The Substance of Language Volume I: The Domain of Syntax
John M. Anderson
Abstract
This book explores the consequences for syntax of assuming that language is substantively based, or grounded, in extralinguistic cognition and perception. Groundedness does not just apply to the categories of syntax, like verb and noun, but also to other aspects of syntactic structure. Thus hierarchization (dependency), linearity, and phonological expression of categories, especially by intonation, are grammaticalizations of, respectively, cognitive salience, our perception of time, and our perception of sound. The major linguistic module of syntax is characterized by a set of categories based ... More
This book explores the consequences for syntax of assuming that language is substantively based, or grounded, in extralinguistic cognition and perception. Groundedness does not just apply to the categories of syntax, like verb and noun, but also to other aspects of syntactic structure. Thus hierarchization (dependency), linearity, and phonological expression of categories, especially by intonation, are grammaticalizations of, respectively, cognitive salience, our perception of time, and our perception of sound. The major linguistic module of syntax is characterized by a set of categories based on distinctions in the perceived ontological status of what the categories represent, and this basis determines the distribution of categories, defined by category members that are prototypical. This is familiar from the tradition of notional grammar. Submodules in syntax are characterized by the substance they grammaticalize. The first part of the book traces the development in the twentieth century of anti-notionalism, culminating in the autonomy of syntax assumption. Subsequently the book addresses various syntactic phenomena, many of them involving the fundamental notion of finiteness, that illustrate the need to appeal to grounding. Among other things, groundedness permits a lexicalist approach that enables the syntax to dispense with structural mutations such as category change, and the invocation of ‘empty categories’, or of ‘universal grammar’ in general.
Keywords:
notional grammar,
prototypicality,
ontological categories,
anti‐autonomism,
lexicalism,
dependency,
structural mutation,
empty categories,
finiteness
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199608317 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608317.001.0001 |
