Grammar In Mind And Brain: Explorations In Cognitive Syntax

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Cognitive linguistics research – 2 – Berlin – New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1992. — 365 p. — ISBN 3-11-013183-8.<strong>Series editors: Rene Dirven, Ronald W. Langacker.This book owes much to George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and John Anderson, whose ideas helped me to conceive how to analyze the conceptual foundations of grammar. Special thanks to Jane Marmaduke, Lee Ann Kirkpatrick, Don Jones, and Dan White, who were always willing to listen as I worked out ideas; thanks also to Laura Janda, whose chance comment at the 1989 ICLA conference inspired Chapter 6, I would like to express my gratitude to Rene Dirven, Dick Geiger, Dirk Geeraerts, Geoff Nathan, Margaret Winter, and Jean Casagrande for their encouragement and support. I am particularly grateful to Ronald Langacker and Richard Hudson who reviewed the manuscript thoroughly and forced me to clarify key ideas, e.g., the exact nature of the Spatialization of Form Hypothesis and the precise relation between discourse function and entrenchment. Any remaining errors or confusions are of course my own. This book was partially supported by NEH Summer Stipend #FT-32626-89, which enabled me to finish revising the manuscript in the summer of 1990 prior to submitting it to Mouton de Gruyter. A final, special thanks to my wife Debbie. While I was writing this book, my brainchild, she was bearing our second son and caring for him in infancy. I appreciate her patience and love both for me and for our children and all her efforts for our physical and spiritual welfare.<strong>Contents.<strong><em>Island constraints as evidence for a cognitive theory of grammar. <strong>The fundamental issues. Syntactic autonomy: empirical issues. Extraction from NP: attribution effects. Extraction from NP in light verb constructions. Exceptional extraction from coordinate VPs. <strong>Alternatives to autonomy: functional and cognitive accounts. Functional correlates of extraction. Cognitive accounts of extraction. <strong>Attention and extraction. Psycholinguistic background. Topic and focus as attentional states. An attentional account of exceptional extraction. <strong>An alternative to strict modularity. Grammar as metaphor? C-command and syntactically channeled spreading activation. <strong><em>An integrated cognitive theory. <strong>Cognitive architecture. Knowledge representation. Temporal lists, spatial images, propositions, and kinesthetic representations. The perceptual grounding of propositional representations. <strong>Storage and retrieval from declarative memory. Productions, relevance, and the matching process. Control of cognition: general considerations. Processing cost and the concept of relevance. <strong>Categorization and polysemy: a case study. <strong><em>The Spatialization of Form Hypothesis. <strong>The cognitive grounding of syntactic knowledge. Grammatical projections of the link schema. Types of linkage. Cooccurrence. Predication. Sense dependence. Referential dependence. <strong>Linkage, immediate constituency, and grammatical relations. A case study: restrictive versus nonrestrictive relative clauses. Taxonomy of grammatical relations. Mediated grammatical relations. The necessity of governors. <strong>Hierarchical structure. Headship and X-bar theory. Layers inside the phrase. <strong>Constituency and accessibility: the concepts of c-command and government. <strong><em>Applications of the theory to English syntax. <strong>Declarative memory for syntax. Interactions among schemata. Interaction between general and specific schemata: non-prototypical heads. ‘Feature passing’ during interaction of discrete schemata. Toug