8.2.1 The cognitive criticism of objectivist semantics
Formalist grammars implement the notion of linguistic discreteness by stipulating separate representational formats such as syntax and semantics and by ascribing to each of these for-mats distinct linguistic primitives and rules. There is another manifestation of the discreteness paradigm, which is more philosophical in nature but has far-reaching repercussions on the analysis of language phenomena nevertheless; I will call it 'epistemological discreteness'.
The central idea behind this form of discreteness is that linguistic expressions have an 'extension' in the sense that they directly refer to an ontology or "things in the world" (Cann 1993: 1). In logical parlance, linguistic expressions can be interpreted with respect to a 'model', i.e. a representation of some state of affairs in the world; a 'denotation assignment function' is thought to be able to rigidly associate linguistic expressions with their extensions in the ontology of the model (Cann 1993: 39). A linguistic statement can then be assessed as either true or false, depending on whether it corresponds to the state-of-affairs represented in the respective model on a particular occasion or not (Cann 1993: 15; Saeed 1997: 82). The tradition of objectivist, truth-conditional semantics thus holds that linguistic items directly refer to things, properties and events in the outside world. Objectivist or referential semantics reifies language by making it independent of its human users; all that has to be figured out is the denotational relation between independently existing linguistic labels and aspects of the external world. Space does not allow me to go into the many philosophical and linguistic paradoxes created by this position (see, e.g., Jackendoff 2002: 294-303; Lakoff 1987: 294-6);
intuitively, however, the claim that words such as beautiful, to love or happiness directly refer to something that is objectively present in the 'real' world seems to be pushing common-sense plausibility to an unacceptable degree.
If we want to dismiss the idea that the world, the human beings that live in it as well as language are discrete entities which are related in objective ways, we arrive by necessity at the conclusion of cognitive linguistics which insists on "pushing 'the world' down into the mind of the language user ..., right along with language" (Jackendoff 2002: 303). This con-ceptual or constructivist approach holds that human beings actively construct their reality and impose meaning on it, and that language is one of the central mechanisms that helps human beings to make their environment meaningful to themselves (Jackendoff 2002: 308; Lakoff
1987: 296; Lee 2001: 77; Linz 2002: 143-4): "Meaning is something that the human brain attributes to the world. Things outside the brain do not have meaning in themselves" (Turner 1991: 30). This Kantian insight is increasingly accepted by neuroscientists as well, who real-ise
daß den physiochemischen Umweltereignissen, die auf die sensorischen Epithelien auftreffen, als solchen keinerlei objektive Bedeutung für das Nervensystem zukommt ... Bedeutungen von Signalen werden erst durch das Gehirn konstituiert. In diesem Sinne ist das Gehirn kein infor-mationsaufnehmendes, sondern ein informationsschaffendes System. (Roth 1991: 361)
I do not want to advocate linguistic relativism, however. Although there are undoubtedly in-terindividual differences in the conceptualisations of reality, these differences are limited in extent because human beings possess the same basic conceptual structures (Lakoff 1987: 268) and constantly have to adjust their conceptualisations of reality to those of others in commu-nication (Jackendoff 2002: 332).
It is fairly easy to conceptualise concrete objects on the basis of perceptual discontinui-ties: "from the point of view of 'everyday' confrontation with the physical world, it is quite reasonable to say that there is a general human tendency to regard certain relatively constant and discrete 'Gestalten' made up of ('spatiotemporally contiguous' ...) properties, as 'things'"
(Lyons 1966: 213). It is much less straightforward, however, to individuate events, i.e. occur-rences in our experience, because events are not spatially isolated like objects; what is more, they are not even temporally isolated because they are part of a complex network of occur-rences (Croft 1991: 261). The isolation of a non-linguistic, external event and the association of a linguistic construction with that event therefore requires a great amount of conceptual work (Croft 1991: 261). The individuation of objects and complex situations does not differ in kind, but in the degree of sometimes arbitrary mental constructions that are necessary for their respective conceptualisations. To isolate an event from the network of occurrences in the world, it is unavoidable to make generalisations, simplifications, and to impose a certain per-spective on the event. Lakoff calls these cognitive constructs which structure experience in a conventionalised way "idealised cognitive models" (ICM) (1987: 68).
Human beings do not just carve out any occurrence from their experience and shape it into a discrete event or ICM, but preferably conceptualise those event types that are somehow
"essential to human experience" (Goldberg 1995: 39) or that represent conceptual "arche-types" (Langacker 1991: 294). Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman (to appear) have been able to show that the earliest constructions children acquire designate basic patterns of experi-ence. Linguistic constructions like those examined in this dissertation can thus be expected to code such cognitively privileged scenes, which are relevant to our everyday experience or reasoning and which help to actively make sense of our environment. Once such significant
events have been isolated and paired with a linguistic construction, they can be used as the basis for less prototypical event types (Croft 1991: 273; Goldberg 1995: 43; Langacker 1991:
295).
It is the task of linguistic research to reveal the meaning constructions that lie behind language data because "visible language is only the tip of the iceberg of invisible meaning construction that goes on as we think and talk" (Fauconnier 1997: 1). Language is an invalu-able source of data when we want to gain a deeper understanding of the complex conceptual principles and mechanisms operative in our cognitive system (Fauconnier 1997: 2-4) because it "serves the semiological function of allowing conceptualizations to be symbolized by means of sounds and gestures" (Langacker 1999b: 14). The examination of the conceptualisations that underlie the RESULTATIVE,DEPICTIVE and QUALIFYING Constructions will be a modest contribution to this enterprise.
8.2.2 Comparing constructions on functional maps
Pivotal to the understanding of a syntactic construction is the nature of the symbolic link which relates its form and meaning, i.e. the question of how semantic relations are reflected in syntactic structure. Prototypically this link is iconic because, as has been suggested above, word order can aid the hearer in identifying a particular construction and the semantic rela-tions underlying it. Despite the great variety of word-order rules across languages, syntactic structures are most frequently direct representations of semantic structures (Croft 2001: 236;
Langacker 1987: 361; Lee 2001: 77). Of the constructions discussed in this book, the syntax of the RESULTATIVE Construction comes closest to directly reflecting the structure of experi-ence. Care must be taken, however, not to stretch the notion of iconicity too far, because we are only talking about the relation between syntax and the semantic structure of an experience as conceptualised by our minds, not about some sort of homomorphism between language and reality as described by natural scientists.
It is one of the defining characteristics of language that it may not only provide an iconic or near-iconic mapping of experience, but that it can also be conducive to viewing the same experience from different perspectives or to highlighting various aspects of that experience (Croft 2001: 236; Goldberg 1995: 43; Langacker 1987: 39-40); this is, for example, one of the main functions of the DEPICTIVE Construction. Differences in information structure are sys-tematic deviations from form-meaning congruities that allow speakers to impose that structure on a scene which is best adapted to their specific communicative purposes. Language is there-fore not a device that merely encodes pre-existing cognitive concepts, but is one of the central tools helping to create and organise these concepts in the first place: "Conceptually, there are
countless ways of construing a given event ... Linguistically, a variety of grammatical devices ... [is] usually available as alternate ways of coding a given conception" (Langacker 1991:
294). The active function language performs in construing experience becomes even more evident when we turn from the encoding of experiences in the external world to the conceptu-alisation of mental reasoning processes. Mental construals, as we will see from the analysis of the QUALIFYING Construction, are frequently not dependent on an external model but are cre-ated and structured by the instruments of the cognitive system itself.
When the same experience can be construed in different ways, it does not make sense to deal with a specific syntactic construction in isolation. The semantic and pragmatic functions of a construction cannot exhaustively be described without taking into account the alternative conceptualisations provided by other constructions in the language. For a systematic compari-son of the functions of related constructions, I will draw on the method employed in linguistic typology to map out functionally similar constructions on what is called a "conceptual space"
there (Croft 2001: 8), and what I, more modestly, will name a 'functional map' because I am only looking at functional variation in English and not at conceptual universals. Syntactic constructions mark out areas on a functional map which can either be discrete or overlapping (Croft 2001: 92-4). As may be expected from the associative network model of the neurosci-ences, functional maps are multidimensional because the same construction can contrast with several sets of constructions along several functional dimensions.
It is a matter of general agreement in cognitive linguistics that constructions differing in form never express the same conceptualisation of experience, i.e. that they must define dis-tinct regions on a functional map. This premise is known under various names, such as the
"Principle of Contrast" (Croft 2001: 111), or the "Principle of No Synonymy" (Goldberg 1995: 67), but the form of argumentation behind it is basically the same: when there are two lexical items (words or constructions) in a language that conceptualise the same entity or event, language users will invariably attribute some sort of semantic or pragmatic difference to them. The Principle of Contrast is a corollary of the "Principle of Maximized Expressive Power" (Goldberg 1995: 68): distinct linguistic forms tend to be reserved for the expression of semantic and pragmatic differences in order to increase the communicative power of the lan-guage.
To conclude, Construction grammar does not describe syntactic and semantic building-blocks of a language plus the respective rules of combination. Instead, it examines the syntax and semantics of individual constructions and compares their specific functions in conceptual-ising experience to those performed by semantically related constructions. Since the
concep-tual explanation of a construction and its comparison to related constructions is a large-scale undertaking, I will devote most space to the RESULTATIVE and QUALIFYING Constructions, and restrict myself to a rather terse discussion of the DEPICTIVE Construction.