From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Cognitive linguistics [was Re: Prototypes]
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 02:57:38 GMT

In article <1814h8INNfib@network.ucsd.edu> vanhoek@bend.ucsd.edu (Karen van Hoek) writes:
>
>A poster recently asked what the difference is between cognitive and
>linguistics and other linguistics (i.e. generative linguistics).  The
>most salient difference is in the kinds of grammatical theories being
>developed by the two schools.  Cognitive linguists generally eschew
>theories involving autonomous syntactic components, considering the
>constructs of autonomous syntax as unnecessary.  Langacker's theory
>of Cognitive Grammar includes as its guiding principle the Content
>Requirement, which essentially states that an analysis cannot posit
>grammatical elements which have neither semantic content nor
>phonological content (this is a very abbreviated statement, of course).
>This rules out devices such as autonomous syntactic tree structures,
>syntactic indexing (i.e. indexing which has no intrinsic semantic
>content), meaningless diacritics, and so forth.  

But for the reference to "trees", the Content Requirement sounds a lot
like Chomsky's current Minimalist theory (Langacker clearly having
temporal priority).  It's interesting to note, therefore, that the
consequences of the Content Requirement, as embodied in Chomsky's recent
work, admittedly including X-bar theory, entirely support syntactic
theory.

>
>Cognitive Grammar proceeds from the position that only three kinds of
>units are needed to describe grammatical phenomena -- semantic units,
>phonological units, and _symbolic_ units, which consist of pairings of
>the first two (i.e. a meaning paired with a phonological form).  There
>is no separate vocabulary or set of theoretical constructs for doing
>syntax; syntax, morphology, etc. are all handled by means of these units.
>The theory has been applied to a number of central syntactic phenomena.
>To take just two examples, there's Langacker's paper "Space Grammar,
>Analysability and the English Passive" in _Language_ 1982.  And there's
>my recent dissertation ("Paths Through Conceptual Structure: Constraints
>on Pronominal Anaphora"), which provides an account of coreference
>restrictions in English without using tree structures (i.e. without
>c-command).  

This sounds interesting. Can you tell us how your system does the
classic cases for which command notions (introduced first by Klima and
Langacker, as it happens) have been posited?  For example, the contrasts
between binding from an NP and binding from a subpart of an NP?

>David Pesetsky asked about arguments for cognitive linguistics.  In the
>case of Cognitive Grammar, one of the most obvious arguments is parsimony.
>It is indisputable that a theory of language must include semantic constructs
>and phonological constructs.  Generative grammar claims further that it
>must include autonomous syntactic constructs which are not reducible to
>either semantic or phonological representations.  Generative grammar 
>therefore posits an entire component which Cognitive Grammar does without.
>It seems to me that we should be asking what the arguments are that such a
>component is necessary.

Well...there's a whole field out there.

Take the existence of word-order Universals, for instance, in which
notions like Head, Complement and Specifier play a role.  These are a
semantically heterogeneous and phonologically heterogeneous set, yet
they seem to behave with a degree of homogeneity elsewhere.  More
constrained cases, where more of the data is understood, make the case
better.  For example, Kayne's discovery that clitic pronoun position in
the infinitive correlates with the possibility of control/Equi in
embedded questions introduced by "if" (!), and his explanation of this
fact.

Take the entirety of Mark Baker's book, recently praised by another
correspondent here, which argues at length for a generalization
of complement/non-complement asymmetries found with WH-movement and
verb-inflection-complementizer couplings to complex morphology and
relation changing rules cross-linguistically.

Take, for that matter, the very existence of cross-language variation,
e.g. in the binding domains for reflexive pronouns, where semantics
appears to remain constant, but some other property differs.  And take
the apparent limited range of such variety.

And so on...

Parsimony is an argument when *all other things are equal*.  The
question is: what leads you (or Langacker) to think that all other
things are equal?  And actually, both of us are asking the wrong
question.  The right question is: how do the various empirical questions
about language get answered?  I can do away with phonology if I want by
ignoring most of the questions phonologists ask.  (I know linguistics
students who've tried to do this too!)  But it doesn't go away.

Addendum: many things that are called "semantics" in the literature are
simply semantically informed examples of syntax, so if "semantics" in
Langacker's work has this character, the debate must take another form.
Ditto, I suppose for phonology.

-David Pesetsky

[who started this thread, therefore deserves what he gets, but is
getting weary]