Croft2007

Course: Syntax Prof. Su I-Wen 2008/11/04

Katarzyna Horszowska, d95142005 Croft, William 2007. “The origins of grammar in the verbalization of experience.” In: Cognitive Linguistics. Vol. 18 (3), p. 339-382 Report of pages: 358 – 382 1. Particularizing process has two subtypes:

Selecting and situation the categorized entities (see Croft 1990). Langacker’s: ‘instance of type’ and ‘grounded’. A. Selecting

Tokens: the individuals and events to be verbalized. Particulars (opposed to types) are situated or grounded. A type or a category is not an instance, it is not situated or grounded anywhere. a) individuating the particular entity •

A part noun for a part: the front of the bike

•

Groups, group of nouns: a flock of birds

•

Numeral: six birds

•

Quantifier: a few birds

•

Grammatical number: the birds

•

Selection of the entity: the other, next, third pencil

b) quantifying c) distinguishing Selection of an event: Aspect particularizes an event. Individuating an event is not just identifying an instance of the type, but also isolating a segment of casual network of events as a unit event. (p. 359)

The quantification of events is usually part of the numeral classifier system in some languages. The particularizing of property is done by associating it with the individual: the green bowl. Agreement in language or indexation: a pronominal element or a classifier is combined with a lexical root. Agreement is usually considered as a means for encoding grammatical relations and other syntactic relations (e.g. head-modifier). B. Situating Situating a particular referent or event in space, time, and in mental space (‘grounding’ in Langacker). Situating follows a figure-ground schema, in which the figure is located relative to a ground object (spatial or temporal). (p. 360) Ground object: described in terms of speech act situation, the landscape around the speakers or an object. Individuals can be situated relative to the position of a ground object (whole or part of it). Spatial adpositions are often derived from the body parts nouns, part of the somatic system. Ablative and allative are derived from the deictic verbs of motion: ‘come’ and ‘go’. The locative is derived from topographic terms and somatic terms. Situating in mental space: articles and modality (p. 361) There’s the rattlesnake! You have to recycle those cans. The ground for situating the individual or event can be the mental space of any person. McCawley calls it: ‘world

creating predicates’ and Fauconnier calls it: ‘space builders’. Example: Ellie wants us to visit the ruins. 2. Structuring: the difference between individuals and

events in propositionalizing. There are two issues: a) the difference in type between the individuals in a chunk –

noun/verb

–

actions/qualities

–

objects/actions

–

topic/focus

b) and the rest of the chunk event or predicate

Q: How to characterize the twofold division between what Chafe calls individuals and the event? (p. 363) Croft sees several overlapping layers: parts of speech, propositional act functions, the predicate-argument contrast; topic-comment or topic-focus; and main-subordinate clause. (p. 364) The predicate is correlated with the information-structural category of the comment or focus, what is being asserted in a proposition. An argument is correlated with a topic, what is being talked about. Croft notices that topic may be a part of the focus: Next the boy comes upon a slide. Guess what? Gary is getting married to Susan! Croft proposes (p. 365) that there is only one level of propositional structuring that interacts with lexical semantic classes. Reference/topic: a speaker is talking about something that lasts beyond the chunk being propositionalized

Predication/focus: a speaker ascribes something to the referent/topic. This ascription lasts only for the verbalization chunk in question before moving to the next chunk, hence it is transitory construal. (p.365) Four generalizations about grammatical encoding across languages p. 365-367: 1st: any lexical semantic class can be used for any propositional act function 2nd: when a noun or argument is used as predication, or is in focus, then it becomes more verb-like. When the verb or predicate is used as a referring expression, it is typically nominalized. 3rd: when a lexical semantic class is used for its propositional act function – the construction used will call for at least as many morphemes as when a lexical semantic class is used for its prototypical function. 4th: nonprototypical lexical semantic classes for each propositional semantic class often have less distributional potential than the prototypical lexical semantic classes, that is, they inflect for fewer of the relevant grammatical categories. Croft proposes to explain the crosslinguistic patterns using three factors of construal and one level of propositional organization. The construal depends on the goals of the interlocutors in the discourse. (p. 367) Construal: what is referred to, predicated, modified. Objects are more lasting, more stable, and nonrelational, and hence are best suited for reference. Actions are transitory, involve change over time, and are relational, and hence are best suited for predication. (p.368)

The mapping of individuals into participant roles in events The basic problem is that one cannot equate the semantic participant roles, such as the agent, instrument, patient or recipient of an event, with their grammatical manifestation as subject or object. (p. 369). Examples: The key opened the door. They loaded the furniture into the truck. In many languages the experiencer of the mental state is expressed in the form of a dative or indirect object. (p.370) Participant roles are part of the semantics structure of events/actions. The same four generalizations about grammatical encoding are found here: 1st: any individual in an event can be the primary topic 2nd: when the particular individual is rendered more (less) topical, then it becomes more (or less) “subject” like.

(p.

370) 3rd: when a participant role is used for a topicality status other than its prototypical one, crosslinguistically the construction used will call for at least as many morphemes as when a lexical semantic class is used for its prototypical function. Example: The book was banned by the authorities. 4th: an individual in a nonprototypical semantic participant role for each topicality status often has less distributional potential as an individual in its prototypical role. The degree of topicality is the level of organization. Page 372: it is a cultural convention of the speech community as to how an individual in a participant role is

encoded morphosyntactically and what sort of linguistic behavior it has. 3. Cohering subchunks The structured subchunks are related to one another via cohering constructions, which fall into two broad categories: •

clause linkage:

–

conjuctions

(coordinators,

subordinators)

–

see

examples (page 373): –

So they’re walking along, and they brush off their pears, and they start eating it.

–

And because he’s watching her, when he turns around his hat comes off.

•

reference tracking: identify the same or different referents from one clause to another; example: anaphoric reference –

another example of reference tracking is gender or class marking (a grammatical morpheme describes schematic categories of animacy and sex, animacy and shape, role in possession

–

noun classes and numeral classifiers are used for indexation (p.376) and anaphoric reference.

4. Conclusions Croft added to Chafe’s model three main processes: – particularizing – structuring – cohering

Every stage of verbalization process involves construal: how it is subchunk

and

which

chunks

are

chosen;

how

it

is

propositionalized and which individuals are exctracted; what type each part is taken to belong to; how to select the individuals and events; how to structure the proposition and how to cohere the chunks.