:868, df ¼ 1, p < 0:003).

Interestingly, before-clauses functioning as independent speech acts (see

examples 18–19 above) always precede the main clause: there are five

before-clauses of this type in the data and all five clauses occur before

the main clause. However, even if we include speech act before-clauses

into the analysis, adverbial clauses marked by after precede the main

clause significantly more often than adverbial clauses marked by before

(w2 ¼ 7:411, df ¼ 1, p < 0:006).Finally, once and until parallel after and before in that they indicate a

temporal sequence between two situations: once-clauses are conceptually

prior to the event in the main clause, while until-clauses denote a poste-

rior situation. However, the distributional contrast between once and until

is much more pronounced than the distributional contrast between after

and before. As can be seen in Table 4, 77 once-clauses precede the main

clause but only 5 until-clauses are preposed. A 2 � 2 w2-analysis revealed

that the distributional di¤erence between once and until is highly signifi-cant (w2 ¼ 109:56, df ¼ 1, p < 0:001). Once again, the iconicity principle

is more consistent with complex sentences containing initial adverbial

clauses than with complex sentences containing final adverbial clauses:

93.9 percent (N ¼ 77) of the initial adverbial clauses occur in complex

sentences that are iconic, but only 81.7 percent (N ¼ 94) of the final

adverbial clauses are embedded in an iconically structured sentence

(w2 ¼ 6:182, df ¼ 1, p < 0:013).

To summarize, we have seen that the positioning of temporal adverbialclauses varies with conceptual order: temporal clauses denoting a prior

event precede the main clause significantly more often than temporal

clauses denoting a simultaneous event, which in turn are more frequently

Table 4. Once- and until-clauses—conceptual order and linear structure

Linear order once until Total

initial 77 5 82

final 21 94 115

Total 98 99 197

476 H. Diessel

preposed to the main clause than temporal clauses of posteriority. The

analysis suggests that iconicity of sequence has a significant e¤ect on the

positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English. However, the data

also reveal that the iconicity principle cannot be the sole determinant of

the sequential structuring of complex sentences because 27.3 percent of

the sentences examined in this study do not have an iconic clause order;

that is, more than a quarter of all sentences violate the iconicity of se-quence. Moreover, the iconicity principle does not explain why complex

sentences with initial adverbial clauses are more often iconic than com-

plex sentences with final adverbial clauses (cf. Figure 2), and why the po-

sitioning of the temporal adverbial clause varies with the subordinate

conjunction. For instance, although both after and once introduce prior

adverbial clauses, once-clauses precede the main clause more often than

after-clauses (cf. Tables 2 and 3). In order to account for these findings,

we have to include additional factors into the analysis. The second studywas designed to investigate the combined e¤ect of the iconicity principle

and other factors influencing clause order in English.

2.2. Study 2

Based on the previous research (see Section 1.1.), we may hypothesize

that in addition to iconicity of sequence the following factors are relevant

for the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses:

1. The semantic relationship between main and adverbial clauses. Com-

plex sentences containing temporal adverbial clauses often imply a

conditional, causal, or purposive relationship (see above). Since con-

ditional clauses tend to precede the main clause, while causal and

purpose clauses usually follow it, it is a plausible hypothesis that the

positioning of temporal adverbial clauses is a¤ected by their implicit

meanings. This may account for the distributional di¤erences be-

tween once-clauses, which are often conditional, and after-clauses,which can be causal.

2. The length of the adverbial clause. It is well-known that heavy con-

stituents tend to occur sentence-finally (Behaghel 1932). There are

two explanations for this: information structure and syntactic parsing

(see Wasow 2002 for a review of the literature). In the discourse-

pragmatic literature it is commonly assumed that given information

tends to precede new information because new information needs to

be grounded in information that is already known to the hearer.Since new information needs more explicit coding than given infor-

mation, long constituents tend to occur at the end of a sentence (cf.

Dik 1989: 351). Alternatively, Hawkins (2004: 104–108) argued that

Iconicity of sequence 477

right-branching languages like English tend to place long constituents

at the end of the sentence because the order short-before-long is

easier to parse than the reverse ordering (see above). Since adverbial

clauses are heavy constituents it is a plausible hypothesis that the pre-

dominance of final temporal clauses results from the weight of these

constructions. Moreover, we may assume that temporal clauses pre-

ceding the main clause tend to be shorter than temporal clauses thatfollow it (cf. Diessel 2005).

3. The complexity of adverbial clauses. Hawkins (1994, 2004) argued

that constituent order is crucially a¤ected by the structural complex-

ity of linguistic elements. Specifically, he claimed that in right-

branching languages like English, syntactically complex structures

tend to occur sentence-finally because in final position they are easier

to parse. Since adverbial clauses can vary in terms of their complex-

ity, we may assume that initial temporal clauses are structurally lesscomplex than final adverbial clauses.

2.2.1. Methods. In order to test these hypotheses, I conducted a binary

logistic regression analysis, in which all of the above mentioned factors

are taken into account. Logistic regression analysis is an extension of or-

dinary regression analysis, in which the dependent variable is categorical

(rather than continuous as in ordinary regression analysis) (cf. Tabachnikand Fidell 2004: Ch 12; Backhaus et al. 2006: Ch 7). The goal of binary

logistic regression analysis is to predict the value of the dichotomous de-

pendent variable from one or more predictor variables that can be contin-

uous, discrete, dichotomous, or a mix of them (cf. Tabachnik and Fidell

2004: 517; Backhaus et al. 2006: 428).3 In the current study, logistic re-

3. Logistic regression analysis involves the same formula as ordinary regression analysis

except that the dependent variable is expressed by the natural logarithm of the odds,

i.e., ln(p/1 � p) ¼ a þ bx. The odds provide a probability measure that is defined as

the ratio of the probability that an event A will occur and the probability that the event

A will not occur, i.e., odds ¼ P(A)/1 � P(A). The odds must be distinguished from sim-

ple probabilities. For instance, in a corpus of a 100 complex sentences with 40 initial ad-

verbial clauses and 60 final adverbial clauses, the odds of randomly selecting an initial

adverbial clause are 40/60 ¼ 0.666, and the odds of randomly selecting a final adverbial

clause are 60/40 ¼ 1.5. By contrast, the probability of selecting an initial adverbial

clause is 0.4 and the probability of selecting a final adverbial clause is 0.6. Probability

values increase linearly, but the odds increase exponentially (cf. 10/90 ¼ 0.11, 20/

80 ¼ 0.25, 30/70 ¼ 0.43, 40/60 ¼ 0.66, 50/50 ¼ 1, 60/40 ¼ 1.5, 70/30 ¼ 2.3, 80/

20 ¼ 4, 90/10 ¼ 9, 95/5 ¼ 19, 99/1 ¼ 99). The natural logarithm of the odds transfers

the exponential curve into a symmetrical S-curve which defines the two outcomes of a

binary logistic regression analysis (cf. Tabachnik and Fidell 2004: Ch 7; Backhaus et al.

2006: Ch 7).

478 H. Diessel

gression analysis was used to predict the position of the adverbial clause

(i.e., initial or final) from the following set of predictors: conceptual order

(i.e., iconicity), meaning, length, and syntactic complexity. Figure 3 shows

the research design.

Conceptual order and syntactic complexity were coded as dichotomous

variables: adverbial clauses denoting a prior event were distinguished

from adverbial clauses denoting a posterior or simultaneously occurringevent, and simple adverbial clauses consisting of a single clause were dis-

tinguished from complex adverbial clauses containing another subordi-

nate clause. Meaning was coded as a discrete variable with three levels:

(i) purely temporal, (ii) temporal with an implicit conditional meaning,

and (iii) temporal with an implicit causal or purposive meaning. Finally,

length was coded as a continuous variable, measured by dividing the

number of words in the adverbial clause by the total number of words in

the complex sentence.4 For all features, intercoder reliability was at least95 percent.

2.2.2. Results. Table 5 shows the raw frequencies of the categorical

predictors, i.e., conceptual order, complexity, and meaning, and Figure 4

shows the histograms of the continuous predictor, relative length (i.e., the

ratio of adverbial clause/complex sentence), for final and initial temporal

clauses.

Figure 3. Research design

4. For instance, if the adverbial clause consists of 6 words and the complex sentence of 13

words, the relative length of the adverbial clause is 6/13 ¼ 0.4615384, i.e., 46.15 percent.

Iconicity of sequence 479

Note that the frequency distributions are consistent with the proposed

hypotheses: prior temporal clauses precede the main clause on average

more often than posterior and simultaneous temporal clauses. In addi-

tion, Table 5 shows that simple adverbial clauses are more often preposed

to the main clause than complex adverbial clauses (i.e., adverbial clauses

including another subordinate clause), and that temporal clauses with an

implicit conditional meaning tend to precede the main clause, whereas

temporal clauses with an implicit causal or purposive meaning almost al-ways follow it. The histograms show that the average relative length of

final temporal clauses is greater than the average relative length of initial

adverbial clauses, but the di¤erence is small: if the adverbial clause fol-

Table 5. Frequencies of the categorical predictor variables

VARIABLE LEVEL INITIAL FINAL TOTAL

Conceptual order 1. posterior/simultaneous

2. prior

47

119

302

102

349

221

Complexity 1. simple

2. complex

138

28

309

95

447

123

Meaning 1. purely temporal

2. conditional

3. causal/purposive

89

76

1

299

52

53

388

128

54

Figure 4. Frequency of the relative length of initial and final temporal clauses

480 H. Diessel

lows the main clause the mean relative length of the adverbial clause is 45

percent, and if the adverbial clause precedes the main clause the mean rel-

ative length of the adverbial clause is 40.5 percent of the entire sentence.

In order to test if and to what extent these asymmetries are relevant for

the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses, I conducted a stepwise lo-

gistic regression analysis starting with the maximal model in which all

predictor variables and their interactions are included in the regression.This model is compared to the null (or empty) model in which none of

the predictor variables is included (cf. Tabachnik and Fidell 2004: Ch

12; Backhaus et al. 2006: Ch 7). In the current study, the maximal model

was significantly di¤erent from the null model, indicating that the predic-

tors as a group reliably distinguish between initial and final position.

However, since the interactions between the various predictor variables

were not significant, they were excluded from the model (cf. Crawley

2005: 104). In the next step, I computed a regression model includingonly the predictor variables without their interactions. In this model,

three of the predictor variables turned out to be significantly related to

the dependent variable, i.e., conceptual order, meaning, and length. Since

syntactic complexity was not significantly related to clause order, it was

removed from the regression model. The resulting minimally adequate

model fit the data significantly better than the null model (w2 ¼ 174:69,

df ¼ 4, p < 0.001) and had almost the same explanatory power (Nagel-

kerke’s R2 ¼ 0:38) as the maximal model (Nagelkerke’s R2 ¼ 0:39). Theoverall prediction accuracy increased from 70.9 percent in the null model

to 80 percent in the minimally adequate model, which is a reasonable im-

provement given that prediction accuracy can only increase if the model

correctly predicts some of the initial adverbial clauses (which account for

only 29.1 percent of the data).

As in ordinary multiple regression analysis, regression coe‰cients indi-

cate the e¤ect of the individual predictor variables on the outcome; but

since the regression coe‰cients of logistic regression analysis are di‰cultto interpret, they are commonly transformed into odds ratios, which is a

measure of e¤ect size that indicates the likelihood of a particular outcome

to occur.5 Table 6 provides a summary of the analysis of the predictor

variables in the minimally adequate model.

5. Odds ratios are calculated by dividing the odds of an event occurring by the odds of an-

other event occurring. For instance, if 65 percent of the days during one year are sunny

and 35 percent are rainy, the odds of a sunny day are 1.86 and the odds of a rainy day

are 0.54 and the odds ratio (sunny/rainy) is 3.43, which means that a sunny day is 3.43

times more likely to occur than a rainy day.

Iconicity of sequence 481

The regression coe‰cients indicate the direction of change induced by a

particular predictor: positive values (which correspond to odds ratios

larger than 1.0) indicate that the predictor variable increases the likeli-

hood of the adverbial clause to precede the main clause; negative values

(which correspond to odds ratios smaller than 1.0) indicate that the pre-dictor variable decreases the likelihood of the adverbial clause to precede

the main clause. The Wald w2-values and the associated levels of signifi-

cance indicate that the predictor variables (conceptual order, meaning,

and length) are significant. The odds ratios show the change in odds for

an adverbial clause to be placed in initial position. For instance, the

odds ratio for conceptual order indicates that for adverbial clauses denot-

ing a prior event the odds of preceding the main clause are 6.7 times

larger than the odds for adverbial clauses denoting a posterior or simulta-neous event. The two final columns show the lower and upper boundaries

of the confidence intervals for the odds ratios (cf. Backhaus et al. 2005:

475–476).

Note that conceptual order and conditional meaning increase the like-

lihood of the adverbial clause to precede the main clause (compared to

posterior/simultaneous temporal clauses with purely temporal meaning),

whereas a causal/purposive meaning and an increase in length decrease

the likelihood of the adverbial clause to precede the main clause (com-pared to purely temporal clauses that are shorter). Note also that concep-

tual order, i.e., the encoding of a prior event, is the strongest predictor for

the initial occurrence of a temporal adverbial clause.

Since the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses varies with the sub-

ordinate conjunction (see above), I also computed regression models for

individual types of temporal clauses. Specifically, I developed three sepa-

rate logistic regression models for when-clauses, after- and before-clauses,

and once- and until-clauses using the same stepwise procedure as in themodel described above (Table 7 in the Appendix provides a summary of

the frequency data). Interestingly, while conceptual order had a signifi-

cant e¤ect on the positioning of all temporal clauses (when: w2 ¼ 12:149,

Table 6. Results of the logistic regression analysis

Factor reg. coef.

B

Wald

w2

df p odds

ratio

lower

CI

upper

CI

Conceptual order 1.902 73.69 1 0.001 6.70 4.34 10.35

Meaning

a. causal/purpose

b. conditional

�2.775

1.364

41.07

7.27

31.20

2

1

1

0.001

0.007

0.001

0.06

3.91

0.01

2.42

0.469

6.31

Length �1.343 7.39 1 0.001 0.19 0.06 0.63

482 H. Diessel

df ¼ 1, p < 0:001; after/before: w2 ¼ 14:504, df ¼ 1, p < 0:001; once/

until: w2 ¼ 32:285, df ¼ 1; p < 0:001), meaning and length were only sig-

nificant for certain types of temporal clauses, suggesting that the e¤ect of

conceptual order is more consistent across clause types than the e¤ect of

the other predictor variables. Meaning was significant for the positioning

of conditional once- and until-clauses (w2 ¼ 6:491, df ¼ 1; p < 0:011) and

marginally significant for the positioning of causal/purposive after- andbefore-clauses (w2 ¼ 3:601, df ¼ 1; p < 0:061); but although when-clauses

were often used with an implicit conditional meaning, conditionality did

not a¤ect their position (w2 ¼ 9:546, df ¼ 1; p < 0:010). Length was only

significant for once- and until-clauses (w2 ¼ 6:491, df ¼ 1; p < 0:011), but

not for when-, after-, and before-clauses (when: w2 ¼ 2:000, df ¼ 1,

p > 0:157; after/before: w2 ¼ 0:398, df ¼ 1, p > 0:528).

3. Discussion

The analysis suggests that iconicity of sequence has a strong and consis-

tent e¤ect on the linear structuring of complex sentences with temporal

adverbial clauses. Temporal clauses referring to a prior event precede the

main clause more often than temporal clauses expressing a simultane-

ously occurring event, which in turn precede the main clause more often

than temporal clauses of posteriority. The iconicity of sequence is in ac-

cordance with both complex sentences in which the conceptual order ofmain and adverbial clauses is encoded by the subordinate conjunction

(i.e., after-, before-, once-, and until-clauses) and complex sentences in

which the conceptual order is inferred from the meaning of the whole sen-

tence because the conjunction itself does not express a particular order

(i.e., when-clauses). In both types of sentences, clause order correlates

with conceptual structure: after- and once-clauses, referring to a prior

event, precede the main clause significantly more often than before- and

until-clauses, denoting a posterior situation, and when-clauses referringto a prior event are more frequently preposed to the main clause than

when-clauses denoting a posterior or simultaneously occurring event.

The analysis also revealed that complex sentences including initial adver-

bial clauses are more consistent with the iconicity principle than complex

sentences including final adverbial clauses: while complex sentences with

initial adverbial clauses are almost always iconic, more than one third of

all complex sentences with final adverbial clauses violate the iconicity of

sequence.Another factor that correlates with the positioning of temporal adver-

bial clauses is their implicit meaning. About one third of all adverbial

clauses examined in this study imply a conditional, causal, or purposive

Iconicity of sequence 483

relationship between the events expressed by main and subordinate

clauses. Like ordinary conditional clauses, temporal clauses with an im-

plicit conditional meaning tend to precede the main clauses, and like or-

dinary causal and purposive clauses, temporal clauses with an implicit

causal or purposive meaning almost always follow it. This may explain

why once- and after-clauses di¤er in their distribution: although both

types of adverbial clauses denote a prior event, once-clauses, which areoften conditional, precede the main clause more often than after-clauses,

which are frequently used with an implicit causal meaning. Note that in

the logistic regression analysis the meaning of the adverbial clause had

less predictive power than iconicity of sequence. Moreover, the analysis

showed that while the iconicity principle influenced all temporal clauses,

the implicit meaning was only relevant for certain types of temporal

clauses.

Apart from conceptual order and implicit meaning, the length ratio ofmain and adverbial clauses was a significant predictor of clause order.

The analysis revealed that initial temporal clauses account for a smaller

proportion of the overall length of the complex sentence than final adver-

bial clauses, i.e., adverbial clauses that precede the main clause are

shorter than adverbial clauses that follow it; but since the di¤erence was

relatively small, length had only a small e¤ect on the positioning of the

adverbial clause. In the conjunction-specific analyses, once- and until-

clauses were the only adverbial clauses for which the length ratio was asignificant predictor.

Why do these factors influence the positioning of temporal adverbial

clauses? I suggest that all of the factors examined in this study are rele-

vant for clause order because they influence the processing of complex

sentences. Specifically, I claim that iconicity of sequence, which is com-

monly characterized as a semantic principle, can be interpreted as a pro-

cessing principle that contributes to the overall processing load of a com-

plex sentence construction because a non-iconic clause order is di‰cult toplan and to interpret. As Givon (1985: 189) put it: ‘‘All other things being

equal, a coded experience is easier to store, retrieve and communicate if

the code is maximally isomorphic to the experience’’ (emphasis is the

original). There are several experimental studies supporting this view.

For instance, Ohtsuka and Brewer (1992) found that iconic sentences

combined by next are easier to understand and to remember than non-

iconic sentences combined by before, and Clark (1971) found that

English-speaking children have fewer di‰culties to understand before-and after-clauses if clause order is iconic (see also Carni and French

1984; Clark 1973; Coker 1978; Diessel 2004; Ferreiro and Sinclair 1971;

Trosborg 1982). Assuming that non-iconic orders are di‰cult to plan

484 H. Diessel

and to interpret, it is a plausible hypothesis that complex sentences tend

to be iconic because speakers prefer linguistic structures that are easy to

process.

Like iconicity, the meaning of the adverbial clause is relevant for the

processing of the complex sentence. In particular, conditional clauses put

a particular constraint on the processing of complex sentences. As I have

argued in Diessel (2005), conditional clauses provide a particular con-ceptual framework for the interpretation of the semantically associated

clause. More precisely, the conditional clause indicates that the main

clause is a hypothetical statement that is contingent on the realization of

the event expressed in the subordinate clause. If the conditional clause

precedes the main clause, it is immediately obvious that the sentence de-

scribes a hypothetical situation, but if the conditional clause follows the

main clause the hearer may at first misinterpret it as a factual statement.

Since the reanalysis of previous clauses is di‰cult to process, conditionalclauses tend to occur at the beginning of the sentence or their occurrence

is announced in the initial main clause by intonation or a subjunctive verb

form.

In addition to the meaning, the pragmatic function can influence the

positioning of adverbial clauses. As has been repeatedly argued in the

literature, initial and final adverbial clauses serve di¤erent discourse-

pragmatic functions. While final adverbial clauses are commonly used to

provide new information or to spell out information that was pragmati-cally presupposed in the preceding main clause, initial adverbial clauses

are commonly used to provide a thematic ground that facilitates the se-

mantic processing of subsequent clauses (see Section 1.1. for relevant

references). Moreover, we may assume that causal clauses typically follow

the main clause because causal clauses are commonly used to back up a

previous statement, i.e., the final occurrence of causal clauses is a conse-

quence of the fact that causal clauses are often embedded in a particular

discourse routine (cf. Diessel 2006; see also Diessel 2004: Ch 7, who dis-cusses the discourse function of causal clauses in early child language).

Finally, length is an important factor for the processing of complex

sentences because the length of constituents defines the recognition do-

main (see above). Adopting Hawkins’ parsing theory, we may assume

that final adverbial clauses are easier to parse than initial adverbial

clauses because complex sentences with final adverbial clauses have a

shorter recognition domain than complex sentences with initial adverbial

clauses. This explains the predominance of final adverbial clauses inEnglish. Note that in left-branching languages like Japanese adverbial

clauses are often consistently placed before the main clause because in

this language type complex sentences are easier to process if the adverbial

Iconicity of sequence 485

clause occurs at the beginning of the sentence (cf. Diessel 2001, 2005).

However, in right-branching languages like English, final position is the

default and the initial occurrence of adverbial clauses is motivated by

competing processing forces.

Adopting an incremental model of sentence comprehension in which

the overall processing load of linguistic structures is determined by the cu-

mulative e¤ect of syntactic, semantic, and other processing constraints(cf. MacDonald et al. 1994), we may assume that speakers tend to avoid

structures in which the overall processing load exceeds a certain level.

This may explain why iconicity of sequence exerts a particularly strong

e¤ect on complex sentences with initial adverbial clauses. Since the com-

bined e¤ect of the initial position of the adverbial clause (which is di‰cult

to parse) and the occurrence of a non-iconic clause order (which is di‰-

cult to conceptualize) can raise the overall processing load to a very high

level, speakers seek to avoid the use of non-iconic clause orders in com-plex sentences with initial adverbial clauses. Put di¤erently, if the adver-

bial clause follows the main clause there is less processing pressure to use

an iconic clause order because complex sentences with final adverbial

clauses are easier to parse; there is thus more tolerance in complex senten-

ces with final adverbial clauses for the increased processing load that

arises from the violation of the iconicity principle.

In sum, this paper has shown that the positional patterns of temporal

adverbial clauses are consistent with the hypothesis that clause order incomplex sentences is usually iconic. While iconicity of sequence is often

characterized as a semantic factor, it can be seen as a processing principle

that is especially relevant for complex sentences with initial adverbial

clauses because these structures are di‰cult to parse, so that speakers

seek to limit the overall processing load by using an iconic clause order.

Received 5 July 2007 University of Jena, Germany

Revision received 11 January 2008

486 H. Diessel

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490 H. Diessel

New evidence against the modularityof grammar: Constructions, collocations,

and speech perception

MARTIN HILPERT*

Abstract

This paper combines quantitative corpus data and experimental evidence to

address the question whether speech perception is influenced by knowledge

of grammatical constructions and, more specifically, knowledge of preferred

collocation patterns of these constructions. Lexical identification tasks are

devised in which subjects are presented with synthesized, phonetically am-

biguous stimuli. The results suggest that knowledge of constructions and

collocations influences speech perception, thus providing evidence for a

usage-based, non-modular view of grammar.

Keywords: modularity of grammar; constructions; collocations; lexical

identification task; phonemic boundaries; compensation for

coarticulation.

1. Introduction

Usage-based approaches to language (Barlow and Kemmer 2000, Bybee

and Hopper 2001, Bybee 2006) hold that repeated usage events over time

shape grammar. One foundational aspect of this hypothesis is the often-

made observation that frequent words tend to reduce phonetically and

phonologically (Zipf 1935; Hooper 1976; Bybee 2000, 2001, inter alia).

Several phenomena empirically support this point. Jurafsky et al. (2001)find that word-final t/d deletion correlates positively with the relative

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 491–511

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.019

0936–5907/08/0019–0491

6 Walter de Gruyter

* I would like to thank Katherine Crosswhite, Suzanne Kemmer, Nancy Niedzielski, Joan

Bybee, Anatol Stefanowitsch, and two anonymous referees for Cognitive Linguistics, who

have o¤ered helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Also, the audience of the

8th CSDL in San Diego provided valuable suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.

Please address correspondence to 3hilpert@icsi.berkeley.edu4.

frequency of lexical items such as want or mind. Similarly, Cooper and

Paccia-Cooper (1980) observe increased palatalization of word-final stops

before a glide in items with higher frequency. Palatalization is thus more

likely in a phrase such as did you, as compared to mind you. Finally,

Gregory et al. (1999) report that word duration is relatively shorter

for items with higher text frequency and greater contextual probability.

These and many other studies strongly support the relation of frequencyand phonetic reduction, and hence the usage-based model.

The present study focuses on another tenet that is commonly held

in usage-based approaches and elsewhere, but which as yet has not been

su‰ciently supported through empirical studies. A core assumption in

both cognitive linguistics (Langacker 1987) and connectionist modeling

(McClelland et al. 1986) has been that the mental representation of gram-

mar is non-modular. The common distinction between a syntactic mod-

ule, the mental lexicon, and a phonological module is rejected in favorof a monotonic structure of grammar. In many formalist frameworks, a

modular organization of grammar with particular emphasis on the auton-

omy of syntax is presupposed, following suggestions and definitions of

Fodor (1983). To illustrate, Newmeyer (1998: 23) defines the autonomy

of syntax in terms of the following hypothesis:

The Autonomy Of Syntax (Autosyn):

Human cognition embodies a system whose primitive terms are nonsemantic

and nondiscourse-derived syntactic elements and whose principles of combination

make no reference to system-external factors.

This hypothesis does of course not deny that information from di¤erent

grammatical modules is integrated at some level of linguistic processing,

or even at multiple levels. The crux of the argument is therefore that cer-

tain types of information are processed in one module but disregarded in

another. Frazier (1987) lays out how, for instance, acoustic spectra are in-strumental for parsing speech into words, whereas the resolution of ana-

phoric reference seems quite unrelated to this particular task. Clifton

(1991: 97) explicates this assumption in the following quote:

Modules are defined, in part, in terms of the information relevant to them, and

thus in terms of their representational vocabularies. Information about letters or

speech sounds is relevant to the lexical module (if there is such a thing), but is of

no possible value to the syntactic module.

In cognitive linguistics, the idea of modularity has been repeatedly

criticized (Bybee 2006; Fillmore et al. 1988; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Lan-

492 M. Hilpert

gacker 1987). The alternative view is that lexical and syntactic knowledge

are stored in the same way, and are not processed by di¤erent mental

modules. A representative position is expressed by Langacker (2005):

Lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a continuum, divided only arbitrarily into

discrete ‘‘components’’. Everything along this continuum is fully describable as

assemblies of symbolic structures. A symbolic structure is specifically defined as

the pairing between a semantic structure and a phonological structure (its seman-

tic and phonological poles).

While this approach denies the existence of distinct modules that han-

dle di¤erent aspects of grammatical knowledge, little experimental evi-

dence has been o¤ered to demonstrate the uniformity of grammar. As a

notable exception, Tanenhaus et al. (1995) demonstrate that visual infor-

mation has an immediate influence on syntactic processing: A sentencesuch as Put the apple on the towel in the box presents hearers with a tem-

porary syntactic ambiguity, as the prepositional phrase on the towel can

initially be understood as a destination. If hearers are given a visual con-

text that contains an apple, a towel, and a box, they will, for a brief pe-

riod, pay close attention to the towel. Tanenhaus and colleagues show

that the situation is very di¤erent if the visual context contains a second

apple that is placed on a napkin. When presented with a contrastive set of

two apples, a towel, and a box, hearers do not initially parse on the towel

as a directional prepositional phrase—little attention is paid to the irrele-

vant sole towel. Tanenhaus and colleagues interpret this result as evidence

against the modularity of syntactic processing.

Despite these findings, the hypothesis that grammar is non-modular is

still both more speculative and not as well supported as the more general

hypothesis that grammar is shaped through usage. The present study

addresses the need to demonstrate more thoroughly that knowledge of

language is indeed a large inventory of symbolic pairings of sound andmeaning, and nothing else.

The issue of modularity is closely related to the question of how audi-

tory perceptual input is integrated with knowledge of lexical items and

syntactic structures. Is speech perception a purely bottom-up process in

which sounds are sequentially parsed into phonemes, words, phrases,

and sentences, or are there lexical and syntactic top-down e¤ects that

guide the perception of speech? Strict bottom-up organization would ac-

cord with (though not necessitate) a modular approach to grammar. Con-versely, top-down e¤ects on speech perception, in which lexical or syntac-

tic levels of processing interact with the processing of speech sounds, are

more naturally accounted for in a non-modular approach. It has to be

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 493

pointed out, though, that both types of organization could in principle be

modeled by either a modular or non-modular architecture.

Lexical top-down e¤ects on speech perception have been reported on

several occasions (Elman and McClelland 1988; Ganong 1980; Magnu-

son et al. 2003; Warren and Warren 1970). As will be explained in more

detail below, these e¤ects only operate on lexical units and therefore do

not bear on the question of the autonomy of syntax. The present studygoes beyond lexical e¤ects and presents a top-down e¤ect on speech per-

ception that is driven by speakers’ knowledge about constructions and

non-lexicalized collocations. The fact that this type of knowledge has an

e¤ect on the perception of auditory input demonstrates the immediate in-

terrelatedness of syntax and phonology, and thus constitutes new evi-

dence against the purported modularity of grammar.

Recently, empirical evidence for syntactic e¤ects on speech production

has been presented by Gahl and Garnsey (2004). In a study of pronunci-ation variation, they show that words are not only shortened if their over-

all text frequency is high, but also when their syntactic context makes

them highly probable. The overall duration of same word is shorter in

contexts where it is more likely to occur, and hence more easily identified

by the hearer.

To illustrate, in the corpus data used by Gahl and Garnsey, the verb

suggest co-occurs with sentential complements more often than with di-

rect objects, such that sentences like The director suggested the scene

should be filmed at night are more likely than The director suggested the

scene between Kim and Mike (2004: 752). In a production study that mea-

sures reading times, Gahl and Garnsey find that syntactic biases toward

one complementation pattern significantly correlate with reduced produc-

tion of the verb in question (2004: 763). Verbs such as argue, believe,

claim, conclude, confess, or decide are pronounced shorter if they occur

with a sentential complement, and longer if they occur with a direct ob-

ject. Conversely, verbs such as accept, advocate, confirm, or emphasize

are reduced when occurring with a direct object, but not when they take

a sentential complement. Gahl and Garnsey conclude that the probabil-

ities of di¤erent complementation patterns are mentally represented for

each verb, and that this knowledge of syntactic probabilities a¤ects

speech production (2004: 768).

These findings suggest that the organization of grammar is in fact non-

modular. On a strictly formalist view, the relative frequencies of syntactic

patterns would not be part of any grammatical module to begin with, asit is held that usage does not a¤ect the mental representation of grammar

(Newmeyer 2003). On any modular view, the fact that syntactic represen-

tations a¤ect subphonemic speech production would require an elaborate

494 M. Hilpert

interface between modules, e¤ectively reducing the autonomy of each re-

spective module to a relative degree. The only conceivable explanation in

terms of strict modularity would require the ad-hoc postulation of di¤er-

ent lexical entries for verbs such as suggest, only di¤ering in relative

length, depending on their complementation patterns. Since such a solu-

tion requires a fair amount of technical machinery and auxiliary assump-

tions, Gahl and Garnsey point out that ‘‘the most parsimonious accountsof these e¤ects will be ones in which the grammar itself is enriched with

probabilistic information’’ (2004: 769).

The present study aims to provide further evidence for the non-

modular view of grammar, and extends the approach of Gahl and

Garnsey to another domain of language use: it will be argued that syn-

tactic probabilities a¤ect not only speech production, but also speech

perception.

2. The experimental paradigm

The experimental paradigm used in the present study is that of lexical

identification tasks. Subjects hear a stimulus and are asked to identify

the word or phrase they perceived by selecting an orthographical repre-

sentation on a computer screen. The stimuli used in this task are often

not unambiguously identifiable. The stimuli are rendered ambiguousthrough synthesized elements that lie on a continuum between two pho-

nemic poles, such as /p/ and /b/. For minimal pairs such as pear and

bear, the intermediate steps on the continuum allow two possible interpre-

tations, each of which is a lexical word of English. The experiment deter-

mines at which step of the continuum subjects flip from one interpretation

to the other.

One of the best known applications of this experimental paradigm is

the demonstration of the so-called categorical perception of speechsounds by Liberman et al. (1957). Liberman and colleagues showed that

speech perception di¤ers fundamentally from other types of perception.

For instance, if subjects are presented with a color continuum from red

to orange, that continuum is perceived as a gradual change that goes

through a stage of orange-red in the middle. By contrast, if subjects are

presented with a continuum from the syllable /pa/ to the syllable /ba/,

each stimulus is perceived as either one or the other. No stimulus is per-

ceived as midways between /pa/ and /ba/. This finding suggests thatspeech perception is categorical and depends on a specialized speech

processing system, but this point has been subject to controversy (Fry

et al. 1962, Kewley-Port and Luce 1984). This particular debate is not of

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 495

concern here, as the present study merely shares the experimental para-

digm, not the theoretical stakes, with these early studies.

An aspect of speech perception that is relevant to the present study has

been discussed by Warren and Warren (1970), who observe a remarkable

e¤ect: When sounds are cut out from a recording and replaced by a non-

phonemic sound such as a cough, hearers will ‘‘fill in’’ the missing sound

without even being aware of it. For instance, if the first /s/ is replaced ina recording of the word legislatures, hearers will fail to hear that the word

has been altered, even when they are explicitly asked to identify the

spliced element. Warren and Warren call this e¤ect phonemic restoration.

They further find that phonemic restoration is sensitive to the meaning

of the context. In a sentence such as It was found that the 3cough4 eel was

on the shoe, hearers robustly restore the word heel. By contrast, replacing

the last word of the sentence with axle leads to the restoration of wheel.

The restored element appears thus to be the semantically most appropri-ate candidate from a set of phonologically related items.

Another application that is similar in spirit to the present investigation

was developed by Ganong (1980). Ganong found that hearers perceive

phonologically ambiguous stimuli with a lexical bias: if a string of pho-

nemes can be interpreted as a lexical word, subjects will favor this inter-

pretation over a competing interpretation that is merely a phonotactically

legal non-word. To illustrate, a stimulus that is ambiguous between face

and faish will tend to be perceived as face. The Ganong-e¤ect can bemeasured by comparing responses to di¤erent continua of stimuli. Re-

sponses to a continuum from face to faish will di¤er markedly from re-

sponses to a continuum from /�s/ and /�§/, which apart from the missing

onset is identical to the face to faish continuum, but which o¤ers only

non-word syllables as possible interpretations. In the first continuum, sub-

jects will be biased towards the competitor interpretation that is a lexical

item ( face). In the second continuum, none of the competitors is a lexical

item, and so comparatively fewer responses will identify an ambiguousstimulus as /�s/. This e¤ect can be interpreted as a shift in the perceptual

category boundaries of phonemes such as /s/ and /§/.

While both phonemic restoration and the Ganong-e¤ect represent

striking lexical top-down e¤ects in the processing of auditory input, they

do not address the hypothesis that syntax is an autonomous module of

grammar. In order to put this hypothesis to the test, the present study in-

vestigates whether not only lexical words, but also larger syntactic units

such as constructions (Goldberg 2006) or collocations can a¤ect speechperception. Under the notion of syntactic e¤ects, the present approach

subsumes even lexico-grammatical dependencies such as the collocational

preferences of particular grammatical constructions (Stefanowitsch and

496 M. Hilpert

Gries 2003). The present study devises lexical identification tasks in which

subjects hear ambiguous stimuli that are embedded in di¤erent syntactic

and collocational contexts. Unlike Ganong (1980), the present study uses

stimuli for which both competing interpretations are actual words of En-

glish, as for example cry and try. Further, unlike Warren and Warren

(1970), the present study employs stimuli whose competing interpreta-tions are all semantically viable, i.e., hearers will not be given the biased

choice of, say, a wheel being either on an axle or on a shoe. If a syntactic

context significantly leads subjects to favor one competitor over the other,

this constitutes evidence against the autonomy of syntax. The basic idea

of the experiments in this study is thus to test whether syntactic context

can shift category boundaries in phonemic perception. Figure 1 shows

two idealized curves of phoneme perception in a continuum from /k/ to

/t/.The grey curve represents responses to stimuli heard in isolation, the

black curve represents responses to stimuli heard embedded in syntactic

context. The null hypothesis of the present study is that syntactic context

has no influence whatsoever on phonemic speech perception. The stimuli

should be categorized the same, whether they are heard in isolation or

embedded within a given syntactic context. The two curves should thus

coincide. The research hypothesis is that syntactic context can introduce

a bias that leads subjects to shift their phonemic category boundaries,such that the two curves coincide at the ends of the continuum, but di-

verge in the middle. These alternative hypotheses are weighed in three dif-

ferent experiments.

Figure 1. Idealized curves of phonemic categorization

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 497

The first experiment of this paper tests the general question whether

syntactic knowledge has any e¤ect on lexical identification. It is shown

that constructions actually influence the perception of phonemically am-

biguous stimuli. Given a stimulus that is ambiguous between two lexical

elements in a construction, subjects are more likely to identify the stimu-

lus as an element that frequently occurs in the respective construction,

and less likely to identify it as an element that only sparsely occurs inthat construction.

The second experiment tests how robust the findings of the first experi-

ment are. If constructions influence the perception of phonemically

ambiguous stimuli, it should be possible to find constructions that induce

opposing biases, thus shifting the perceptual category boundaries in op-

posite directions. The results show that this is the case, corroborating the

findings of the first experiment.

In a third experiment it is tested whether constructional context doesnot only influence the level of phonemic processing, but also extends to

low-level phonetic processing. While the results of the first two experi-

ments could be dismissed as operations that potentially involve the late

re-categorization of ‘misheard’ words, the third experiment investigates

whether syntactic knowledge directly and instantaneously influences

lower levels of speech perception. The used test case is whether construc-

tional context can trigger the phonetic e¤ect of compensation for coarti-

culation (Elman and McClelland 1988). In processing naturally occurringspeech, hearers accommodate the fact that any string of phonemes is af-

fected by coarticulation. The production of every speech sound is influ-

enced by its preceding elements that are coarticulated with it. For exam-

ple, the /k/ in this car will sound somewhat di¤erent than the /k/ in one

car. Compensation for coarticulation can be thought of as an increased

‘‘tolerance’’, such that even less than perfect examples of a phoneme are

categorized as such, when hearers know that there is a reason for the un-

dershoot. Compensation for coarticulation is necessarily a low-level pho-netic process that works instantaneously to keep up with the natural

speech flow. The results of the third experiment show that constructions

can indeed induce compensation for coarticulation. This means that

knowledge of syntax has an e¤ect on phonetic processing, which in turn

constitutes evidence against syntactic modularity of the kind hypothesized

in Newmeyer (1998).

3. Materials and participants

The speech stimuli used in the present study are based on recordings of

an adult female human voice, speaking in a standard American English

498 M. Hilpert

variety. After the recordings, the stimuli were altered with a computerized

synthesizer to yield ten-step continua between two phonemic poles,

such as /k/ and /t/. The chosen method of synthesizing was sample-

averaging. This technique divides two wave forms of the same length

into small slices at the rate of 44.1 kHz and creates continua of ambigu-

ous sounds by laying wave forms from the two di¤erent sources on top of

each other. Depending on how strong each source is represented at agiven continuum step, the resulting wave form sounds more or less like

one of the original sources. The synthesized stimuli are embedded in un-

altered recordings of actual words to yield a continuum between, say, the

English words cry and try. The end points of the continuum are unambig-

uously perceived as cry and try, but the point at which the perceptual

crossover from cry and try occurs will vary from person to person.

In some experiments reported in this paper, the outer continuum steps

were discarded if pilot studies indicated that even steps that lay more to-wards the center of the continuum were identified unambiguously across

subjects.

Fifteen volunteer subjects with self-reported normal hearing, normal or

corrected to normal vision, and English as their native language partici-

pated, each one in all three of the experiments. Since this was a procedure

of about 45 minutes, subjects were instructed to take breaks whenever

they felt the need for doing so. The experimental design was fully self-

paced through mouse clicks and allowed for subject-controlled breaks.All subjects were Rice University undergraduate or graduate students

that were either paid or given course credit for their participation. None

of the data had to be excluded.

4. Experiment 1—The English make-causative

In the first experiment, subjects are presented with ambiguous speech sig-

nals within a construction that is intended to bias the lexical identificationprocess towards one of the two competing interpretations. The construc-

tion used in this experiment is the English make-causative, which has a

strong bias towards verbs of emotion and psycho-physiological reaction

(Kemmer 2001). Typical examples are It made me feel dizzy or That

makes it look a lot bigger; examples involving activity verbs such as He

made me do it are much less frequent, despite the high text frequency of

the verb do. Table 1 shows the twenty most frequent verbs from an ex-

haustive extraction of the make-causative construction from the BritishNational Corpus (Leech 1992), which yields 10,708 examples.

While the verb cry occurs 73 times in the make-causative construction,

the verb try, which is not shown in Table 1, occurs only eleven times. As a

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 499

minimal pair with cry, it a¤ords a test case for the e¤ect of constructional

context on speech perception. Note that try is ten times as frequent in dis-

course as cry (Francis and Kucera 1982), such that the frequency of cry

and try in the make-causative is asymmetrical to their overall frequency.At any rate, the context of the make-causative should bias the categoriza-

tion of stimuli ambiguous between cry and try towards cry. The carrier

phrase that is used in the experiment is the phrase They made me, which

is followed by a signal that ranges on a eight-step continuum from /trai/

to /krai/. It is hypthesized that the constructional carrier phrase biases

hearers towards perceiving a principally ambiguous signal as /krai/. To

test this hypothesis, subjects categorized the ambiguous signals both with-

in the constructional frame and in isolation.

4.1. Method

4.1.1. Materials. For the experiment, a ten-step /t/-/k/ continuum

was created using a sample-averaging script within Praat (Boersma andWeenink 2005). The source signals were the items cry and try, recorded

from the speech of a female native speaker of American English. Input

sections were selected that contained the burst of the consonant as well

as the first four glottal pulses. Again using Praat, the longer one of the

two sections was shortened such that both sections were of equal length.

From these continuum endpoints, intermediate signals were created in

10% steps. Each of the resulting /t/-/k/ continuum steps was concate-

nated with the remaining stretch of the recording of try, which comprisedthe entire word minus the burst and the first four glottal pulses. This

procedure yields a continuum of sounds, the first one an unambiguous

/krai/, and the last one an unambiguous /trai/. In pilot studies the two

Table 1. The 20 most frequent verbs in the English make-causative construction in the BNC

Verb Tokens Verb Tokens

feel 1654 appear 142

look 822 happen 119

think 542 come 111

laugh 358 realise 111

seem 293 see 100

work 264 pay 97

sound 258 meet 93

go 237 stand 91

want 195 take 74

wonder 157 cry 73

500 M. Hilpert

endpoint steps were identified unambiguously and hence discarded; only

the intermediate eight steps were used. For the carrier phrase, the phrase

they made me was recorded from the same speaker, and subsequently

concatenated with each of the eight stimuli. The subsequent concatena-

tion of stimuli types yields 16 di¤erent stimuli (carrier phrase and null

context by eight try-cry continuum steps).

4.1.2. Procedure. The experiment was conducted using PsyScope 1.2.5

(Cohen et al. 1993). Subjects were given on-screen instructions, stating

that they would see a clickable red dot as a fixation point at the center

of the computer screen. After clicking the dot, they would hear a pre-

recorded sound file and have to identify the percept as a word of English

in a two-way choice. Orthographical representations in a 44 pt font were

displayed to the left and right side of the screen. The same orthographical

representation would appear in the same place throughout. For each sub-ject, this experiment involved 64 trials, such that each of the eight contin-

uum steps was heard eight times, four times in isolation, and four times in

the constructional context. No filler trials were used.1 Stimuli were pre-

sented in randomized order, while the relative positions of the ortho-

graphical representations were kept constant.

4.2. Results

Figure 2 summarizes the outcome of the first experiment. In both condi-

tions, the perceptual crossover from /k/ to /t/ occurs between steps three

and six. The outer two steps on either side of the continuum are unambig-

uously identified by all subjects. The figure shows that the categorizationcurve is drawn half a step towards the right side of the continuum in the

context of the make-causative construction, which is consistent with the

research hypothesis. More instances of ambiguous sounds are identified

as cry if they are presented in the constructional carrier phrase. A re-

peated measures ANOVA was conducted for the cry responses in isola-

tion and in the constructional context to measure the e¤ect of the con-

structional carrier phrase. The calculation is based on all cry responses

of fifteen subjects in two di¤erent conditions (isolation, causative) acrossthe eight steps in the synthesized continuum.

1. To the extent that filler trials serve to obscure the research question in an experimental

design, they were not deemed necessary in the present study. Additionally, since partic-

ipants completed all three experiments in one lengthy sitting, fillers would have meant

an additional strain on the participants.

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 501

The constructional e¤ect is significant in a by-subject analysis (Fð1;14Þ ¼18:44, p < 0:001) and approaches significance in the corresponding

by-item analysis (Fð1;7Þ ¼ 4:17, p ¼ 0:08).

5. Experiment 2—Using collocations to induce opposing biases

While the first experiment is designed to merely explore whether construc-

tional knowledge, which falls into the domain of syntax, has an e¤ect on

speech perception, the second experiment tests how robust this e¤ect is.

Given that only the by-subject analysis returned a significant result in

the first experiment, further investigation seems necessary. Again, subjects

are presented with phonologically ambiguous stimuli that are embedded

in constructional frames. This time however, subjects hear the same stim-uli in three di¤erent conditions. In the control condition, subjects hear the

stimuli in isolation. In the two other conditions, the stimuli are embedded

in collocations that exhibit di¤erent lexical preferences. The research hy-

pothesis is that each carrier phrase biases lexical identification towards its

lexical preference, while the control condition yields responses that fall in

between the two other conditions. The null hypothesis is that all three

conditions should receive similar responses, or responses that di¤er

randomly.The phrases it’s always and it’s getting are used as carrier phrases be-

cause they collocate heavily with the elements worse and worth, which

form a phonological minimal pair of English. The collocational prefer-

Figure 2. Perception of the /trai/-/krai/ continuum in isolation and the causative

502 M. Hilpert

ences are opposed to each other: while it’s always frequently occurs with

worth, it’s getting is frequently followed by worse. The reverse combina-

tions are not ungrammatical, but very infrequent. Sentences such as It’s

getting worth investing again are thus rarely seen. Table 2 shows the ten

most frequent items that occur after it’s always and it’s getting in theBNC. The table is based on 502 occurrences of it’s always and 292 tokens

of it’s getting.

As expected, function words such as the determiners the and a, and

prepositions such as to and on are among the most frequent elements.

However, both lists also contain open-class elements such as the adjec-

tives nice, di‰cult, easier, and better with it’s always, and late and dark

with it’s getting. What matters to the present analysis is that the minimal

pair members worse and worth approximate a complementary distribu-tion across the two collocational environments. In terms of absolute fre-

quency, worse and worth occur at the same order of magnitude (Francis

and Kucera 1982), such that any observed e¤ect should not be due to

stronger familiarity with one of the two competitors.

The distributional asymmetry between the items after it’s getting and

it’s always should lead subjects to interpret the same ambiguous stimuli

in di¤erent ways, depending on the preceding context. The question pur-

sued in this experiment is whether this di¤erence is strong enough to in-duce opposing biases that are statistically significant, and that are both

distinct from intermediate responses to the control condition.

5.1. Method

5.1.1. Materials. A ten-step /s/-/y/ continuum was created using the

same sample-averaging script within Praat. The source signals were the

items worse and worth, which were recorded as spoken by a female native

Table 2. The 20 most frequent items after it’s always and it’s getting in the BNC

it’s always Tokens it’s getting Tokens

the 74 a 25

a 64 late 20

like 14 dark 15

nice 14 more 11

di‰cult 13 worse 10

there 12 to 9

worth 11 on 8

easier 9 the 7

going 9 too 7

better 8 very 7

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 503

speaker of English. Input sections were selected that contained the last

four glottal pulses from the vowel /fi/. The longer /s/-section was short-

ened such that it was of equal length as the /y/-section. From these con-

tinuum endpoints, intermediate signals were created in 10% steps. Each of

the resulting /s/-/y/ continuum steps was concatenated with the remain-

der of the word worth, which comprised the entire word minus the last

four glottal pulses and the frication. This procedure yielded a continuumof sounds, the first one an unambiguous /wfis/, and the last one an un-ambiguous /wfiy/. The first points and the last two points of the contin-uum were interpreted unambiguously in pilot tests, such that they werediscarded and not used in the actual experiment. Only the seven stepsfrom step two to step eight were used.

5.1.2. Procedure. The experiment was conducted in much the same

way as experiment 1, using PsyScope 1.2.5 with on-screen instructions.

For each subject, this experiment involved 84 trials, such that each of

the seven continuum steps was heard twelve times, four times in isolation,

and four times in each of the two di¤erent constructional contexts.

No filler trials were given. Stimuli were presented in randomized order;

the relative positions of the orthographical representations were kept

constant.

5.2. Results

Figure 3 shows that syntactic context actually biases lexical identification

in the predicted way. The diagram shows all worse responses relative to

the three conditions of the experiment. The perceptual crossover covers

all steps except the first one, regardless of context. It can be seen that syn-

tactic context has an e¤ect on the interpretation of the ambiguous stimu-

lus, as the condition it’s getting produces the most worse responses. The

light grey curve, representing the condition it’s always is flatter and drawnmore to the left than the black curve, as this condition yields the fewest

worse responses. The medium grey line, representing worse responses in

the absence of a carrier phrase, falls between the two other lines, except

at step 7.

A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted for all worse responses to

measure the e¤ect of the constructional carrier phrases. The calculation is

based on all worse responses of fifteen subjects in three di¤erent condi-

tions (isolation, it’s always, it’s getting) across the seven steps of the syn-thesized continuum. The constructional e¤ect is significant in a by-subject

analysis (Fð2;28Þ ¼ 13:60, p < 0:001) and in the corresponding by-item

analysis (Fð2;12Þ ¼ 18:83, p < 0:001).

504 M. Hilpert

6. Experiment 3—Compensation for coarticulation

The first two experiments yield evidence that knowledge of constructions

and collocations induces shifts in phonemic category boundaries. This

can be interpreted as a syntactic e¤ect on phonological processing. Whilethe explanation of such an e¤ect requires some auxiliary assumptions on

a modular view of grammar (Newmeyer 1998, 2003), the e¤ect itself does

not amount to a refutation of modularity. One possible criticism is that

the observed results are the e¤ect of late feedback between modules,

which is how the e¤ect of phonemic restoration due to semantic context

(Warren and Warren 1970) is most appropriately interpreted. It could

thus be that an input that is passed from the phonological module to the

syntactic module is left unspecified or subsequently judged to be a misper-ception, and therefore re-analyzed at a relatively late processing stage. In

order to show that syntactic e¤ects on speech perception apply immedi-

ately at the level of auditory input processing, it needs to be demonstrated

that on-line phonetic processing is a¤ected by syntactic context. The third

experiment investigates whether this is actually the case.

A potential source for such evidence is the phonetic e¤ect of com-

pensation for coarticulation (Elman and McClelland 1988). In processing

naturally occurring speech, hearers do not expect each token of a phone-mic category to be invariant. Hearers unconsciously compensate for

the fact that every speech sound is influenced by its preceding elements.

If a transition from one phoneme to the next takes e¤ort, hearers will

Figure 3. ‘worse’ responses relative to condition

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 505

accommodate the resulting undershoot and perceive even less than perfect

examples of a phoneme as a proper member of its category. The behavior

of compensation for coarticulation can be exploited in an experimental

setting. What the experiment aims to test is whether compensation for

coarticulation, as an on-line phonetic e¤ect, can be triggered by the syn-

tactic context of a given construction.

To this end, not only one ambiguous stimulus is required, but two. Forthe first part of the complex ambiguous stimulus, the third experiment re-

uses stimuli of the second experiment. Subjects are presented with stimuli

that are ambiguous between worse and worth in two conditions. In the

control condition, subjects hear the stimulus in isolation, while the second

condition presents the stimulus appended to the carrier phrase it’s always.

As has been shown in experiment 2, this carrier phrase biases lexical iden-

tification towards the competitor worth. It is assumed here that prior ex-

posure to the stimuli does not have a biasing e¤ect; the same subjectsheard the enhanced stimuli in the third experiment.

The stimulus continues with an element that is phonetically ambiguous

between the words trying and crying. It is here that compensation for

coarticulation comes into play. The interpretation of the first stimulus

(worse-worth) should lead subjects to categorize the second stimulus

(trying-crying) in di¤erent ways, depending on the degree of e¤ort on the

part of the speaker to make the transition. Transitional e¤ort is opera-

tionalized here, in a somewhat simplistic but not confounding way, as dis-tance in production site. The two ambiguous stimuli yield four possible

interpretations, which are shown in Table 3.

If the first stimulus is perceived as worth, which ends on the interdental

/y/, subjects should ‘forgive’ that a following velar /k/ is pronounced

somewhat more towards the front; so they should be more likely to per-

ceive the second stimulus as crying. Put simply, as /y/ is produced further

in the front of the mouth than /s/, we expect it to generate a relatively

greater tolerance. By contrast, the transitions from dental to velar (/s/> /k/), from interdental to alveolar (/y/ > /t/) are relatively easy; and

the transition from dental to alveolar (/s/ > /t/) is the easiest option al-

Table 3. Stimuli interpretations and degree of e¤ort in coarticulation

Interpretation Transition E¤ort

worth crying interdental - velar di‰cult

worse crying dental - velar intermediate

worth trying interdental - alveolar indermediate

worse trying dental - alveolar easy

506 M. Hilpert

together. Hearers should therefore be the least tolerant with respect to

this transition.2

On the research hypothesis, the constructional context it’s always

should bias subjects towards perceiving worth more often than in the con-

trol condition. This, in turn, should result in a bias to perceive the second

ambiguous stimulus as crying more often. If we thus observe more crying

responses in the second condition, this would suggest that syntax a¤ectseven low-level phonetic processing.

6.1. Method

6.1.1. Materials. The carrier phrase it’s always and the seven-step

worse-worth continuum from the second experiment were re-used without

further changes, but the stimuli were concatenated with further material.

A ten-step continuum was created from the recorded items crying and try-

ing, using the previously discussed method. Here, the first point and the

last three points of the continuum were interpreted unambiguously in

pilot tests, such that they were discarded and not used in the actual exper-

iment. Only the six steps from step two to step seven were used. The sub-sequent concatenation of stimuli types yielded 42 di¤erent stimuli (seven

worth-worse continuum steps times six trying-crying continuum steps).

6.1.2. Procedure. The experiment was conducted in the same way as

the other experiments, using PsyScope 1.2.5 with on-screen instructions.

The only di¤erence concerned the fact that this time, subjects had to iden-

tify a percept as a word of English in a four-way choice: worth crying,

worse crying, worth trying, or worse trying. Orthographical representa-tions in a 44 pt font were either arrayed into the four corners of the screen

or displayed to the left and right side of the screen. The same orthograph-

ical representation would appear in the same place throughout. For each

subject, this experiment involved 252 trials. Each of the 42 stimuli was

heard six times, three times in isolation, and three times after the carrier

phrase it’s always. No filler trials were given. Stimuli were presented in

randomized order while the relative positions of the orthographical repre-

sentations were kept constant.

2. A reviewer points out that both worth and worse should trigger the fronting of the initial

consonant of crying and asks whether a minor di¤erence in place of articulation, such as

dental vs. interdental, has been shown to make a significant di¤erence in compensation

for coarticulation. Elman and McClelland (1988) report an e¤ect for the alternation be-

tween /s/ and /§/, i.e., an alveolar and a postalveolar fricative, so that indeed minute

di¤erences seem su‰cient for the e¤ect to obtain.

New evidence against the modularity of grammar 507

6.2. Results

Figure 4 shows that there are fewer crying responses in the control condi-

tion than in the condition that involved the constructional carrier phrase.

The diagram shows the absolute numbers of responses to the second am-biguous stimulus (crying-trying). After the constructional carrier phrase

it’s always we expected a higher number of worth responses and conse-

quently a higher number of crying responses. This expectation is borne

out.

A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted for all crying responses

to measure the e¤ect of the constructional carrier phrases. The calculation

is based on all crying responses of fifteen subjects in two di¤erent condi-

tions (isolation, it’s always) across the six steps of the synthesized contin-uum. The constructional e¤ect approaches significance in a by-subject

analysis Fð1;14Þ ¼ 4:02, p ¼ 0:065); the corresponding by-item analysis re-

turns a significant result (Fð1;5Þ ¼ 6:58, p ¼ 0:050).

7. Conclusion

The results of the three experiments demonstrate that syntactic context in

the form of constructions and collocations has an e¤ect on both phone-mic categorization and low-level phonetic processing. Presenting ambigu-

ous sounds in the carrier phrase of a constructional or collocational frame

alters the phonemic category boundaries in a lexical identification task,

Figure 4. Crying responses to the second ambiguous stimulus by condition

508 M. Hilpert

and it can induce the phonetic e¤ect of compensation for coarticulation.

It needs to be acknowledged that the observed e¤ects fail to reach signifi-

cance in the cases of the by-item analysis of experiment 1 and the by-

subject analysis of experiment 3. Here, there is only evidence in the form

of trends. The directions of the observed e¤ects are, however, as pre-

dicted; they always move towards the lexical element that more fre-

quently occurs with the carrier phrase. This rea‰rms the point that collo-cations and collocational patterns within constructions (Stefanowitsch

and Gries 2003) have a psychological reality that shapes the way in which

hearers perceive speech. It can also be concluded that the lexically based

Ganong-e¤ect has a more abstract counterpart which extends to the level

of syntax, and which is not restricted to the opposition of words and non-

words. The result that subjects are biased towards hearing entrenched

units over hearing chance collocations is consistent with views held in

Construction Grammar and cognitive linguistics, but up to now, thisview had not been su‰ciently supported through empirical studies. The

results of the present study provide new evidence that syntactic and lexi-

cal knowledge are not stored in di¤erent mental modules, but rather form

a continuum from heavily entrenched and conventionalized units to

loosely connected elements (Bybee 2006).

Received 27 June 2007 ICSI Berkeley, USA

Revision received 3 January 2008

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New evidence against the modularity of grammar 511

Negative entrenchment: A usage-basedapproach to negative evidence

ANATOL STEFANOWITSCH*

Abstract

The alleged absence of negative evidence in the linguistic input has played a

major role both in linguistic theorizing and in discussions about linguistic

methodology. I argue that, given a su‰ciently sophisticated understanding

of frequency, negative evidence can be inferred from the positive evidence in

the linguistic input. Using an extension of collostructional analysis, I show

how the corpus linguist, and, by analogy, the language learner, can discrim-

inate between combinations of linguistic items that are accidentally absent

from a given corpus and combinations whose absence is statistically signifi-

cant. I also show that this kind of negative corpus evidence correlates with

degrees of acceptability in judgment tasks. I propose a conceptualization of

such negative evidence as negative entrenchment in a usage-based model.

Keywords: negative evidence; acceptability; collostructional analysis; cor-

pus linguistics; entrenchment; usage-based model.

1. Introduction

The alleged absence of negative evidence in the linguistic input has played

a major role both in linguistic theorizing and in discussions about linguis-

tic methodology. In this short paper, I will argue that negative evidence is

not as absent as it may seem, but that this perception is due to a relativelysimplistic understanding of the kind of information that can be derived

Cognitive Linguistics 19–3 (2008), 513–531

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.020

0936–5907/08/0019–0513

6 Walter de Gruyter

* I would like to thank the editor of this special issue, Arne Zeschel, and the two anony-

mous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like

to thank Martin Hilpert for recruiting the participants for the experiment reported in this

paper. Contact Address: Universitat Bremen, Fachbereich 10, Postfach 33 04 40, 28334

Bremen, Germany. Author e-mail: stefanowitsch@uni-bremen.de.

from the frequency of linguistic items in the input. With a more sophisti-

cated approach, negative evidence can, in fact, be inferred from the posi-

tive evidence in the linguistic input.

In Section 2, I will briefly introduce the ‘‘no negative evidence’’ prob-

lem (Bowerman 1988) and discuss some potential solutions that have

been proposed in the literature. I will also touch on the way in which

these solutions might fit in with the idea of a usage-based model oflanguage.

In Section 3, I will then expand one particular solution and show how a

corpus linguist, faced with the same problem as the language learner, can

solve the ‘‘no negative evidence’’ problem using inferential statistics

rather than relying on raw frequencies, as is still widely done.

Finally, in Section 4, I will present the results of a pilot study correlat-

ing two kinds of corpus-derivable negative evidence with acceptability

judgments, showing that it is plausible to assume that speakers have ac-cess to such evidence.

2. The ‘‘no negative evidence’’ problem

There seems to be widespread agreement across theoretical frameworks

that the crucial task of language learners is to arrive at some representa-

tion of the general properties of a grammar, when all they have in terms

of evidence is a limited corpus of actually occurring utterances. The

main piece of evidence for the existence of such representations is the

fact that speakers seem to be able to classify sentences that they have

never heard before as grammatical or ungrammatical.It is a reasonable assumption that speakers arrive at such representa-

tions by generating hypotheses about the general properties of the gram-

mar on the basis of the available input and then testing whether these hy-

potheses are true. For example, they might be faced with utterances such

as those in (1a, b) and (2a, b) (cf. Baker 1979; Bowerman 1988):

(1) a. Dad told a story to Sue.

b. Dad told Sue a story.

(2) a. I gave a book to John.

b. I gave John a book.

On the basis of these utterances, a learner might hypothesize that all

verbs that occur in the pattern [NPsubj V NPobj to NPobj] (the dative con-

struction) can also occur in the pattern [NPsubj V NPobj NPobj] (the ditran-

sitive construction). However, this hypothesis turns out to be overly gen-

eral, as the following judgments show:

514 A. Stefanowitsch

(3) a. Dad said something nice to Sue.

b. *Dad said Sue something nice.

(4) a. Mary donated a book to the library.

b. *Mary donated the library a book.

The problem for the speaker is that they have no way of testing theirhypothesis: there is nothing in the input that tells them that (3b) and (4b)

are ungrammatical—there is no negative evidence. It is generally argued

that the fact that such sentences never occur cannot in itself provide such

evidence because the task of generalizing from a limited input to a gram-

mar potentially producing an unlimited output always requires going be-

yond the input. In other words, grammaticality can not be equated with

(likelihood of ) actual occurrence (cf. Chomsky 1957: 15¤.).

It seems that usage-based cognitive grammar (cf. Langacker 1991,2000) does not, as such, provide a solution to this problem. In the usage-

based model, grammaticality is taken to be a graded phenomenon. The

usage-based model assumes that linguistic knowledge is represented in

the form of linguistic units that emerge from recurrent usage-events.

Such units may di¤er in their degree of schematicity, ranging from fully

specified linguistic expressions over relatively concrete multi-morphemic

expressions with a single open slot to highly schematic configurations of

abstract linguistic categories. As these units emerge from and are main-tained by concrete usage-events, they may also di¤er in their degree of en-

trenchment. As Langacker puts it:

Every use of a structure has a positive impact on its degree of entrenchment,

whereas extended periods of disuse have a negative impact. With repeated use, a

novel structure becomes progressively entrenched, to the point of becoming a unit;

moreover, units are variably entrenched depending on the frequency of their oc-

currence . . . (Langacker 1987: 59)

Once a unit with a particular degree of entrenchment and schematicity

is established in the system, it may serve to sanction further usage events

to a greater or lesser extent:

To the extent that a target structure accords with the conventional units in the

grammar, these units are said to sanction this usage. It is crucial to realize that

sanction is a matter of degree and speaker judgment. It is a measure of an expres-

sion’s well-formedness, i.e. how closely it conforms to linguistic convention, in all

its aspects and dimensions. (Langacker 1987: 66)

The mechanisms of entrenchment and sanction explain straightfor-

wardly how speakers are able to distinguish degrees of grammaticality

Negative entrenchment 515

(or conventionality, in Langacker’s terms) among those utterances and

utterance types that do occur. These degrees of grammaticality simply

reflect the degree to which an utterance conforms to one or more estab-

lished units and to the degree to which these units are entrenched. How-

ever, it does not explain how speakers are able to distinguish degrees of

grammaticality among utterances and utterance types that do not occur.

If a particular configuration of linguistic elements is never instantiated,speakers will not derive a schema corresponding to this configuration.

Essentially, this means that, when faced with an utterance that does

not correspond to an established unit, they should reject it categorically.

Of course, matters are slightly more complex: speakers do have the

option of comparing the utterance in question to schemas to which it

corresponds partially. This is referred to as partial sanction (Langacker

1987: 69). However, the mechanism of partial sanction is obviously

highly restricted, since many utterances will correspond partially to estab-lished schemas but still be unacceptable. For example, (3b) and (4b) are

partially sanctioned by (and can be interpreted in relation to), respec-

tively, (1b), (2b) and the ditransitive schema, yet they are categorically

unacceptable to speakers of English. Thus, as it stands, the usage-

based model does not provide a solution to the ‘‘no negative evidence’’

problem.

In the literature, a range of suggestions have been made across frame-

works as to how the language learner might get around the lack of nega-tive evidence. Many of these are discussed in detail in Bowerman (1988)

so I will summarize them here only briefly in the form of strategies poten-

tially available to the language learner:

(a) don’t hypothesize rules that would require negative evidence to

prove them incorrect (‘innate constraints’ on possible rules, Baker

1979);

(b) construct extremely conservative grammars, either by choosing thenarrowest grammar compatible with the evidence from the set of

grammars o¤ered by a UG (cf. Berwick 1985; Berwick and Wein-

berg 1984), or by abstracting only very concrete, low-level schemas

from the input (cf. Dabrowska 2000; Tomasello 2003; Lieven et al.

2003);

(c) if you have positive evidence that something can be expressed in a

particular way, assume that it cannot be expressed in other ways,

unless you have positive evidence for the other ways (‘preemption’);(d) form expectations about what to encounter in a particular context

and take the occurrence of other things in that context to be nega-

tive evidence (also a kind of ‘preemption’, Goldberg 1995).

516 A. Stefanowitsch

The idea of innate constraints on possible rules is an attractive sugges-

tion in theory, but it shares the drawback of all innatist accounts: unless

the properties of a mechanism capable of constraining the learner to the

relevant class of rules can be described in detail and unless it can be

shown that such a mechanism actually exists in humans (or at least, that

it could have evolved in the history of our species), Baker’s suggestion re-

mains purely speculative. Certainly, recent proposals on the nature ofUniversal Grammar (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002) contain nothing

that could serve this function even in principle. This does not mean that

no appropriate mechanism will ever be found, but until it is, it seems a

plausible research strategy to focus on more tangible explanations.

The idea of narrowly constructed grammars may seem somewhat sim-

plistic, but it has been shown to go a long way towards explaining lan-

guage acquisition. However, it clearly cannot be the whole story: first, as

(Bowerman 1988: 81) points out, overextensions do occur in child lan-guage and speakers do at some point begin to use their grammar produc-

tively. Second, it does not fully explain the ability of speakers to discrim-

inate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in cases where

something falls outside of the scope of their previous linguistic experience.

Like the idea of narrowly constructed grammars, the idea of preemp-

tion is a simple but powerful mechanism that has been shown to have an

influence on the acquisition of grammatical constructions (Brooks and

Tomasello 1999; Brooks and Zizak 2001). But as in the case of narrowlyconstructed grammars, it cannot provide a complete explanation, at least

in the case of grammar. It is quite plausible that a child, upon repeatedly

hearing an irregular past tense form like went, will take this as evidence

against the existence of the regular alternative goed. However, it seems

much less plausible that the same child, upon repeatedly hearing sen-

tences like Dad told a story to Sue will take this as evidence against the

alternative Dad told Sue a story: if they did, grammatical alternatives

could not persist in the language. In other words, the idea that the prepo-sitional dative could preempt the ditransitive might appear to account for

the fact that (3b) and (4b) are unacceptable, but it also wrongly predicts

that (1a) and (2a) should be unacceptable.

Goldberg (1995: 29f.) puts forth an interesting extension of the notion

of preemption that avoids this problem. She observes that grammatical

alternatives, where they exist, are never completely synonymous, and

suggests that language learners could exploit this. For example, the di-

transitive and the dative di¤er in terms of their information-structuralproperties (cf. Erteschik-Shir 1979, cf. also Gries 2003). Therefore,

when children hear the dative being used with a particular verb in an

information-structural context that calls for the ditransitive, they could

Negative entrenchment 517

infer that the ditransitive is an option for that verb. Goldberg’s proposal

is extremely interesting if it could be shown that, for example, the dative

occurs in inappropriate information-structural contexts with verbs that do

not alternate between the ditransitive and the dative. However, this lies

outside the focus of the present paper.

Instead, this paper will investigate an alternative extension of the pre-

emption account, namely the possibility that the degree of entrenchment

of a potentially preempting construction might play a role in providing in-

direct negative evidence. Note that in the case of irregular morphology,

the entrenchment of the preemptive form is typically maximal: the combi-

nation of go and ‘past tense’ is realized as went one-hundred percent of

the time. In contrast, the entrenchment of verb-construction combina-

tions can vary quite widely. For example, tell may never occur in the di-

transitive construction, but that does not mean that it occurs in the dative

construction one-hundred percent of the time. Instead, it occurs in avariety of constructions including transitives with or without additional

oblique arguments (e.g., Dad told a story, Dad told Sue about his own

childhood ). Whether or not a combination of a particular verb and con-

struction is capable of preempting a semantic or functional alternative

might depend on how strongly it is statistically associated with the poten-

tially preempting construction.

Finally, this paper will discuss an additional source of negative evi-

dence that has not, to the best of my knowledge, received extensive treat-ment in the previous literature (but cf. Briscoe and Copestake 1999: 26¤

for a related discussion). Formulated as a strategy, access to this source of

negative evidence can be characterized as follows:

(e) Form expectations about the frequency of co-occurrence of linguistic

features or elements on the basis of their individual frequency of oc-

currence and check these expectations against the actual frequencyof co-occurrence.

In the next section, I will first rephrase this strategy in terms of a

corpus-linguistic method and then briefly discuss it within the framework

of the usage-based model.

3. Negative evidence in corpus linguistics

As mentioned above, there is a long-standing assumption in linguistics,beginning with Chomsky (1957), that corpus-linguistic methods do not

provide access to negative evidence and are therefore of no—or at least

of a very limited—use as a tool for theoretical linguistics. This assump-

518 A. Stefanowitsch

tion is by no means restricted to researchers with a generally anti-

empirical mindset, but it is, somewhat surprisingly, shared by many cor-

pus linguists. For example, McEnery and Wilson’s widely-used textbook

on corpus linguistics contains the following passage:

Without recourse to introspective judgments, how can ungrammatical utterances

be distinguished from ones that simply haven’t occurred yet? If our finite corpus

does not contain the sentence:

*He shines Tony books.

how do we conclude that it is ungrammatical? [ . . . ] It is only by asking a native or

expert speaker of a language for their opinion of the grammaticality of a sentence

that we can hope to di¤erentiate unseen but grammatical constructions from those

which are simply ungrammatical and unseen. (McEnery and Wilson 2001: 11–12)

In other words, the corpus linguist is assumed to be in a position simi-

lar to that of the child learning a language, although, unlike the child,

they can resort to an alternative source of information, acceptability

judgments.

While this may seem a plausible position at first glance, I have argued

elsewhere (Stefanowitsch 2005, 2006, cf. also 2007) that there is a solution

to the apparent problem of ‘‘no negative evidence’’ for the corpus linguist

that does not require recourse to acceptability judgments.McEnery and Wilson’s claim holds true only for individual linguistic

features or simplex elements: if a particular feature or element does not

occur in our corpus of a given language, there is no way of determining

whether it exists in that language or not.

This may well be a problem, for example, for the historical linguist try-

ing to pin down the exact date at which a particular word entered the lan-

guage. It is not, at least in principle, a problem for a theoretical linguist

trying to uncover the structural properties of a language. The theoreticallinguist is rarely concerned with the existence of individual features or

simplex elements, since their task is to formulate the principles according

to which such features or elements are combined.

In other words, they are concerned with the co-occurrence of features

or elements. As long as these elements occur in the corpus at all, their in-

dividual frequencies, together with information about the size of the cor-

pus can be used to calculate (or, in some cases, estimate), their expected

frequency of co-occurrence. This can then be compared to the actual fre-quency of occurrence (whether it is zero or some other number) and

statistically evaluated to determine whether the di¤erence between the ob-

served and the expected frequency is significant.

Negative entrenchment 519

Consider the case of the ‘‘dative shift’’ discussed above, specifically ex-

ample (3b), repeated here as (5)

(5) *Dad said Sue something nice

The crucial claim expressed by the judgment of unacceptability on thissentence is that say cannot take ditransitive complementation, or, put

di¤erently, that the lexical construction say cannot co-occur with the

ditransitive construction. In this case, the acceptability judgment seems

uncontroversial, and therefore it does not come as a surprise that not a

single instance of say with ditransitive complementation occurs in the

one-million word British Component of the International Corpus of En-

glish (or, indeed, in the 100 million word British National Corpus).

But in fact we do not need an acceptability judgment to tell us that (5)is not an acceptable sentence of English. Table 1 shows the frequencies

required to determine this purely on the basis of corpus data. The ditran-

sitive construction occurs 1,824 times and the verb say occurs 3,333 times.

The total number of verbs in the ICE-GB is 136,551. Thus, if there were

no particular relationship between say and the ditransitive construction,

we would expect the combination to occur 44.52 times in the corpus

(1,824 � 3,333 / 136,551); all expected frequencies are shown in parenthe-

ses in Table 1. The di¤erence between the observed frequency of zero andthe expected frequency can now be tested for significance using any statis-

tical test appropriate for contingency tables. For example, the Fisher-

Yates exact test yields a probability of error of p ¼ 1.96E-20.1 In other

words, if we reject the hypothesis that there is a chance relationship

Table 1. Ditransitive complementation and say in the ICE-GB

Ditransitive sDitransitive Total

say 0

(44.52)

3,333

(3,288.48)

3,333

ssay 1,824

(1,779.40)

134,394

(131,105.52)

133,218

Total 1,824 134,727 136,551

1. While no particular claim is made here that the Fisher-Yates exact test is the best model

for the way in which speakers would calculate association strengths, it is the best test

available to the corpus linguist for reasons discussed in detail in Stefanowitsch and Gries

(2003) and Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004). In particular, it will not exaggerate the sig-

nificance of low frequency events in the way in which, for example, Mutual Information

will.

520 A. Stefanowitsch

between say and the ditransitive and assume instead that the non-

occurrence of this combination is non-accidental, there is a chance of

less than one in 5 quintillion that we are wrong. Extending the terminol-ogy of collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003), we might refer

to say as a (significant) zero collexeme of the ditransitive construction.

Of course, a corpus-derived statement of significant non-occurrence

does not tell us why two (or more) features or elements cannot co-occur

anymore than an intuition-based judgment of unacceptability does—in

both cases, it is up to linguistic theory to provide an explanation. Such

explanations are likely to take a variety of forms. Consider Table 2,

which shows the top twelve zero collexemes of the ditransitive (all thosewhose absence is statistically significant at corrected levels of significance,

cf. Stefanowitsch 2006).2

In all cases except for say, the non-occurrence with the ditransitive con-

struction can be relatively straightforwardly accounted for in semantic

Table 2. Top twelve zero collexemes of the ditransitive in the ICE-GB

Collexeme F(Corpus) FO(Ditr) FE(Ditr) p-value

be 25416 0 340.00 4.29E-165

be|have 6261 0 83.63 3.66E-038

have 4303 0 57.48 2.90E-026

think 3335 0 44.55 1.90E-020

say 3333 0 44.52 1.96E-020

know 2120 0 28.32 3.32E-013

see 1971 0 26.33 2.54E-012

go 1900 0 25.38 6.69E-012

want 1256 0 16.78 4.27E-008

use 1222 0 16.32 6.77E-008

come 1140 0 15.23 2.06E-007

look 1099 0 14.68 3.59E-007

2. As discussed in more detail in Stefanowitsch (2006), both the verb and the construction

in question must have a certain minimal frequency of occurrence in order for this

approach to yield significant results. In a one-million word corpus like the ICE-GB, it

will only pick out a few dozen verbs as significantly non-occurring and leave the status

of many other non-occurring verbs uncertain. Even in an hundred-million word corpus

like the British National Corpus, there will be verbs and/or constructions that are not

frequent enough to determine whether the fact that they do not co-occur is due to

chance or not. However, while this might be a problem for the corpus linguist, it is not

a fundamental problem for the suggestion that language learners may use this kind of

negative evidence: it simply makes the prediction that judgments of unacceptability

should be less strong for infrequent verbs and/or constructions than for frequent ones.

Negative entrenchment 521

terms: it is simply not clear how any of these verbs should be interpreted

in the ditransitive. Say (and other verbs occurring further down the list,

such as put, believe, provide, produce, suggest, and describe), on the other

hand, would be perfectly interpretable in the ditransitive, since they regu-

larly occur with three arguments whose semantic roles match those of the

ditransitive construction. Here, phonological, syntactic or fine-grained se-

mantic constraints must be (and have been) posited to explain their statis-tically significant absence. These will not concern us here, but see Stefa-

nowitsch (2007) for some discussion.

Instead, let us briefly relate the corpus-linguistic method introduced

here to the usage-based model. I would suggest that we could conceptual-

ize the notion of entrenchment in terms of expectations of co-occurrence

rather than in terms of raw frequency of occurrence. If a corpus linguist

can use information about the individual occurrence of features and ele-

ments to predict their frequency of co-occurrence and compare the pre-diction to the actual observations, then a speaker faced with linguistic in-

put should be able to do the same. It does not seem implausible to assume

that for any given configuration of linguistic categories, speakers are able

to (subconsciously) calculate a likelihood of occurrence based on the

known frequencies of occurrence of the individual categories. The higher

the frequency of occurrence of a particular configuration is with respect to

this baseline expectation, the more likely it is to become represented as a

unit in Langacker’s sense. Assuming such a statistically-driven modelof entrenchment, the availability of negative evidence is a natural con-

sequence: the stronger an expectation of co-occurrence is, the more

noticeable its absence will be. The continued non-occurrence of a given

expected configuration of linguistic categories would thus lead to a

negative entrenchment of the combination of features in question. This

negative entrenchment could serve as direct negative evidence for con-

straints on rules or schemas. Since it is statistical rather than categorical

in nature, it would also explain why speakers seem to be able to assigndi¤erent degrees of unacceptability to sentences instantiating ungrammat-

ical combinations of features and elements.

4. Preemption, negative evidence and acceptability

4.1. Aims and methods

The aim of the pilot study reported in this section was to test, first,

whether speakers assign di¤erent degrees of acceptability to ungrammati-

cal sentences and second, and crucially, whether these degrees of accept-

522 A. Stefanowitsch

ability correlate with the degree of preemption discussed in Section 2 or

the degree of negative entrenchment discussed in Section 3, or both.

Twenty verbs were selected that seemed to be either categorically

banned from occurring in the ditransitive while occurring freely in the da-

tive, or vice versa. These eighteen verbs show varying degrees of preemp-

tion (i.e., association with a potentially preempting construction) and

negative entrenchment (i.e., degree of significant absence from the con-struction), as shown in Table 3.

For each verb, a short text was constructed consisting of a sentence set-

ting up a context, followed by a grammatical target sentence containing

the verb in question in the construction in which it does occur. The sen-

tences were constructed to reflect typical uses of these verbs as determined

by browsing naturally occurring examples on .uk and .us web pages.

These were the control items. The experimental items were then con-

structed by simply switching the construction of the target sentence. Afull list of the stimuli is given in the Appendix.

The acceptability judgments were collected on-line. Seventeen un-

dergraduate students at a US-American university participated in the

Table 3. Degrees of preemption and negative entrenchment

PREEMPTION NEGATIVE ENTRENCHMENT

Rank Verb Coll. Strgth Rank Verb Coll. Strgth

1. win 4.81E-01 1. devote 8.21E-01

2. suggest 3.96E-01 2. transfer 7.85E-01

3. provide 9.69E-02 3. address 6.49E-01

4. reveal 4.72E-02 4. issue 6.20E-01

5. describe 1.23E-03 5. reveal 6.11E-01

6. admit 2.39E-05 6. earn 4.97E-01

7. wish 3.42E-06 7. admit 4.90E-01

8. mention 1.04E-06 8. introduce 4.28E-01

9. earn 2.31E-07 9. relate 4.21E-01

10. report 3.40E-08 10. return 4.02E-01

11. relate 2.21E-08 11. report 3.38E-01

12. issue 3.54E-10 12. explain 2.77E-01

13. allow 1.35E-10 13. mention 2.33E-01

14. address 1.14E-10 14. describe 1.51E-01

15. explain 5.36E-14 15. suggest 1.49E-01

16. return 6.08E-17 16. wish 1.42E-01

17. introduce 1.48E-17 17. win 6.90E-02

18. put 2.80E-20 18. provide 5.85E-02

19. transfer 1.62E-28 19. allow 1.60E-02

20. devote 5.08E-36 20. put 2.96E-03

Negative entrenchment 523

experiment. They logged in at their convenience and from a location of

their own choice. They then received written instructions that they would

be presented with a series of short texts containing one sentence in bold

type and that they should rate this sentence in terms of how ‘‘acceptable’’

it sounded (see Appendix). The subjects were then presented with the ex-

perimental items one by one, always followed by an unnumbered ten-

point scale ranging from ‘‘fully acceptable’’ to ‘‘not at all acceptable’’.There was no time limit and the subjects were able to change their ratings

until they were satisfied. They then submitted their judgment by clicking

a button that would bring up the next item. The items were presented to

each subject in one of four pseudo-random orders. After subjects had

rated all ungrammatical sentences, they were presented with the control

items in the same order to provide a control judgment.

4.2. Results

For three of the verbs, transfer, issue and provide, it turned out that the

ungrammatical version was ranked as equally or more acceptable than

the grammatical version. This may be due to a dialectal di¤erence be-

tween British and American English or the subjects may have been con-

fused by the existence of a third grammatical alternative with with (They

issued/provided him with a new passport) that shares the meaning and theconstituent order of the ditransitive. In the terminology of the usage-

based model, we could say that they received partial sanction from this

grammatical construction, causing subjects to misjudge their grammati-

cality. These items were discarded from further analysis.3

Next, all items were discarded for each subject where the grammatical

version did not receive an acceptability rating of 1 (‘‘fully acceptable’’) or

2. This was intended to control for problems that subjects may have

3. One of the reviewers criticized the fact that these items were discarded from the analysis,

arguing that ‘‘surely, partial sanction is going to be a factor in processing’’. Their point

is well taken, but since partial sanction was not controlled for systematically in this

study, there is nothing that can be said about this issue here. In the present study, the

items had to be discarded, as the method used here would have assigned negative unac-

ceptability scores to these items. Negative unacceptability is hard to interpret (it would

mean that these strings were ‘‘more than acceptable’’) and it certainly does not appear to

capture any actual property of the strings in question. Thus, the influence of partial

sanction on judgments of unacceptability will have to be investigated separately in

future research.

524 A. Stefanowitsch

had with the texts/sentences that were not due to the ungrammatical

combinations of verb and construction.4

For the remaining items, the acceptability rating of the grammaticalsentence was subtracted from that of the ungrammatical sentence. The

average of the resulting di¤erence scores was then taken to be the final

acceptability score, shown in Table 4.

Given that they were rated on a ten point scale, the di¤erences in the

acceptability scores are relatively small. Together with the relatively large

standard deviations, this means that the ranking cannot be taken too

literally.

Table 4. Acceptability scores

Rank Verb Average St. Dev.

1. earn 6.78 2.07

2. admit 6.75 2.65

3. win 6.56 1.81

4. devote 6.50 2.31

5. report 6.00 3.00

6. mention 5.39 3.09

7. relate 5.25 2.65

8. address 5.20 2.28

9. reveal 5.00 2.65

10. describe 4.72 2.60

11. introduce 4.56 3.28

12. explain 4.50 2.58

13. suggest 4.22 2.56

14. wish 4.11 2.53

15. allow 3.47 3.30

16. return 2.89 2.78

17. put 1.44 2.90

4. Discarding these items ensures that only those judgments remain that were given by

speakers for whom the theoretically grammatical strings are actually acceptable. In

other words, it controls for dialectal or idiolectal variation concerning the baseline sen-

tences. Clearly, if a speaker feels that a sentence like She returned his essay to him is not

(almost) fully grammatical, then any judgment they make about She returned him his es-

say would be di¤erent in quality from the judgments of the majority of speakers of En-

glish for whom the first sentence is fully grammatical. There is a second problem with

those stimuli for which the grammatical variant receives a low acceptability rating: in

these cases, the method used here creates the illusion that the ungrammatical versions

are close to acceptable: for example, if the grammatical version is rated 6 and the un-

grammatical version is rated 8, the di¤erence score will be 2 (almost fully acceptable).

Negative entrenchment 525

Keeping in mind this caveat, there is a large and statistically significant

correlation between acceptability judgments and negative evidence

(Spearman’s rho ¼ 0:53, p ¼ 0:03, *). In contrast, there is no statistically

significant correlation between acceptability judgments and preemption

(Spearman’s rho ¼ 0:30, p ¼ 0:23, n.s.).5

4.3. Discussion

The results, though preliminary, suggest that, at least for the combinabil-

ity of verbs with argument structure constructions, preemption does not

have an influence on acceptability judgments while negative entrench-

ment does.

The first result is not too surprising as there are strong a priori argu-ments against a role for preemption in grammar, but the results lend

Figure 1. Regression lines for acceptability judgments and negative evidence (9- - -) vs. pre-

emption (C � � �)

5. One of the reviewers inquired whether the di¤erence between the two correlation coe‰-

cients was significant. This is not the case: the standard method used to assess the signif-

icance of the di¤erence between two correlation coe‰cients (cf., e.g., Blalock 1972: 406–

407) yields a z-value of 0.74 ( p ¼ 0:46). However, this does not seem to me to be cru-

cially important: the main point of this paper was not to decide between preemption

and negative evidence but to assess independently for each of the two factors whether

they might play a role in shaping judgments of unacceptability.

526 A. Stefanowitsch

additional weight to these arguments and show that preemption is an

unlikely source of negative evidence in the acquisition of grammatical

constructions even if it is reconceptualized in statistical rather than cate-

gorical terms. This would not, of course, mean that preemption could not

play a role at linguistic levels that have a more categorical structure, such

as phonology and morphology and it would not mean that more sophisti-

cated approaches to preemption could not play a role at the level ofsyntax.

The second result, if substantiated in larger-scale follow-up studies,

would suggest that speakers do indeed make use of statistically significant

absences in determining constraints on grammatical constructions. Note

that the point here is not simply that significantly absent combinations

are judged as unacceptable but that degrees of significant absence corre-

late with degrees of unacceptability.

5. General discussion

The notion of negative entrenchment deserves a place in the usage-based

model even if it were not needed to account for constraints on rules/

schemas. The fact alone that degrees of negative entrenchment correlate

with degrees of unacceptability would be su‰cient to include it unless

some other usage-based mechanism could be shown to account for the

gradedness of acceptability judgments.However, it seems plausible that negative entrenchment is not just in-

volved in creating a sense of unacceptability, but that it is actually used

by speakers in identifying constraints on schemas, i.e. in figuring out

ways in which a particular schema can not be put to use. Speakers might

uncover certain semantic motivations for these constraints (for example,

the ‘‘narrow-class rules’’ suggested in some lexicalist approaches, e.g.,

Pinker 1989), but those semantic motivations are not necessary for learn-

ing the constraint in the first place. In other words, negative entrenchmentis a mechanism that allows the learner to acquire both motivated and

arbitrary restrictions.

Thus, negative entrenchment would be a valuable addition to the usage-

based model, serving a function that no currently known mechanism can

fulfill. At the same time, it does not require a major reconceptualization of

the usage-based model, since negative entrenchment is simply an additional

aspect of the notion of entrenchment as discussed by Langacker. Thus, it is

interpretable relatively straightforwardly within the existing framework.

Received 22 November 2007 Universitat Bremen, Germany

Revision received 30 January 2008

Negative entrenchment 527

Appendix: Stimuli

The audience welcomed the speaker with a round of applause.a) He addressed some opening remarks to them.

b) He addressed them some opening remarks.

Tony could not hide his terrible past from his wife any longer.

a) He admitted his crimes to her.

b) He admitted her his crimes.

Jack’s team was losing the game when it was his turn at bat.a) His home run allowed them a spectacular comeback.

b) His home run allowed a spectacular comeback to them.

As an eyewitness, Emma was questioned by the police.

a) She described the accident to them.

b) She described them the accident.

Richard was a huge fan of his local football team.a) He devoted a whole website to them.

b) He devoted them a whole website.

Sara is a very successful author.

a) Her books have earned her a fortune.

b) Her books have earned a fortune to her.

The professor wanted the students to perform an experiment.a) He explained the procedure to them.

b) She explained them the procedure.

John needed capital to develop his invention.

a) His agent introduced some investors to him.

b) His agent introduced him some investors.

The embassy was very helpful when Grace lost her purse.a) They issued a new passport to her.

b) They issued her a new passport.

Emily’s dad called to ask how things were going.

a) She mentioned her back pain to him.

b) She mentioned him her back pain.

The architect presented his plan for the new lecture hall.

a) The students provided valuable feedback to him.b) The students provided him valuable feedback.

The famous singer made a rare appearance on a talk show.

a) Viewers were invited to put their questions to him.

b) Viewers were invited to put him their questions.

528 A. Stefanowitsch

Olivia’s friends wanted to know everything about her trip to Nepal.

a) She related her experiences to them.

b) She related them her experiences.

The committee asked Diane about her research.

a) She reported her results to them.

b) She reported them her results.

The teacher was very pleased with Ron’s written work.

a) She returned his essay to him.

b) She returned him his essay.

The undercover agent needed police backup.

a) He revealed his true identity to them.

b) He revealed them his true identity.

Robert and Susan asked the hotel manager for a good place to eat.a) He suggested an excellent restaurant to them.

b) He suggested them an excellent restaurant.

Laura called her parents from Italy because she needed money.a) They transferred the money to her.

b) They transferred her the money.

The senator ran a very honest re-election campaign.

a) His honesty won him widespread support.b) His honesty won widespread support to him.

Mary gave a farewell party before leaving for Italy.

a) Everyone wished her a safe journey.b) Everyone wished a safe journey to her.

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Negative entrenchment 531

Manner of motion saliency:An inquiry into Italian

FILIPPO-ENRICO CARDINI*

Abstract

The present study reports the findings of an empirical investigation aimed at

testing how salient the domain of manner of motion is in Italian. Hitherto,

Italian has been as sumed to be low-manner-salient simply on the grounds

that it is a Romance language. But di¤erently from languages such as

French or Spanish, for example, hardly any empirical evidence has been

produced that can prove the validity of that assumption. In this study, the

degree of manner of motion saliency in Italian has been investigated by con-

trasting it to that exhibited by a typical high-manner-salient language,

namely English, which has been extensively studied from this point of view.

The investigation consisted of: (a) a dictionary-based lexical survey aimed

at comparing the number of Italian manner of motion verbs with that of

English; (b) experimental trials with Italian and English native speakers,

aimed at measuring the manner of motion salience manifest in their linguis-

tic behaviour. The experimental work with speakers involved three tests of

‘‘ease of lexical access’’, intended to establish how quickly speakers can re-

trieve manner of motion verbs from memory, and one test on ‘‘spontaneous

narration’’, designed to test the frequency with which manner of motion

verbs are used during free speech. The results of the study provide the

first empirical evidence that Italian does indeed show typical traits of low-

manner-salience.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–4 (2008), 533–569

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.021

0936–5907/08/0019–0533

6 Walter de Gruyter

* Author’s e-mail: 3f.cardini@lancaster.ac.uk4. I wish first of all to thank Paul Chilton

and Jan McAllister for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also want to express

my gratitude to all the participants in my study, who took part without any economic

compensation. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the support I received from

the secondary schools that gave permission to test some of their pupils. These are:

Bungay High School (Bungay, Su¤olk, England); Scuola Media Schiaparelli-Marconi

(Savigliano, Cuneo, Italy); Liceo Classico Giuseppe Mazzini (Genoa, Italy). Finally, I

thank the reviewers for their useful criticism.

Keywords: manner of motion semantics; manner of motion salience;

Italian.

Introduction

Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) bipartite typology of satellite-framed-

languages (or simply ‘‘S-languages’’: e.g., Germanic languages) as op-

posed to verb-framed-languages (or simply ‘‘V-languages’’: e.g., Romance

languages) has, over recent years, triggered increasing research into se-

mantic domains such as that of manner of motion. When describing

some motion event, a Germanic S-language such as English is expected

to express manner of motion through the main verb of the clause,

whereas path of motion is indicated by means of a verb particle (a ‘‘satel-

lite’’ to that verb), as in ‘‘The man ran (manner of motion) across (pathof motion) the street’’. By contrast, a Romance V-language such as

Italian is expected to encode path information in the main verb, while

manner may be expressed at the end of the clause by means of an adverb,

gerundive form or prepositional phrase, as in ‘‘L’uomo attraverso (path

of motion) la strada correndo (manner of motion)’’ (‘The man crossed

[path of motion] the street running [manner of motion]’).

Interestingly, the di¤erence between the two types of expression seems

to produce e¤ects on the ease with which manner information is deliv-ered. Slobin (e.g., 2003, 2004) has repeatedly observed that because the

encoding of manner through the satellite-framed construct does not re-

quire any addition to the phrase, S-language speakers are facilitated and

encouraged to express manner information, at least when compared to V-

language speakers. The latter tend to provide such information only when

it is important to the context. Slobin further claims that this is ultimately

the reason why a considerable amount of empirical work has found the

semantic domain of manner of motion significantly more prominent inS-languages than in V-languages. In particular, it has been shown that S-

language speakers exhibit a wider and more fine-grained array of manner

verb types in their everyday speech, and that the rate of use of such verbs

is remarkably higher than that displayed by V-language speakers. This

and other related phenomena have therefore led some linguists to call S-

languages high-manner-salient languages, while V-languages low-manner-

salient languages.

With regard to Italian, however, very little research has been done inthis connection, and the alleged low-manner-salience is simply pre-

sumed on the grounds that it is a Romance language. An empirical

check on this presumption is particularly needed also because some

534 F-E. Cardini

analyses made on the Italian lexicalisation patterns for the expression

of motion events have actually found that these do not tightly conform

to the ‘‘pure’’ verb-framed typology, and that Italian might in some re-

spects even be regarded as a ‘‘mixed’’ language. For example, in a brief

contrastive analysis made between French, Italian and German locative

adverbials, Schwarze (1985: 362) argues that ‘‘. . . , with regard to the

descriptions of change of location, Italian is as much ‘Romance’ as itis French, . . . , but it makes a more systematic use of an alternative con-

struct, the one we have called ‘Germanic’ ’’ (author’s italics; my trans-

lation). He notes that the Italian system of locative adverbials which can

combine with motion verbs (thus giving rise to a construction similar to

the satellite-framed one) su¤ers fewer restrictions when compared to the

French system: (i) French does not have any equivalent for via (‘away’);

(ii) many French adverbial forms are composite, whereas Italian forms are

simple (thus, probably, quicker to use); (iii) in general, the use of suchadverbials in combination with motion verbs is more limited; (iv) pleo-

nastic forms such as uscire fuori (‘to exit out’) are not acceptable in

French. Arguing along similar lines, Koch (2000: 109) claims that ‘‘. . .

Italian features among the verb-framed languages. One has to acknowl-

edge, however, that, di¤erently from other Romance languages, Italian

undoubtedly shows satellite-framing tendencies . . .’’ (author’s italics; my

translation). For example, Italian often seems to be rather comfortable

in employing the satellite-framed construct even in types of motionevents which typical V-languages are expected to express exclusively

with path information encoded in the main verb of the clause. This is

the case of so-called boundary-crossing-events, that is, motion events in-

volving the actions of entering, exiting or crossing (Slobin and Hoiting

1994: 498). Although prototypical V-languages are said to licence the use

of a manner verb as a main verb of a clause only when no boundary-

crossing is predicated (Slobin 2004: 225), it is by no means a rare occur-

rence to hear Italian speakers say sentences such as ‘‘Corse fuori di casa’’(‘S/he ran out of the house’) instead of ‘‘Uscı di casa correndo’’ (‘S/he

exited the house running’), or ‘‘Salta in macchina!’’ (‘Jump into the car!’)

instead of ‘‘Entra in macchina con un salto!’’ (‘Enter the car with a

jump!’).

In view of the above, the aim of this research is to collect empirical

data for Italian in order to clarify whether and to what extent it can actu-

ally be viewed as a low-manner-salient language. The role of English,

whose high-manner-salient character has clearly emerged in many con-trastive studies (e.g., see Naigles and Terrazas 1998; Naigles et al. 1998;

Ozcalıskan and Slobin 1999; Slobin 2000), will be that of a control, giving

us a measure against which Italian can be contrasted.

Manner of motion saliency 535

The work reported here consists of two main parts: Study 1 and Study

2. Study 1 concerns a vocabulary research which was carried out in order

to see how large the vocabulary of manner of motion verbs is in both En-

glish and Italian. As a matter of fact, the size of a manner of motion vo-

cabulary appears to be one of the main indices of manner saliency for

some languages: ‘‘In High-manner-salient languages there is a rich lexi-

con of manner morphemes’’ (Slobin 2004: 251); ‘‘[S-languages] . . . havedeveloped large lexicons with many fine-grained distinctions of manner,

in comparison with smaller and less di¤erentiated manner lexicons in V-

languages’’ (Slobin 2003: 163). The report of the findings is preceded by a

section dedicated to the set up of criteria for the identification of those

features a verb should have in order to be categorised as a ‘‘manner of

motion’’ verb. The creation of such criteria is needed in order to count

manner verbs, but it is itself a fundamental research necessity: despite

the numerous studies concerning ‘‘manner of motion verbs’’, the termappears to have been used rather loosely in the literature, with no partic-

ular concern about what it identifies precisely. The same point is made by

Zlatev and his coauthors (forthcoming).

Study 2 provides information about the experimental work conducted

on some English and Italian speakers on features related to speech pro-

duction. One kind of test which was carried out was measuring how

quickly speakers could retrieve manner of motion verbs from memory.

This sort of task has been already tried out by other researchers on, forexample, French vs. English (see Slobin 2003: 164–5) and Basque vs. En-

glish (Ibarretxe-Antunano 2004: 324). Those results were consistent in

showing that manner of motion concepts are less readily available to

speakers of V-languages. Another issue investigated in Study 2 is the fre-

quency with which manner of motion verbs are used by the two linguistic

groups in spontaneous speech. As already noted, this is a kind of fre-

quency with respect to which speakers of high- and low-manner salient

languages are supposed to show a significant di¤erence: ‘‘In High-manner-salient languages, speakers regularly and easily provide informa-

tion about manner when describing motion events, whereas in Low-

manner-salient languages manner information is only provided when

manner is foregrounded for some reason’’ (Slobin 2004: 251).

1. Study one: How many manner of motion verbs?

Previous inquiries into the size of the manner of motion domain in di¤er-ent languages have shown that, in S-languages, the semantic domain of

manner of motion verbs is considerably larger and more fine-grained

than that displayed by V-languages. Thus, for example, a study of 115

536 F-E. Cardini

English manner of motion verbs found only 79 French counterparts,

many of them of low-frequency use when compared to the English ones

(Jovanovic and Kentfield 1998). However, an analogous study conducted

on English vs. Russian showed that these two S-languages are equally sat-

urated on this dimension (Dukhovny and Kaushanskaya 1998). More

generally, Slobin (2004: 251) reports that: ‘‘Work with dictionaries and

consultants . . . suggests that the Romance languages, Turkish and He-brew [V-languages] have no more than about 75 intransitive manner

verbs in regular use, whereas the Germanic and Slavic languages, Hun-

garian and Mandarin [S-languages] have upwards of 150’’. The first step

of the present research will be to see how the size of the Italian semantic

domain of manner of motion verbs compares to that of an S-language

like English.

To carry out a count of manner of motion verbs, criteria are needed to

determine what is and is not a manner of motion verb. It is necessary toindicate which features a verb should exhibit if it is to be classified as one

of manner of motion. The features will mainly be semantic. As we will see,

the only clearly syntactic feature required is that the verb must be intran-

sitive. This is in order to conform to the only known criterion used in pre-

vious vocabulary researches of this kind (see Slobin [2004: 251] quoted

above).

In seeking to identify those features able to characterise a verb as one

of manner of motion, the two dimensions of the term will be dealt withseparately: the dimension of motion will be examined first. Then the dis-

cussion will turn to manner.

1.1. Required features for motion

This section will discuss what is here understood under the term motion,

but, also, what kind of motion will be of concern in this paper. To enter

the list of motion verbs used here, a verb will have to show all the follow-

ing features:

A) The verb meaning must clearly express a change of location in space

Motion implies a change of location in space of some entity. The occur-

rence of this change is what distinguishes MOVE from BE/located ‘‘. . .

the only two motive states, which are structurally distinguished by lan-

guage’’ (Talmy 2000: 25). Therefore, the first requirement for a verb to

be included in the list is that it must clearly express a change of locationin space. To ensure that this semantic component is a su‰ciently salient

characteristic of the verb’s meaning, some restrictive conditions will have

to be met.

Manner of motion saliency 537

Firstly, it will be required that change of location is expressed by the

verb root, and not acquired through adjoining verb particles. To give an

example, the phrasal verb make o¤ (‘‘leave hurriedly, especially in order

to avoid duty or punishment’’) contains a clear motive semantics only be-

cause of the particle o¤; otherwise, the verb make taken in itself, though

certainly of dynamic character, does not really tell us about a change of

location in space.Secondly, the motion component must receive the direct and primary

focus within the verb’s semantics. That is, verbs which only indirectly sig-

nal movement while primarily focusing on some other kind of semantic

content will not feature in the list. This is the case for verbs denoting

kinds of searching, pursuing, hunting, etc., where the main semantic con-

cern seems to fall on the purpose of the movement rather than on the

movement itself. For this reason the verb chase, for example, has been in-

cluded in the list by virtue of its meaning ‘‘rush in a specific direction’’(‘‘He chased down the motorway’’), and not by virtue of its predominant

meaning ‘‘pursue in order to catch up with’’ (‘‘The police chased the sto-

len car through the city’’).

Thirdly, it will be required that the motive component is not confined

to the onset or o¤set of some described action. Thus, verbs that indicate

only the beginning of some movement will not be part of the list (e.g.,

incamminarsi [‘start walking’]). The same ban will apply to verbs indicat-

ing the end point of some movement, such as verbs of collision (e.g.,crash, cannon, cozzare [‘bang into’]). Verbs of collision mainly focus on

the violent nature of the impact rather than on the motion prior to it. In

fact, in Snell-Hornby’s (1983: 80) categorisation of descriptive verbs, they

do not fall under ‘‘movement’’, but under ‘‘static’’ verbs.

B) The verb meaning must involve translational movement

Since most studies on manner of motion (e.g., Naigles et al. 1998; Ozca-lıskan and Slobin 1999; Papafragou et al. 2002) are based on the model of

motion event proposed by Talmy (2000: 25), the idea of motion o¤ered

here will have to address the claims of that model. One of those claims is

that the motion verb must be of translational nature: ‘‘The Motion com-

ponent refers to the occurrence (MOVE) or non-occurrence (BELOC)

specifically of translational motion’’ (author’s emphasis) (Talmy 2000:

25). Talmy (1985: 141) distinguishes between two fundamentally di¤erent

kinds of motion: translational and self-contained. ‘‘In the former, an ob-ject’s basic location shifts from one point to another in space. In the

latter, the object keeps to the same basic, or ‘average’ location’’. So, for

example, a verb like kneel simply causes the kneeler to change his or her

538 F-E. Cardini

posture, but not his or her basic position in space. By contrast, a move-

ment like that denoted by run can indeed shift the fundamental position

of the entity that is running in space (e.g., from one end of a corridor to

the other end), thus constituting a translational motion. In Sablayrolles’

(1995: 281–2) terms, the first of the two verbs, i.e., kneel, would be a

verb denoting Change of postures (CoPtu), while the second, i.e., run, a

verb denoting Change of position (CoPs). CoPtu verbs merely denotea change of the relations between the parts of an entity. CoPs verbs, in-

stead, shift the whole entity from some part to another part of some loca-

tion, changing its position. Probably, one can safely equate Sablayrolles’

CoPtu verbs with Talmy’s self-contained motions, and Sablayrolles’ CoPs

verbs with Talmy’s translational motions. It may also be possible to define

Talmy’s notion of average location of an entity as ‘‘the portion of space

lying within the reach of any part of that entity’’. This definition could

often be useful for establishing whether or not some verb of movementdenotes translation, although, at the same time, one should also be aware

of some of its limitations. One major weakness of the proposed definition

is that the notion of containment there expressed is based too much on

physical rather than on conceptual boundaries. The movement expressed

by the Italian dondolare (‘rhythmically move back and forth in oscilla-

tion’) that someone can perform while being seated on a swing, for exam-

ple, presupposes that the subject on the swing constantly shifts his/her

physical average location as defined above (provided that the swingingmovement is su‰ciently long). However, to claim that dondolare really

expresses translational motion is questionable because it leaves the mov-

ing entity shifting its position within one and the same restricted portion

of space.1

The reason why Talmy’s theoretical frame of motion event requires the

nature of the motion verb to be translational can be readily understood if

one looks at the definition of such an event: ‘‘The basic Motion event . . .

1. The English for dondolare is swing, for which an analogous observation can be made.

However, swing also has another meaning (‘‘move by grasping a support from below

and leaping’’), one in which some Figure moves from A to B following the same curving

trajectory expressed by dondolare, with the di¤erence that it does not move back to A to

then start new cycles of the same back and forth movement. One can argue that, at least

conceptually, it is only this second meaning of swing that has a true translational charac-

ter. This is because, even in the case that the length of a motion from some A to some B

point were the same for an entity that swings (in its second meaning) and another that

dondola between those two points, only the second entity keeps finding itself in a same

range of locations (those comprised between A and B): this despite the fact that that

range may be wide enough to constantly shift its physical average position in space.

Manner of motion saliency 539

is analysed as having four components: besides Figure and Ground, there

are Path and Motion’’ (author’s emphasis). The Figure is the moving en-

tity; the Ground is the locative reference object in relation to which the

Figure moves; Path is the direction followed by the Figure; Motion is

the presence per se of motion in the event (e.g.,: ‘‘The dog [F] is running

[M] into [P] the building [G]’’). The definition necessarily entails that the

presence in some entity of some motion per se is not su‰cient to give riseto a motion event (whether or not mannered): the movement of the Fig-

ure must be able, if required, to refer to a Ground through some Path

information.

Motion verbs that have the translation element such as walk or crawl

for example, are perfectly able to meet such a requirement, as they can

readily combine with path adverbs specifying their direction in relation

to the Ground (‘‘I walked across the street’’; ‘‘The baby crawled out of

the kitchen’’). Such verbs will therefore be included in the list.By contrast, some contained motion verbs such as those relating to vi-

brations, for example, can hardly be used in motion event descriptions as

defined above. Sentences like ‘‘I am quivering’’ or ‘‘I am trembling’’

(whose verbs certainly indicate movement; quiver: ‘‘tremble or shake

with short rapid motions’’; tremble: ‘‘shake involuntarily, typically as

a result of anxiety, excitement or frailty’’) are perfectly all right, but a

sentence like ‘‘I am quivering/trembling towards/into/etc. the room’’,

sounds unusual. It appears that the rigidly contained nature of these mo-tion verbs does not even allow possible combinations with path adverbs

for the formation of translational motion frames. Such verbs will not en-

ter the list.

There is a further type of motion verbs that perhaps could be described

as potentially translational, which are not strictly of translational charac-

ter themselves but which can easily acquire such a characteristic by con-

joining with path adverbs. This kind of verb will be included in the list

mainly because some of the most typical manner of motion verbs belongto this category, and to exclude them would be rather odd. For example,

because of the observation made earlier about the conceptual boundaries

within which some motion possesses self-contained character, certain in-

stances of a verb like bounce/rimbalzare, namely those instances in which

some entity repeatedly hits a surface on the same spot by vertical oscilla-

tion, cannot be strictly considered translational. The same applies to

jump/saltare, which does not always involve a motion outside conceptual

boundaries. However, both these verbs regularly appear in constructionalframes in which the element of translation is readily attained (‘‘The ball is

bouncing towards the exit’’/‘La palla sta rimbalzando verso l’uscita’;

‘‘The cat jumped o¤ the table’’/‘Il gatto salto via dal tavolo’).

540 F-E. Cardini

C) The motion verb must be intransitive

The literature on manner of motion usually treats a good number of tran-

sitive verbs as of manner of motion verbs. As already mentioned, how-

ever, the present investigation is confined to intransitive verbs in order to

conform to the only known criterion used by previous vocabulary re-

searches on S- and V-languages for manner of motion verb categorisa-tion. The criterion is applied rather stringently, as the ban on transitive

verbs also extends to composite constructs such as that in which certain

motion verbs combine with ‘‘one’s way’’ (e.g., ‘‘to wend one’s way’’).

Note that verbs such as drive and climb, which are very often or predom-

inantly used transitively, feature in my list only because they do have

intransitive forms as well (‘‘He drove home late’’; ‘‘She started to climb

out of the front seat’’).

The only exception that is made to the exclusion of transitive verbsconcerns reflexive forms made up of a transitive verb (e.g., to launch)

plus a reflexive pronoun (oneself ). This form enables the transitive motive

action to fall onto the grammatical subject of the phrase itself (the Fig-

ure), enabling it to perform a translational motion along a path. In En-

glish, the reflexive pronoun is ‘‘-self/selves’’ (‘‘I launched myself out of

bed’’); in Italian it is the pronominal particle mi/ti/si/ci/vi (‘‘Mi lanciai

fuori dal letto’’), which, in the infinitive form, is attached to the end of

the verb in the form -si (‘‘lanciarsi ’’).2 The reason for this exception isthat Italian appears to make a widespread use of reflexive motion verbs

(according to this research on manner of motion verbs, their number

turns out to be about 15 percent of the whole lot). To ignore them would

have probably meant to overlook a significant area of vocabulary habitu-

ally used in conversation by Italians.

1.2. Required features for manner

We now need to consider which kinds of features actually characterize

how some motion occurs. In order for a motion verb to be ‘‘mannered’’

this will have to carry at least one of the following kinds of semanticinformation:

2. Not all those Italian verbs ending with the su‰x -si in the infinitive are reflexive forms of

transitive verbs like the above lanciarsi (¼ trans. lanciare þ -si). Some other verbs such

as inerpicarsi (‘clamber’), for example, are actually intransitive motion verbs which exist

integrated with the pronominal particle -si. Such verbs, called intransitive pronominal

verbs, do not have any correspondent transitive form.

Manner of motion saliency 541

A) Information about aspects of motion directly referring to input mate-

rial perceived by our senses

A1) Information about some fundamental movements which can be

performed both by animate and inanimate entities interacting with

surfaces during translation

There are some general kinds of movements within which almost any

type of more specific motion performed on some surface seems to fall.

At least three of these movements can be identified: oscillation, rotation,continuous friction. Depending on the particular physical characteristics

of the moving entity and of the underlying surface (e.g., shape, material),

any body moving on a surface will show one of these three fundamental

manners of motion: round-shaped bodies will best perform rotation;

highly elastic materials will increase the likelihood of oscillation by the

moving body (i.e., bouncing); smooth or slippery surfaces will increase

that of continuous friction.

Translational or potentially translational motion verbs that best ex-press such general kinds of movements are, respectively, roll/rotolare,

bounce/rimbalzare, slide/scivolare, which can therefore be viewed as typi-

cal representatives of this kind of manner information. Notice, however,

that other sorts of verbs that highlight more specific features of motion on

surfaces (therefore listed later under di¤erent kinds of manner informa-

tion) are nothing more than particular instances of such general kinds of

manners. Some kinds of jumping can actually be viewed as a vertical os-

cillation; cycle involves rotation; ski/sciare and skate/pattinare involvecontinuous friction.

A2) Information about kinds of body movements peculiar to some living

entities, performed during translation

Typical of this type of information are body movements propelling hu-mans and animals into such a translation: e.g.,: walk/camminare (‘‘move

. . . by lifting and setting down each foot in turn, never having both feet

o¤ the ground at once’’); trot/trottare (‘‘[horse or quadruped] proceed or

cause to proceed at a pace faster than a walk, lifting each diagonal pair of

legs alternatively’’).

Still belonging to this type of information are body movements which

simply add complexity to some translational event. For example, in a

verb such as the Italian sculettare (‘wiggle one’s hips and bottom whilewalking’), the self-contained body movement consisting in the oscillation

of hips and bottom does not provide the element of translation to the

global motion performed by the Figure (the translation is provided by

542 F-E. Cardini

the walking movements), but it does load that motion with further man-

ner characterisation.

A3) Information about particular trajectories traced in space by some en-

tity during translation

Examples of such semantic information can be found in zigzag (‘‘have or

move along in a zigzag course’’ [zigzag: ‘‘a line or course having abrupt

alternate right and left turns’’]); arc (‘‘move with a curving trajectory’’).

This kind of information regarding trajectory might raise some problems,since it could be easily identified with the notion of path as this is usually

understood in the literature of motion events. The latter is traditionally

kept distinct from manner (e.g., Slobin 2000: 109; Talmy 1985: 62–72).

In this respect, it is important to note that the term trajectory used above

does not stand for what is usually understood by the term path. In the pres-

ent argument, path denotes the fundamental direction followed by some

moving entity independently of details regarding possible patterned shifts

of position in space on the part of that moving entity. It is to handle suchpath ‘‘details’’ that the term trajectory is adopted here. To see the di¤er-

ence between the two concepts we can compare some path verbs not pro-

viding any manner information against what might be called trajectory

verbs providing manner information. Verbs like enter, exit, cross, ascend,

descend, advance, retreat, orbit, etc. are path verbs since they inform about

the basic direction followed by the Figure.3 In fact, in each of them, the

idea of motion is conflated with the semantics of directional adverbs (in

the above verbs with into, out of, across, up, down, forward, back, around,respectively) so that any possible combination between a path verb and a

path adverb (e.g., ?‘‘to advance forward’’) would result in a redundant

form. This is not true for the trajectory verbs as defined here, whose seman-

tics does not contain any clue about the fundamental direction followed

by the Figure. In fact, when used in conjunction with path adverbs

(‘‘The ball arced across the room’’) no redundant form arises: the combi-

nation will express both the basic direction (through the path adverb) and

the particular trajectory (through the main verb) followed by the Figure.

A4) Information about vehicles used for translational motion, or about

actions required for propelling them into such a motion

3. Here, ‘‘basic direction’’ denotes the capacity of some verb to provide some approximate

information as to where some entity is going. A verb like ascend (¼ go up) does not tell

us precisely where the ascending entity is going; however, it tells us at least that the en-

tity will not reach any point in space below, behind, in front of the entity, etc., and that

it will instead reach some points in space located above it.

Manner of motion saliency 543

Examples of the first kind are: cycle (‘‘ride a bicycle’’); canoe (‘‘travel in

or paddle a canoe’’). Examples of the second kind are: pedal (‘‘move by

working the pedals of a bicycle’’); paddle (‘‘move through the water in a

boat using a paddle or paddles’’). In some instances the vehicle used for

motion remains unspecified, left to be inferred through context: ride

(‘‘travel on horse or other animal’’; ‘‘travel in or on a vehicle’’).

A5) Information about particular sounds associated with translational

motion

Information of this kind can be found, for example, in verbs such as rattle

(‘‘[of a vehicle and its occupants] move or travel with a knocking

sound’’); whistle (‘‘produce a high-pitched sound by moving rapidly

through the air or a narrow opening’’); zoccolare (‘make noise with one’s

clogs while walking’).

B) Information about aspects of motion evoking fundamental concepts

The definitions of many verbs found in this research suggest the existence

of some fundamental concepts which can be evoked by particular mo-tions.4 In many motion verbs the manner component appears to be ulti-

mately related to such concepts. It is proposed that the following concepts

are among those involved in a certain type of manner of motion:

B1) SPEED

fast: zoom (‘‘move or travel very quickly’’); hurtle

(‘‘move or cause to move at high speed’’);

filare (‘move at high speed’).

slow: drift (‘‘be carried slowly by a current of air

or water’’).

B2) ENERGY/FORCE

forceful, violent: barge (‘‘move forcefully or roughly’’);

prorompere (‘come out with vehemence,

violence’).

weak, feeble: totter (‘‘move in a feeble or unsteady way’’).

4. The term ‘‘fundamental’’ refers here to concepts which might be universal to all humans.

This is not to say that all cultures must have linguistic labels for them. Although some

scholars indeed claim that the existence of any presumed universal concept can be dem-

onstrated only by showing that all languages have a label for it (Wierzbicka 1999), some

studies actually claim to have proved the existence of universal categories which are

not coded linguistically by all cultures (e.g., Berlin and Kay 1969). Thus, although

none of the proposed fundamental concepts actually features in the table of universal

lexical items so far identified (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002), they are presented here

nonetheless.

544 F-E. Cardini

B3) WEIGHT

heavy: trundle (‘‘[with reference to a wheeled vehicle

or its occupants] move or cause to move

slowly and heavily’’).

light: trip (‘‘walk, run or dance with quick light

steps’’).

B4) EFFORT

easy, e¤ortless: coast (‘‘[of a person or vehicle] move easily

without using power’’); fluire (‘flow easily

and in abundance’).

di‰cult,

laborious:

clamber (‘‘climb or move in an awkward and

laborious way, typically using both hands

and feet’’); arrancare (‘to advance with

e¤ort’).

B5) CONTINUITY

continuous,

steady:

flow (‘‘[of a liquid, gas or electricity] move

steadily and continuously in a current or

stream’’); pace (‘‘walk at steady speed’’).

abrupt, jerky: joggle (‘‘move or cause to move with

repeated small bobs or jerks’’).

B6) HARMONY

elegant,

co-ordinated:

ballare (‘to perform co-ordinated movements

following the rhythm or music or of

singing’).

clumsy, awkward: lollop (‘‘move in an ungainly way in a series

of clumsy paces or bounds’’).

B7) STEADINESS

controlled, steady: march (‘‘walk in a military manner, with a

regular, measured tread’’).

uncontrolled: stagger (‘‘walk or move unsteadily as if

about to fall’’); barcollare (‘[of people or

things] move unsteadily, as if about to fall,

swaying from one side to the other’).

C) Information about aspects of motion evoking emotional states

Many motion verbs are loaded with certain di¤erent emotional character-

isations. They seem to indicate the attitude underlying the motion of

some entity. Without attempting to come up with an inventory of suchattitudes as was done for fundamental concepts in information type B,

some examples can be given: HASTE (hurry/a¤rettarsi: ‘‘move or act

Manner of motion saliency 545

with great haste’’); FEAR (sneak/sgattaiolare: ‘‘move or go in a furtive

stealthy manner’’); CONFIDENCE/ARROGANCE (swagger: ‘‘walk

or behave in a very confident and arrogant or self-important way’’);

CALM/RELAXATION (stroll/passeggiare: ‘‘walk in a leisurely way’’);

GAIETY (caper: ‘‘skip or dance about in a lively or playful way’’; gam-

bol: ‘‘run or jump about playfully’’).

Contrary to the information belonging to the previous category, thisone is usually to be found in connection with the living entities only.

This is because emotional states can only exist in entities with a psycho-

logical reality. Both animals and non-living entities can move with speed,

energy, etc., but it is only animals that can be in a hurry, be fearful, an-

gry, confident, relaxed, etc. Bullets move fast and whiz past, for example,

but they do not rush or hurry. To some extent, the same can be said for

vehicles such as cars or trains when travelling at high speed.5

The important observation that must be made after having outlined thethree fundamental kinds of information providing a motion verb with

manner content is that the picture is not as rigid as it might at first ap-

pear. Manner of motion verbs very rarely fall into only one of the pro-

posed categories of manner information, but normally contain di¤erent

types of manner information combined together. Thus, the picture is a

very flexible one. Although we can have motion verbs whose semantics

involves only one type of manner information (e.g., the previously men-

tioned hurtle [B1]), the majority of manner of motion verbs encapsulatemore kinds of manner information. In this respect, many of the verbs of-

fered as examples of our manner categories should not be viewed as verbs

exclusively containing the type of manner they have been put in relation

to, but simply as predominantly focusing on that kind of manner. For

example, the semantics of a verb like run, which was classified as informa-

tion type A2, also carries some information related to the B1 type, as it

is somehow associated with the idea of a quick motion, at least when

compared with walk. A verb like stomp (‘‘tread heavily, noisily, typicallyin order to show anger’’) seems to combine types A2 (visual percep-

tion), B3 (fundamental concepts), A5 (hearing perception), C (emotional

characterisations).6

5. However, vehicles can often acquire emotional characterisations transferred by meton-

ymy from the animate entity co-involved with its motion (i.e., their human driver). For

example, it is possible to hear of a car ‘‘rushing past’’.

6. The coming together of such very di¤erent types of representation into one and the same

concept is somehow reminiscent of the observations made by Damasio and Damasio

(1992) about the word as a kind of convergence zone which ties together aspects of

thought that may be stored separately in di¤erent areas of the brain.

546 F-E. Cardini

Along with what were deemed to be the three principal types of infor-

mation which can provide an element of manner to motion verbs, there

are other types of information some might want to add to the list, but

which, on close scrutiny, do not seem to possess the necessary require-

ments. These kinds of information are:

a) Information about a particular location (more or less specified) with

which the motion expressed by the verb is somehow connected

This may be the case for verbs like slot (‘‘be placed or able to be

placed into a long narrow aperture’’), scollinare (‘to cross hills’). It

may sound obvious that locative information relates to the question

where, and not how, so that it should not have anything to do with

manner. If so, however, one could argue that information type A4

(vehicles for motion) should not have been included in the list of

manner information types either, since vehicles can equally be viewedas a particular location to which some motion is connected. The

objection has a point: ‘‘travel in a canoe’’ (to canoe), certainly gives in-

formation about where some motion occurs. However, locations rep-

resented by vehicles are of a special kind in that they move together

with the Figure. They enable and give rise to the motion, which, as a

result, becomes dependent on and closely connected to them. This is

shown by the fact that many vehicles inevitably bring along features

of motion inherent to their own nature. Motions performed on skis orskates will display sliding features, for example. Motions in/on any

wheeled vehicle will show rolling features: those performed on large

wheeled vehicles (e.g., lorries) will show heavier and less agile features

than those performed on small ones (e.g., scooters). By contrast, loca-

tions that do not move together with the Figure can only rarely a¤ect

its motion with any kind of manner. An exception was made for the

intransitive use of squeeze (‘‘manage to get into or through a narrow

or restricted space’’) and the intransitive use of squash (‘‘make one’sway into a small or restricted space’’), which strongly evoke the con-

tained movements possibly made by the Figure trying to make itself

smaller in order to get in or through a narrow space.

Information about locations includes physical places constituting

the aim of some motion.7 Locative aim can probably be pursued

7. More abstract kinds of aim coincide with the notion of purposes, discussed above in the

section dedicated to motion. Just as locative information cannot be viewed as an ele-

ment of manner because not informative of how but rather of where some motion takes

place, in the same way purposes cannot be viewed as an element of manner because they

are not informative of how but rather of why some motion takes place.

Manner of motion saliency 547

only by living entities with attributed intentionality. So, a verb like

disgorge (‘‘[of a river] empty into a sea’’) does not express the idea

of locative aim, whereas verbs like rincasare (‘go back home’) or to

earth (‘‘run [of a fox] to its underground lair’’) do. Amongst this

latter kind of verbs one should also list those that indicate a lack of

aim such as roam, rove, etc. (and the very similar Italian errare, va-

gare, vagabondare, etc.). Of this type of verbs, only those which alsocontain elements of manner discussed earlier were included in the list.

Thus, a verb like wander (‘‘walk or move in a leisurely or aimless

way’’), does feature in the record of verbs by virtue of the leisurely

attitude (¼ unhurried, relaxed) with which the motion can occur

(manner type C). Likewise, the Italian girellare (‘to go about lazily

and aimlessly here and there’) was listed because of the indolent atti-

tude characterising the motion (still manner type C). By contrast, a

verb like roam (‘‘move about or travel aimlessly or unsystematicallyespecially over a wide area’’), which only seems to indicate the

aimlessness of the motion, has not been included; nor has been the

Italian errare (‘go here and there without any precise aim’).

b) Information about some particular character of the moving entity

rather than of the motion itself

This may be the case of the verb swarm (‘‘move somewhere in large

numbers’’), or flock (‘‘move or go together in a crowd’’) where, ifsome manner can be spotted at all, this may reside in the particular

quantity/numbers of the moving entity/entities: as to how the mo-

tion itself occurs, no clue is actually o¤ered.

Information regarding the moving entity rather than its motion

may also refer to its particular form, and not quantity. Take drip

(‘‘[of liquid] fall in small drops’’), and gocciolare (‘to exit in small

drops’) for example: although the information in small drops could

well answer the question ‘‘how is the water falling/exiting?’’, the how

does not seem to refer to the motion of the water but rather to the

water itself, namely to its shape.

One last consideration regards what can be described as ‘‘low manner

content motion verbs’’, that is, motion verbs showing an almost negligible

load of manner of whichever kind this may be. Probably, the most nota-

ble case concerns fall.8 This verb seems to contain a manner component

8. I only refer to those instances of fall involving translational motion (e.g., free fall

of some entity through the air: ‘‘I fell down from the cli¤ ’’), not to those involving self-

contained motion (e.g., the sudden loss of the erect position: ‘‘I fell down onto the

floor’’).

548 F-E. Cardini

in that the motion is ‘‘typically rapid and without control’’ (Oxford Dic-

tionary of English, second edition, 2003). At the same time, this compo-

nent must be very weak. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, third

edition, 1973, does not report this aspect of manner: ‘‘to descend (primar-

ily by gravity); to drop from a high or relatively high position’’; ‘‘to

descend, to sink, to decline’’. The same observation about low manner

load can be made for the Italian equivalent cadere. Its concept of descentis neutral even with regard to the speed involved in the motion, which

does not have to be necessarily rapid; the only characterisation regards

the absence of any support for the falling entity: ‘go from a high to a

low position without any prop, either slowly or rapidly’ (Lo Zingarelli,

Vocabolario della lingua italiana, dodicesima edizione, 1999).

1.3. Dictionaries used and related issues

Two monolingual dictionaries (Oxford Dictionary of English, second edi-

tion, 2003; Lo Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana, dodicesima

edizione, 1999), and one bilingual dictionary (Il Ragazzini, dizionario

inglese/italiano–italiano/inglese, terza edizione, 1995) were used for the

research. Some further help was then provided by Grande Dizionario della

Lingua Italiana, 1970, by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, third

edition, 1973, and by the Oxford Paravia, il dizionario inglese/italiano–

italiano/inglese, 2001.

Manner of motion verbs were first selected from the two monolingual

dictionaries which provided a source for definitions (by contrast, bilingual

dictionaries predominantly o¤er only a translation of some lexeme into

the closest available to the other language). It was by looking at these dic-

tionary definitions that the semantics of verbs could be checked against

the criteria previously set.

In order to ensure a good degree of balance across the vocabulary size

of the two languages investigated, a bilingual dictionary was also used,since bilingual dictionaries must necessarily provide such a balance. After

that all those verbs deemed to possess manner of motion semantics were

identified in the two monolingual dictionaries, from that subset only those

items which were also found in the bilingual dictionary (smaller in size

than the two monolingual dictionaries) were then selected.

Although the size of the bilingual dictionary used was large enough to

ensure a good degree of validity to the research (74,500 entries for En-

glish, 63,500 for Italian), the fact that, at the same time, it was smallerthan that of the monolingual dictionaries may have helped identify those

items whose frequency of use among speakers is not negligible. To the

same end, terms marked by the dictionaries as archaic, poetic, literary

Manner of motion saliency 549

and regional were not selected. With regard to English regional forms,

only those terms to be found in all English speaking countries should

therefore have been included in the list (e.g., British English, North

American English, Australian English, etc.). However, since further

work with native speakers (reported in the second part of the study) in-

volved British subjects only, those lexical items that the dictionary la-

belled as specific to British English were accepted too. By contrast, termsspecific to any other kind of English were excluded.

1.4. Results and discussion

Following the criteria set in 1.1. and 1.2., 251 English and 138 Italian

manner of motion verbs (i.e., Italian size ¼ 55 percent of English

size) were found. The di¤erence is strongly significant (chi-square test:

X2 ¼ 17.40; p < 0:0001), (test of comparison of proportions: z ¼ 4.25;

p < 0.001). Interestingly, the proportion between the numbers of the two

languages here investigated is very close to that (roughly 2 to 1) regularly

found between S- and V-languages in general (see quote in section 1.,

p. 5). The list of verbs can be found in the Appendix. To check the relia-bility of the classification system, the verbs were categorised by an inde-

pendent bilingual rater who had no knowledge of the research question.

The independent rater was asked first to read the criteria used in this

paper, and then to indicate which verbs of the list met such criteria. For

each verb, the rater was provided with: (a) the definition the researcher

had found for that verb in the dictionaries used; (b) one example of its

use. When the rater did not regard some verb as one of manner of mo-

tion, he was also asked to indicate whether the problem lay in the motioncriteria or in the manner ones. The results of the interreliability test can

be seen in Table 1 below. Instances of disagreement mostly involved mo-

tion criteria. The Cohen’s Kappa could not be calculated: the Kappa is

never computable when one of the raters (in this case, the researcher) cat-

egorises all items of a sample as belonging to one and the same category

(in this case, manner of motion verbs).

Table 1. Results of the interreliability test

Rater 1 Rater 2 Agreement rate

Number of verbs found to meet

motion criteria

389/389 363/389 93.3 percent

Number of verbs found to meet

manner criteria

389/389 386/389 99.2 percent

Number of verbs found to meet

both motion and manner criteria

389/389 360/389 92.5 percent

550 F-E. Cardini

This result could have been refined by an inquiry into the frequency of

use in the population of the listed verbs.9 However, the data available in

various frequency lists (e.g., Brown Verbal Frequency for English; Lessico

di frequenza dell’italiano parlato [De Mauro et al. 1993 for Italian]) are

inadequate to the aims pursued in here. One major obstacle is that the

frequency lists consulted do not make a distinction between di¤erent

meanings that one and the same lexical item may have. To give an exam-ple, frequency figures for the verb run include uses such as run a risk, run

a business, etc., which do not seem to indicate any manner of motion of

some moving entity.

2. Study two: Experimental work with speakers

The vocabulary research reported in the previous section has shown how

the number of English manner of motion verb types is significantly higher

than the number for Italian. Further possible aspects of the di¤erent

degree of manner of motion saliency shown by the two languages were

investigated through experimental work on native speakers. Two di¤erentkinds of experiment were carried out: (a) three tests on ease of lexical

access; (b) one test on spontaneous narration.

2.1. Tests on ease of lexical access

Ease of lexical access tests measure how easily speakers can retrieve a

particular category of lexical concepts from memory. Such tests consist

in having participants write/utter as many relevant lexical concepts as

possible within a short time frame. As already noted in the introduction,

previous such tests on V-languages like French (Slobin 2003: 164) andBasque (Ibarretxe-Antunano 2004: 324) indicated that their speakers

produce a significantly lower number of manner of motion verbs than

English speakers do, thus showing that such verbs are in some way

more salient in English speakers’ minds. The question was therefore to

see how Italian would fare in this respect. In the first set of tests (A), En-

glish and Italian speakers of two di¤erent age groups were tested on man-

ner of motion verbs. Subsequently, for reasons that will be explained

later, a complementary test (B) on motion verbs in general was also car-ried out.

9. This would have allowed us to see to what extent the gap found between the vocabulary

size of the two languages is actually paralleled by one concerning the variety (types) and

frequency (tokens) of verbs used by the average speaker.

Manner of motion saliency 551

A) Test on manner of motion verbs

Aim of the test

The aim of the test was to see how salient manner of motion concepts are

to English and to Italian speakers by measuring how readily available

such concepts are to these speakers.

Participants

The test investigated separately two di¤erent age groups. The first set of

data was collected from 35 English and 35 Italian native speakers of both

sexes aged 14. All participants were monolingual and were recruited in

two secondary schools (one in England and one in Italy).

The second set of data was collected from 35 English and 35 Italian

adult native speakers of both sexes (21 to 60 years old; the average age

of both groups was about 35) of di¤erent educational and socioeconomicbackgrounds. They were interviewed separately in libraries and other

public places such as cafes and sports centres only when the environment

was su‰ciently quiet. All English participants were tested in England.

Some of them reported they had some knowledge of French but regarded

themselves as monolingual speakers. As for the Italian participants, they

were all tested in Italy; many of them said they had a rudimentary knowl-

edge of English, but all of them regarded themselves as monolingual

speakers.

Task and procedure

The 14 year old participants performed the task simultaneously in their

classrooms. The task consisted in writing down on a piece of paper as

many manner of motion verbs as they could think of within a time frame

of 90 seconds. The time given in previous instances of the same kind of

test to undergraduates was 60 seconds (Slobin 2003: 164), but because of

the young age of the participants, it was decided to lengthen the timeframe. The researcher first explained to the participants what a manner

of motion verb is by making a contrast between the verb go/andare

(which does not provide information about manner) and the verb run/

correre (which does provide information about manner): ‘‘There are

some verbs like go that indicate motion without indicating the manner in

which the motion occurs. By contrast, there are other verbs like run,

which do not only indicate motion but also the manner in which the

motion occurs: we can call the latter ‘manner of motion verbs’ ’’; ‘‘Cisono verbi come andare che indicano movimento senza pero indicare la

maniera in cui il movimento avviene. Al contrario, ci sono verbi come

correre che non solo indicano movimento, ma anche la maniera in cui il

552 F-E. Cardini

movimento avviene: possiamo chiamare questi ultimi ‘verbi di maniera di

movimento’ ’’.10 After making sure that every participant had grasped

what a manner of motion verb is, the researcher explained their task:

‘‘When you hear ‘start’, try to write down as many manner of motion

verbs as you can’’; ‘‘Al ‘via!’ provate a scrivere quanti piu verbi di man-

iera di movimento riuscite’’. The test was started immediately after the

task explanation, since it was crucial not to leave the participants anytime to start thinking about instances of manner of motion verbs in

advance.

With regard to the adult participants, the test was carried out on a one-

to-one basis. The time frame given for the task was 60 seconds as in Slo-

bin’s previous tests on undergraduates (2003: 164). The explanation of the

task to the adult participants was analogous to that given to the teenage

participants, although, alongside run/correre, this time the researcher also

o¤ered zoom/sfrecciare as a further example of manner of motion verb.This was done in order to prevent participants from focusing only on

types of manner related to kinds of bodily movements peculiar to humans

and to some animals.11

Results (14 year old participants)

The mean for English manner of motion verbs per participant was 7.63

(std. dev.: 2.46); that for Italian was 3.23 (std. dev.: 2.02). An independent

10. The concept of ‘‘manner of motion verb’’ is admittedly not immediately grasped by all

people, and some detailed explanation of it was needed before the test. This, however,

was not ideal, because the informants might not fully understand the explanation. In-

deed, in the list of manner motion verbs produced by some participants there are items

not in the least related to manner of motion. The writing of ‘‘incorrect verbs’’ occurred

in Slobin’s test too, although this was not seen as a problem but rather as a further

means for investigating manner of motion salience in English vs. French speakers,

with the latter apparently unable to focus on this semantic area as precisely as the

former: ‘‘French speakers found it hard to limit themselves to manner verbs, listing

non-manner verbs such as descendre ‘descend, to go down’, traverser ‘cross, traverse’.

English speakers showed no such intrusions’’ (Slobin 2003: 164). The results of the

present study showed a similar pattern, with Italian speakers making more ‘‘errors’’

than English speakers. However, one should be careful to interpret this as evidence

for less manner salience. It could be simply a chance result, whereby errors on both sides

were caused by problems with task understanding.

11. Because run/correre and zoom/sfrecciare were used as examples for explaining what a

manner of motion verb is (run/correre both in the test on teenagers and in that on

adults; zoom/sfrecciare in the test on adults only), instances of these verb types pro-

duced by the participants during the task were not counted. More precisely, instances

of run/correre were not counted in either of the two tests; instances of zoom/sfrecciare

were only counted in the test run on teenagers.

Manner of motion saliency 553

samples t-test provides strong evidence for a significant di¤erence between

the two means (t ¼ 8.18; p < 0.001). This result is illustrated in Figure 1

below.

Overall, the English group produced 37 types of manner of motion

verbs, the Italian group 25. The elicited types (tokens in brackets) are

shown below.

English:

sprint (31); walk (30); jog (26); jump (25); hop (22); skip (20); drive (16); fly

(14); swim (12); crawl (10); bike (9); leap, roll (7); dance (4); climb, wobble

(3); bounce, dive, paddle, skate, slide, spring, stagger (2); accelerate, creep,

glide, pace, pedal, rattle, ride, sail, shoot, ski, sneak, stroll, stumble, zoom

(1).

Italian:

camminare (22); saltare (16); strisciare (7); ballare, nuotare, volare (6);

arrampicar-e/si, rotolare, saltellare, scappare (5); pattinare, pedalare (4);

gattonare, scorrere (3); danzare, galoppare, scattare, scivolare, zoppicare

(2); barcollare, precipitare, ruzzolare, sgambettare, trottare, trotterellare

(1).

Results (adults)

The mean for English manner of motion verbs per participant was 6.89

(std. dev.: 3.12); that for Italian was 3.51 (std. dev.: 2.01). Again, an inde-pendent samples t-test provides strong evidence for a significant di¤erence

Figure 1. Lexical access: Mean for manner of motion verbs per teenage participant

554 F-E. Cardini

between the two means (t ¼ 5.37; p < 0.001). These results are summa-

rised in Figure 2 below.

Overall, the English group produced 63 di¤erent types of manner mo-

tion verbs, whereas the Italian group produced 36. The figure regard-

ing the English number of types is encouragingly similar to that of 74

found by Slobin (personal communication) in a comparable test made

on 37 undergraduates. The elicited types (tokens in brackets) are shownbelow.

English:

walk (29); fly, jump (17); hop, skip (13); crawl, drive, swim (10); jog (9);

slide (6); ride (5); cycle, gallop, glide, speed, stroll, wander (4); bounce,

dash, leap, race, rush, saunter, shoot, slither, sprint, trot (3); canter, climb,

dance, hurry, row, stagger, step, stomp, stride, swing, tiptoe, zip (2); accel-

erate, amble, belt, creep, dive, ease, gambol, limp, mince, pace, paddle,

potter, pounce, rocket, scamper, scurry, scuttle, shu¿e, ski, slip, trudge,

waddle, wobble, zigzag (1).

Italian:

camminare (16); saltare (12); nuotare (10); volare (8); passeggiare, sciare

(6); galoppare, pedalare, strisciare (5); marciare, rotolare, scivolare, trot-

tare (4); cavalcare, navigare, pattinare, precipitarsi (3); arrampicare,

schettinare, vogare (2); balzare, caracollare, fiondarsi, montare, remare,

rimbalzare, saettare, saltellare, scappare, serpeggiare, sfarfallare, slittare,

spaziare, svolazzare, trotterellare, veleggiare (1).

Figure 2. Lexical access: Mean for manner of motion verbs per adult participant

Manner of motion saliency 555

Discussion

Adult groups from both languages showed, as expected, a better perfor-

mance compared with their respective teenager groups. That is, the adult

groups scored a similar number of verb tokens and a higher number of

verb types in a shorter time frame. What is relevant to the present in-quiry, however, is that, when compared to their Italian counterparts,

both English groups produced, statistically, a significantly greater number

of manner of motion verb tokens, also displaying a wider repertoire of

types. In other words, the data are remarkably consistent in showing a

greater manner of motion salience for English speakers. Some reserva-

tions, however, may be made in relation to the methodology used in the

task, which required a formal explanation of the meaning of ‘‘manner of

motion verb’’. For practical reasons, the explanation could only provide ageneral indication of what was meant, and, further, it may not have been

fully understood by all informants. It was therefore thought that the

validity of the data obtained through this test should be verified by a

complementary experiment, similar to this one and yet free from the

drawbacks just mentioned. This second kind of experiment is reported in

section B below.

B) Test on motion verbs in general

Aim of the test

The aim of the test was the same as that of the previous test, namely tomeasure how readily available manner of motion concepts are to speakers

from the two languages. Again, it was inquired how easily speakers could

retrieve manner of motion verbs from memory within a short time frame.

As we will see in the task description, this test investigated the issue

slightly less directly, but had the advantage of eliminating possible prob-

lems with task understanding. At any rate, the experiment o¤ered the

possibility of checking whether or not the previous participants’ perfor-

mance on manner of motion verbs would change if a di¤erent testingmethod was adopted.

Participants

The experiment was run on 35 undergraduates per linguistic group of

both sexes. All participants were tested in two university libraries (one inEngland and one in Italy). They were all monolingual; many Italian

speakers said that they had some knowledge of English but that they

were not fluent.

556 F-E. Cardini

Task and procedure

The participants were tested on a one-to-one basis. The task consisted in

writing down on a piece of paper as many motion verbs as the participant

could think of within the time frame of 60 seconds. Investigation of man-

ner of motion verbs specifically would still be possible by checking how

many manner of motion verbs could be found within the list of motion

verbs produced by the participants. The inquiry was therefore not as di-

rect as it was in the previous task, but had the advantage of not needing

any formal explanation about the verbs the informants were required to

list (see related problems again in note 10), since the concept of verbs of

motion is much easier to grasp intuitively. The task instructions were very

simple: ‘‘When you hear ‘start’, please write down as many verbs indicat-ing motion as you can’’; ‘‘Al ‘via’ scrivi quanti piu verbi puoi indicanti

movimento’’.

Results

With regard to the manner of motion verbs found within the larger pool

of motion verbs in general, the English mean was 8.40 (std. dev.: 2.60).

The mean for Italian respondents was 4.43 (std. dev.: 2.10). An indepen-

dent samples t-test provides strong evidence for a significant di¤erence

between the two means (t ¼ 7.02; p < 0.001). As for the remaining non-

manner motion verbs, the English mean this time was lower than the Ital-ian mean (4.03 [std. dev.: 2.60] vs. 6.80 [std. dev.: 3.00] respectively) and

significantly di¤erent (t ¼ �4:14; p < 0.001). Figure 3 shows, for each

Figure 3. Lexical access: Mean for motion verbs per speaker with split into manner of

motion verbs and non-manner motion verbs

Manner of motion saliency 557

language, the speaker’s mean for motion verbs produced with the split

into manner and non-manner motion verbs also shown.

Overall, the English group produced 61 types of manner of motion

verbs, whereas the Italian group produced 33. The elicited types (tokens

in brackets) of manner of motion verbs are shown below.

English:

run (34); jump (29); walk (28); swim (17); dance, skip (16); hop, jog (14); fly

(12); leap, sprint (9); drive (7); crawl (6); bounce, climb, roll (5); cycle, slide

(4); canter, skate, spin, step, swing (3); dive, glide, hurry, race, ride, row,

shimmy, stroll (2); back-flip, bound, chase, flick, flow, gallop, hike, jive,

limp, pace, pounce, prance, rattle, rush, saltate, shu¿e, sidle, ski, slither,

splash, spring, stagger, stamp, stumble, stunt, surf, trot, tumble, wander,

wobble (1).12

Italian:

correre (31); camminare (25); saltare (22); nuotare (15); volare (12); ballare

(6); scivolare (5); rotolare, sciare (4); accelerare, passeggiare (3); fuggire,

pattinare, saltellare, scappare (2); a¤rettarsi, arrampicarsi, circumnavigare,

deambulare, galoppare, marciare, pedalare, rimbalzare, sbandare, scattare,

schizzare, scorrere, sfrecciare, slittare, strisciare, trottare, trotterellare,

zoppicare (1).

Discussion

As in the previous test on adults, the English speakers were able to

produce significantly more manner of motion verb tokens than Italian

speakers, and in a very similar proportion (in the test on manner of mo-

tion verbs the Italian figure was 51 percent of the English figure, while inthis test it was 52.7 percent). Likewise, the number of types per group was

similar to those already found earlier (in the first experiment the Italian

figure was 57.1 percent of the English total; in this second experiment it

was 54.1 percent). Thus, the data of this last experiment corroborated

12. A couple of English verbs produced by the speakers in this test do not feature in my list

of English manner verbs. This is because the dictionaries used for the present research

did not report such verbs. However, they do exist (they were found in the Shorter Ox-

ford) and therefore must be accepted. This was the case of back-flip and saltate, which

the Shorter Oxford defines as ‘‘to perform a backward somersault and ‘‘leap, jump,

skip’’ respectively.

558 F-E. Cardini

and provided additional evidence for what was found in the first one. It is

also interesting to notice that, when compared with Italian, the roughly

double number of English manner of motion verbs was not paralleled by

an analogous double amount of English non-manner motion verbs. If

that had been the case, the significantly greater figure scored by English

subjects for manner of motion verbs should have been viewed simply as

an instance of a wider phenomenon involving a larger area of vocabulary,namely that of motion verbs in general. In fact, the number of English

non-manner motion verbs was significantly lower than the number found

for Italian.13 These data therefore seem to suggest that the greater sa-

lience shown for English subjects with regard to manner of motion verbs

does not extend to other kinds of motion verbs. Or, if it does, the salience

of manner of motion verbs relative to the rest of motion verbs is higher

than the Italian one.

One last observation relevant to all three tests of ease of lexical accessneeds to be made concerning the significantly greater number of manner

of motion verb tokens produced by the English speakers throughout. It is

certainly the case that the greater size of the English manner of motion

verbs vocabulary (see Study 1) must have played a considerable role in

determining that phenomenon. The English participants could and did

pick from a larger number of available verb types, this of course having

an e¤ect on the overall number of tokens elicited. However, when one

looks at the figures regarding some semantically corresponding pair ofverbs of wide use, it is interesting to notice that the number of English

tokens is consistently higher than that for Italian. For example, across

the three tests, 87 tokens were elicited for walk against 63 for the Italian

equivalent camminare; 71 for jump against 50 for saltare; 43 for fly

against 26 for volare; 39 for swim against 31 for nuotare; 34 for run

against 31 for correre (for this last pair, the figures can only refer to

the last test on motion verbs in general—see again note 11). This sug-

gests that the greater number of tokens of manner of motion verbs inEnglish cannot be accounted for only in terms of the wider repertoire

of types that were available to their speakers. At least to some extent,

the phenomenon must also have been brought about by the greater en-

trenchment with which such verbs are represented in English speakers’

13. Because the higher number of English of manner of motion verbs was counterbalanced,

to some extent, by the Italian higher number for other kinds of motion verbs, the over-

all number of verbs listed by each group was not very di¤erent. The English mean for

motion verbs per subject was 12.43 (std. dev.: 2.33), whereas the Italian mean was

11.23 (std. dev.: 3.19). An independent samples t-test provides only a slight evidence

for a significant di¤erence between English and Italian (t ¼ 1.80; p < 0.1).

Manner of motion saliency 559

mind, presumably because of their higher frequency of use in everyday

speech.

2.2. Spontaneous narration of the ‘‘Frog story’’

Aim of the test

The test was meant to check the frequency and variety of manner of mo-tion verb production during spontaneous narration, that is, narration

where people’s natural flow of language does not underlie any kind of

constraints imposed by the researcher.

Material

The test material was the picture book Frog, where are you? (Mayer

1969), which consists of a sequence of 24 wordless pictures relating a

short story, and which the informants had to freely narrate in their

own words. The book has been used in previous experiments to elicit nar-

rations from speakers of many languages (Berman and Slobin 1994). In-formation has also been gathered for Italian speakers (see Slobin 2004:

225), who, in the case of one particular picture of the book (‘‘the Owl’s

Exit’’), obtained a score for manner mention which was similar to that

of all other V-languages and significantly lower than that of any of the

S-languages. However, full published data referring to all episodes of

the story do not seem to be available for this language.

Participants

The participants were 23 English and 29 Italian native speakers of both

sexes between 17 and 19 years of age. They were recruited in two second-

ary schools (one in England and one in Italy). The participants were allmonolingual; the Italian participants had some limited knowledge of

English which was acquired in the school, but none of them regarded

themselves as a fluent speaker of this language.

Task and procedure

Participants were interviewed on a one-to-one basis and were given the

same instructions as were used in previous linguistic tests made on the

Frog story (see Berman and Slobin 1994: 22–3). They were first asked to

look through the entire book and then to tell the story while looking at

the pictures. The participant sat side-by-side with the researcher, whowas the only listener. During the participant’s narration, the researcher

minimised as much as possible the verbal feedback in order not to influ-

ence the chosen form of expression. Still following the procedures used in

560 F-E. Cardini

previous tests on the Frog story, the prompts used during the narrations

were (1) silence or nod of head, (2) ‘‘uh-huh’’, ‘‘okay’’, ‘‘yes’’, (3) ‘‘Any-

thing else?’’, (4) ‘‘and . . . ?’’, (5) ‘‘Go on’’. Each session was audio-

recorded, then orthographically transcribed.

Analysis of the samples and results (manner of motion verbs)

In order to obtain a reliable comparison between the two linguisticgroups on manner of motion verbs production, for each language, the

elicited manner motion verbs had to be counted relative to the whole

amount of speech recorded in that language. Since no constraints were

imposed on the length of the narration, samples from the two groups

varied in this respect. To control for length e¤ects, the procedure outlined

by Berman and Slobin (1994) was adopted here. Speech length was

measured by counting the number of clauses produced. Essentially, each

clause gravitates around a verb, so that the count of recorded verbsshould correspond to that of the clauses. However, modal and aspectual

verbs were counted together with their main verbs. Thus, the following

constitute single clauses: ‘‘he wants to find the frog’’; ‘‘the boy went

searching for the frog’’; ‘‘the dog starts following’’. The analysis ex-

cluded personal comments relating to the task (e.g., ‘‘. . . don’t know

what else to say’’), or queries about object identification, such as asking

the investigator what an animal is called (e.g., ‘‘I don’t know what that’s

called’’).To give an example of how the target verbs were counted relative to the

amount of speech and compared across the two linguistic groups, we can

look at the number of tokens of manner of motion verbs recorded. For

each informant, the number of elicited tokens was divided by the number

of clauses produced, giving the mean value for manner of motion verbs

tokens per clause. With that information it was then possible to reckon

the mean value for each entire linguistic group. The English group scored

a mean of 0.0675 manner of motion verbs per single clause (std. dev.:0.036); the Italian group scored a mean of 0.0378 (std. dev.: 0.033). An

independent-samples t-test indicates that the di¤erence between the two

means is significant (t ¼ 3.05; p < 0.01).

The figures regarding tokens of target verbs refer to all tokens actually

recorded. It must be pointed out, however, that in some cases, certain

verbs were repeated more than once to describe what was a single action

depicted in the book (e.g., ‘‘. . . a big deer, who ran and ran . . .’’; ‘‘Billy

then climbed on top of the rock . . . Unfortunately when he was climbing

onto the rock . . .’’). It is possible that the repetition of one verb for the

description of one same event was simply due to the temporary influence

of the activation of the verb when pronounced the first time rather than a

Manner of motion saliency 561

phenomenon related to its permanent salience in the speaker’s mind.14

This kind of influence may have even increased the chances of item repe-

tition across similar yet distinct events portrayed in the story. One practi-

cal example to make the point: in the Frog story there are two separate

pictures which can both evoke the action of climbing. One is the picture

of the boy who has climbed a tree, the other is that of the same boy who

has climbed a rock. Many interviewed participants described both distinctevents with the verb climb/arrampicarsi. Now, was the participant who

used the verb climb/arrampicarsi to describe the first event more likely to

use it again in the description of the second event, than s/he would have

been if they had used another verb instead (e.g., get on/salire) the first

time? If yes, then the only figure free from such kind of influences is that

regarding the number of types of manner motion verbs per single partici-

pant. In other words, contrary to the figure regarding frequency of use

(number of tokens per single participant) of some language category, thefigure indicating variety of use (number of types per single participant)

gives an index of salience which cannot be biased by the temporary influ-

ence of the language produced by the informant during the specific time

of the task. When checking the number of types of manner of motion

verbs per single participant, it was found that the English group scored a

mean of 0.0534 (std. dev.: 0.031) per clause; for the Italian group, the

same kind of mean was 0.0288 (std. dev.: 0.024). An independent-samples

t-test indicates that the di¤erence between the two means is significant(t ¼ 3.130; p < 0.01). The results referring to the mean number of man-

ner of motion verbs found per single clause are shown in Figure 4a

(tokens) and in Figure 4b (types).

The types (tokens in brackets) elicited from the two groups are listed

below:

English: climb (23); run (18); fly, jump (8); walk (6); creep (4); crawl, slip

(3); bound, chase, dance, flap, hop, sneak, spring, swim, tumble, wander,wriggle (1).

Italian: arrampicarsi, correre (18); scappare (12); saltare (7); volare (5);

fuggire (3); scivolare (4); camminare, intrufolarsi, nuotare, scagliarsi, sgus-

ciare (1).

14. In other words, we cannot exclude the possibility that the repetition of some verb was

facilitated by repetition priming. Wheeldon and Monsell (1992), for example, found

that production of a word in response to a definition had a large and long-lasting facil-

itatory e¤ect on latency for later production of the same word to name a pictured

object.

562 F-E. Cardini

Notice that although the English group was smaller than the Italian

group (23 informants the former, 29 the latter), the number of types per

linguistic group (the same kind of data shown with regard to types in thetests on ease of lexical access previously reported) was 19 for English and

12 for Italian.

Analysis of the samples and results (path and neutral motion verbs)

Although manner of motion verbs were the actual target of the investiga-

tion, it was necessary to inquire about other kinds of motion verbs in

order to check that the di¤erence detected between English and Italian

subjects with regard to manner of motion verb use was not also found in

other types of motion verbs, in which case the di¤erent trend noticed be-tween English and Italian would not have been meaningful to the present

inquiry. A check was therefore carried out on a kind of verb which could

well have been used for describing the various motion events in place of

manner of motion verbs. All those intransitive, translational motion verbs

were counted which do not give any indication of manner, whether these

were path verbs (e.g., exit/uscire, ascend/salire) or simply verbs that

denote neutral translational motion (come/venire, go/andare, move/

muoversi). Here, this group of verbs will be referred to as ‘‘path/neutralmotion verbs’’. The analysis of the samples in relation to path/neutral

motion verbs followed the same criteria previously used for the analysis

of manner of motion verbs. With regard to tokens of path/neutral verbs

per single clause, the English mean was 0.1104 (std. dev.: 0.047), while the

Italian 0.1471 (std. dev.: 0.060). With regard to types per single clause,

the English mean was 0.0527 (std. dev.: 0.016), while the Italian mean

was 0.0659 (std. dev.: 0.025). This time the English means were therefore

Figure 4a. Spontaneous narration: Mean

for tokens of manner of motion

verbs per clause

Figure 4b. Spontaneous narration: Mean

for types of manner of motion

verb per clause

Manner of motion saliency 563

lower than the Italian means. The results referring to the quantity of

path/neutral motion verbs found per single clause are given in Figures

5a (tokens) and 5b (types).Below is the list of types (tokens in brackets) of path/neutral verbs pro-

duced by the two linguistic groups. The number of types per linguistic

group was 8 for English and 14 for Italian.

English: fall (67); go (28); come (22); get on/o¤/onto/out (9); move (6);

leave (3); swarm (2); head (1).

Italian: cadere (105); uscire (79); andare (25); (ri)tornare (24); salire (21);

avvicinarsi (11); allontanarsi (7); dirigersi, infilarsi (3); entrare, muoversi,scendere (2); provenire, recarsi (1).

Discussion

The English group produced significantly more manner of motion verbs

than the Italian group. Indeed, the English mean for tokens and types of

manner of motion verb per clause was significantly greater than the Ital-ian mean (Figures 4a and 4b). It is also worth noting that the English

participants produced more types per group even if the number of sub-

jects was lower than that of the Italians.

What is also relevant to our inquiry is that the results obtained for

path/neutral motion verbs across the two linguistic groups did not repli-

cate the same pattern found for manner of motion verbs. As a matter of

fact, they showed an opposite tendency, since this time all the relevant

Figure 5a. Spontaneous narration: Mean

for tokens of path/neutral

motion verbs per clause

Figure 5b. Spontaneous narration: Mean

for types of path/neutral motion

verb per clause

564 F-E. Cardini

figures regarding English participants were actually lower than the rele-

vant Italian ones (Figures 5a and 5b). Because the greater use of manner

of motion verbs in English was therefore not paralleled by a similar trend

with path/neutral motion verbs, the English greater salience for motion

verbs appears to be restricted to the former kind of verbs.15

In this respect, one can say that the results of this experiment are con-

gruent with those obtained earlier in the test regarding ease of lexical ac-cess of motion verbs in general. There too, the greater salience of manner

of motion verbs among English speakers compared with the Italian

speakers did not extend to other kinds of motion verbs.

Conclusions

Looking at the overall body of data collected in the two studies, it ap-

pears that Italian can indeed be categorised as a low-manner-salient lan-

guage. Although grammatical analyses agree that Italian must be consid-ered one of the least typical V-languages, the prominence of the semantic

domain of manner of motion in the knowledge and use of its speakers

does not seem to be near that exhibited by speakers of prototypical S-

languages such as English.

The vocabulary investigation, aimed at inquiring into the size of the

semantic domain of manner of motion, showed that the number of

Italian manner of motion verbs is significantly lower than the number

for English. With regard to the extent of such a di¤erence, resultsmatched fairly closely previous comparisons made between other V- and

S-languages.

The experimental work carried out with speakers also pointed to a sig-

nificantly lower salience of the Italian manner of motion domain, this

time in terms of linguistic behaviour shown by such speakers. That is to

say, Italian speakers were slower in retrieving manner of motion verbs

from memory, and showed a significantly lower frequency and variety of

mention of this kind of verbs in their spontaneous speech.With regard to future research questions related to the above find-

ings, it would now be of interest to see whether the linguistic phenom-

ena detected in this study give rise to Whorfian e¤ects. That is, whether

15. The fact that the Italian number of path/neural verbs was higher than the English

quantity was, to some extent, to be expected. If some speaker described some motion

event without using a manner of motion verb, s/he must perforce have used some other

kind of translational motion verb (i.e., path or neutral motion verb) instead. Thus,

at least some of the Italian lesser amount of manner of motion verbs must have been

compensated by some greater amount of path/neutral verbs.

Manner of motion saliency 565

the significantly di¤erent degree of linguistic salience found between

the speakers of these two languages has a coherent counterpart in non-

linguistic cognitive areas.

Appendix: List of manner of motion verbs

English:

accelerate, amble, arc, bank, barge, beat, beetle, belt, (bi)cycle/bike,

billow, boat, bob, bobble, bolt, bounce, bound, bowl, breeze, bumble,

bump, bus, bustle, buzz, canoe, canter, caper, careen, career, cascade,

charge, chase, chug, clamber, climb, coach, coast, collapse, course, crawl,

creep, cruise, dance, dart, dash, dive, dodder, dodge, drag oneself, drift,

drive, ease, edge, flap, flash, flee, fleet, flick, fling, flit, flitter, float, flounder,

flow, flutter, fly, foxtrot, freewheel, fumble, gallop, gambol, gimp, glide,

gush, gust, hare, hasten, hike, hitch(-hike), hobble, hop, hurry, hurtle,

inch, irrupt, jerk, jet, jink, jive, jog, joggle, jolt, jump, kite, launch oneself,

leap, leapfrog, limp, loiter, lollop, lope, lurch, march, mince, mizzle, moon,

mosey, motor, nose, pace, pad, paddle, parachute, parade, patter, pedal,

pelt, plane, plod, plop, plough, plummet, plunge, potter, pounce, pour,

prance, promenade, prowl, pump, race, rack, raft, rattle, reel, ride, ripple,

roar, rocket, roll, roller-skate/blade, row, rumble, run, rush, rustle, sail,

saunter, scamper, scoot, scramble, scud, scu¿e, scull, scurry, scuttle, sham-

ble, shimmy, shin, shoot, shu¿e, side-slip, sidle, skate, ski, skid, skim, skip,

skitter, sledge/sleigh, slew, slide, slink, slip, slither, slog, slosh, sneak, soar,

somersault, speed, spin, splash, splosh, spout, spring, sprint, spurt, squash,

squeeze, squirt, stagger, stalk, stamp, stampede, steam, step, stomp, storm,

stream, stride, stroll, strut, stumble, stump, stunt, surf, surge, swagger,

swan, sweep, swim, swing, swoop, tango, teeter, thrash, throw oneself,

thrust, tiptoe, toboggan, toddle, toe in/out, totter, trail, traipse, tramp,

trek, trip, trot, trudge, trundle, tumble, vault, volplane, waddle, wade,

walk, wallow, waltz, wander, whi¿e, whirl, whiz, wing, wobble, worm,

wriggle, zigzag, zing, zip, zoom.

Italian:

accelerare, a¤rettarsi, ambiare, ancheggiare, arrampicar-e/si, arrancare,

avventarsi, ballare, ballonzolare, balzare, balzellare, barcollare, bighello-

nare, bordeggiare, brancolare, buttarsi, calarsi, camminare, capitombolare,

caracollare, cascare, catapultarsi, cavalcare, (ac)ciabattare, claudicare,

correre, crollare, danzare, deambulare, derapare, divincolarsi, erompere,

filare, fiondarsi, fluire, franare, frullare, fuggire, galoppare, gattonare, get-

566 F-E. Cardini

tarsi, girellare, gironzolare, grufolarsi, guizzare, incedere, inciampicare,

inerpicarsi, intrufolarsi, irrompere, lanciarsi, marciare, molleggiarsi, mon-

tare, navigare, nuotare, pagaiare, paracadutarsi, passeggiare, pattinare,

pedalare, piombare, planare, precipitare, precipitarsi, prorompere, remare,

rimbalzare, rinculare, rinsaccare, ronzare, rotolare, rovinare, ruzzare, ruz-

zolare, saettare, saltare, salte(re)llare, sbalzare, sbandare, sbarellare, sca-

gliarsi, scalpicciare, scantonare, scapicollarsi, scappare, scaraventarsi,

scarpinare, scarrozzare, scattare, schettinare, schizzare, sciare, scivolare,

scodinzolare, scorrazzare, scorrere, sculettare, sdrucciolare, sfarfallare, sfi-

lare, sfrecciare, sgambettare, sgattaiolare, sgorgare, sgusciare, slanciarsi,

slittare, smottare, sobbalzare, spaziare, sprizzare, sprofondare, squagliar-

e/sela, strascicarsi, strisciare, svicolare, svignar-e/sela, svolazzare, tacchet-

tare, telare, tombolare, traballare, trascinarsi, tronfiare, trottare, trotterel-

lare, tu¤arsi, veleggiare, vogare, volare, volteggiare, (av/ri)voltolarsi,

zampettare, zampillare, zigzagare, zoccolare, zoppicare.

Received 18 December 2006 Lancaster University

Revision received 24 February 2008

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Sequential and summary scanning: A reply

RONALD W. LANGACKER*

Abstract

It is quite legitimate for Broccias and Hollmann (2007) to question the

characterization of verbs in terms of sequential scanning. However, they

have not advanced any cogent arguments against it. Although experimental

evidence is certainly to be desired, there is no doubt about the psychological

status of sequential scanning: it amounts to nothing more than the sequen-

tiality inherent in the real-time experience of events. Its sequentiality should

be most fully manifested when a verb is directly apprehended as a grounded

clausal head (hence most salient); owing to general e¤ects of compression,

a more holistic view should prevail when a verb is subordinated to other

elements. The arguments made by B&H concerning the English auxiliary,

causatives, and path prepositions are discussed and found to be invalid.

Nonetheless, their critique has shown the need for clarification and refine-

ment and has directed attention to important issues.

Keywords: auxiliary; distribution; grammatical category; grounding;

mental simulation; path preposition; summation; verb.

In a recent article, Broccias and Hollmann (2007), B&H hereafter, ques-

tion my conceptual characterization of verbs in terms of sequential scan-

ning (Langacker 1987a, 1987b). Certainly it is legitimate for them toraise this issue. The description, having been proposed over two decades

ago, is ripe for reexamination; at the very least it stands in need of

clarification and elucidation. While I do not believe that B&H have raised

any valid objections to it, they have performed a most useful service by

Cognitive Linguistics 19–4 (2008), 571–584

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.022

0936–5907/08/0019–0571

6 Walter de Gruyter

* Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego; author’s e-mail:

3rlangacker@ucsd.edu4.

subjecting it to needed scrutiny and directing attention to other important

matters.

The point they emphasize the most is that the putative distinction be-

tween summary and sequential scanning is not supported by independent

psychological evidence (in contrast, say, to figure/ground organization)

and is thus to be regarded with suspicion. I disagree with this assessment

of its status. Rather than being exotic or mysterious, the two kinds ofscanning are basic aspects of moment-to-moment experience. Sequential

scanning is our primary mode of experience in the real-time observation

of events. As we watch an event unfold, e.g., a ball rolling down an

incline, we observe it at just a single position at a given point in time. In

terms of what is directly and immediately apprehended, the component

spatial configurations are accessible and available only in the temporal

sequence of their occurrence. Sequential scanning is nothing more than

this fundamental aspect of dynamic experience.Of course, our apprehension of events is not limited to direct, real-time

observation. We can also recall or imagine events through processes of

mental simulation. Evident as well is the ability to summarize sequen-

tially experienced events and apprehend them holistically. This happens,

for example, when we watch something move and draw a line to repre-

sent its trajectory; the successive configurations constituting a dynamic

occurrence are then all captured in a single, static diagram. This summing

capacity is directly reflected in a device commonly used in visual presen-tations, e.g., to indicate the route followed by migratory birds or the

changing price of gold: starting from a point, a line or arrow is shown as

‘‘growing’’ across the screen until it occupies the full extent of the path it

represents. Two phases or levels of organization are thus involved: a

‘‘growth’’ or ‘‘build-up’’ phase, which captures directionality and tempo-

ral sequencing; and the final, persistent stage that results, in which the

successive configurations are compressed into a single, simultaneously

available gestalt. That is precisely how I characterize summary scanning.It goes without saying that experimental investigation of these scanning

modes would be most welcome. One would like a detailed, empirically

grounded understanding of their nature, their scope, their relation to one

another and to other cognitive phenomena, as well as the specifics of their

implementation. We can hope for the convergence of linguistic and psy-

chological evidence, as exemplified by recent experimental work indicat-

ing that ‘‘fictive motion’’ really is conceived in terms of motion (e.g.,

Matlock 2004), or that a participant’s status as trajector actually doesinvolve the focusing of attention (Tomlin 1995, 1997; Forrest 1996).

However, the mere existence of sequential and summary scanning as con-

ceptual phenomena is hardly problematic.

572 R. W. Langacker

To be sure, one can acknowledge their existence without accepting the

proposals made in Cognitive Grammar (CG) concerning their application

to grammatical description. Resistance to their acceptance is possible

at several di¤erent levels. There is first the standard doctrine that basic

grammatical categories are simply not susceptible to semantic character-

ization. So firmly entrenched is this attitude that the CG proposals are

often rejected out of hand without being considered on their merits. Iwould claim, however, that the usual arguments for this doctrine con-

fuse separate issues and make invalid assumptions (Langacker 2005,

2008). In fact, I can only wonder why—from the perspective of cogni-

tive linguistics based on conceptual semantics—the semantic definability

of fundamental notions would not be the default expectation. Alterna-

tively, it might be objected that phenomena like modes of scanning are

inappropriate as the basis for their description. I take this attitude as be-

ing not just gratuitous but wrong-headed. If general characterizationsare indeed possible, they have to be highly schematic. The only viable

candidates, I suggest, are mental capacities independent of any specific

conceptual content (e.g., the directing and focusing of attention, figure/

ground organization, conceptual grouping and reification, and the invo-

cation of mental spaces). Sequential and summary scanning are clearly

of this nature. We can reasonably expect them to have some linguistic

manifestation.

The critique by B&H is less concerned with these basic issues than withthe specifics of the CG analysis. Are sequential and summary scanning re-

ally necessary for describing grammatical categories and constructions?

Are the proposed descriptions optimal linguistically and viable from the

processing standpoint? To properly assess these matters, we need a realis-

tic and more elaborate view of these modes of scanning and their imple-

mentation in online processing.

It would not be realistic, for example, to view sequential scanning

as consisting in a series of discrete experiences with each component‘‘state’’—the relationship obtaining at a single point in time—being fully

activated at just that instant and not at all at either the preceding or the

following instant. Our primary experience is one of continuity, where

each component state morphs seamlessly into the next and thus provides

the basis for its emergence. In processing terms, the component configura-

tions (e.g., conceptions of the ball at particular positions along the in-

cline) are neither individuated nor instantaneous. Each is projected from

those which closely precede it and contributes to projecting those whichfollow (cf. Grush 2007). To the extent that we distinguish them analyti-

cally, their activation thus has a temporal contour, where it rises to a

peak and then falls. The scanning is nonetheless sequential in that the

Sequential and summary scanning: A reply 573

configurations reach their peak activation only momentarily and in the

order of their temporal manifestation.

It would likewise not be realistic to assume that sequential and sum-

mary scanning are mutually exclusive, so that only one can occur during

a given span of processing time. If my interest lies specifically in the tra-

jectory followed by a rolling ball, I can summarize over its positions—

building up a holistic conception of its path—even while watching theevent unfold. If summation is done through memory, a simulation of the

original sequential experience may well be necessary as a means of access-

ing the component configurations. It is not implausible to suppose that

sequentiality and summation coexist in event conceptions as two aspects

or levels of processing activity, their relative salience depending on the

higher-level task. On this view, linguistic characterizations based on the

modes of scanning would indicate the extent to which the sequentiality

of direct experience is preserved in mental simulations.Of course, mental simulations are only partial recreations of primary

experience. Relative to the original, a simulated experience is generally

less intense, less detailed, and realized during a shorter span of processing

time. This naturally holds for the simulations that figure in linguistic

meanings, including the sequential scanning claimed to be inherent in the

meanings of verbs. If a verb like swim incorporates perceptual and motor

images of this activity, their sequentiality is bound to be less salient than

that of the primary experience, if only due to temporal compression: ittakes a while to swim, but apprehension of the verbal meaning is mea-

sured in milliseconds. Other well-known factors also diminish its salience.

The first is automatization (or entrenchment), allowing a mental or phys-

ical action to be executed in streamlined fashion without close attention

to specific details or temporal phases. Also, an element subordinated as

part of a larger structure tends to be compressed and attenuated com-

pared to when it occurs independently. We can thus expect the actual

manifestation of sequential scanning to be a matter of degree. Indeed,apprehending a sequenced occurrence holistically may simply consist in

its sequential aspect falling below the threshold of awareness.

These matters bear on a key argument made by B&H concerning

my analysis of the English auxiliary. As schematic verbs, the auxiliaries

have and be involve sequential scanning, whereas the participial ele-

ments impose a summary view on the process they apply to. In com-

plex expressions, sequential and summary scanning therefore alternate at

successive levels of composition, as each derivational element (shown inbold) imposes its construal on the structure already assembled: follow >followed > be followed > being followed > be being followed > been being

followed > have been being followed. B&H suggest that this ‘‘oscillation’’

574 R. W. Langacker

between the scanning modes is inappropriate ‘‘as a cognitively plausible

processing representation’’ (506).

And it no doubt is. The question, though, is whether this implausible

oscillation is actually entailed by the characterization of verbs and

participles in terms of modes of scanning. The argument depends on the

following assumptions: (i) CG descriptions of grammatical structure are

intended as direct representations of what actually occurs in online lan-guage processing. (ii) The metaphor of ‘‘composition’’—whereby an ex-

pression is ‘‘constructed’’ by successively combining smaller structures

into larger ones—is to be taken literally. (iii) Successive levels of com-

position represent distinct temporal phases in online processing; the

structures at one level are fully implemented (i.e., the processing activity

comprising them is fully executed) before the next level is initiated. (iv) A

structure is fully implemented in all its occurrences—there is no attenua-

tion or compression due to factors like automatization or subordinationto other elements.

But I do not make any of these assumptions. The question of how lin-

guistic structures relate to online processing is a vital one that I have long

pondered and continue to wrestle with. While I do envisage an integrated

account, this remains a long-term goal owing to the sheer complexity

of the matter. Processing occurs simultaneously in many dimensions of

structure, at multiple levels of organization, and on vastly di¤erent time

scales. A complex expression cannot be reduced to any single representa-tional format, type of cognitive activity, or path of mental access. So if

CG descriptions succeed in capturing certain aspects of semantic and

grammatical structure, they are not o¤ered as direct or stand-alone ac-

counts of actual online processing. In particular, reference to composition

and structures at successively higher levels of organization should not be

interpreted as claiming that they are processed in temporal sequence from

‘‘bottom to top’’. To counteract this entailment of the standard composi-

tion metaphor, I often emphasize that a ‘‘composite structure’’ is anentity in its own right, and that ‘‘component structures’’ serve only to cat-

egorize and motivate certain facets of it. Rather than being constructed

out of building blocks, an expression consists in an assembly of symbolic

structures linked by correspondences. What matters is an assembly’s over-

all coherence based on how the structures relate to one another, whether

they are accessed in top-down, bottom-up, or left-to-right fashion (or any

combination of these).

Regardless of sequence of access, can it plausibly be maintained thatmultiple instances of sequential and summary scanning coexist within

the verb group of a single clause, as in have been being followed ? Two

general considerations bear on the matter. First, we do have an evident

Sequential and summary scanning: A reply 575

capacity for dealing with structures at numerous hierarchical levels, each

with its own intrinsic organization. In this respect the auxiliary sequences

are actually not dissimilar to a nominal expression such as a row of stacks

of plates. Whatever one claims about constituency or sequence of access

in online processing, it would seem to be undeniable that our overall

apprehension of this expression involves multiple structures with di¤er-

ent kinds of profiles: bounded things ( plate, stack, row), plural masses( plates, stacks), and relationships (of plates, of stacks). Moreover, certain

structures impose their organization on others: as a whole, for instance,

stacks of plates refers to the stacks, and the entire expression, to a row.

I do not see, then, that there is anything inherently implausible about

positing complex symbolic assemblies of this sort, where certain struc-

tures override the construal imposed by others.

Perhaps the modes of scanning are di¤erent in this regard. But in mak-

ing this assessment, we need to consider what happens in general when astructure is subordinated as part of a symbolic assembly in which its own

organization is overridden at a higher level. The basic e¤ect is one of

compression and attenuation. When subordinated as part of plates, the

conception symbolized by plate is much diminished compared to when it

occurs independently. The notion of a single bounded entity is evoked to

some extent, being inherent in the conception of a plural mass, but has

lesser salience due to the mass being focused as the profile. Likewise, a

syllable pronounced independently, with full stress, has fuller manifesta-tion than when incorporated in unstressed position within a word, where

it has lesser amplitude, is shorter in duration, and is more susceptible to

phonetic reduction (e.g., vowel centralization).

We ought to expect a comparable e¤ect when a verb is subordinated

to other elements. Presumably a processual conception is fully mani-

fested when it is profiled and grounded by a finite clause, thereby being

directly apprehended as the focused onstage entity. It is subject to com-

pression and attenuation when it has a background role as part of alarger structure, thereby being apprehended in relation to other elements

that impose their own organization on the overall expression. By explic-

itly overriding a verb’s processual nature, elements like infinitival to and

the participial inflections allow its content to be invoked for functions

other than its primary one of heading a finite clause (e.g., for noun

modification or non-finite complementation). A verb’s subordination is

bound to diminish its inherent sequentiality, if only by compressing it

into the smaller time-frame allocated to background structures. Its se-quential aspect may indeed be e¤ectively or even wholly suppressed,

given that the very purpose of these constructions is to impose a summary

view.

576 R. W. Langacker

I conclude that B&H, in their critique of the CG analysis of auxiliary

sequences, do not provide a valid argument against sequential and sum-

mary scanning. They do however raise a number of considerations that

were not addressed in the original formulation (Langacker 1987b: 78,

1991: ch. 5). Prompted in part by their comments, I am presently working

toward a revised description that is more comprehensive and more ame-

nable to an integrated account of structure and online processing. Al-though it is too complex for detailed presentation here, in terms of both

analysis and the view of grammar it presupposes, I will briefly mention

some basic features.

I now consider the layering exhibited by auxiliary sequences—e.g.,

(have (-en (be (-ing (be (-ed ( follow)))))))—to be a matter of conceptual

organization (semantic scope) rather than grammatical constituency. The

same conceptual structure can be packaged and expressed symbolically in

di¤erent ways. Even using the same basic elements, it can often be codedby symbolic assemblies providing alternate means of access to it. Constit-

uency is a non-essential aspect of such assemblies: the hierarchical

arrangement of symbolic composition. It is partial, variable, and non-

exhaustive of the groupings and relationships that figure in semantic

and grammatical structure (Langacker 1997, 2008). More important are

semantic correspondences specifying how component elements relate to

one another as overlapping facets of the composite conception (regardless

of order of composition), as well as the construal imposed on the overallexpression (notably its profile) for higher-level purposes. In particular, the

auxiliary sequence in a finite clause profiles the process representing the

outermost layer in terms of scope (e.g., have been being followed profiles

the have relation). This is the process profiled and grounded by the clause

as a whole.

Grammar is not conceptual structure, but rather a means of symboli-

cally expressing it. There is no expectation in CG that the organization

of symbolic assemblies should mirror that of the conceptual structurescoded by them. Assemblies exhibit multiple dimensions of organization,

with elements being grouped in di¤erent ways for di¤erent purposes.

One dimension comprises groupings based on semantic function. Within

a finite clause, for instance, the entire sequence have been being followed

functions semantically as the grounded structure (connected to the

ground by tense and modality). Also established as groups, on the basis

of their perspectival functions (perfect, progressive, and passive), are the

combinations (have þ -en), (be þ -ing), and (be þ -ed ), which cross-cut thegroupings based on scope relations. A second dimension consists in com-

positional relationships, where ‘‘component’’ symbolic structures serve to

motivate (not, strictly speaking, to constitute) ‘‘composite’’ structures of

Sequential and summary scanning: A reply 577

greater complexity. Within an auxiliary sequence, each word represents a

minimal grouping of this sort: ((have) (been) (being) ( followed )). Observe

that this way of grouping basic elements is non-congruent with the other

two. A third dimension is temporal sequencing (‘‘linear order’’). Because

it defines a salient path of mental access (though certainly not the only

path), I regard the order of presentation as an aspect of linguistic mean-

ing in its own right, above and beyond its grammatical significance.The various factors cited by B&H all have their place in a full descrip-

tion of auxiliary sequences recognizing these (and other) dimensions of

organization. Left-to-right processing is indeed a central feature. Struc-

tures of di¤erent sizes—e.g., be Ved, be Ving, being Ved, have been Ving,

have been being Ved—do indeed achieve the status of well-rehearsed units

which can thus be invoked as familiar gestalts. To a significant extent

these units retain their analyzability (a matter of degree); have been being

Ved has not been reinterpreted as a single morpheme. Still, owing toentrenchment and compression the constitutive elements do have lesser

salience. An account of this sort thus eliminates (or at least greatly

mitigates) any problem of oscillation between sequential and summary

scanning. The scope relations in question are not mirrored at the level of

symbolic expression, where only a modest degree of compositional layer-

ing is posited for auxiliary sequences. The words and phrases of these

sequences provide serial access to overlapping portions of the implied

conceptual structure. Since these words and phrases are mostly fixed ex-pressions in which verbs are subordinated to other elements, sequential

scanning is largely suppressed. Only the grounded process, being directly

apprehended and profiled by the clause as a whole, is manifested without

compression and with full realization of its inherent sequentiality.

The other main arguments advanced by B&H concern the issue of

whether the distinction between sequential and summary scanning is

descriptively necessary. For two cases, alternatives are proposed that do

not rely on this distinction. The first involves causative constructions,where to-infinitives (e.g., with cause) are supposedly scanned in summary

fashion, and bare infinitives (e.g., with make) in sequential fashion. A

proposed alternative based on Givon’s (1980) notion of binding is consid-

ered in both synchronic and diachronic perspective. While I do not have

any quarrel with the B&H analysis, I fail to see its relevance, since I do not

in fact employ the scanning modes to distinguish the two constructions.

To my recollection, my only published analysis of bare infinitives re-

gards their occurrence with perception verbs, where they contrast withactive participles, e.g., I saw the ship sink vs. I saw the ship sinking (Lan-

gacker 1999: Ch. 7, §5). In that account, I posited for the former a zero

subordinator directly analogous to -ing, the only di¤erence being that

578 R. W. Langacker

-ing restricts the profile to some internal portion of the verbal process.

Hence in both constructions that process is said to be viewed holistically.

Now in retrospect I would avoid positing a zero subordinator. The impo-

sition of a summary view is better ascribed to the subordinating construc-

tion itself, where the complement event is specifically apprehended in

relation to the matrix predicate (rather than being grounded and directly

apprehended in its own right). Be that as it may, I do not take V as beingsequentially scanned in either make V or cause to V, and I quite agree

that the constructions di¤er in degree of binding and other semantic fac-

tors, such as the general future orientation of to (Wierzbicka 1988: Ch. 1).

B&H also question my appeal to modes of scanning in order to distin-

guish verbs from path prepositions. The discussion is based on my de-

scription of enter vs. into (Langacker 1992), which (at least in certain

uses) would seem to be a minimal pair, contrasting solely in this property.

Each profiles a complex relationship in which the trajector occupies allthe locations constituting a spatial path. In each case, moreover, it typi-

cally occupies these locations successively through time. Hence the verb

and the preposition are not consistently distinguished in terms of concep-

tual content, profiling, or trajector/landmark alignment. I thus proposed

that the basic di¤erence resides in whether the ‘‘component states’’—the

relationships obtaining at each successive point in conceived time—are

accessed through processing time in sequential or summary fashion.

The alternative proposed by B&H supposedly accords a greater role todistributional factors. Since path prepositions typically occur in combina-

tion with motion verbs, they incorporate a schematic motion event as an

unprofiled element in their base. The trajector of the preposition corre-

sponds to the trajector of this event (the mover). B&H do not say explic-

itly what into profiles, but they represent its profile as a straight arrow,

using a squiggly arrow for the unprofiled motion event. As for enter, they

merely say that it foregrounds (i.e., profiles) the motion event without

featuring ‘‘an extra component’’ as part of its meaning. They representthis event with the same straight arrow employed for the profile of into. I

confess to being mystified by these notations, which imply that enter is

simpler than into and is also non-eventive, being what remains when the

unprofiled motion event is subtracted from the latter. This is certainly not

their intent, and indeed, what they evidently have in mind is eminently

reasonable. I suggest, however, that when this proposal is spelled out in

more careful detail, it is not a true alternative to the CG analysis.

I fully agree that the basic sense of into incorporates a schematic mo-tion event as an unprofiled part of its base. It is not su‰cient, however,

to say that the preposition’s trajector corresponds to the mover; it must

further be specified that the path profiled by into is none other than the

Sequential and summary scanning: A reply 579

path traversed by the mover in the motion event. Also in agreement with

B&H, I take the schematic motion event evoked by into as corresponding

to the specific event profiled by the verb it combines with; walk into the

garage thus indicates that the into path is the path followed in walking.

But it is no less true that a motion verb incorporates the schematic notion

of a path as a central part of its meaning—there is no motion without a

path of motion. This path functions as elaboration site for the verb’scombination with the prepositional phrase, and since the former functions

as profile determinant, the latter is a complement rather than a modifier.

Enter, of course, is slightly di¤erent in that the path is more specific, so

enter into the garage seems redundant and somewhat marginal (we would

normally say enter the garage, with the final location focused as enter’s

landmark). This is apparently what B&H are alluding to when they say

that enter lacks ‘‘an extra component’’ of meaning. But enter does incor-

porate the notion of a path, just as into incorporates that of a motionevent.

I believe B&H would accept the following rephrasing of their analysis:

while they both indicate motion along a path, enter profiles the motion

(including a specification of the path), whereas into profiles the path, the

motion event being unprofiled (hence less salient). The di¤erence thus

resides in the relative prominence of the motion component within the

overall conception. Although this is certainly correct so far as it goes, I

suggest that it does not go far enough. I noted that B&H do not explicitlysay what into profiles. More fundamentally, they o¤er no explicit charac-

terization of the central notions: motion and (presumably) path. This is

crucial, since the very reason for examining enter and into is that these

particular expressions allow us to see how minimally di¤erent these

notions are.

How might one describe the conception of motion (as in walk, enter,

etc.)? Its essential content is that the trajector, through time, occupies a

series of locations; it thus comprises a temporally ordered sequence ofspatial relationships (each potentially coded by a prepositional phrase,

like in the garage). What about the notion of a path? The issue is not the

meaning of the English noun path (which is merely used here for conve-

nience), but rather the shared conceptual import of prepositions like into,

along, and through. These, I presume, do not profile things but rather spa-

tial relationships. The distinctive property of these relationships is their

complexity: they do not consist in just a single configuration, where the

trajector occupies a single, point-like location, but in an ordered series ofsuch relationships. In typical uses, this ordering (the source of a path

preposition’s inherent directionality) has a temporal basis, the component

configurations being realized successively through time.

580 R. W. Langacker

Granted these characterizations, the two notions are equivalent in

terms of their essential content: both involve the trajector occupying a

temporally ordered series of locations. At least in some cases, therefore,

enter and into are not distinguished by their conceptual content (nor by

profiling or choice of trajector). How, then, do they di¤er? Along with

B&H, I would say that the ‘‘motion component’’ is less salient in the

case of into. But I have just argued that the ‘‘motion’’ and ‘‘path’’ compo-nents are really the same, comprising an ordered series of locative rela-

tionships. It would seem that the di¤erence can only reside in the degree

of prominence accorded to the temporal basis of the ordering—whether

the profiled relationship is viewed primarily as developing through time,

or whether its temporal evolution remains in the background.

What is the actual conceptual import of evolution through time being

foregrounded rather than backgrounded? I suggest that this has the e¤ect

of emphasizing an event’s inherent sequentiality. Events unfold throughtime, each component configuration obtaining at just a single instant. In

direct experience, this serial exposure to an event’s component states

represents the primary mode of apprehending it. So to the extent that

meanings are based on simulations of such experience, foregrounding an

event’s evolution through time ensures that its inherent sequentiality is

fully manifested. By the same token, it tends to be diminished or sup-

pressed when time is relegated to the background. In that case there is

greater emphasis on the component configurations per se, viewed inabstraction from their temporal evolution. The balance thus shifts from

sequentiality to summation.

In sum, I see no intrinsic conflict between my own analysis of enter vs.

into and the one proposed by B&H. When the latter is spelled out in more

explicit detail—in a way that I believe conforms to their intent—it relies

on a distinction either equivalent or closely akin to sequential vs. sum-

mary scanning. I am not too concerned about the precise manner in

which the distinction is drawn. More important, from the CG standpoint,is that there be some consistent conceptual basis for distinguishing verbs

from other categories.

B&H seem doubtful that we can or should even expect to find concep-

tual characterizations of this sort. They suggest that such distinctions

‘‘can be regarded first and foremost as by-products of distributional facts,

i.e., of grammar as a usage-based model’’ (509). I certainly agree with the

importance of distributional facts, in accordance with the usage-based

approach (Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Bybee and Hopper 2001; Lan-gacker 1987a, 1988, 2000). Indeed, my analysis of enter and into is based

on distribution in just the way that B&H indicate. It is on the basis of

their grammatical distribution that enter and into are assigned to di¤erent

Sequential and summary scanning: A reply 581

categories, by both the linguist and the language learner. Like B&H,

moreover, I presume that path prepositions, owing to their frequent

occurrence with motion verbs, incorporate a schematic motion event as

part of their meaning. (Of course, the converse also holds.) The issue is

whether distribution alone su‰ces, or is at least the primary factor (being

‘‘first and foremost’’). Here I can only suggest that distributional and con-

ceptual factors have to be considered in tandem. Without the latter, wecannot explain why the observed distributional asymmetries—supporting

the postulation of verbs and a preposition-type category in language after

language—should arise in the first place. Could we explain this just by

positing semantic prototypes? I tend to doubt it, but in any case it be-

hooves us at least to look for general definitions. In my own view, the ex-

istence of schematic characterizations of the sort proposed in CG ought

to be our default expectation. This fits in well with an overall approach

viewing grammar as a product of subjectification, whereby mental opera-tions inherent in concrete experience come to be applied in abstraction

from such experience as the basis for grammatical phenomena (Lan-

gacker 2004, 2008).

I have profited from this occasion to reexamine, refine, and hopefully

clarify my original description of the modes of scanning and their linguis-

tic application. In response to the question posed by B&H in their title, I

would still answer in the a‰rmative. But as is so often the case in linguis-

tic disagreements, we are dealing here with di¤erent presuppositions con-cerning what is reasonable to assume as the basis for analysis. B&H start

from the supposition that the scanning modes are something outlandish

whose existence is to be doubted and whose application in linguistic de-

scription ought to be resisted. I start from the opposite view. We exhibit

the capacity for summation whenever we use a static shape to represent

the course of a movement event. Sequential scanning amounts to nothing

more than mental simulation of the sequentiality inherent in real-time

event experience. In di¤erent guises and under di¤erent labels (including‘‘image schemas’’), simulation has come to be widely accepted as an

essential component of linguistic meaning (Johnson 1987; Barsalou 1999;

Matlock 2004; Hampe 2005; Bergen 2005; Svensson, Lindblom, and

Ziemke 2007). It is also widely agreed that simulations are extended to

circumstances beyond those giving rise to them, and that this plays a

major role in grammar and mental construction. Whatever its ultimate

outcome, the issue raised by B&H needs to be considered in this broader

context.

Received 15 February 2008 University of California, San Diego

Revision received 11 April 2008

582 R. W. Langacker

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584 R. W. Langacker

Metaphor and phonological reductionin English idiomatic expressions

DANIEL SANFORD*

Abstract

Gibbs and O’Brien (1990) argue that the high degree of consistency in

speakers’ mental images for common idioms indicates that conceptual

metaphors play a vital role in constraining the meaning of such expressions.

The experiment reported here, which monitors speakers’ reading of the

stimuli used by Gibbs and O’Brien, seeks to uncover a phonological corre-

late of the same phenomenon. It is argued here that the highly constrained

nature of the source domains from which metaphorically motivated idioms

draw their meanings (evidenced, in the Gibbs and O’Brien study, by the

consistency of speakers’ mental images) causes words internal to such idi-

oms to be highly predictable. This predictability is associated with words

carrying a low semantic load, licensing their phonological reduction. The

hypothesis that words internal to idiomatic expressions are reduced in dura-

tion is confirmed, and this is taken as further support for Gibbs and

O’Briens’ findings that metaphors are to at least some extent active in the

on-line processing of idioms.

Keywords: metaphor; idiom; predictability; word length; reduction.

Cognitive Linguistics 19–4 (2008), 585–603

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2008.023

0936–5907/08/0019–0585

6 Walter de Gruyter

* A version of this paper was presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic

Association of the Southwest in Denver, CO, and I am grateful for comments I

received there. Sincere thanks as well to Evan Ashworth and Joan Bybee of the

University of New Mexico, and to two anonymous reviewers for their highly helpful

comments and contributions. Contact address: Department of Linguistics, Humanities

Bldg. 526, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131–1196; author’s e-mail:

3dsanford@unm.edu4.

1. Introduction

Idiomatic expressions, generally defined as utterances the meaning of

which can’t be entirely derived from the words comprising them, have

long been problematic to linguists in that they seem to represent excep-

tions to the principles by which language has long been assumed to

operate. Simple utterances such as he let the cat out of the bag are usedwithout di‰culty or ambiguity by native speakers in casual conversation.

Such expressions, however, have proven extremely di‰cult to account for

in models of language that assume a clear distinction between the lexicon

(which contains words and morphemes) and rules (the morphological and

syntactic processes which operate on these entities). The reaction to idiom-

aticity on the part of the community of language researchers has ranged

between, on the one hand, the grudging acceptance that some multiple-

word collocation do exist in the lexicon, but only as exceptions that provethe more general rule that morphology and syntax operate according to

rules of compositionality (Chomsky 1965, 1980; Jackendo¤ 1992), and,

on the other, idioms being embraced as central, rather than peripheral,

to how grammar operates, and the lexicon reconceptualized as incorpo-

rating elements from all levels of linguistic structure (Barlow and

Kemmer 1994; Goldberg 1995; Croft 2001; Wray 2002). According to

this second view of idiomaticity (the framework within which this paper

is situated), idiomatic expressions represent one end of a continuumwhich places highly analyzable and semantically decomposable utterances

at one end, and highly specified, semantically opaque utterances (idioms)

at the other.

This view of idiomatic expressions as entrenched instances of con-

structions is explicitly usage-based, the storage of constructions depen-

dent on the act of communication. Bybee and Hopper (2001: 19) state

that the ‘‘constituent structure [of a construction] is determined by fre-

quency of co-occurrence (Bybee and Scheibman 1999): the more two ele-ments occur together in a sentence the tighter will be their constituent

structure.’’ The more a particular combination of elements (a construc-

tion) is used, the more the construction is conventionalized as a linguistic

unit of itself.

Idiomatic expressions have proven a thorny issue, as well, in the field of

metaphor research, where they raise a di¤erent host of issues. While it

seems certain that an utterance such as the one given above is in some

sense figurative, it’s less clear that it’s predicated on a metaphor. If, in-deed, it is, then more questions arise: what metaphor? Does this metaphor

only exist in the past, fossilized in this one expression, or is it active in

the conceptual systems of speakers of English, activated whenever this

586 D. Sanford

utterance is processed? The traditional answer to these questions is that

idiomatic expressions are merely the fossils of dead metaphors: whatever

metaphorical motivation might underlie them exists only in the history

of the language, long forgotten by speakers to whom the connection

between an idiom and its meaning is purely arbitrary (Aitchision 1987;

Cooper 1986; Cruse 1986; Strassler 1982).

In an attempt to challenge these assumptions, a hallmark study on therole of idiom in metaphor comprehension by Gibbs and O’Brien (1990)

presented subjects with the task of describing the mental images with

which they associate particular idiomatic expressions, and answering spe-

cific questions regarding these mental images. In the case, for example, of

spill the beans, subjects were asked questions such as ‘How big is the

container?’ ‘Is the spilling accidental or intentional?’ and ‘After the beans

are spilled, are they easy to retrieve?’ A systematic comparison between

subjects’ responses for idiomatic expressions and subjects’ responses forclosely related literal expressions (for example, spill the peas was the con-

trol item corresponding to spill the beans) revealed two major findings.

First, subjects’ responses to questions were markedly more consistent for

the idiomatic expressions than the literal ones. Second, within a group of

idioms sharing a particular figurative meaning but di¤ering notably in

their surface forms (for example, blow your stack and hit the ceiling), sub-

jects’ responses showed a high degree of consistency.

The authors interpret these results as strong support for the propositionthat the meanings associated with idiomatic expressions are predicated

upon the metaphors which underlie them, and that these metaphors,

far from being dead, are quite active in the on-line processing of idiom-

atic expressions. These findings are consistent with the view of meta-

phor that has emerged out of the cognitive school, that highly conven-

tionalized metaphors reflect precisely those cross-domain mappings (in

which one cognitive domain is used a framework whereby another is

conceptualized) which are most active (Fauconnier 1997; Lako¤ 1987;Sweetser 1992).

The experiment reported in this paper undertakes to shed light on the

intersection of these two views of idiom. It is exploratory as to the role

of metaphors which underlie common idioms in interacting with an e¤ect

generally associated with frequency: phonological reduction, and, in

particular, word length (see Jurafsky et al. 2001 and Berkenfield 2000,

among others, for the e¤ect of frequency on word length).

Specifically, this project addresses the question of whether metaphorhas an e¤ect, aside from frequency, in the production of idiomatic expres-

sions, and if so, how this interacts with frequency-based e¤ects. Partici-

pants in the study completed a task in which they read, out loud, from a

Metaphor and phonological reduction 587

list containing matched pairs of idiomatic and non-idiomatic expressions

(the same used in Gibbs and O’Brien 1990) di¤ering from one another by

a single word, and the duration of the verb in each utterance were mea-

sured using audio analysis software. It’s hypothesized that metaphor has

an e¤ect, beyond frequency, in causing the reduction of elements internal

to idiomatic expressions. This study posits, as the mechanism whereby

underlying metaphors e¤ect the phonological reduction of words internalto idioms, the high degree of predictability (caused by the motivating

metaphor) for semantic elements internal to the idiom.

According to the predictability-based account of word-level reduction,

words which are highly predictable based on their context carry a low se-

mantic load, which is reflected in production by shortening (Bolinger

1991; Fowler and Housum 1987). Elaborating on this view, Gregory et

al. (1999) assert that frequency-based and probability-based e¤ects are in

fact di¤erent facets of the same phenomenon: speakers’ probabilisticknowledge of their own language reflected in their production of it, such

that highly probable—whether said probability be due to high frequency

or predictability—words are reduced in duration. Metaphors, by their

nature, use the systematicity of highly cognitively structured domains to

structure the conceptualization of less concrete domains. The image

schema which forms the basis for an idiom such as let the cat out of the

bag is highly structured to the extent that let is highly predictable based

on the remainder of the string. The same conceptual metaphors, then,that Gibbs and O’Brien (1990) view as governing the high degree of con-

sistency in speakers’ mental images for idioms, should also be expected to

provide a high degree of ‘contextual probability’ which, Gregory et al. as-

sert, will license word shortening. Such a finding would be consistent with

research which has linked the predictability of words in idiomatic expres-

sions to the same idioms’ ease of processing (Cacciari and Tabossi 1988),

an e¤ect described by Cronk, Lima and Schweigert (1993: 69) as ‘‘the bi-

asing context of the phrase itself ’’.It is hypothesized, then, that the duration of verbs in the idiomatic ex-

pressions will be generally shorter than those in their literal counterparts,

as a result of their being highly predictable due to the e¤ects of underly-

ing metaphors. In that, however, frequency e¤ects are a well-attested

cause of word-level reduction, and that idioms have been advanced as in-

stances of frequent collocations, this e¤ect will be taken as support of the

hypothesis only if the observed reduction in duration can be demon-

strated (using several statistical measures) to go significantly beyondwhat might be expected from frequency e¤ects alone. A second com-

ponent of the analysis, taking advantage of a survey method used to

independently assess the extent to which each stimulus instantiates a

588 D. Sanford

metaphor, will aim to isolate the e¤ect of metaphor from that of idiom-

aticity, demonstrating that it is not simply the lexicalization of idiomatic

collocations which causes the reduction of verbs within the idiomatic

stimuli.

2. Methods

Twenty students from the University of New Mexico (11 males and 9

females) participated in the experiment. The participants were native

speakers of English between the ages of 18 and 30 and were o¤ered a

small amount of extra credit for their participation by the instructors of

their introductory linguistics classes. The stimuli used in this experiment

(see Appendix 1) are taken directly from Gibbs and O’Brien (1990), 50

utterances comprising 25 matched pairs of idioms and literal, semanti-

cally coherent utterances, each pair contrasting by a single word (blow

your stack vs. blow your tire, crack the whip vs. crack the glass). The 25

idioms represent five categories with respect to their figurative meanings:

Anger, Exerting Control/Authority, Secretiveness, Insanity, and Revela-

tion. For the purposes of this study, each utterance was altered slightly so

as to be a complete sentence, capable of being uttered with some degree

of naturalness by a speaker. blow one’s stack, for example, became Don’t

blow your stack, while keep x in the dark became Don’t keep him in the

dark. Both members of each linked pair were changed in the same way,so that the altered stimuli remain di¤erent from one another by only a

single word. The 50 stimuli were presented to each participant in one of

four random orders.

Participants in the study, advised that there was no right or wrong

speed or way to read the stimuli and that the researcher was interested

only in how they, as native speakers, said each utterance, were directed

to look at each item, see what it said, and then say it out loud, moving

in this manner through the list of 50 items. Subjects’ responses were re-corded using a digital recording device, and waveforms were generated

for the resulting audio files using the audio analysis program Sound

Forge 4.0. For each utterance, the verb (where relevant, the verb of the

subordinate clause, the portion containing the idiom in the 25 idiomatic

utterances: spill, for example, in Don’t spill the beans and Don’t spill the

peas) was isolated and measured in milliseconds.

Isolated words were chosen as the units being measured with respect to

duration (rather than the phrase as a whole) because 1) the hypothesizeda¤ect applies to individual words, due their level of predictability, rather

than to entire phrases, and 2) because measuring the entire phrase would

include the element being controlled, the nominal which conditions either

Metaphor and phonological reduction 589

a literal or figurative reading. The verb, specifically, was isolated because

the nominals are the element being manipulated, and because grammati-

cal words are already subject to extensive frequency e¤ects. The verb is

the remaining element which is common to all of the stimuli, and which

can therefore serve as a measure of the indicated e¤ect. The nature of the

action, moreover, is an element expected to be highly constrained in the

image schema underlying each idiom, and thus the verb should be espe-cially subject to the predicted e¤ect.

Several issues present themselves with respect to measuring the dura-

tion of individual words in natural speech. Most critically, it can be

di‰cult to establish a clear dividing line between a word and the ones pre-

ceding and following it. While Blow the lid/water o¤, for example, is rel-

atively straightforward, with blow beginning with the onset of the [b] and

ending with the onset of frication from the initial consonant of the word

which follows, others entail considerably more ambiguity. In natural pro-duction of Hold your tongue/arm, for example, the [d] of hold and [ j] of

your merge, in many cases, into a single voiced alveolar a¤ricate. In Go

o¤ your rocker/path, it’s no mean task to decide where the final vowel of

go ends and the initial one of o¤ begins. These issues have been, to some

extent, sidestepped here: in that the stimuli come in linked pairs, the mea-

surement of duration serves the purposes of the study as long as it takes

place according to the same criteria for each member of the pair. In the

examples cited above, for example, the release of the dental stop [d] (intoeither frication or a glide) was treated as the end of hold for both items in

the matched pair, and a characteristic trough in the waveform treated as

the end of go, for all participants.

3. Results

Table 1 presents the results (averaged by stimulus, with standard devia-

tions reported in parentheses to the right of each average) obtainedfrom the study, along with frequency data for each item. The frequency

figure given for each item reflects the frequency of the phrase in a corpus

ofQ360 million words. The methods used in collecting frequency data are

outlined in Appendix 2.

In Table 1, the third column presents the duration of the target word

in each of the idiomatic utterances, while the entries in the fifth repre-

sent the duration of the same verb in the corresponding, non-idiomatic

control utterances. The final column gives the di¤erence between thetwo, a positive number indicating that the verb in the idiom was (as pre-

dicted) shorter than the verb in the non-idiom, a negative number the

inverse.

590 D. Sanford

Table 1. Experiment data

Idioms Controls Di¤erence

(Control—Idiom)

Frequency

(/Q360 m)

Duration

(ms)

Frequency

(/Q360 m)

Duration

(ms)

Frequency

(/Q360 m)

Duration

(ms)

Don’t blow your stack/tire. 6 151.65 (27.12) 0 187.65 (42.96) �6 36

She hit the ceiling/table. 22 170.9 (29.53) 35 172.25 (28.55) 13 1.35

He lost his cool/wallet. 18 336.85 (58.62) 8 333.2 (54.42) �10 �3.65

Try not to foam at the mouth/top. 10 244.25 (65.77) 1 278.4 (53.88) �9 34.15

Don’t flip your lid/coin. 1 269.05 (65.05) 0 257.8 (60.74) �1 �11.25

Let’s crack the whip/glass. 26 281.6 (36.36) 4 298.95 (48.46) �22 17.35

It’s time to lay down the law/tile. 49 176.05 (42.49) 0 170.15 (35.77) �49 �5.9

I call the shots/police. 153 209.9 (35.97) 783 223.55 (30.57) 630 13.65

You wear the pants/scarf. 13 190.85 (33.89) 3 199.05 (43.96) �10 8.2

Try to keep the ball rolling/steady. 14 203.85 (47.02) 0 218.85 (71.33) �14 15

Just keep it under your hat/bed. 2 193.25 (38.83) 0 199.7 (37.44) �2 6.45

Will you button your lips/shirt? 1 256.25 (42.42) 110 258.45 (52.3) 109 2.2

Please hold your tongue/arm. 34 188.95 (41.41) 6 195.85 (38.38) �28 6.9

He went behind my back/chair. 4 195.95 (66.82) 4 180.95 (33.3) 0 �15

Don’t keep him in the dark/garage. 4 232.5 (54.05) 0 222.9 (27.15) �4 �9.6

Try not to go o¤ your rocker/path. 1 127.85 (28.97) 0 153.25 (44.19) �1 25.4

You’re going to lose your marbles/hair. 2 221.45 (35.97) 19 252.65 (43.95) 17 31.2

Are you going to go to pieces/church? 36 151.35 (59.13) 602 107.35 (80.18) 566 �43.7

I suppose you’ll lose your grip/keys. 6 239.25 (45.31) 6 274.25 (122.5) 0 35

They’re going to bounce o¤ the walls/floor. 15 281 (37.21) 2 279.35 (20.64) �13 �1.65

Don’t spill the beans/peas. 47 279.55 (49.12) 0 324.35 (52.02) �47 44.8

Try not to let the cat out of the bag/house. 18 168.95 (39.53) 0 178.25 (33.41) �18 9.3

Let’s blow the whistle/bubble. 142 180.9 (46.81) 0 192.15 (32.81) �142 11.25

Blow the lid/water o¤. 16 202.35 (49.22) 1 221.1 (70.09) �15 18.75

She has loose lips/teeth. 31 229.65 (60.24) 12 236.85 (50.8) �19 7.2

Average 26.84 215.4 (45.47) 63.84 224.7 (48.39) 37 8.9

Meta

ph

or

an

dp

ho

no

log

ical

redu

ction

59

1

As a measure of inter-rater reliability for verb-duration scores, data

from two randomly selected participants (10% of the data overall) were

coded by a second reader, who did not know the hypothesis of the exper-

iment, according to the same method. Pearson’s correlation between the

sets of scores (all of the data for each of the two participants, including

both idiomatic and control utterances) yielded by the author and by the

second reader was r ¼ .85, indicating a satisfactory degree of inter-raterreliability, and allowing for a high degree of confidence in the observed

experimental e¤ect.

Two approaches were taken to analyzing the data. The first follows the

original study (Gibbs and O’Brien 1990) in treating idiomaticity as a cat-

egorical variable which is co-occurent with metaphoricity, while the sec-

ond treats metaphoricity as a continuous variable, based on the results

of a survey. Both approaches are outlined below.

3.1. Idiomaticity as a categorical variable

Comparing results across the two levels of the independent variable of

idiomaticity, it’s clear that the verbs in the idiomatic utterances were gen-

erally shorter in duration than those in the controls, with this pattern

bearing out in 18 of the 25 matched pairs. Averaging across stimuli, the

verbs in the idiomatic expressions averaged 215.4 ms and the verbs in

the controls 224.7 ms. The verbs in the idioms, then, were on average 9.3

ms shorter than those in the controls. These results were statistically sig-

nificant, tð24Þ ¼ 2.4, p ¼ <.05.One candidate as to a confounding variable in the data is the possibility

that certain of the idiomatic items could be interpreted as literal: blow the

whistle, for example, could potentially be read as referring to the act of

blowing a whistle, rather than to the figurative meaning of calling atten-

tion to a misdeed. A t-test on the data which removed those items which

were most likely to interpreted literally was no more significant (i.e., the

likelihood that the observed e¤ect was due to chance was no lower) than

the score indicated above, indicating that this was not an importantvariable.1

The possibility of the length of the nominal being manipulated a¤ect-

ing the length of the rest of the phrase (and, therefore, the length of the

word being measured) was investigated using a t-test which looked for

1. Items removed in the control for literalness: Are you going to go to pieces/church?, I call

the shots/police, He went behind my back/chair, Let’s blow the whistle/bubble, Don’t spill

the beans/peas.

592 D. Sanford

a di¤erence between the two experimental groups in the length, mea-

sured in syllables, of the manipulated nominal. The results of this test,

tð24Þ ¼ �.37, p ¼ .71, indicate that there was not a significant di¤erence

between the two experimental groups in the number of syllables in the

word being manipulated, and therefore that this factor did not have a sig-

nificant e¤ect on the duration of the verb.

Figure 1 compares, for each participant, the averages of their responsesfor the idiomatic and control utterances.

In Figure 1, idiomatic expressions correspond to the black line, and

the controls to gray: For 17 of the 20 participants, responses for idioms

were shorter than responses for controls, and the average (across par-

ticipants) di¤erence between the verbs in the idiomatic and control ut-

terances is 8.9 ms. The results of the analysis by subjects also indicated

a significant di¤erence between the two groups, tð19Þ ¼ 3.8, p ¼ <.005.

In that the average duration of target words in the idioms is shorterthan the average duration of target words in the the controls, despite the

fact that average frequency was considerably higher for the control utter-

ances than for the idioms (63.84 and 26.84, respectively), this initial look

at the data suggests that frequency does not wholly account for the ob-

served di¤erence between the two groups. Two statistical methods were

used towards the goal of more fully understanding the relationship be-

tween the two variables, both attempts to isolate reduction due to idiom-

aticity and reduction to frequency e¤ects. First, as a rough control for

Figure 1. Average target word duration by participant

Metaphor and phonological reduction 593

frequency, the 20% of matched pairs which had the greatest di¤erence, in

frequency, between the idiom and control utterances were removed from

the analysis.2 This control for frequency, rough as it is, increased the ef-

fect to tð19Þ ¼ �3.3, p ¼ <.005 for the by-stimulus analysis, indicating

that the more variation due to frequency is removed, the greater the e¤ect

due to idiomaticity.

Second, an Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), which tests whetherthe di¤erence between two groups of observations (here, the duration

of the verbs in each of the two experimental conditions) is signifi-

cant following controlling for the e¤ect of a pre-existing, confound-

ing variable (frequency), was used in an attempt to fully control for

the e¤ect of frequency. A test for homogeneity of regression yielded

F ð1; 46Þ ¼ .28, p ¼ .59, indicating that the assumption of homogene-

ity of regression is satisfied (i.e., that the covariate—frequency—is

a¤ecting each of the two groups equally) and that an ANCOVA canbe performed. The results of the ANCOVA itself indicate a statistically

significant main e¤ect of idiomaticity on duration following a control

for frequency: F ð1; 47Þ ¼ 4.67, p < .05, r ¼ .26.3 The model R-square

is .07, indicating that a relatively low level of variation is accounted

for the by the two factors combined. The adjusted means for the experi-

mental and control group are .97 and 1.05, respectively, and h2, a

measure of the size of the size of the experimental e¤ect, was calculated

at .09.Each of the between-groups analyses presented in §3.1 indicates that

the observed experimental e¤ect cannot be wholly traced to the e¤ect of

the frequency of the phrases in which the target words are embedded.

These analyses are dependent, however, on the asumption that each of

the idiomatic utterances are metaphorical, and that each of the control

utterances are not (and, indeed, that all of the utterances in each category

are metaphorical to the same extent: either entirely, or not at all). §3.2

elaborates on these analyses by independently assessing the degree towhich each utterance used in the experiment is metaphorical, allowing

for a more fine-tuned approach to isolating the e¤ect of metaphor from

that of frequency.

2. Items removed in the control for frequency: It’s time to lay down the law/tile, I call the

shots/police, Will you button your lips/shirt?, Are you going to go to pieces/church?, Let’s

blow the whistle/bubble.

3. In the ANCOVA, the durations of the target words were converted to a standard format

by expressing each measurement as a ratio of each item relative to the duration of the

other item in each matched pair (e.g., the duration of let in let the cat out of the bag /

the duration of let in let the cat out of the garage).

594 D. Sanford

3.2. Metaphoricity as a continuous variable

One weakness of the experiment outlined here, inherited from the Gibbs

and O’Brien study on which it is based, is the conflation of metaphoricity

and idiomaticity. Despite the fact that, for each of the idioms used in this

experiment, their idiomaticity and metaphoricity is closely interconnected

(the conventionality of the expression tightly linked to the conventionalityof the metaphor underlying it), the two cannot be treated as referring

to the same property: not all idioms are figurative, and of those that are,

not all are metaphorical. An argument addressing the causative factors of

the reduction taking place must make a clear distinction between the two.

In order to preserve the study’s basis in the original Gibbs and Brien

(1990) experiment and allow for a direct comparison of results, the same

categorical variable of idiomaticity was used. A subsequent analysis,

however, attempts to look more directly at the e¤ect of metaphor itself,independently of idiomaticity, on reduction. In oder to provide an inde-

pendent measure, for each utterance used in the experiment, of the degree

to which it instantiates a metaphor, a survey method (following Ho¤man

1984; Gentner and Bowdle 2001; Coulson and Van Petten 2002) was

used. The methodology used for the survey is outlined in Appendix 3.

The results of the survey, averaged across participants and rounded to

the nearest tenth, are indicated in Table 2 (standard deviations are, again,

reported in parentheses to the right of the mean figure for each stimulus).The numbers indicated are the mean of subjects’ metaphoricity rating for

each stimulus on a scale of 1 to 5, with a lower number indicating a more

metaphorical stimulus.

A glance at Table 2 demonstrates that survey participants, averaging

across the data, ranked idiomatic utterances about 1.8 points lower than

the controls on a 5-point scale with respect to the degree to which each

utterance is metaphorical. This indicates that the idiomatic utterances

are, as intended, clearly more metaphorical than the controls, a predic-tion borne out by a t-test which shows a statistical di¤erence between the

two groups, tð24Þ ¼ 11.2, p < .005. This test supports the overall validity

of the categorical approach taken in §3.1 (and in Gibbs and O’Brien

1990), in that the idioms are, as intended, not only more idiomatic but

also more metaphorical than the controls. It also demonstrates the valid-

ity of the survey method, in that variation between respondents’ ratings

for items does not outweigh variation between the two experimental

groups.In analyzing the survey data in connection to the experimental data,

all analyses use, as the unit of comparison, the di¤erence between the

Idiom and Control (Idiom—Control, for frequency, metaphoricity, and

Metaphor and phonological reduction 595

duration) for each matched pair (the values found in the rightmost col-

umns of Tables 1 and 2). The survey rating serves as an independent mea-

sure of the di¤erence, for each matched pair, between the metaphoricity

of the idiom and of the control, while the experimental data provides

the di¤erence in reduction, for the target word, between the idiom and

control. A clear relationship between these two figures, across the setof matched pairs used in the survey and experiment, indicates that

phonological reduction is related to metaphoricity. A test of the hypothe-

sis that metaphoricity correlates significantly with reduction yielded

tð23Þ ¼ �2.16, p < .05, indicating that, at least for this preliminary anal-

ysis of the relationship between metaphoricity and reduction, the null

hypothesis that there is no meaningful relationship between the two can

be rejected.

In order to isolate, in this analysis, the e¤ect of metaphoricity from thatof frequency, a multiple regression analysis was used. Multiple regression

Table 2. Average metaphoricity rating by stimulus (lower number ¼ higher metaphoricity)

Idioms Controls Di¤erence

(Control—Idiom)

Don’t blow your stack/tire. 1.9 (1.2) 3.2 (1.4) 1.2

She hit the ceiling/table. 1.9 (1.1) 4.1 (1.2) 2.2

He lost his cool/wallet. 2.3 (1.3) 4.8 (.9) 2.5

Try not to foam at the mouth/top. 2.2 (1.3) 3.3 (1.6) 1.1

Don’t flip your lid/coin. 2.1 (1.1) 3.2 (1.3) 1.2

Let’s crack the whip/glass. 1.7 (.9) 3.4 (1.4) 1.8

It’s time to lay down the law/tile. 2 (1.1) 4.2 (1.3) 2.2

I call the shots/police. 2.6 (1.4) 4.8 (.5) 2.3

You wear the pants/scarf. 2.4 (1.4) 4.3 (1.1) 1.9

Try to keep the ball rolling/steady. 1.8 (1) 3.1 (1.5) 1.4

Just keep it under your hat/bed. 2.5 (1.3) 3.9 (1.3) 1.4

Will you button your lips/shirt? 1.8 (1.1) 4.7 (.9) 2.9

Please hold your tongue/arm. 2.3 (1.2) 4 (1.2) 1.7

He went behind my back/chair. 2.5 (1.2) 4.6 (.9) 2.1

Don’t keep him in the dark/garage. 2.2 (1) 4.2 (1.1) 2

Try not to go o¤ your rocker/path. 2 (1.1) 2.6 (1.3) 0.7

You’re going to lose your marbles/hair. 1.5 (.9) 3.5 (1.4) 2

Are you going to go to pieces/church? 2 (1.2) 4.9 (.7) 2.8

I suppose you’ll lose your grip/keys. 3 (1.3) 4.2 (1.1) 1.2

They’re going to bounce o¤ the walls/floor. 1.6 (.7) 3.3 (1.6) 1.7

Don’t spill the beans/peas. 1.6 (.9) 3.7 (1.4) 2.1

Try not to let the cat out of the bag/house. 1.5 (.9) 4.4 (1.1) 2.9

Let’s blow the whistle/bubble. 3.3 (1.3) 2.9 (1.4) �0.5

Blow the lid/water o¤. 2.3 (1.2) 3.2 (1.5) 0.9

She has loose lips/teeth. 2.2 (1.3) 3.9 (1.4) 1.7

Average 2.1 (.6) 3.9 (.6) 1.7

596 D. Sanford

analyzes the e¤ects of each of a number of independent variables (regres-

sors) on a single dependent variable. This analysis, then, analyzed the

e¤ect of the regressors frequency and metaphoricity on the dependent

variable of duration. The regression, overall, approached but failed to

reach statistical significance, F ð2; 22Þ ¼ 3.24, p ¼ 0.058—unsurprising,

given that the two factors of phrase frequency and metaphoricity can’t

be expected, of themselves, to wholly account for word duration. Nota-bly, however, R2adj, a measure of the portion of overall variation which

is accounted for by the model, increases from 13%, in a regression which

looks at frequency alone, to 16% when metaphoricity is included.

One output of a regression analysis is a formula which can be used to

predict a set of values for the y-variable given a set of values for one or

more x-variables. In this case, the multiple regression yielded a formula

for predicting the di¤erence in duration for the target word between

the idiomatic and control utterances, given the di¤erence in frequencyand metaphoricity between the idiomatic and control utterance in each

matched pair. Another regression was completed in order to derive a for-

mula for predicting the di¤erence in duration between the target in the

idioms and controls using frequency alone (Fð1; 23Þ ¼ 4.49, p < 0.05).

Both of these formulas were applied to the data, yielding two sets of fig-

ures: expected values for di¤erence in duration based on frequency alone,

and expected values based on both metaphoricity and frequency.

The average di¤erence between the expected and actual figures usingfrequency alone was 15.19 ms, and there was a .4 correlation between

the two sets of figures. The average di¤erence between the expected and

actual figures using both metaphoricity and frequency was 14.3 ms, and

the correlation between the two sets of figures was .48. This analysis

provides direct verification of the hypothesis that metaphoricity and fre-

quency predict word duration more accurately than frequency alone.

4. Discussion

The nature of the experiments reported here precludes, for several reasons

(most notably, the aforementioned high degree of interconnectedness be-

tween idiomaticity and figuration, and the assumed imperfection of the

relationship between perceived and actual metaphoricity), an expectation

for an extremely robust experimental e¤ect. These data, in combination

with the findings reported in Gibbs and O’Brien (1990) which attest to

the reality of the mental images underlying common figurative idioms,are cautiously interpreted as consistent with the view outlined in §1. The

highly constrained nature of the metaphorical image schemas underlying

many common figurative idiomatic expressions cause words internal to

Metaphor and phonological reduction 597

the idioms to be highly predictable, licensing their phonological reduc-

tion. Both analyses, with their di¤ering approaches to controlling for fre-

quency, indicate that the observed di¤erences in the duration of verbs in

the experimental and control items is neither due to chance nor wholly

to frequency e¤ects, bearing out the prediction that metaphoricity has a

direct e¤ect on word shortening.

An alternate account for the findings presented here (and one alsohighly consistent with the functionalist approach framing this research)

might posit the observed reduction in duration to be a function of the ho-

listic storage (Bybee 1995; Alegre and Gordon 1999; Titone and Connine

1999; Jurafsky et al., 2001) of idiomatic expressions. The loss of internal

complexity which accompanies the holistic storage of frequently occur-

ring multi-word collocations is accompanied by the reduction of internal

elements. This causes individual words within the utterance to be re-

duced, in duration, during production. Holistic storage, however, is afunction of frequency, and the analyses presented here have demostrated

that the observed e¤ect is not wholly due to frequency.

This interpretation, moreover, would seem to run contrary to research

which has challenged the view of idioms as unanalyzable wholes. Nun-

berg, Sag, and Wasow argue, with respect to the internal complexity of

phrasal idioms such as the ones employed here, that the conventionality

of such expressions does not necessitate a corresponding loss of analyz-

ability. They assert, rather, that ‘‘the meanings of most idioms have rec-ognizable parts, which are associated with the constituents of the idiom’’

(1994: 531). Billig and MacMillan’s (2005) study on the use of the expres-

sion smoking gun in political discourse, similarly, demonstrates that the

use of conventionalized linguistic metaphors doesn’t necessarily become

any more automatic as they become conventionalized, but rather that

the metaphor underlying such idioms can continue to be ‘negotiated’ in

discourse. The predictability-based view of the observed reduction better

allows for some (if reduced) semantic load to be associated with wordsinternal to the idiom, and is therefore more consistent with findings such

as these.

Future studies on the role of metaphor in licensing the reduction of

words internal to idioms would do well to seek other independent mea-

sures of the metaphoricity of phrases, to which word duration can be

compared. A study replicating both the original Gibbs and O’Brien

experiment, and the experiment reported here, would be well situated to

compare the duration of words internal to idioms to the consistency forthe mental images which speakers have for such idioms, potentially

providing very strong evidence both for the connection between meta-

phoricity and duration, and for the metaphoricity of idioms.

598 D. Sanford

5. Conclusion

The study reported in Gibbs and O’Brien (1990) indicates that, for com-mon idioms with figurative meanings, their meanings are not arbitrary,

but are constrained by conceptual metaphors. Nor, according to the re-

sults of their study, can the metaphors that have assigned them their

meanings be relegated to the history of the language. Metaphorically mo-

tivated idioms aren’t the fossils of dead metaphors, with meanings now

determined on a purely lexical basis, but rather continue to draw their

meaning from the underlying metaphor, with speakers’ covert awareness

of these metaphors accounting for the high degree of consistency in theirmental images for such expressions.

The results presented here demonstrate, for the same idioms, a phono-

logical correlate of the same underlying cause: the conceptual metaphors

which underlie many common idiomatic expressions cause the shortening

of elements within the idiom which are, via the highly structured nature

of the source domains of the metaphors, highly predictable based on their

context. These findings add yet another factor to the growing host of fac-

tors which have been put forward as contributing to word shortening, andpoint in hopeful directions as to a diagnostic tool which might be used

to identify metaphorically motivated idioms. They o¤er support for the

hypothesis, advanced in Gibbs and O’Brien (1990) and elsewhere (Nayak

and Gibbs 1991; Pfa¤, Gibbs, and Johnson 1997; Cacciari and Levor-

ato 1998), that the meaning of figurative idioms are predicated on un-

derlying conceptual metaphors, and, should they be corroborated by

further research, point to the extension of the e¤ects of metaphor into

the domain of phonology, underscoring the impossibility of treating dif-ferent levels of linguistic structure as operating largely independently of

one another.

Received 14 May 2007 University of New Mexico

Revision received 20 March 2008

Appendix 1: Experimental stimuli

Idioms Control items

Anger

Don’t blow your stack. Don’t blow your tire.

She hit the ceiling. She hit the table.He lost his cool. He lost his wallet.

Try not to foam at the mouth. Try not to foam at the top.

Don’t flip your lid. Don’t flip your coin.

Metaphor and phonological reduction 599

Exerting Control/Authority

Let’s crack the whip. Let’s crack the glass.

It’s time to lay down the law. It’s time to lay down the tile.

I call the shots. I call the police.

You wear the pants. You wear the scarf.

Try to keep the ball rolling. Try to keep the ball steady.

Secretiveness

Just keep it under your hat. Just keep it under your bed.

Will you button your lips? Will you button your shirt?

Please hold your tongue. Please hold your arm.

He went behind my back. He went behind my chair.Don’t keep him in the dark. Don’t keep him in the garage.

Insanity

Try not to go o¤ your rocker. Try not to go o¤ your path.

You’re going to lose your marbles. You’re going to lose your hair.Are you going to go to pieces? Are you going to go to church?

I suppose you’ll lose your grip. I suppose you’ll lose your keys.

They’re going to bounce o¤ the

walls.

They’re going to bounce o¤ the

floor.

Revelation

Don’t spill the beans. Don’t spill the peas.

Try not to let the cat out of the

bag.

Try not to let the cat out of the

house.

Let’s blow the whistle. Let’s blow the bubble.

Blow the lid o¤. Blow the water o¤.

She has loose lips. She has loose teeth.

Appendix 2: Corpus methodology

In order to control for the e¤ect of frequency causing reduction in dura-tion for the experimental items, the frequency of each utterance used in

the experiment was assessed in a corpus. The BYU Corpus of American

English (Davies 2008), a 360þ million-word corpus which is equally di-

vided among both genres of discourse (including spoken), and years

from 1990 to the present, was used for this study.

The frequency figures used in the analysis (which appear in Table 1)

were gleaned on February 22, 2008. These figures report the frequency

only of that part of each utterance which comes from Gibbs and O’Brien(1997), not of the overall string resulting from placing these items into a

complete utterance (e.g., the frequency of let the cat out of the bag was

600 D. Sanford

assessed, not the frequency of Try not to let the cat out of the bag), and it

is the frequency of the exact string (not allowing for variations in tense

and person) which is reported here.

Appendix 3: Survey methodology

All 50 of the items used in the experiment (both idioms and controls)

were presented, in one of four di¤erent random orders, to a group of 34

participants who did not take part in the experiment but were drawn fromthe same population as the experimental participants. Participants were

asked to rate each item on a scale running between 1, corresponding to

utterances which are very metaphorical, and 5, corresponding to utter-

ances which are not at all metaphorical. Metaphorical expressions were

defined, in the instructions for the survey, as expressions for which the fig-

urative meaning is not the same as the literal meaning, but for which the

literal meaning contributes to the figurative meaning. Participants were

not otherwise given direction as to what constitutes a metaphor, the sur-vey relying for the most part on their previous understanding of the term.

While the link between perceived and actual metaphoricity (used here

to indicate the extent to which an utterance activates an underlying meta-

phor) is assumed to be imperfect, the method is anticipated to be su‰-

ciently fine-grained to provide a basis for making judgments as to the

link between metaphoricity and reduction.

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Contents Volume 19 (2008)

Ben Ambridge and Adele E. Goldberg

The island status of clausal complements: Evidence in

favor of an information structure explanation (19–3) 357–389

Robert Botne and Ti¤any L. Kershner

Tense and cognitive space: On the organization of

tense/aspect systems in Bantu languages and beyond

(19–2) 145–218

Filippo-Enrico Cardini

Manner of motion saliency: An inquiry into Italian

(19–4) 533–569

William Croft

On iconicity of distance (19–1) 49–57Ewa Dabrowska

Questions with long-distance dependencies:

A usage-based perspective (19–3) 391–425

Holger Diessel

Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the

positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English

(19–3) 465–490

Gilberto Gomes

Three types of conditionals and their verb forms in

English and Portuguese (19–2) 219–240

John Haiman

In defence of iconicity (19–1) 35–48

Martin Haspelmath

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical

asymmetries (19–1) 1–33

Martin Haspelmath

Reply to Haiman and Croft (19–1) 59–66

Cognitive Linguistics 19–4 (2008), 605–607

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0936–5907/08/0019–0605

6 Walter de Gruyter

Martin Hilpert

New evidence against the modularity of grammar:

constructions, collocations, and speech perception (19–3) 491–511

Wolfram Hinzen and Michiel van Lambalgen

Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Arie

Verhagen, Constructions of Intersubjectivity (19–1) 107–123

Zhuo Jing-Schmidt

Much mouth much tongue: Chinese metonymies and

metaphors of verbal behaviour (19–2) 241–282

Ronald W. Langacker

Sequential and summary scanning: A reply (19–4) 571–584

Fey Parrill

Subjects in the hands of speakers: An experimental study

of syntactic subject and speech-gesture integration (19–2) 283–299

Karen Roehr

Linguistic and metalinguistic categories in second

language learning (19–1) 67–106

Daniel Sanford

Metaphor and phonological reduction in English

idiomatic expressions (19–4) 585–603

Anatol Stefanowitsch

Negative entrenchment: A usage-based approach to

negative evidence (19–3) 513–531Arie Verhagen

Intersubjectivity and explanation in linguistics: A reply

to Hinzen and van Lambalgen (19–1) 125–143

Daniel Wiechmann

Initial parsing decisions and lexical bias: Corpus

evidence from local NP/S-ambiguities (19–3) 447–463

Arne Zeschel

Introduction (19–3) 349–355Arne Zeschel

Lexical chunking e¤ects in syntactic processing (19–3) 427–446

Book reviews

Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green. Cognitive Linguistics.

An Introduction.

Reviewed by Rene Dirven (19–2) 338–348

Verena Haser. Metaphor, Metonymy and Experientialist

Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics.

Reviewed by Dominik Lukes (19–2) 313–324

606 Contents Volume 19 (2008)

Catherine E. Travis. Discourse Markers in Colombian

Spanish: A Study in Polysemy.

Reviewed by Natalya I. Stolova (19–2) 301–313

Dirk Geeraerts (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings.

Reviewed by Thora Tenbrink (19–2) 325–338

Contents Volume 19 (2008) 607