Neural Network Model of Lexical Organisation

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A Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization

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A Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization

Michael Fortescue

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 © Michael Fortescue 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Michael Fortescue has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

978-1-44111-143-2 (hardback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Publisher has applied for CIP data.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

Part 1 The Basics 1 Introduction 1.1 The mental lexicon 1.2 The nature of the model

1 1 4

2 Some Sample Word Templates 2.1 A noun template 2.2 Nouns versus verbs 2.3 Other parts of speech 2.4 A ‘derived’ word

13 13 18 23 26

3 The Production and Comprehension of Simple Sentences

30

4 Expansion to a Complex Sentence 4.1 Some new word types 4.2 Production of a complex sentence – and an inference

37 37 46

5 Further Dimensions of the Model 5.1 Relating event structures 5.2 Nominalizations and abstract nouns 5.3 Some loose ends

49 49 54 57

Summary of Part 1

65

Part 2 Applications 6 Semantic Fields and Lexical Categories

71

7 Compositionality 7.1 Nominal composition 7.2 Verbal decomposition 7.3 More on causal derivation 7.4 Complex word meaning: a test case for compositionality

78 78 80 86 88

Contents

vi

8 Constructions 9 Polysemy

95 102

9.1 Polysemy and context 9.2 An excursion into metaphor and metonymy

102 106

10 Some Further Questions of qualia

111

11 Extensions to Languages of Different Morphological Type

118

Summary of Part 2

132

Part 3 Cognitive Justification of the Model 12 The Interfacing of Grammar and Lexicon 12.1 Grammar templates 12.2 The realization of grammatical and semantic features by call trees 12.3 How call trees and combination matrices might function

137 137

13 The Neural Representation of Context

153

14 Acquisition

161

15 Prospective Conclusions 15.1 The justification for separating affordance levels 15.2 Potential (dis)confirmation of the model

168 168 171

Appendix 1: The Relationship to Burnod’s Neurological Model

177

Appendix 2: Paradigmatic Features of English Words

185

Appendix 3: Sample Derivations

193

List of Templates and Graphic Conventions

195

Notes

199

References

230

Index

235

140 147

Part One

The Basics


1

Introduction

1.1 The mental lexicon This book is about the mental lexicon. By this I mean the cortical representation and organization of semantic memory in so far as this concerns the form and meaning of words in the minds of speakers of a specific language. It is not about formal representations of semantic knowledge and relationships, nor about the use of lexical knowledge in specific discourse contexts, nor is it about the way such knowledge is (or should be) captured by dictionaries. The lexical knowledge mastered by any speaker of a language covers a vast number of forms corresponding to a still vaster array of overlapping meanings. It has proved very difficult to distinguish the latter from encyclopedic knowledge in any principled manner. In fact, most cognitive linguists today would claim that there is no such boundary − thus Langacker (2000: 4) states bluntly that lexical knowledge is encyclopedic knowledge. With prototype effects, metaphorical extensions and the influence of context prevalent throughout the lexicon one can, from this perspective, at best hope to isolate a prototypical ‘core’ region of a word’s meaning relatable to underlying ‘image schemas’, or the like. Various attempts to (re)instate a clear boundary have nevertheless been made within different theoretical approaches. Typically this involves form rather than content, everything unpredictable and/or irregular being consigned to the lexicon – this is the approach of Dik (1989: 68f.), for example, who isolates irreducible ‘basic predicates’ with their grammatical frames and places them there. The meaning of these items can then be made explicit through ‘meaning postulates’ that basically paraphrase it in terms of other predicates of the language. This still does not really solve the problem of where exactly to draw the line between lexical and encyclopedic knowledge (if one must), since meaning postulates do not account for all essential contrastive dimensions between lexical items (what exactly distinguishes a ‘daisy’ from a ‘marguerite’?). Further more, they may in principle be extended to all manner of defeasible or contingent information (e.g. that the ‘jay’ has mainly blue feathers – true only in America). If the problem is ultimately intractable, there is nevertheless a further way of cutting the cake that can prove useful, namely distinguishing those

4

Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization

aspects of the meanings of words that have a bearing on grammar (including collocational restrictions) and on logical inferences between words (meaning postulates indefeasible except in figurative usage) from those that do not. It is this distinction that I shall endeavour to adhere to throughout the book. Following this route simplifies matters considerably without denying that the mental lexicon is embedded in the vaster domain of encyclopedic (and indeed episodic) memory. This is a luxury which ‘external’ dictionaries, for practical reasons, cannot allow themselves: they cannot refer to holistic experiences or irreducible image schemas, but must needs follow the paraphrasing route, since they are couched in words of the same language (or another language via translation). A compromise with the encyclopedic is inevitable (and desirable), since the utility of a dictionary lies in introducing as many specific contexts as possible that have an affect on the meaning of the word. The approach I shall follow allows for contextual and sensory associations to be open-ended as regards detail, while the word as it relates to grammatical patterning (and ultimately to its use in discourse) is finitely circumscribed, both in its paradigmatic and its syntagmatic aspects. This is essential if words are to function as an efficient currency of communication. It is also compatible with the view of lexical representation as being widely distributed through cortical networks, a conclusion recent neurolinguistic evidence points inescapably towards.1 The question is ‘how distributed?’ – in both the ‘where?’ and the ‘to what degree?’ senses. The ‘mental lexicon’ is not a place, it is a distributed (but not arbitrarily distributed) nexus of relationships mediating between phonological forms, sensory and functional affordances, grammatical patterns and context types.

1.2 The nature of the model Existing linguistic theories of the organization of the lexicon (including Pustejovsky’s generative lexicon, Talmy’s cognitive semantics, Wierzbicka’s semantic primitive approach, and Lamb’s stratificational model) are generally conceived of in terms of representations of meaning-form pairings and their combinatorial potential. They vary considerably, however, as to how closely they are intended to reflect cognitive reality or to be implementable in computer simulations. None of them – apart from Lamb’s − is directly geared to what is known of specific processes in the brain that utilize the mental lexicon ‘on line’, nor to the physical distribution of lexical information in the cortex. Lamb (1998: 352ff.) does discuss localization, but admits that his own proposal for placing ‘Lexis’ in one particular area (around the angular gyrus) is misleading, since it is probably widely distributed (as Deacon 1997 and Pulvermüller 2002, for example, argue). My own proposal − as first presented in Fortescue (2009) − takes both processing and localization in the brain seriously and was originally inspired by Yves Burnod’s ‘Adaptive neural network’, a milestone in

Introduction

5

the attempt to bring AI modelling closer to what is actually known of the workings of the brain (Burnod 1990). The ramifications of his model for linguistics − or indeed for cognitive science − have not been fully appreciated, owing largely to difficulties of presentation (and translation). It is premised on the ‘six-dimensional’ symmetry of cortical connectivity, the six dimensions being respectively: left-right (between hemispheres), associativefrontal (posterior-anterior), spatial-molecular (outer cortical surface-limbic system), visual-auditory, parietal-temporal, and (more locally) primary-secondary (sensorimotor-associative). See further in Appendix 1 for an account of the more detailed relationship between Burnod’s model and my own. I shall limit myself in the following chapters to brief characterizations of key correlations. To Burnod’s model − which is not always easy to follow for non-specialists − my own adds a functional/cognitive perspective on grammar. At the same time I take up Lamb’s challenge as regards specifying the distribution of lexical information by applying his ‘Proximity hypothesis’ in a more consistent way than he himself does. (This is a matter Burnod did not attempt to resolve.) The overall aim is to provide a bridge between neurology and theoretical linguistics in the area of the lexicon, in order on the one hand to spell out to neurologists some of the broad linguistic issues which must eventually be addressed and experimentally investigated by the methods that they have developed, and, on the other, to illustrate to linguists how far it is at present possible to go in providing a reasonably firm neurological basis for the categories and processes that interest them. In meeting this aim, the model, by virtue of its hybrid nature, faces the inevitable risk of not satisfying practitioners from either side of the disciplinary divide, each used to working within their own theoretical and/or experimental framework. I am not alone among cognitively orientated linguists in believing that the divide will eventually disappear, although there is still a long way to go. It is not premature, it seems to me, to try and get a grip − even in a tentative way − on the fine-grained intermediate territory remaining to be explored and explained.2 Although much of the detail is necessarily speculative (controversy still abounds as regards interpreting the neuroimaging and aphasic evidence, for example), the graphic framework that I propose will at least, I hope, contribute to clarifying what kind of overall modelling we need to undertake in order to generate testable hypotheses in this area. In contrast to most kinds of schematic representation of semantic networks it provides the possibility of a homologous correlation with the three-dimensional object, the human cortex, in which the mental lexicon is instantiated. My model represents, then, a framework which can be used to elucidate lexical organization in a wide variety of languages and across different sub-areas of lexicon, including those that interface directly with grammar. In a sense it combines Burnod’s ‘bottom-up’ approach with Lamb’s ‘top-down’ approach to neurolinguistic modelling. It can furthermore be said to combine a classical

6


AI modelling approach, involving the manipulation of symbols by and between discrete processing modules (e.g. a sentence formulator and a parser), with the more recent parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach of the connectionists. The systems the latter employ simulate neural networks whose non-symbolic connections (or rather their ‘weights’) determine the overall input-output relationship while all intermediate layers remain ‘hidden’.3 As Harder and Togeby (1993) put it in arguing for an ‘instructional semantics’, the two approaches are in fact complementary and task-specific, with the ‘soft’ connectionist perspective best suited to modelling certain types of low level processes, and the ‘hard’, linear AI one best suited to higher level symbol-based processes. In my model the connectionist perspective is reflected in my application of Burnod’s notion of the ‘call tree’, instantiated in the synaptic connectivity of cortical columns, while the modular, symbol-based perspective is reflected both in the long-distance communication between different modules of the cortex and in the compositionality of word meanings. In Chapter 12, I shall provide a more detailed example of a Burnodian ‘call tree’, also of his notion of the ‘combination matrix’, the selective interaction of orthogonally crossing neural pathways – this is another of his terms which plays a significant role in the present model. The organization of the model generates a number of testable hypotheses, given modern neuroimaging techniques, and is compatible with results already presented in the literature. I shall focus on this in Chapter 15.2. Ultimately, both neurological and computational adequacy is aimed at. Like any adequate model of lexical organization, the present one must account for productive compositionality, inferences, polysemy, constructional collocations and mutual argument-predicate interactions. The graphic formalism is tailored to mesh both with a procedural approach to language (combining top-down and bottom-up aspects) and with the basic architecture and symmetry of cortical columns organized into neural networks.4 This perspective will be seen to produce a clearer overall picture of lexical organization than either Lamb’s approach or stochastically based connectionist ones such as Elman’s (2004). I specifically do not emulate Lamb’s attempt to integrate a notation for ‘and/or gating’ circuitry with high-level linguistic modelling (derived in his case from Stratificational Grammar), though I shall refer to the neural gating mechanism as such (notably in Chapter 12.3). It is rather the intermediate ‘modular’ level of lexical organization that I address, a level where ‘call trees’ or ‘pointers’ from cortical columns can take the place of tangled hard wiring. Call trees correspond approximately to the features tested for by Morton’s (1969) ‘logogen’ model and by Miller and Johnson-Laird’s (1976) ‘decision tables’. At the same time, the model is more neurologically oriented than the formal framework of Pustejovsky (1995), whose notion of lexical ‘qualia’, while highly relevant to this endeavour, covers both abstract functional and more specific sensory features without clear distinction.5 His ‘qualia structure’ specifically

Introduction

7

refers to four aspects of word meaning: constitutive (the relation between an object and its constituent parts); formal (that which distinguishes it within a larger domain); telic (its purpose and function); and agentive (factors involved in it origin). The last two will prove to be the most relevant in the present context. The overall lexical network is taken to be anchored in multi-modal association regions of the cortex that display complex links to sensory-specific regions. Following Burnod (at least in part), I conceive of the language-dominant left hemisphere as traversed by a number of concentric ‘circuits’, including an inner ‘word/sentence’ one of linguistic mediation, and an outer ‘image/relational’ one (of semantic content). These correspond roughly to Deacon’s (1997: 291) ‘tiers’ and are divided into complementary anterior/frontal and posterior halves, the (exterior) ‘relational’ or ‘story’ circuit and the (interior) ‘sentence’ one forming the anterior continuations of the posterior ‘image’ and ‘word’ circuits respectively (Burnod op. cit.: 272ff.). To these I add a still more ‘inner’ phonological circuit, directly linking Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas (via the arcuate fasciculus and insular cortex), as in Figure 2 (cf. Démonet et al. 2005: 66f.). This forms part of working memory − an unconscious ‘procedural‘ or ‘implicit’ part.6 These ‘circuits’ are all highly complex networks channelling the spread of cortical activity whenever language is involved. Note in particular that the primary somatosensory ‘body map’ traverses all circuits along the central sulcus (the line separating the frontal and parietal lobes) and that the ‘word circuit’ is therefore discontinuous at this point. Burnod’s outer ‘image’ circuit is defined in terms of the links between visual, parietal and temporal association cortex and thus does not include primary auditory cortex (which lies inside the phonological circuit on Figure 2). The ‘image’ circuit as I conceive it must also involve the latter and it can thus hardly be considered a closed loop, so I have not added it on the figure. In fact my ‘word/sentence’ circuit, connecting higher association areas, corresponds more closely to his ‘image/relational’ one and cannot be considered a simple loop either (see further on this in Appendix 1). The essential innovation in the present approach is a distinction between more posterior (sensory) and more anterior (functional) sub-parts of lexical entries. Accordingly, I divide lexical features into sensory and functional affordances (or associations).7 Note that MacWhinney (1999) and others limit the use of the word ‘affordance’ to sensory associations (it was originally used by Gibson in the sense ‘parameters for motor interaction signalled by sensory cues’ – cf. Arbib et al. 1998: 169). Although I would not want to deny the important difference between primary (sensory) affordances and secondary (mediated) ones, I have extended this usage since I follow Burnod in seeing the same underlying mechanism – that of the ‘call tree’ – behind both kinds of affordance. The reader may prefer to substitute Damasio’s more general term ‘disposition’ (Damasio 2000: 139ff.).

8


These different ‘affordances’ are taken to be associated via mediatory ‘word columns’ that are spread along two major diverging/converging routes across the dominant hemisphere of the brain, a more ventral ‘nominal’ one and a more dorsal ‘verbal’ one, corresponding to sections of the ‘word/sentence’ circuit mentioned above. These are homologous with the well-known ‘what’ and ‘where’ streams of visual processing (cf. Hickok and Poeppel 2004). The linguistic relevance of these ‘routes’ has proved a contentious matter. The distinction was mooted by Landau and Jackendoff (1993) in terms of the processing of nouns as opposed to prepositions, by Givón (1995: 408f.) in terms of lexical concepts as opposed to ‘propositional’ information involving space and motion, and by Hurford (2003) in terms of the logical coding of variables as opposed to predicates.8 My own position on the role of the two ‘routes’ is more or less identical with that of Werning, who in his ‘open peer’ commentary to Hurford’s article (op. cit.: 299f.) states that the dorsal stream is predominantly occupied with the representation of events, which are dynamic in nature, while the ventral stream tends to produce representations of objects, and that it therefore should be natural that nouns and their modifiers should correlate with the ventral route and verbs and their modifiers with the dorsal route. I should emphasize that I do not claim an exact correlation of verb = dorsal and noun = ventral, just that there is a natural bias for the positioning of mediatory ‘representations’ of prototypical verbs (and adverbs and prepositions) along the first route, and prototypical nouns (and adjectives) along the second. Démonet et al. (2005: 76ff.) present and discuss the relevant neuroimaging data. These investigators distinguish a semantically oriented ‘lexical’ ventral pathway involving the uncinate fasciculus and a production oriented ‘sub-lexical’ dorsal one involving the arcuate fasciculus (the latter corresponding to my innermost phonological circuit). This seems to conflate the two pathways (or routes) with sections of Burnod’s concentric ‘circuits’. I interpret this as indicating a ‘where’ versus ‘what’ stream architecture extending over both the parallel circuits. The Hickok and Poeppel model appears to place all lexical semantic processing on the ventral route, which runs counter to the evidence (to be discussed below) that at least concrete verb meanings are primarily anchored along the ‘where’ route, i.e. that their mediatory word columns are situated along this dorsal route. Arbib et al. (1998: 243) prefer the term ‘how’ to ‘where’ here, since it is a matter of ‘how to interact with an object’ (location being only one aspect of this). Henceforth I shall refer to the dorsal ‘where/how’ route or stream. Note that there is also evidence of distinct temporal and parietal ‘what’ and ‘where’ routes to frontal cortex in auditory processing (Wise et al. 2001: 92). For readers worried about this apparent overlap between the visual and the linguistic systems or ‘modules’ I should point out that I am simply adopting a position common to many forms of cognitive linguistics, namely that the various cognitive sub-systems of the brain overlap, with some processes and

Introduction

9

structures being shared between them, others being specific to only one system. In the present case this is a matter of the correlation of the linguistic and visual systems. This close correlation is what allows for efficient communication and ‘translation’ back and forth between the two systems in cooperative tasks (which constitute the core of rational ‘thinking’). Clearly it is the semantically anchored ‘word/sentence’ circuit that is primarily involved here, not the ‘phonological circuit’, which has little to do with the visual system (except in reading).9 Now when I talk of individual ‘word columns’ and represent them as individual ‘templates’ on the model it should be understood that this is for practical convenience. In many (if not all) cases I shall actually be referring to aggregates of more than one cortical column, corresponding to Burnod’s notion of the ‘multi-module‘ (op. cit.: 129). These are interconnected assemblies of columns that are not necessarily contiguous one to another but share a common ‘goal’ (say the production or recognition of a single word). They are coordinated in such a way (by both long- and short-distance connections) that their common ‘goal’ can be accessed from a number of different starting points within the network. This property they share with Pulvermüller’s ‘word webs’ – or more general ‘functional webs’ (cf. Pulvermüller 2002: 156ff.). However, within the ‘multi-module’ complex there will be a privileged ‘pilot module’, the hierarchically most superordinate node that can initiate a whole range of call tree ‘searches’ into the network. The mediatory word column as I conceive it occupies such a position in the organization of the mental lexicon. The assumed proximity of a mediatory word column to the cortical area containing the word’s principal sensory affordances (if it has any) is logical: it ensures that it is activated as the result of spreading activation from associated sensory imagery more rapidly than are irrelevant words that would have to be suppressed − or, conversely, that an activated word column will spread its activation more rapidly towards relevant than towards irrelevant images. My model does not assume that all lexical information apart from phonological and morphological ‘form’ is gathered in unitary ‘lemmas’ in the manner of Levelt (1989: 187f.).10 It sees this information as distributed across a number of specific cortical regions – though by no means as radically distributed as in connectionist models. Word columns on the model are assumed to be located not just in, say, a single ‘mediation’ area for nouns and a single one for verbs. They should be seen as each mediating individually between other widely distributed columns embodying phonological forms and sensorimotor images and/or higher-level ‘scenarios’ or ‘frames’. It is widely accepted today that the principal sensory affordances for basic nouns and verbs are located separately in the cortex, anchored respectively in temporal and – primarily – premotor areas, as neuroimaging studies corroborate (cf. MacWhinney 1999: 247 and Pulvermüller 2002: 45). In a lexical decision task using a PET scan technique, Perani et al. (1999) found that left dorso-lateral frontal cortex (Brodmann’s areas 45 and 46, i.e. Broca’s area) was

10


activated by verbs but not nouns (a finding corroborated by aphasic evidence). Note that the anterior part of Broca’s area is involved in syntactic processing while the posterior (‘opercular’) part is involved in phonological processing (and linearization). The same overall area is activated during the perception of actions, especially those involving the hands (op. cit.: 2341f.). Other areas were also activated by verbs, in particular in temporal and parietal parts of the left hemisphere. The temporal lobe activity may reflect the sensory affordances of typical object noun arguments (i.e. of entity types typically performing the activities concerned), just as nouns may in turn have associations with specific actions or states expressed by verbs. Perani et al.’s study covered psychological verbs like ‘believe’ as well as action ones, and the same areas were reported as activated in both cases. The networks associated with verbs are clearly quite complex, although with a common denominator. As regards nouns, the results of the study did not strictly indicate ‘double dissociation’ between location and function, since there was no clear distinguishing pattern for all nouns – they are presumably too diverse in category and distribution for such a pattern to have registered in this particular task.11 The sensory (or rather ‘sensorimotor’) affordances of verbs are taken, following Burnod, to be organized along orthogonal motor-spatial and auditoryvisual axes. The motor-spatial axis links the (pre-)motor areas of the cortex with the corresponding inferior parietal region that Burnod sees as involved in − amongst other things − the affordances of telic verbs of transferral and the like containing a resultant state component (cf. Burnod 1990: 277f.). The axes defining the sensory affordances of nouns again include the auditory-visual one, but now this is orthogonal to a (spatial) parietal-temporal pole axis. The temporal pole constitutes a higher level ‘convergence zone’12 rather than a primary sensory or motor region, and is related to the perceptual object-classifying function of the inferior and middle temporal lobes. It appears to form a gradient from the more general (‘natural kinds’) to the more specific (‘individuals’) in a posterior to anterior direction (Damasio and Damasio 1992: 70). I shall call this the ‘object synthesis’ dimension. There is a further dimension that should be mentioned here, namely that associating words to affect-laden ‘limbic’ affordances (this is especially, but not exclusively, relevant for ‘emotional’ nouns and adjectives). The functional affordances of nouns are organized on the model’s templates into crossing paradigmatic (contrastive property) and syntagmatic (combinatorial) axes. The former axis contains grammar-relevant semantic and referential features like animacy and countability (corresponding to Pustojevsky’s ‘formal qualia’), while the latter contains associations to syntactic complement or modifier types with which the noun typically combines. Similarly for the functional affordances of verbs: the paradigmatic axis contains temporally extended eventtype features (‘aktionsart’), while the syntagmatic one specifies particular argument types required for the verb to form predications. The syntagmatic axis is

Introduction

11

assumed to be oriented orthogonally to those of nouns when they meet in the frontal ‘grammar’ area in such a manner that nouns (or, rather, the NPs they head) fill the argument slots of verb frames, thus facilitating their integration into predications. Variations on this basic pattern for other parts of speech will be met in ensuing chapters. Speculations as to the more precise cortical location of the functional affordances of words are presented in Appendix 1. All phonological word-forms, regardless of class or function, are assumed to be anchored in Wernicke’s area, which is situated in the superior posterior part of the temporal lobe close to the multimodal convergence region at the junction of the major sensory axes along which call trees can be directed. Lamb distinguishes between a more posterior sub-part, closer to lexis (and presumably morphosyntax), and a more anterior, lower-level part, closer to primary auditory cortex.13 Démonet et al. (op. cit.: 66) see the area as functionally heterogeneous, involved in both phonological perception and access to lexical representations (also word-retrieval from semantic memory). There would appear to be agreement as to its essentially ‘relational’ nature. From a network perspective one should certainly be wary of associating cortical location and function too closely. At a still higher functional level, many verbs – and some nouns, especially those for artefacts of all sorts – are further associated with specific ‘scenarios’ anchored mainly in frontal cortex but perhaps connected further with the parietal lobes (cf. Servan-Schreiber and Cohen 1998: 195 for the involvement of pre-frontal cortex in maintaining contextual information). Scenarios of this kind cement argument and event types into higher-level conceptual aggregates that contain elements of causality and intentionality (both individual and institutional).14 These cognitive schemata can be termed ‘macro-functional’ − as opposed to a word’s grammatically relevant ‘micro-functional’ affordances − and may primarily involve the right hemisphere, which contains essentially non-linguistic (albeit often linguistically ‘moulded’) context types. The relevant literature, mainly from aphasia studies, indicates that the right hemisphere is intimately involved not only in ‘script’ knowledge, but also in pragmatics (including indirect speech acts and Gricean principles of communicative cooperation), metaphor (and other figurative uses of language), connotative meaning, and general context and discourse cohesion (cf. Joanette et al. 1990). The role of this higher functional level in the extension of ‘basic’ or ‘concrete’ meanings of lexical items (e.g. via relations of metaphorical similarity and metonymical association) will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapters. A major organizing principle of the model states that the microfunctional affordances of words must be mappable from and to sensory and/or macro-functional ones. When noun-headed referring expressions (probably initiated in the temporal lobe) are combined, according to the model, with the predicate frames of verbs in the frontal ‘sentence’ circuit, there must be consonance between the

12


parts combined at all levels (sensory, micro-functional and macro-functional, semantic as well as syntactic). The functional ‘qualia’ associated with a given predicate frame (to use Dik’s [1989] term) must mesh with those of nominal terms integrated as appropriate arguments. To a certain degree the model reflects the layered structure of the clause within Dik’s Functional Grammar, namely in the hierarchical organization of the (pre-) frontal ‘grammar’ area where the functional affordances of words may be anchored and modulated by higher-level discourse factors on the ‘story/relational’ circuit. The abstract operators of FG are reflected in features mapped down onto the paradigmatic axis of predicates. They reflect the dimensions of higher-level event structure, e.g. aspect, modality and tense. Further contextually modulated specifications (e.g. for illocutionary force) may be assigned to a still higher level of frontal lobe processing. The core lexicon and the extended ‘Fund’ encompassing it are not as closely associated as on the FG model, however.15 The derivational part of the ‘Fund’ is seen on the present model as part of the recursive morphosyntax, thus as pertaining directly to the interplay in ‘grammar’ cortex between the micro-functional affordances of lexical items and higher ‘story’ circuit requirements, and only indirectly to the semantics of individual lexical items. The semantics of the model is ‘instructional’ in so far as the activation of cortical columns corresponding to lexical items during the comprehension of a ‘text’ is seen to initiate specific cascading processes. These continue at increasingly higher levels of organization throughout the cortical network until final equilibrium or ‘satisfaction’ is obtained through integration of the incoming information with an internally consistent ‘mental model’ (cf. Fortescue 2007). The approach is also compatible with ‘simulation semantics’ (cf. Feldman 2008: 177), i.e. the general principle of words activating internal simulations – this is relevant especially to ‘scenarios’. In the following chapters, I shall illustrate how the model works by setting up schematic templates for some typical words belonging to different word classes in English. Then I shall show how these can be integrated into phrases and clauses and finally into complex sentences, in other words how the model functions as a basis for actual production and comprehension processes. Thereafter I shall fill out some important basic aspects of the model remaining to be introduced and illustrated. In Part 2 of the book I shall move on to how the model can be applied to theoretical issues concerning semantic fields, compositionality, constructions, polysemy and metaphor, and the semantic interaction of verbs and the ‘qualia’ of noun arguments. I shall also look briefly at how it can be applied to languages of types very different types from English. Finally, in Part 3, I shall consider the interfacing of grammar and lexical ‘call trees’ and address the general question of the cognitive justification of the model: how could lexical items organized in the manner described by the model be acquired by children, and how can the model itself be (dis) confirmed?

2

Some Sample Word Templates

2.1 A noun template The simplest starting point is to consider a concrete, countable noun, such as ‘parrot’. What does this word immediately conjure up to you, and how much of what is ‘conjured’ is relevant to language and specifically to your mental lexicon of English? Like me, you probably think of such sensory features as the way a typical parrot looks, its colouration, its size, and the parts which can separately be described such as the beak, the wings, the individual feathers, the claws, etc. But also how it sounds (the screeching as well as the human imitation), the way it moves, its typical spatial position (on a perch, in the air, even on a pirate’s shoulder), and, above all, the ‘fact’ that it is a kind of bird. Here you will have drifted away from simple sensory impressions into the overall semantic field to which such creatures belong. You could easily go further and list associations more likely learned from books about its typical habitat (the jungle?), its feeding preferences and habits (imitating humans, pecking at seeds or fruit held in its claws), distinctions between different sub-species you may know about, and so on. You may even think of a particular pet parrot you are acquainted with, and its name. How much of this is relevant to the correct use of the word ‘parrot’, however? In the following it will become apparent that I try to distinguish between those sensory features or ‘affordances’ of the word that distinguish it from all other words for ‘natural kinds’ (i.e. kinds of animals or plants or other natural categories).16 When it comes to words that do not refer to natural kinds but are defined at least in part by cultural or technological function (‘function’ in the broad, non-technical sense) I shall be making a similar distinction between those affordances that distinguish the word concerned from all others in a given lexical field and those that are merely contingent. For the sake of brevity I often take the short-cut of just indicating a general kind of sensory feature, indicating a more specific value in parentheses as necessary for expository purposes. But not all these features, if spelt out in detail, are relevant to the ‘correct’ use of the word. That a parrot is larger than a sparrow has no immediate bearing on how the word can be used in a sentence (though it may do so as

14


regards the ‘fit’ of that sentence to the world). Moreover, the factors that determine the correct use of a word are not necessarily translatable into sensory terms at all (e.g. the fact that a parrot may be the object of a transitive verb like ‘shoot’). There is a need, then, to distinguish between sensory features as a whole and those features determining the word class and other linguistic properties of the word, i.e. features – both syntactic and semantic − that force some grammatical choice when the word is used in an acceptable fashion. These are what I call the ‘functional affordances’ of the word. While the sensory affordances of a word are open to ‘prototypicality’ effects (recall my use of ‘typical’ in the previous paragraph), functional affordances are − within a narrow margin for variation − fixed by convention. English, which stringently distinguishes word classes (at least as regards their grammatical behaviour), demands, for example, that we treat the word ‘parrot’ as a noun (let us ignore here the figurative use of the word as a verb). This entails that we may freely modify it by appropriate adjectives or specify its referential status with an article or demonstrative in front of it. It may also appear (in suitable phrasal attire) as the subject of numerous verbs of physical movement and other kinds of action requiring an animate agent. It may also be the object of a suitable transitive verb or preposition. Only a subset of the sensory affordances of the word have a direct bearing on its normal usage, then, and on its relationship to other words (I shall return later to extensions by metaphor). These can be directly ‘mapped up’ to a subset of the word’s functional affordances, although, conversely, many of its functional features cannot be mapped onto sensory features at all, since they are language-specific abstractions. Thus the sensory feature of having wings can be ‘mapped up’ to the possible collocation of this noun with the verb ‘fly’ (a syntagmatic, functional matter), whereas the fact that the language treats ‘parrot’ as an animate being (it can occur as the subject of verbs of voluntary movement, for example) cannot, I would claim, be ‘mapped down’ onto a discrete set of sensory features. The associations involved would be too heterogeneous to be of any use for distinguishing the denotation of the word, either compared with other words within its own naturally occurring lexical field (birds) or compared with words referring to entities belonging to other, inanimate fields. I assign to the word ‘parrot’, then, as a first approximation, the lexical ‘shape’ represented on Template 1, corresponding to a single mediatory word column (or a cluster of cortical columns forming such a functional unit). It is to be understood in the following manner. The vertical line reflects the columnar structure and the medial arrow traversing it corresponds to input from the thalamus at cortical layer 4 (the ‘granular’ layer of cortical columns), which projects information both upwards and downwards to other layers (cf. Burnod 1990: 71). In the case of a spoken word (as assumed here), this input is an already phonemically segmented pattern that finds ‘resonance’ in the column when receiving activation from Wernicke’s area, where linguistic input through either the auditory or the visual channel is analysed.

Sample Word Templates N

15

syntag.: _V (fly, etc.)

[pár t]

paradig.: animate being

auditory

spatial

e

bird object synth.

Template 1

visual (wings, beak, colour, etc.)

Parrot

The format employed is schematic and not meant to be taken too literally as corresponding in detail to the organization of individual cortical columns. The fact that it nevertheless suggests their layered structure is not fortuitous however, as will, I hope, become apparent. The degree of abstraction from actual neural structure can be illustrated as on Figure 1, where a fairly direct representation of the neural column (from Arbib et al. 1998: 220) is shown at the upper left.17 An empty template of the type I employ in this book is shown at the bottom right, and in between is a schematic representation of a Burnodian cortical column with input/output arrows. The template at the bottom right, note, is for practical reasons rotated vertically through 180 degrees compared with the other two, so that − in so far as a direct correlation can be maintained − the cortical surface (and more locally connected ‘supragranular’ layers 2 and 3) should be envisaged as below, whereas it is above on the other schemas. The lower half of Template 1 (constituting the linguistic ‘sign’ as such) associates a phonological form with the endpoint (in production) or starting point (in comprehension) of call trees corresponding to the word’s sensory affordances. Since this is a common noun referring to a natural kind the column will presumably be situated somewhere in the multimodal association areas of the medial or inferior temporal lobe, approximately in a position defined by the shortest distance to the relevant sensory area habitually involved in activating the word or, conversely, in being activated by it. Here we can invoke Lamb’s ‘Proximity hypothesis’.18 This can be stated more specifically from the present perspective than from Lamb’s own: the mediatory word column correlating to the sensory affordances of a word should be located in multi-modal association cortex close to the primary sensory (or, for verbs, motor) cortex to which the predominant call trees from it are directed (e.g. along the visual dimension towards primary visual cortex for an object typically imagined visually). The exact ‘lateral’ position within association cortex will on the other hand be determined by the strength and extent of associated call trees along the second, orthogonal axis, typically along the object synthesis dimension for natural

16

Figure 1


The cortical column at different levels of abstraction

objects. Thus names of individuals will be located in a more anterior position along that dimension than common nouns. In the case of ‘parrot’, the two principal dimensions involved are the visual and the object synthesis ones, as indicated by the features on the two crossing lines at the bottom of the template. As will be seen, accepting a version of the Proximity hypothesis as regards the location of mediatory word columns does not go counter to the now widely accepted distributed network view of lexical representation.

Sample Word Templates

17

Activation of the word will send call trees out to reconstruct a visual image of a parrot, back through successive stages of analysis in partly redundant parallel pathways for colour, shape, distinctive parts, etc., towards the primary visual area of the occipital cortex. This ‘call’ is rarely carried through to the point of producing a fully-specified image: it can stop at any point along the way as soon as a good enough approximation to higher-order expectations is made (e.g. just some vague bird-like shape moving in some characteristic manner). At the same time as this principal call, others will go out to recreate auditory images (e.g. a parrot’s characteristic shriek) or kinaesthetic ones set in space – perhaps the ‘feel’ of imitating a flying bird’s flapping wings, for example. Most importantly, a simultaneous call will be initiated along the ‘object synthesis’ dimension which binds them all into a multi-modal image (however under-determined as regards detail). Note that the arrow indicating the phonological input from Wernicke’s area is aligned in parallel with the auditory axis of the call tree below it: the orthogonal axes on all levels are not arbitrarily oriented, but provide a handle on relating individual word columns to overall cortical architecture. Expanding activation in all four directions (relatively slow since this takes place via local cortical links) will result in more and more specific delineation of the object type ‘parrot’, along both the major sensory modality axis and the orthogonal spatial-object synthesis one. The arrow pointing towards the object synthesis pole on templates for nouns indicates the more persistent activation produced by such words along this axis − namely towards unified multimodal images, i.e. the most specific level of imagery possible. Ultimately, calls along this dimension may reach named individuals – including, say, a particular pet parrot. This dimension is also crucial in sentence generation, namely in the specification of potentially referential ‘terms’ (syntactic NPs). More contingent, ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge about parrots can presumably be accessed along this axis, but such knowledge (especially if structured propositionally) is not necessarily limited to proximity to the word’s sensory affordances, and may be associated with higher-level functional affordances in the form of ‘scenarios’ based on book knowledge rather than on personal experience of the creature. The mediatory column for the word ‘parrot’, along with nouns for other specific bird species, can further be assumed to be located (perhaps literally) within a natural semantic field of ‘birds’ (cf. Pulvermüller 2002: 88–90). This is defined by the call trees initiated by all these related words, namely by a summation of those properties (along all four dimensions of the relevant axes) shared by them at an early stage of their activation. The semantic field is hinted at by the small lines crossing the call tree axes at the bottom end of the ‘parrot’ column. I shall return in Chapter 6 to the question of hypernym/hyponym relations. For the time being, the short line crossing the ‘object synthesis’ dimension (labelled ‘bird’) can be understood as indicating the relevant hypernym here, though actually this can be more accurately represented by the intersection of extensions of similar lines traversing all four dimensions of the two axes, schematically forming a square or rectangle.19

18


In the upper half of the template, the pair of short parallel lines indicate that the link to the functional affordances of the word (above) traverses a relatively long distance compared with that to the sensory ones. The important point is that some input and output connections to and from cortical columns project to distant cortical areas, while others are more local. What the template is meant to suggest is a contrast between local call tree axes (sensory affordances) and long-distance connections through myelinated fibre tracts to the functional affordances in correlated frontal (and for comprehension processes probably also temporal) cortex.20 The latter connections presumably pass from the axons of the pyramidal cells of mediatory word columns to the dendritic trees of cortical columns located at a considerable distance from them. The template can thus be interpreted as actually containing at least two widely separated columns. As will be seen later, further (macro-) functional levels (implying still other, hierarchically superior columns) may be superimposed on a single template above a word’s micro-functional affordances. The micro-functional affordances, organized on orthogonal paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, probably within inferior lateral frontal cortex, provide the trajectories for activated call trees that radiate outwards in specific directions, searching for their functional ‘goals’. In the case of the word ‘parrot’, these include features relevant to the connectivity of general ‘grammar’ templates, such as ‘noun’ (as marked by the bolded ‘N’ above the intersection of the two axes), also – paradigmatically – ‘animate being’, and – syntagmatically – the common occurrence of the word before activity verbs like ‘fly’. (The italics indicate a ‘pointer’ to an actual phonological word, perhaps facilitated via the cerebellum − cf. Deacon 1997: 275.) Note that ‘animate being’ redundantly contains the feature ‘countable’ (see Appendix 2 for the redundancy relations between paradigmatic features). All the features relevant for the correct grammatical functioning of the word can be conventionally indicated in this way by short crossing lines. Figure 2 is a highly schematic representation of the location of the various cortical areas referred to above and the orientation of the major linguistic ‘circuits’ or ‘tiers’ cross-cutting them. Burnod’s symmetrically interlocking ‘relational’ and ‘image’ circuits could be added as an outermost tier in, respectively, anterior and posterior cortex, but these are bi-hemispheric and not specific to language. It is also important to bear in mind that the areas marked within these circuits are not dedicated solely to the functions concerned.21

2.2 Nouns versus verbs A similarly organized template can be constructed for other kinds of nouns, for example nouns referring to extended geographical features such as ‘river’, as on Template 2. The sensory and functional affordances involved are of course

Sample Word Templates (dorsal)

19

word/sentence circuit

parietal lobe

central sulcus

frontal lobe

Wernicke’s area (anterior)

Broca’s area uncinate

(posterior)

angular gyrus arcuate fasc.

occipital lobe

Sylvian fissure

fasciculus phonological circuit temporal lobe (ventral)

Figure 2 Principal cortical areas and language-related ‘circuits’

different in kind from those of ‘parrot’ but they can nevertheless be displayed on the same crossing axes. The word’s sensory affordances include at least the impression of flowing water contained by banks and location within an outdoor space, and its paradigmatic functional affordances indicate a geographical object rather than a living creature or an artefact.22 Also the feature ‘water’ (referring to a river’s material) has been added along the object synthesis dimension − this is a complex property consisting of a conjunction of specific sensory features (including touch), as is typical for many features on this dimension. Observe how I have joined up the angles formed by the small lines indicating respectively the visual, spatial and object type affordances of the word, using dotted lines. This is meant to indicate the interdependence of these features: also joining up the features on the auditory dimension would produce a square representing the broader category of natural waterways to which the word belongs in a manner similar to the indication of the relationship between ‘parrot’ and ‘bird’ on the preceding template. However, as with the case of the feature ‘animate being’, I would claim that there is no imageable superior category of ‘geographical object’ (which therefore remains as a functional affordance). The way in which this may be extended to a general way of representing semantic fields will be returned to in Chapter 6, in conjunction with a convention for indicating the mapping relationship between sensory and functional affordances in such cases.

20

Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization syntag.: _V ( run, etc.)

N

paradig.: geograph. obj. e

[rív ] audit.: (splash, etc.)

spat.: extended between banks

(material:) water

vis.: flowing

object synth.

Template 2

River

On Template 3 is presented a similar schematization for the mass word ‘water’, which is related to the ‘river’ template above via the corresponding ‘material’ feature there. Observe the grammatically relevant feature ‘mass word’ marked on the paradigmatic axis, also the lack of an arrow on the object synthesis dimension: this does not extend far in the direction of ‘individuation’, but involves at least a tactile affordance (‘wet’ to the touch). The latter belongs inherently to the sematosensory end of the parietal (‘spatial’) dimension (i.e. the part of the ‘body map’ related to the hands), although it is here arbitrarily positioned along the common axis.23 Comparing the ‘river’ template to that for ‘water’ should serve to remind the reader that all affordance features marked on templates are call trees goals − the goal of the feature ‘water’ on the ‘river’ template is the same set of sensory affordances pointed towards by the word column for ‘water’. These affordances need to be potentially activated when, for example, constructing images that correspond to the phonological word ‘river’. This is a different kind of relationship from the hypernym-hyponym relationship between ‘bird’ and ‘parrot’: ‘water’ does not ‘contain’ ‘river’ but represents one of its major default features (which could alternatively be called ‘aqueous’). N

V_ (drink, swim in, etc.) mass word

e

[wó:t ] aud. (tactile:) wet (obj.)

spat.: unbounded vis.: transparent

Template 3

Water


21

The fact that ‘water’ is a mass word does not prevent it from being conceptualizable in context as bounded, as in ‘(give me) a fizzy water’, just as a normally bounded/countable word may be conceptualized as unbounded. This is discussed by Langacker (1987: 61) under the rubric ‘virtual boundaries’ and is ultimately grounded in gestalt principles of perception (cf. also Taylor 1989: 128 on alternate conceptualizations involving the features ‘mass’ and ‘multiplex’). On the present model such relationships are handled by a ‘derivation’ (to be exemplified in Chapter 2.4), the result of which may become lexicalized as an independent item or remain associated as an additional polysemic sense of the word from which it derives.24 Polysemy will in turn be discussed in Chapter 9. There are other indirect ways in which the templates for ‘river’ and ‘water’ can be associated through higher-order ‘scenarios’ − e.g. for ‘swimming in rivers’ or ‘washing clothes in rivers’ if these are culturally relevant. If one now compares these noun templates with one for an activity verb such as ‘fly’, as on the left of Template 4, it will be seen that the orientation of the phonological input to the column has been swivelled through 90 degrees. This is meant to indicate that the activation it has caused is here being traced along the more dorsal (parietal) ‘where/how’ route, rather than the more ventral (temporal) one associated with nouns. It further reflects the ‘U-bend’ around the end of the Sylvian fissure, where the two routes branch out behind Wernicke’s area. Although the auditory-visual axis remains the same (still parallel paradig.: motion syntag.: NP_ ag. (bird, etc.)

mot. vis. (bird)

V

paradig.: past [flu:] [flái]

[flái]

(aud.) spat.: air

Template 4

Fly

with the stream of phonological input), the orthogonal axis along the dorsal route is the sensorimotor one linking the spatial (parietal) and the premotor (frontal) regions of the cortex. The bolding indicates the primary importance of this axis for basic motion and activity verbs. On the syntagmatic functional axis a suitable NP to fill the single argument slot of the verb’s predicate frame is indicated – here an animate ‘agent’ noun, usually (or by default) an exponent of the category of ‘bird’. Observe that the syntagmatic axis for verbs is oriented the same way as that for nouns (and all parts of speech) on the model’s templates. As mentioned in Chapter 1.2, I hypothesize that they will actually cross orthogonally in the frontal ‘grammar cortex’ integration area, given the mutual orientation of the ‘what’ and the ‘where/how’ routes (this is suggested

22


by the orientation of the arrows on the phonological input). Note that the position of features indicated along the syntagmatic axis of functional affordances is arbitrary for both nouns and verbs (positioned right or left for convenience on the templates), whereas the position of a feature along the paradigmatic axis of verbs with time-extended meaning is determined by its relative position along the ‘arrow of time’ (as mappable from the ‘story’ circuit). The broken vertical line links the sensory affordance of something winged like a flying bird with a suitable argument type (e.g. the noun ‘bird’) at the functional level – the default ‘bird’ indicated on the latter is not itself strictly necessary here (note again the convention of putting pointers to actual words in italics). This represents the basis for the compatibility of ‘bird’ (or its hyponyms) with the selection restrictions required by ‘fly’: it is difficult to imagine ‘flying’ without simultaneously imagining something (typically a bird) doing it. Motion and change is central to action verbs, but can also enter a noun’s affordances in the form of typical visual actions/activities associated with them, just as there are typical argument types associated with verbs. Verbs are ‘actions or events leading to changes in entities’ according to Givón (1979: 320f.). The two types of percept are unlikely to be stored in complete isolation one from another in the mental lexicon.25 A similar vertical line could also have been added to map the feature ‘motion’ onto the motion dimension of the sensory affordances below. A way of indicating that the motion concerned involves wings will be introduced later. Other, more complex types of verbs will be dealt with in the following Chapters. The form of ‘fly’ discussed so far has been its infinitive or ‘citation’ form. What of inflected forms like past tense ‘flew’? The relation between this and ‘fly’ is indicated on the partial template to the right above, which could be integrated with the one on the left – it is assumed that the word column as a whole may be activated by either of these allomorphs as phonological input (the sensory affordances are of course shared). The node-like blobs have been added to make the connections between the two forms clearer. The past tense form is actually only ‘summoned’ at a higher level, namely by the requirements of the ‘story/relational circuit’, a matter I shall return to in Chapter 3. Since the form of the past tense of ‘fly’ is irregular, it cannot simply be handled by a general grammatical ‘derivation’ that adds -ed to the lexical stem (as needed for regular verbs). One must assume that the form ‘flew’ is anchored in the micro-functional affordances of the ‘fly’ word column itself, ready for higher-order activation, although it in turn ‘maps’ to paradigmatic sets of forms in Wernicke’s area, where such formally related items may be gathered.26 The mediatory column, in other words, has two activation states (what I call ‘eigenstates’), past and non-past, according to the grammatical demands of the given discourse context. An irregular past tense form ‘went’ must also be marked on the template for ‘go’, for example, but since there is no formal overlap at all between the two phonological forms they will presumably not be adjacent in Wernicke’s


23

area − ‘went’ will have its own representation there, only indirectly linked to the citation form via the mediatory word column for ‘go’.

2.3 Other parts of speech Next, let us consider adjectives. On Template 5 the simple adjective ‘wide’ is portrayed. According to the Proximity hypothesis it will be located somewhere in parietal association cortex, along the ‘what’ route as for nouns. The spatial dimension is central to its meaning, in particular its sematosensory extreme (which includes kinaesthetic and tactile affordances), since the spatial perception of size is, as a default, relative to the perceiver’s own bodily experience (although the visual dimension is also involved). The opposite dimension on that axis, that of object synthesis, is less relevant here, hence the lack of the arrow in that direction (there is no degree of ‘individuation’ involved). Other kinds of adjective will have their sensory affordances anchored in regions closer to primary sensory areas.27 Note that the ‘standard’ marked on the paradigmatic axis for ‘wide’ (‘wide for a −’) is determined by the particular nominal involved (hence the dotted lines forming a right-angle). This is part and parcel of the general mutual adjustment of meaning between lexical items in phrases or compounds (which I shall return to in Chapter 7.1). The syntagmatic affordance given for ‘wide’ reflects its primary function of modifying nominal heads paradig.: dimension

Adj standard

syntag.: _N [wáid]

(aud.) (obj.)

Template 5

spat.

vis.

Wide

(the predicative use of adjectives will be discussed in Chapter 5.3).28 The orientation vis-à-vis head nouns is given by the short line crossing the syntagmatic axis (modifiers are orthogonal to the syntagmatic axes of both nouns and verbs). As will be discussed in Chapter 3, this is important for the assemblage of phrases along the common syntagmatic axis of the frontal ‘sentence circuit’. The sensory affordances for adverbs, such as ‘swiftly’, are oriented as for motion verbs on the ‘where/how’ route, the mediatory columns concerned presumably being located in proximity to such verbs along the motor-spatial

24


axis. The adverb’s orthogonal relationship with verbs, namely fulfilling a modifying (manner-indicating) function, is indicated on the word’s syntagmatic functional axis on Template 6. Other kinds of adverbials will also allow for the secondary modification of adjectives in adjective phrases. The regular relationship of ‘swiftly’ to adjective ‘swift’ can be handled by a ‘derivation’ of the type to be discussed in Chapter 2.4 below. Note the lack of a paradigmatic axis arrow when compared to verb templates, also the highlighted sensory dimension (‘motion’) onto which the paradigmatic ‘manner’ feature maps. paradig.: manner

Adv

syntag.: V_ [swíftli]

(aud.)

mot.

vis.

spat.

Swiftly

Template 6

The sensory affordances for a preposition like ‘over’ are assumed to be anchored in a column in the parietal association area on the ‘where/how’ route (which projects further into motor cortex), since its prime function is one of spatial position and movement, hence the highlighting of that axis on Template 7. The functional affordances given (with the NPs indicating ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ respectively) are for the word’s prepositional path-describing meaning, which may also have adverbial function (note the alternative slot for a verb as well as an NP – the figure of the relationship − on its syntagmatic axis). Its static positional sense would have the spatial dimension alone highlighted.

mot.

Prp

_NP2 ground (under) [óuv ] e

paradig.: path figure syntag.: NP1_;V_

(aud.)

vis.

Template 7

spat.

Over


25

Both of these possibilities must be potentially activated by the same phonological input in isolation, however − the way in which multiple functional affordances can be represented will be further discussed in Chapter 5.1. The joining dotted lines indicate that the second NP expresses the ground of the relationship (= Langacker’s ‘landmark’). Spatial prepositions often enter into mutually exclusive oppositions with other members of that word class, and the relation of ‘over’ to ‘under’, its antonym, could (and should) be indicated on the template here, since it is part of what constrains the possible extension of its meaning. This could be done by reciprocally connecting the template for ‘under’ to the present one by a broken line between their respective micro-functional ‘ground’ and ‘figure’ features. A call tree for the ground of ‘over’ would thus potentially activate the figure of ‘under’, and vice versa. There is considerably more to say about the polysemy of ‘over’ (treated extensively by Lakoff 1987: 418ff. and Taylor 1989: 109ff.), but that must wait until Chapter 9. Note that both here and with adjectives like ‘wide’, above, the only relevance of the auditory dimension is in terms of the orientation of the phonemic input from Wernicke’s area parallel with it. Finally, something needs to be said about ‘function words’ like ‘if’, ‘not’ and ‘and’, which are not strictly speaking symbolic but only have functional affordances as defined above (this is also true of inflectional affixes); pronouns, which also have minimal sensory affordances, will be treated separately in Chapter 4.1. I do not wish to imply that such words have no ‘meaning’ at all apart from the interpretive or production processes they initiate. Their primary function is indeed ‘instructional’ in this sense, but they may also leave long-lasting traces in mnemonic structures (‘mental models’). Thus negative word ‘not’ in English, for example, links this phonological form (or a set of its contextually determined allomorphs) to the paradigmatic micro-functional feature ‘negative’, which indicates the absence of an object or the non-manifestation of an event, quality or state (its syntagmatic affordances simply indicate its morphosyntactic behaviour). But the word is also an ‘operator’ linked to specific speech acts of denying and the like at the macro-functional level. The most general kind of macro-affordance here corresponds to a basic cognitive act, namely that of inhibiting a content that otherwise might have been activated positively.29 In the case of conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘but’ there may similarly be traces left of their instructional function in enduring mental models in the form of the ‘feel’ of increase or contrast, but these are presumably more ‘dispensable’ in mnemonic terms (cf. Fortescue 2007: 136). The essential function they serve is in building (and interpreting) such mental models, although ‘and’ and ‘or’, both of which correspond, like ‘not’, to ‘basic cognitive acts’, are also grammatical phrase-level connectors. In the latter case ‘and’ indicates little more than simultaneous juxtaposition of two potential referents treated as one compound ‘term’, whereas ‘or’ maintains its (macro-functional) instructional sense

26


of choice or interchangeability. As sentence-level connectors they are broader and vaguer than their logical use suggests, merely nudging the hearer in the direction of certain types of inference anchored in shared presuppositions about the world. Some function words – in particular emphatic scalar words like ‘even’ − also contain a ‘feeling’ component, thus ‘even N’ can be analysed as ‘and N too’ plus a feeling of surprise. How this dimension can be captured in general will be illustrated in the following Chapter.

2.4 A ‘derived’ word An analysis of the word ‘frightened’, a participial form derived from a verb, will allow us to fill out some dimensions of the sensory and functional affordances of words that have not been dealt with up to this point. As regards sensory affordances, it illustrates a still ‘deeper’ level of call tree activity, representing one of Burnod’s axes of symmetry not yet discussed in detail, namely the limbic (or ‘molecular’) one of emotional reaction, which he opposes to what he calls the ‘spatial’ (or ‘lateral’) dimension. The latter can be understood as the whole of the outer cortical surface (defined by the other axes of symmetry) as opposed to the inner limbic and mid-brain structures (which lie below the hidden medial surface of the temporal and frontal lobes in Figure 2, and also include olfactory and gustatory affordances).30 The ‘feelings’ mentioned at the end of Chapter 2.3 can now be understood as limbic affordances. The ‘fear’ meaning element of ‘frightened’ is added on Template 8 as an extension ‘downwards’ of the cortical column for the word (cf. Pulvermüller 2002: 91 on the involvement of the amygdalae with such ‘word tails’). Although this axis is especially important for certain adjectives and verbs of emotion, it is potentially there to be exploited by other types of words too. Still more important for the overall model of the neurological embodiment of word meaning is the extension ‘upwards’ from the (micro-)functional pole of the template to the higher level of morphosyntactic generality where the adjective is related to the verb from which it is derived, namely ‘frighten’, to its right. On Template 8 this is indicated by the horizontal line joining the two columns (presumably a relatively short-distance link). Specifically, it joins the event type associated with the adjective (a state) with that of the verb (a causal action), via a causal link that projects the relationship between the two arguments of the verb (the causer and the causee) ‘upwards’, associating the latter with the experiencer argument of the adjective. While the ‘causee’ must be animate (an ‘experiencer’), note that the ‘causer’ is only prototypically an ‘agent’: NP1 could be represented by an inanimate or higher-order entity, depending on broader semantic and situational compatibility. The slanting broken lines on both columns indicate this projective mapping − the ‘cumulative’ or ‘abstracting’ nature of higher-level relationships will in general be


27

symbolized in this fashion. The two short parallel lines again indicate a shift in hierarchical level, as with the divide between sensory and micro-functional affordances, although here not necessarily involving physical distance. Compare the (micro-)functional affordances of the two words. The adjective is labelled as Past Participle (a functional sub-variety of adjective) and its paradigmatic axis indicates that it refers to an emotional state – this of course can map onto its sensory affordances, but its role at the functional level is in delimiting the various constructions it can enter, since it syntagmatically requires an experiencer as nominal head. The functional affordances of the verb are those typical for causal action words, linking a causal event with a resultant state (note the direction of the arrow). What the large arrow connecting the two words then actually indicates is not the causal event as such but the derivation of an adjective suitable to describe the resultant state of the undergoer of the type of resultant state (D1)

_N: exp.-er paradig.: emot state

e 1: cause NP2 _: ag.

V _NP1: exp.-er e 2 : result e

Adj (PaP)

[fráit n]

[fráit nd] e

mot.

vis.

mot. aud. spat. limbic: fear

Template 8

aud. spat.

vis.

limbic: fear

Frightened and frighten

event expressed by the verb, a purely linguistic relationship. This ‘derivational’ process can be generalized as a frontal cortex ‘grammar’ template applicable to the class of (transitive) verbs that can undergo it.31 The orientation of the orthogonal lines defining the relevant affordances both within and between the columnar structures are important. Note the short lines crossing respectively the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes of both the verb’s and the adjective’s functional affordances – as elsewhere on the model with orthogonally oriented features of affordances, they form a rightangle when extended and joined up. Thus the lines indicating ‘emotional state’ and ‘experiencer’ on the adjective’s affordances have been extended and joined by dotted lines to associate that paradigmatic function with that syntagmatic argument, just as ‘result’ and ‘experiencer’ can be joined up on the


28

corresponding affordances of the verb. Observe that although the derived form is an adjective, it has inherited the (verbal) sensory affordances − and their orientation − from the verb that it is derived from. It is the micro-functional syntagmatic axis that is crucial for its integration into sentences, and here it is indicated – correctly − as orthogonal to its head noun host. The ‘derivational’ process here (let us call it ‘D1’) is of course historically established and does not preclude the two words (and their columnar networks) existing independently. Once it is established for the individual speaker the joining line can be regarded as a simple associative trace, one of many from the word column ‘frighten’. The derivational ‘template’ itself, with its relatively open verb slot, is nevertheless potentially productive and can be triggered by a sentence-level context above the level of the individual word, e.g. when one needs to refer to the resultant state of some new emotional verb like ‘gob-smack’. Further on we shall look in greater detail at another kind of higher-level functional relationship that has been mentioned, namely that with macro-functional ‘scenarios’. These involve long-distance connections to a context type, probably anchored principally in the right hemisphere. Figure 3 represents the general ‘unpacking’ of a word template into at least three separate but interconnected columns. (In fact the arrow crossing the mediatory word column to the right receives input from a further column in Wernicke’s area that embodies the phonological form of the word, a matter I shall return to in Chapter 3.) This should be understood as spelling out the following relationships: the microfunctional affordances associated with a mediatory word column (e.g. a verb’s predicate frame) are associated with one or more ‘grammar’ templates embodied in frontal ‘grammar cortex’, and its macro-functional affordances link it to ‘scenarios’ essential to its meaning. But in between there are ongoing discourselevel processes involving the ‘story’ circuit, which may initiate a ‘derivation’ to be applied to a word’s functional affordances, or to combinations of words scenarios

time/space axes discourse context

deriv.s

macro-functions

grammar columns

paradig./syntag. axes

micro-functions

mediat. word column sensorimotor axes

Figure 3

The ‘unpacking’ of a word template into columns


29

within broader morphosyntactic ‘grammar’ templates.32 The short arrow labelled ‘discourse context’ indicates the inhibitory effect of discourse context on all but the contextually appropriate derivational, inflectional, and scenario alternatives associated with individual word columns. Derivational processes of the type we have just seen feed back into the system of grammar templates and may enter into the recursive morphosyntactic accretion of whole sentences. It should be clear by now that by ‘derivation’ I mean all manner of lexical extensions or modifications, syntactic as well as morphological, above the level of the individual word stem.33 This includes generalized grammar templates and constructions, also the extraction of event structures from nominals in certain ‘qualia unification’ processes in Pustojevsky’s theory, a matter I shall return to in Chapter 10. There is almost always some semantic purport to them − they cannot just be relegated to a ‘form lexicon’. They can, on the other hand, all in principle be instantiated in assemblies of cortical columns organized into morphosyntactic templates. As will be seen, derivations fall into three main types: ‘add’, ‘change’ or ‘expand’. A list of those occurring in the text (plus some further examples) will be found in Appendix 3. One must be careful not to conflate the ‘process’ and the ‘pattern’ perspectives here, however. The three types of derivation are not meant to be understood literally as online processes: they indicate relationships. In so far as their ‘products’ are well established in the lexicon or grammar of a language, contextual factors may directly ‘trigger’ them. In the following Chapter, I shall adopt the processual perspective, but thereafter return to that of lexical patterning as such.

3

The Production and Comprehension of Simple Sentences

How, then, do the individual content words focused on up to now participate in forming whole sentences? In this Chapter we shall put some of them together into the sentence: ‘A frightened parrot flew swiftly across the wide river.’ Here the perspective shifts away from sensory affordances in the more posterior parts of the cortex to the functional affordances of the individual words in processes located in the frontal (and prefrontal) cortex. This Chapter (and also 4.2) can be skipped by readers primarily interested in the lexicon as such. In Figure 4 can be seen a schematic representation of the activation in the inferior lateral area of the left frontal lobe via lexical input impinging from both the dorsal ‘what/how’ route and the ventral ‘what’ route (this assumes that the individual words have been activated by visual perusal of a scene to be described). The curving lines represent the functional affordances activated in the process. Their hypothesized orthogonal crossing in the area just anterior to Broca’s area (in Burnod’s ‘sentence’ circuit) ensures that nouns (as heads of NPs) fall into appropriate ‘slots’ in the predicate frames of verbs.34 But verbs plus nouns alone do not constitute sentences: these consist of whole predicates and arguments (plus any adjuncts). The bottom-up integration of content parts of speech must be guided by the syntactic integration of phrases and clauses (the thin double-headed arrows connecting the templates and words in Figure 4), under further top-down control from the ‘story’ circuit (the thick double-headed arrows). Note the intermediate position of ‘grammar’ templates between the two circuits. This arrangement will not only ensure the grammatical ordering of the components of resultant sentences, but will also correctly insert purely functional words like articles, pronouns and auxiliaries, which in turn are controlled by the wider discourse context determining choices of tense and modality and means of reference, for example. How does all this correlate with the present model? The potential to elucidate actual processing in the brain is after all the raison d’être of the particular kind of lexical organization it proposes. Once more, the principles of orthogonal axes and combination matrices – now supplemented by the unique ‘stacking’ ability of the frontal cortex – provide the necessary explanatory framework.

Production and Comprehension of Simple Sentences

31

motor pole story’ circuit grammar templates where/how’ (dorsal) route phonemic input

frontotemporal pole

Figure 4 cortex

what’ (ventral) route

The integration of ‘what’ and ‘where/how’ lexical input in frontal

In essence, what I propose is that the first step in the production of a sentence is the parallel top-down activation of an overall syntactic template corresponding to an illocutionary intent and the start of bottom-up integration of a ‘subject’ noun’s functional affordances into the appropriate argument position in a verb’s functional affordances (its ‘predicate frame’). This is in conformity with the specific grammatical requirement of English that an NP subject should be followed by a VP in an ordinary declarative sentence. In this way predicates and arguments (from a simultaneously activated, ‘time-locked’ set of content words) are moulded into skeletal predications from the start, although the top-down and the bottom-up processes have yet to mesh in detail. Thereafter, more specific requirements are triggered according to the constraints of the grammar, such as the demand for a tensed form of a verb or the introduction of a determiner or copula. Adjuncts and satellites of various kinds (phrases or clauses indicating time, place, reason and the like) must also be integrated into the overall top-down template, the lexical filling in of which can − thanks to the stacking properties of the frontal cortex − be suspended pending the completion of bottom-up elaborations.35 As both the general top-down and the lexically determined bottom-up templates expand into the ‘grammar’ network, each from their own direction, potentially incompatible ramifications from either direction must be suppressed until harmonious meshing can occur in its malleable (and continually updated) middle regions. Let us look in somewhat greater detail at how the different argument terms and adjunct expressions in our example sentence may be integrated – stepwise or in parallel – into the predicate frame of the verb on its way to becoming a fully-fledged proposition. I shall continue to use Burnod’s notion of the call tree when discussing such processes, even though the goals of call trees at this level are more abstract (and subject to rapid automaticization) than at the level of sensory affordances. The cortical area involved (the locus of ‘grammar’ templates) is also rather tightly localized (on the posterior inferior frontal gyrus,

32


PIFG, according to Démonet et al. 2005: 71).36 Call trees, recall, involve the ‘push down’ suspension of superordinate goals while sub-goals are searched for and are thus well suited to the functioning of grammar cortex. The relatively anterior location of the sensorimotor affordances of verbs – closer to the PIFG compared with those of nouns − is probably not fortuitous. Burnod (op. cit.: 283) describes action verb columns as lying at the motor cortex end of the frontal ‘time’ axis, where they express an ‘elementary action’ (a basic pulsation in the network). It would appear, however, difficult to distinguish the location of the micro-functional affordances of verbs from that of the lower level templates of ‘grammar’ cortex itself since they are so intimately tied up with the latter (cf. Damasio and Damasio 1992: 70). Consider now the assumed initial stage in the interdigitation of the functional affordances of the noun ‘parrot’ and the predicate frame of the verb ‘fly’. Here, as suggested, it is the orthogonal orientation of the two head content words (the noun and the verb) along their respective ‘routes’ that allows this meshing. At this point, an overall syntactic template may already have been summoned for a subject NP followed by a VP, as co-determined by the top-down speech-act requirements for this type of declarative sentence. I ignore here the difference between ‘subject’ and ‘first argument’ within the Functional Grammar framework (cf. Dik 1989: 70) − in this simple example they can be taken as equivalent. A transitive verb would, via its predicate frame, trigger a further subdivision of VP into a ‘V plus object NP’ template, a ditransitive one would have summoned a template with three argument slots, and a complementtaking verb one with a ‘subcategorized’ sentence/clause slot.37 Next, the potentially referring NP ‘a frightened parrot’ must be assembled around its nominal head, already in place vis-à-vis the verb. There are again simultaneous top-down and bottom-up processes involved in generating this phrase. Bottom-up, the integration of the functional affordances of the activated adjective ‘frightened’ and the noun ‘parrot’ must be conformal with the top-down expectation of a noun phrase to consist of a determiner plus a modifier plus a head noun. The determiner (here ‘a’ for specific, non-definite reference, as determined by the speaker/writer’s top-down supposition that the hearer/reader needs to set up such a referent in their accruing mental model) must be chosen at this level. The NP as a whole will fit correctly into the ‘agent’ argument slot of the predicate frame of the verb ‘fly’ since the head of the noun phrase, the noun ‘parrot’, is already associated with it. The overall sentence template (i.e. the full top-down expansion of the ‘S’ node, if one prefers) will also ensure that the adverb ‘swiftly’, which must be suitably oriented syntagmatically vis-à-vis its verbal head already bottom-up, will be integrated in the correct position. Similarly, the prepositional phrase ‘over the wide river’ will be assembled according to the appropriate template(s) and combined with the other components of the sentence in correct final position. Note that this ‘satellite’ (to use the Functional Grammar term for an adjunct) is not treated here as


33

an argument required (or ‘sub-categorized’) by the verb: it is attached at the level appropriate (according to the FG theory of the layered structure of the clause) to features of location and manner not inherent in the head verb’s predicate frame.38 All the components of the sentence will now be correctly ordered along the syntagmatic axis of the sentence circuit grammar template that − according to Burnod − ‘translates’ the image-plus-relation-based input from the relational circuit. This linearized structure will in theory almost be ready to become encoded in the appropriate motor sequences to produce a fully-fledged utterance. The word template network on Figure 3 can be supplemented at this point by Figure 5 in order to indicate the relationship to the inner ‘phonological circuit’ between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas. Of the two diagrams there, (a) is in word-recognition mode (from auditory input) and (b) is in production mode (from image and/or higher-level context input). Activated columns are bolded, with small arrows indicating the order of activation. In (a), the auditory input from the cochlea is analysed on a combination matrix where ‘vowel bands’ cross ‘consonant bands’ (Burnod op. cit.: 209f., reproduced in my Figure 8, Chapter 12.3). A particular sequence in a specific temporal order for which a word-form column or aggregate in Wernicke’s area is ‘tuned’ activates that column. Its output in turn acts as input or trigger (probably via the thalamus) to the mediatory word column in the centre of the diagram. Here, as we have seen, call trees which the column initiates ‘search’ for matches with the sensory and (via a long-distance ‘leap’) functional features that define the word’s meaning. In the reverse (production) mode in (b), suitable input from sensory (a) from auditory input to wordrecognition

Broca’s area

microfunctions phonemic sequence

image

consonants auditory input vowels Wernicke’s area

(b) from image/ context to word context production (scenarios) motor activation tongue vocal tract image

Figure 5 The relationship of mediatory columns to the phonological circuit

34


images and/or macro-functional scenarios to the mediatory column activate a premotor column in Broca’s area which correlates the phonological sequence constituting the word form with corresponding motor cortex commands. This involves tongue shape versus vocal tract dimensions − or hand movements in writing. The broken line represents feedback/feedforward from vocal production to phonemic recognition and vice versa involving the arcuate fasciculus – the direct route circumventing meaning.39 Note that early phonological processing is bilateral, though only the left hemisphere area (Wernicke’s) is connected directly to that for speech production (Broca’s). The homologous right hemisphere area works on a less finegrained temporal scale and is probably more geared for prosodic analysis (Hickok and Poeppel 2004, Chapter 4.2). According to Joanette et al. (1990: 150), those aspects of prosody relevant for whole utterances (as opposed to lexemes with their individual stress patterns) are controlled by the right hemisphere, which is sensitive to a larger number of distinct prosodic patterns and parameters, no doubt reflecting varied emotional content as well as emphatic focus and other context-determined dimensions. I shall have little more to say on the complexities of automatic lower-level phonological processing (an area inviting distributed connectionist approaches), but refer the reader to Levelt’s Chapter 9 (op. cit.: 318–63), where he discusses the relative merits of the ‘slot and filler’ and ‘activation spreading’ approaches to these matters (he favours – as I do − a hybrid approach).40 There remains, however, at least one step before this handing over of the final stages of production to the phonological circuit can occur, namely the choice of the correct past-tense form of ‘fly’ (recall the discussion in connection with Template 4). There is evidence from aphasia that such morphological information − at least in less analytic languages than English − may be stored in a different area than that where syntactic (word-order) information is stored, probably in Wernicke’s area. Thus in richly synthetic Turkish Broca’s aphasiacs are not reduced to ‘telegraphic’ speech and inflectional forms may still be correctly accessed (cf. Slobin 1991). This suggests that grammar (as ‘morphosyntax’) may be distributed redundantly across more than one cortical area (cf. also Deacon op. cit.: 308). Whole sets of paradigmatic phonemic alternants in inflectional languages may well be stored together in or near Wernicke’s area for potential activation when any one form is activated. Both Levelt’s close association of phonological and morphological information in ‘form lexicon’ and Bybee’s (1985) ‘usage-based’ approach to morphology are in theory compatible with this view (as is the ‘Word and Paradigm’ approach to morphology in the structuralist tradition).41 From Bybee’s perspective, paradigmatic sets of forms are seen as anchored in the frequency-based ‘entrenchment’ of key forms, around which the rest of the paradigm is organized. What actually triggers the specific choice of a tensed alternant − also in English − is in all cases the broader communicative context, the here and now of the ongoing discourse


35

(or the displaced temporal framework of a narrative). In FG, this is a matter of a higher level of the layered structure of the clause, that of the ‘proposition’, which, suitably anchored in time and space (and cognitive attitude), can be assigned a truth value. On the present model it can be handled by the top-down selection of the allomorph of ‘fly’ that fits the relevant feature of the time axis of the outer ‘story’ circuit, namely ‘pastness’ with reference to the time of utterance. The whole process of generating (or comprehending) the utterance must be under the overall control of a still higher level which keeps track of the discourse context and monitors the semantic ‘fit’ of successive sentences to accreting mental models. There are also pragmatic factors having to do with the immediate communicative situation which need to be satisfied in producing utterances (cf. Démonet et al. 2005: 71f. for some relevant neuroimaging studies). In particular, the sentence needs to be organized according to pragmatic factors like ‘topic’ (‘given’ or ‘new’ information) and ‘focus’, which may cut across the (bottom-up) semantic roles adhering to the arguments of lexical verbs These must be assigned in a ‘top-down’ direction and have no effect on the lexical entries of individual words with which we are mainly concerned; they may well, as has been suggested, be right-hemisphere controlled. However, it is also true that such modulation can involve specific constructions (e.g. focusing ‘clefts’ like ‘it was X that _’) as well as introduce discourse-modulating conjunctions, etc., and these must presumably be stored at the hierarchically highest level of grammar templates embodied in (pre-)frontal cortex. The ‘grammar’ cortex mediating between the two major circuits must itself be layered in this sense. Tentatively, one may envisage the following overall processing sequence: (a) top-down input from discourse intention plus ongoing context (from the ‘story circuit’) triggers one or more suitable sentential templates on the corresponding left-hemisphere ‘sentence’ circuit (patterns already sensitive to pragmatic factors such as topic pre-posing). At the same time, the medial word columns corresponding to the ‘images’ associated with the discourse-level/intentional input are triggered in the more posterior ‘word’ circuit. Then (b), the predicate frame of the main verb activated as representing the core of the event/ state to be expressed is integrated with its arguments in a proposition-forming combination matrix in the manner described above (via the converging of input from the ‘what’ and ‘where/how’ streams). And finally (c) the output of the latter process is in turn integrated in a further, higher-level combination matrix (in intervening ‘grammar’ cortex) with the output of (a). Although stage (b), operating largely in parallel with (a), may take longer to complete (since it refers to widely distributed mediatory columns), it is reasonable to suppose that the final integration can only be satisfied when complete harmony is achieved between inputs (a) and (b) in (c). In other words, activation of the word-specific predicate frame and its associated arguments and modifiers may

36


over-generate potential grammatical templates from the overall set defining the syntax of the language, just as the top-down (speech-act motivated) activation must over-generate potential templates, but only one possible combination will satisfy both top-down and bottom-up requirements. All other templates thus potentiated must be aborted as non-conformal. In theory, a single, integrated sentence representation could at this stage be relayed to the production ‘module’. In reality this is more likely to be an incremental process, with production of the first sequential constituents initiated before the rest of the utterance is fully worked out (its ‘content’ probably held in a short-term memory buffer in prefrontal cortex). If more than one possible sentential configuration fulfils both top-down and bottom-up requirements, pure speed – reflecting a higher degree of familiarity/entrenchment of the configuration chosen – will presumably win the day. In sum, both hemispheres of the frontal lobes are no doubt involved in the highest levels of production (and comprehension), but at this point we can halt our sketchy procedural analysis. The subject of call trees and how they may be involved in processes of comprehension and production will be returned to in Chapter 12.3.

4

Expansion to a Complex Sentence

4.1 Some new word types In order to expand the array of lexical phenomena so far considered, let us look at a more complex version of the sentence analysed in the previous chapter, namely: ‘We saw Raoul raise his rifle to his shoulder, and a moment later a frightened parrot flew swiftly over the river.’ Here we have some additional categories, two personal pronouns (one possessive), a proper noun, an artefact noun, a conjunction, a time adverbial, two transitive verbs (one perceptual), as well as an embedded clause (corresponding to a second-order entity or state of affairs) and an interesting bridging inference that needs to be lexically anchored. As regards the matrix sentence here, let us assume – to give it a context − that ‘we’ are watching a soundless film sequence of Raoul on a hunting expedition in the Amazon. But before considering the sentence as a whole we N paradig.: name (male) [raúl] aud. (R’s voice) obj. synth.

Template 9

spat.

vis. (R’s appearance)

Raoul

need to look at the ingredient lexical words individually. Postponing the question of pronouns for the moment, let us go directly to the first noun. This is easily represented on Template 9, the mediatory cortical column concerned being situated in the relatively anterior part of the temporal lobe where proper nouns/names are stored (cf. Damasio and Damasio 1992: 70). I ignore here the probable more detailed imagistic involvement of the symmetrically associated right hemisphere region.

38


Next, consider the transitive perceptual verb ‘see’, which involves an experiencer and a visual stimulus. The stimulus can be either a first-order entity (a thing or person) or a second-order entity, as here. This is indicated on Template 10 by the alternative realizations of the stimulus as an individual ‘physical object’ or an event expressed as a clause/sentence (‘S’). If this had been a speech-act verb like ‘say’ rather than ‘see’ the alternative complement types marked would have been a direct quote or a speech-act complement clause, also introduced by ‘that’ (as will be seen in Chapter 5.3). The meaning here is, of course, the basic one of perception – ‘see’ is polysemous, being elsewhere virtually homonymous with ‘understand’.42 Note the bolding here of the visual dimension and the broken line mapping onto it from the functional affordance ‘stimulus’. NP1_: exp.-er perception

V _NP2: stimul. (phys.obj.; that S)

[si:]

mot.

(aud.)

spat.

vis.

Template 10

See

Compare this with the transitive (causative) movement verb ‘raise’, as represented on Template 11, where a new convention is introduced. The type of motor activity involved is specifically indicated as being (prototypically) ‘by hand’. The convention here is to add a secondary short line crossing the agent

phys. action

V

_NP2: pat. (thing)

(by) hand NP1_: ag. (human)

mot.

path (upwards) [réiz]

(aud.)

hand vis.

Template 11

spat.: up

Raise


39

line to indicate an attribute or part of an argument, here the agent, e.g. his/her hands, which can in turn be joined up to the paradigmatic event type by a dotted line in the manner indicated so as to suggest the direct involvement of the agent’s hands in the action.43 This can be mapped to a visual representation of the scene, as shown by the leftmost vertical broken line. Note the bolded line on the motor-spatial axis: this reflects the major semantic ingredient of this type of action, namely (the feeling of) raising an object. The notion of movement on the part of the object raised is captured by the short lines of the relevant functional affordances being extended by dots so as to meet at right angles. This is in turn mapped by the second broken line to the spatial dimension of the word’s sensory affordances. The explicit specification of the path by an adverb or prepositional phrase (in the direction counter to gravity) is optional − this could have been added separately on the syntagmatic axis. It is unnecessary to indicate the causal and/or intentional affordances of the verb as such, as these are covered by the verb’s ‘time arrow’ (the physical action of the agent followed by the upward path of the patient) plus the functional affordances for the two arguments involved (‘human’ and ‘thing’ respectively), although ‘physical action’ on the paradigmatic axis could in theory be replaced by more specific ‘caused motion’ (an event type subsumed by the former). Note the default equivalence of temporal sequence and causal sequence with event types like this. Also the default intentionality of human actions is understood here: if the verb were one of involuntary action (like ‘drop’), a feature ‘involuntary’ would have to be added to the agent by a further secondary crossing line. The question of event structure features (and how they are to be interpreted procedurally) will be returned to in Chapter 12.2. The next noun, ‘rifle’, introduces another important aspect of lexical meaning not yet addressed, namely the telic qualia of artefact words, in this case the function of shooting and killing game. Such a function can be represented as on Template 12, in the form of a higher-order ‘scenario’ contained within a macro-functional circle. It should be clear from the amount and kind of information contained in the circle that the full scenario is unlikely to be instantiated in a single cortical column. ‘Scenarios’ in general probably represent quite complex aggregates or networks of columns, though the essential features within them (those that map onto the micro-functional affordances of individual word columns) may be represented by mediatory right-hemisphere columns abstracted from open-ended arrays of sensory associations in a manner similar to the way mediatory word columns function in the left hemisphere (I shall spell this idea out further in Chapter 13). The scenario − let us call it ‘shooting for game’ − is mapped via the slanting line onto the micro-affordances of the word ‘rifle’ as shown; it is also mapped onto those of the verb ‘shoot’ and ‘kill’ and other associated words. The feature ‘weapon’ is a sub-type of ‘instrument’ (and ‘artefact’), note. The words within the circle should be regarded for the moment as arbitrary labels of perceptual categories/events. Observe that


40

‘shooting for game’ action: aim fire (intention: kill) instr.: weapon pat.: game

ag.: hunter

V action

N V_ (shoot , etc.)

weapon

_NP2: pat. NP1_: ag.

(with_) NP3: instr. (weapon) (telic) [šu:t]

e

[ráif l]

aud.

spat. (parts)

obj.

vis.

Template 12

mot. (aim) (fire) vis.

aud. (loud report) spat.

Rifle and shoot

the scenario has both temporal and spatial aspects, and that the former can be indicated by arrows for temporal sequence or phase. There is more of a problem with the sensory affordances of this noun, since on the one hand it clearly lies on the ‘what’ route, as a visually identifiable physical object (it could be recognized even by someone not familiar with its exact function), and on the other hand it is an instrument or tool which is handled in a specific manner for a specific purpose – which suggests that the ‘where/how’ route (involving the motor-spatial axis of physical manipulation) is also crucial, although the latter is more closely associated with verbal actions and spatial relations. Pulvermüller (2002: 58) presents evidence of strong premotor activity associated with ‘tool’ words, as opposed to strong occipital activity with easily visualized animal words, and Chao and Martin (2000: 483) present neuroimaging evidence that the left intraparietal sulcus and ventral premotor cortex (areas associated with grasping and manipulation) are activated in the naming of tools, which reflects the hypothetical ‘where/how’ route, as well as areas of the temporal lobe ‘what’ route reflecting their form and movement. Damasio et al. (1996) reach a somewhat different conclusion, namely that ‘tool’ words (or rather the mediation areas between such words and the concepts they refer to) are located in the association area between the temporal and occipital lobes, posterior to the lower mid-temporal area for ‘animal’ words and the anterior temporal area for names of persons.


41

There is in general still a good deal of controversy as regards the interpretation of neuroimaging evidence for the localization of conceptual categories – see Martin and Caramazza (2003) for a summary of this research going back to the early 1980s, e.g. Warrington and Shallice (1984), who present a ‘Sensory/ functional’ theory to explain evidence of the ‘double dissociation’ between words for animate vs. inanimate objects found in rare forms of aphasia. The categories that have been distinguished so far include, besides the broad animate/inanimate distinction, human faces, houses, animals and tools. Double dissociation of more specific sub-categories such as furniture, vehicles, fruits and vegetables have also been reported. There are at least three major approaches to interpretation here, depending on the emphasis laid on individual properties as opposed to distinct categories as the basic for localization effects, namely the above-mentioned Sensory/functional theory (which sees conceptual knowledge of objects as organized by sensory and functional/instrumental properties); a ‘Correlated feature’ theory (involving wide distribution); and a ‘Domain-specific’ theory (in which the ‘same’ features may be redundantly represented in a few specific domains). Though my approach appears to lie closest to the first of these, none of them are really incompatible with the others, and all involve lower-level ‘feature detectors’ corresponding to Burnodian call trees.44 The solution to the ‘route’ problem for words like ‘rifle’ that I shall adopt here (partially based on the existing neuroimaging data, but still awaiting unambiguous confirmation) is to utilize the macro-functional scenario already postulated, namely the word’s indirect links to ‘shoot’ (itself situated along the motor-spatial axis). On the template the affordances of the verb and of the noun match and are linked, suggesting that the affordances of ‘rifle’ do involve both routes, in so far as its functional affordance as a weapon can be accessed via the scenario and/or the ‘instrument’ slot of the functional affordances of the associated verb on the ‘where/how’ route, distinct from its perceptual properties. I shall return to this in Chapter 13 in connection with Figure 9. As with all the templates given so far, only essential detail has been added – scenarios also contain a wealth of secondary associations (presumably even to token episodic occasions). Note that the different phases of shooting map indirectly via the scenario to the ‘motion’ affordances of the verb: the motion dimension is inherently time-extended, in the order of sub-events given. I shall return in Chapter 5.1 to the resultative sense of ‘shoot’ whereby the patient is shot dead rather than just shot at. The next noun, ‘shoulder’, on Template 13, illustrates the handling by the model of ‘body part’ words. The object-synthesis dimension seems less relevant here since a shoulder is rarely experienced as a distinct ‘object’ as opposed to a part of something larger (in Chapter 10, I shall have more to say on such ‘meronymies’). For this reason the arrow along that dimension on the template for most other nouns is absent. Now there is neuroimaging evidence that verbs

42

Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization N body part [šóuld ] e

(aud.)

(obj.)

spat.: body arms

Template 13

vis.

Shoulder

referring to movements/activities involving body parts are anchored in the vicinity of the relevant part of the motor cortex ‘body map’ (Pulvermüller 2002: 62). It is logical that the body-part terms themselves should lie along the continuation of the same axis into the corresponding parietal sematosensory area. There are presumably links from the noun ‘shoulder’ to words describing activities involving that body part, e.g. the verb ‘shrug’, which could be marked on the word’s syntagmatic axis − as indeed the Ø-derived verb ‘shoulder’ in the phrase ‘shoulder a rifle’ could. Note in general that other words associated via common collocations can be indicated (as ‘pointers’) on the functional affordances of individual words. They should, as usual, be understood as call trees whose targets are the mediatory columns for the words concerned, accessible, for example, via their phonemic form. The sensory dimension crucial for words like ‘shoulder’ is the spatial one, as highlighted on the template, but a call tree along the visual axis is also required to focus on the visual junction between the upper torso and the upper arm. The relationship to the whole body constitutes an instance of Pustojevsky’s ‘constitutive’ qualia, which cover, besides ‘part and component elements’ like this, features of ‘material’ and ‘weight’ (Pustejovsky 1995: 85). These all belong along the object synthesis-spatial (somatosensory) axis on my model. Recall that the spatial dimension is common to both the ‘what’ and the ‘where/how’ route (they are both ‘anchored’ there). In the case of objects like a rifle or an orange, which can also be analysed into parts, this information needs to be indicated along the same axis (compare the spatial feature on Template 12). On Template 13, the vertical broken line to the paradigmatic functional feature ‘body part’ (relevant for inalienable possessive constructions, for example) maps the word onto the visualizable meronymy concerned, which constitutes a natural semantic field in its own right. This is over-simplified here, but one can understand the order of features (call tree sub-goals) along the visual dimension as reflecting the usual one for call trees whereby the most general, ‘outermost’ category (the whole body) is activated/tested for prior to the more specific ones ‘closer in’. These would include ‘upper torso’ and ‘arm’, but also more detailed features such as place of attachment to upper torso, relation and orientation to upper arm, size, shape, etc. There is actually some degree of


43

indeterminacy as to exactly how far into the torso and down the upper arm the term can be used to refer in standard usage. This will depend to some degree on the context in fixed phrases or compounds (recall the discussion of the semantics of ‘wide’ in Chapter 2.3). Thus in the collocation ‘shoulder strap’ what is relevant is the support the upper part of the shoulder gives to a gun or bag or anything else suspended that way, whereas in ‘a shoulder to cry on’ it is the front part that is relevant. This will be returned to in Chapter 7.1. The situation with the semantic field ‘body parts’ here should be compared with that for ‘birds’ (mentioned in passing in 2.1 in connection with ‘parrot’). Whereas the former is structured as a fairly clear-cut meronymy, the semantic field of ‘birds’ displays typical ‘prototype’ behaviour, with only vague ‘degree of likeness’ determining its boundary. This distinction falls out naturally, in fact, from the nature and direction of the sensory call trees involved in the two cases: with body parts this is a matter of call trees searching for a more and more specifically defined location on the body along the same spatial dimension, as delimited by the whole body. In the case of birds on the other hand (or rather the mediatory column for the word ‘bird’ associated with that field), calls go out in all directions, with no determinate cut-off point. The ‘square’ covered by these orthogonal searches (within which the sensory affordances of all more specific hyponyms may lie) corresponds to a compound target. Precisely because it is compound, consisting of various criteria along different dimensions, its boundaries will be fluctuating, depending on which of the criteria dominates in assigning the token concerned to the type. I shall return to this in Chapter 6 on semantic fields. There is no need to introduce a separate template for the next word in our complex sentence, the preposition ‘to’, since this will be similar to that for ‘over’ (Template 6), except that the ‘ground’ feature (the short line crossing the paradigmatic axis) must be replaced by an ‘end-point’ one. More interesting is how to represent the temporal phrase ‘a moment later’, for it is just that, a phrase and not a single word or a simple combination of atomic word meanings (‘a moment later’ has little to do with the independent meaning of ‘late’). Moreover, it represents the first template so far exemplifying a linguistic unit without any sensory affordances at all. Like other words and phrases to do with time, I assume that it is anchored somewhere in frontal cortex, correlating with the (dorsal) time axis of the outer ‘story/relational’ circuit (which also extends in the posterior direction to the superior parietal lobe according to Burnod, i.e. joins up with his ‘image’ circuit). As will be seen in Chapter 5.2, this also applies to words with much more complex macrofunctional affordances, such as ‘holiday’ (the only non-limbic sensory affordances that this word has are through the various socio-cultural scenarios it evokes). ‘A moment later’ functions as an adverbial ‘satellite’ attachable to a predication at the same level as tense assignment in Dik’s theory (op. cit.: 206). It is presented on Template 14, whose lower (sensory) half has been truncated.


e1 S1_

narrative sequence _S2 e2 : (a little) later e

Adv

e

44

e

[ móum ntléit ]

Template 14

A moment later

Observe the crossing of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes here: on the former there is a short line marking a point a little way forward on the (relative) time line to be established (a further short line crossing it could separately indicate the degree), and on the latter axis two sentences or clauses (S1 and S2) referring respectively to preceding and succeeding events along the time line (e1 and e2) are indicated. The dotted lines joining them up indicate the default temporal relationship between the two clauses that the adverbial expression establishes. The slanting broken lines project this upwards to the macrofunctional ‘story/relational’ circuit, i.e. to the ongoing process of forming a mental model of coherent successive events.45 Note that it is the paradigmatic rather than the syntagmatic axis that aligns with the narrative time line here, as with verbs. The syntagmatic order of words is a matter of the requirements of English lexico-grammar. The expression of e2, i.e. S2, usually follows the adverb, but that is not necessarily the case (thus ‘The parrot flew over the river a moment later’ is quite acceptable). Now the affordances of the component elements ‘(a) moment’ and ‘later’ can also be read off sub-sections of this same template, which is not surprising since the phrase is composite in origin. Thus by removing the syntagmatic axis markings and the higher-level discourse link one is left with the meaning of ‘moment’ (a short distance along the time axis). Since this is a noun it will have different syntagmatic affordances, and of course a separate phonemic input, and thus, presumably, its own (adjacent) word column. It will nevertheless retain the same orientation as verbs and adverbs on the ‘where/how’ route in the same way, I would maintain, as all lexical expressions that have to do essentially with the time dimension. This does not undermine the orthogonal integration of nouns (heads of terms) with verbs (as predicates) since the word will generally not be entering the grammatical integration region of the frontal lobe via the temporal ‘what’ route at all. In fact its principal syntagmatic use is in temporal satellites, where the orientation is already correct for the modification of verbal predicates (and predications containing them). If ‘moment’ is used as the head noun of an argument term (the subject or object of a predication) this will involve the same ‘as if’ strategy which treats abstract nouns in the


45

grammar as if they were physical objects entering via the ‘what’ route. This will be returned to below under 5.2. The preceding discussion underscores the point made earlier that the word classes ‘verb’, ‘noun’, etc., should not be too closely equated with the two distinct ‘routes’. What counts in the present case is that the word refers to events/states extending in time (on the frontal-parietal ‘where/how’ route). As regards ‘later’, this is what is left on Template 14 when one removes the quantity feature ‘a little’ from the syntagmatic axis: any position along the time arrow pointing forward to a relatively later time will correspond to the meaning of the word ‘later’. Here the word retains its adverbial function and the column mediating its affordances will presumably be located nearby. The derivational (comparative adverbial) relationship between this word and the adjective ‘late’ will be more indirect, via a higher-level link such as we saw between ‘frighten’ and ‘frightened’ on Template 8. There are two other classes of words lacking sensory affordances, namely conjunctions like ‘and’ and pronouns like ‘he’, both of which nevertheless require their own word columns in frontal cortex activated by word-form input from Wernicke’s area. The former has been mentioned already under 2.3, and the latter can be represented as on Template 15. For ‘we’, ‘3.sing.masc.’ (shorthand for a male non-speech-act-participant) would be replaced by ‘1.plural’. It could be argued that ‘he’ does have one sensory affordance, namely the feature ‘masculine’, but this is essentially a functional feature with only an indirect link to the biological gender feature ‘male’ − more so in some languages (like French) than in others, but relevant even to English (think of ‘she’ for a ship or – jocularly − a car). Further on I shall treat even the feature ‘male’ as (micro-) functional for nouns like ‘father’ and ‘bull’ (Templates 30 and 31 respectively), although a direct mapping down to visual affordances must be possible there. anaphoric Pro

_NP (poss.-ed)

3.sing.masc _V [hiz]

poss.

[hi:]

Template 15

He and his

Note that the template, despite consisting only of functional affordances, has the same orientation as nouns on the ‘what’ route, as can be seen from the angle of the phonological input. This allows pronouns in general to associate with – or anaphorically replace − referring expressions accessed via the ‘what’ route. The form of ‘he’ in the complex sentence given at the start of this section is actually the possessive one, ‘his’, and this can be represented as shown, in a

46


way similar to that relating ‘flew’ and ‘fly’ on Template 4, though here (because the template is oriented as a noun) with a vertical broken line from the allomorph not directly to the paradigmatic feature itself but to its extension in the direction of the syntagmatic ‘slot’ before a possessed NP (to which it is joined by a dotted line). The object form ‘him’ could be added in a similar way (with another short line crossing the paradigmatic axis joining up with one on the syntagmatic axis following a verb or preposition). The same graphic convention is needed for irregular plurals of nouns, i.e. a linkage of paradigmatic feature ‘plural’ to the syntagmatic slot before a plural verb – the plural allomorph will map up to the extension of the paradigmatic ‘plural’ feature irrespective of whether a verb follows, however. In fact no overt possessed nominal is required after ‘his’ used as a possessive pronoun either. This convention is also useful in connection with general grammar templates in order to indicate agreement phenomena between nominal arguments and verbs (I will deal with this under 12.1). The slanting broken line on Template 15 points up to the anaphoric discourse function on the higher ‘story’ level from the paradigmatic axis since it concerns equally all allomorphs of ‘he’, i.e. also ‘his’ and ‘him’.46

4.2 Production of a complex sentence – and an inference Now we can consider how the whole complex sentence is assembled. First, an overall template for the matrix clause ‘we saw’ plus a transitive ‘object’ slot is summoned by the interdigitation of ‘we’ and the predicate frame of ‘see’. The integration of Template 10 for ‘see’ with a pronominal subject is straightforward – as mentioned above the latter is treated, like all pronouns, as if it were a term coming via the ‘what’ route, although the pronoun itself lacks sensory affordances (a ‘Pro’ is simply treated as a complete NP on the syntagmatic axis). Nor is it problematic that the object is a complement clause representing a whole state of affairs (‘Raoul raise his rifle to his shoulder’) rather than a firstorder entity: this is already allowed for by the syntagmatic affordances of the verb. The object clause itself requires a non-finite form of the verb ‘raise’, however. This is part of the relevant complement clause pattern associated with the grammar of verbs of perception like ‘see’, as triggered by the feature ‘perception’ on Template 10.47 The past-tense form has still to be selected via top-down activation (as with ‘flew’ from ‘fly’ on Template 4). Next, the prepositional phrase ‘to his shoulder’ is assembled − a process that may be parallel or overlapping in real time, like the integration of ‘over the wide river’ in Chapter 3. It will fit the optional syntagmatic slot associated with the ‘path’ feature of the verb ‘raise’ on Template 11. The only remaining issue here concerns the introduction of possessive ‘his’ both before ‘rifle’ and before ‘shoulder’. The anaphoric function (and interpretation) of the pronoun is a


47

matter of higher-level context, not just of the semantics of the pronoun itself. This was indicated by the slanting broken line to the discourse level on Template 15. What it does in effect is to associate the possessor referent to the animate being already introduced as ‘Raoul’ (the discourse topic) on the accreting mental model for the episode being described. One may regard this as the principal instructional function of the pronoun. Note that it is the grammar of English that requires explicit possessor marking here, even though ‘shoulder’ has an inalienable default possessor and the identity of the subject (Raoul) as the possessor of the rifle is inferable from the ‘game hunting’ scenario. The pronoun is one item available as a paradigmatic choice amongst others (including articles) that can function as the ‘determiner’ of an NP. It should be clear by now that the generalized grammatical patterns I refer to contain crossing paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes which must match those of the microfunctional affordances of the individual words integrated with them ‘online’. I shall have more to say as to the nature of generalized ‘grammar templates’ in Chapter 12.1. This first sentence is then added to the one we have already discussed in Chapter 3, here conjoined by ‘and’ plus the additional time satellite ‘a moment later’. Both these elements are assigned by the higher-level ‘story’ circuit, subject to the general principles of textual cohesion embodied there. Even words assigned at such a high functional level have their own phonological form, of course. The link between this frontal level of control/monitoring and the production/recognition of the conjunction ‘and’ can be assumed to go via the fast inner ‘phonological circuit’ linking Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas directly over the arcuate fasciculus, independently of both the ‘what’ and the ‘where/how’ semantic routes. We have already discussed the function of ‘a moment later’ (determined by the relative position of the two clauses/events along the time dimension) − the phrase will be introduced in the correct position in the sentence-level template for ‘framing’ adverbial material of this sort. It should be repeated that the dorsal part of the parietal lobe lies across Burnod’s ‘image’ circuit, the posterior correlate of the frontal ‘story/relational’ circuit: this area may well be involved in defining the (quasi-)spatial framework of the accruing mental model as well as in interpreting the spatial parameters of individual prepositions and adverbials like ‘over’. There remains to consider the status and source of the bridging inference that it is necessary to draw in order to attain full textual coherence between the two conjoined sentences, namely that the cause of the parrot’s fright was Raoul shooting his rifle. Although this is not an immediate matter of lexicon it does concern the way in which lexical information is drawn upon in the creation of such inferences during the processing of ongoing ‘stories’. It is known that the right hemisphere plays an important role in checking ongoing textual coherence, searching in context for conceptual ‘bridges’ when linking information is not explicitly spelled out in words (cf. Joanette et al. 1990: 166), and one would

48


therefore expect that the ‘scenarios’ anchored in the right hemisphere that I have proposed should be involved. Now Burnod envisages call trees on the ‘story/relational’ circuit as constantly striving to answer ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’ questions, their ‘goals’ being attained when answers are established, even if this involves information that is not explicitly expressed verbally. These searches, orthogonal to the syntagmatic ‘time axis’, may cover large areas of frontal cortex and extend into the contralateral hemisphere. In this way call trees can be said to generate inferences (op. cit.: 281–2). There is nothing explicit in the two sentences about Raoul firing his rifle or indicative of a causal link with the parrot’s fright, other than the purely temporal link expressed by ‘a moment later’. Clearly, general knowledge contained in the ‘hunting’ scenario is crucially involved. This bridging inference (an action, not a ‘thing’) is what is required to integrate the contents of the sentences in a coherent manner into the ongoing story that is being constructed. There is no necessary link between the two events at all – we are dealing here with probabilities based on experience, and, as is well known, people tend to take temporal sequence between two sentences describing successive actions in a narrative to imply causal sequence, especially if the second event is of a type implying a cause.48 In fact, the adjective ‘frightened’ in the second sentence does imply a cause (see Template 8), and the preceding sentence is the one most readily at hand to fit that ‘slot’. Indeed it is perfectly coherent in all other respects with the assumption of the causal relation reflected in the hunting scenario. Gricean and/or stylistic principles of brevity and efficiency can be evoked to explain why this is not spelled out more explicitly. The only point that needs to be made here is that it is precisely via that feature or ‘node’ e1 of the verb ‘frighten’ on Template 8 that the content of the second sentence (the second event in the sequence) will be ‘attached’ to the accreting mental model (which already contains the first event). That node is presumably only accessible indirectly from ‘frightened’ via the frame of the verb from which it is derived and to which it is still strongly associated. What is still not known (or supposed) after hearing these two sentences is whether Raoul was actually shooting at the parrot or at something else (which would seem a priori more probable), and in the latter case, whether he actually killed it or not.

5

Further Dimensions of the Model

5.1 Relating event structures The verb ‘shoot’ − the ‘missing link’ in the bridging inference of Chapter 4.2 − can be used to illustrate an aspect of the model to which justice has not yet been done, namely the relationship between two different event structures associated with the same word. shooting to kill’ ag. (X) pat. (Y) intent: X kill Y

action NP1_: ag.

V

V _NP2 : pat telic

cause: e1 NP1_: ag.

[šu:t]

_NP2 : pat. result: e2 (die) [kil]

mot.

vis.

aud. (loud report) spat.

Template 16

mot.

vis.

aud. spat.

Shoot and kill

We can start by extending Template 12 for action verb ‘shoot’ as on Template 16, to include the intended result of killing the ‘patient’ argument. This requires a more general macro-functional scenario of ‘shooting (to kill)’ than that on Template 12 (‘shooting for game’), which it actually includes, just as the sensory affordances of a hyponym are ‘included’ in those of its hypernym. Notice

50


the extra line I have added on the paradigmatic axis of ‘shoot’ specifying that the action is telic (an option on Template 12), replacing the here irrelevant ‘instrument’ feature. This maps onto the element ‘intent’ in the scenario (‘action’ by a human agent can be broken down into the features ‘+ telic’ and ‘+ control’). This element can further be mapped onto the verb ‘kill’. So far so good. The question now is how to relate ‘kill’ to the result of that action, i.e. the death of the ‘patient’. As can be seen, I have adopted the same kind of representation as on Template 8 for causal event features, namely by indicating both the causal and the resulting events on the paradigmatic axis of ‘kill’. Relating the sensory affordances of ‘kill’ directly to those of ‘die’ (e.g. ‘lack of motion’) alone would not be sufficient (though individuals deprived of language could no doubt infer such causal relations from sensory information alone). Causality as such – which can be of varying degrees of directness − is handled at the micro-functional level in terms of paradigmatic features (which may be introduced by higher-level causal derivations). The particular kind of causality will depend on the specific macro-functional ‘scenario’ involved (such as ‘shooting to kill’, ‘accidentally causing to die’ and ‘assassination’, treated below). These may be culturally distinguished and in turn have associations to a variety of both linguistic and non-linguistic (sensory) elements. A secondary short line ‘by physical action’ could be added across the causal event feature ‘cause’: the meaning of ‘kill’ is not just a general ‘CAUSE to die’.49 Both the act and the result are mappable onto sensory affordances as shown. It is the dotted rightangle formed between the caused event and the patient argument that expresses the intended resultative relationship. At this point I should reiterate Burnod’s claim made in Chapter 1.2 about semantically complex verbs of ‘transferral’ (or caused motion) having inherent resultative states that are represented towards the posterior, parietal end of the ‘where/how’ route. In so far as this proves generally to hold up, we can see that my placing of the resultant state (e2) rather than the causal event (e1) to the right along the paradigmatic axis is justified. Note how it maps onto the spatial dimension below: although the two sensory components may be ‘split’ between symmetrical premotor and parietal columns, the functional affordances are probably gathered in one location. The functional ‘time’ arrow should nevertheless be understood as indicating the actual direction along an abstract time axis. To make explicit the relationship between ‘kill’ and ‘dead’, a further template for ‘die’ can be drawn, as on Template 17. The corresponding word column will be activated by the feature addressing it on the paradigmatic axis of ‘kill’, as we have seen, and its own paradigmatic indication of final state activates in turn that of ‘dead’, an adjective which (unlike ‘wide’ in 2.3) is best represented on a ‘where/how’ route template (I shall deal in 5.3 with the question of the copula required). The word in parenthesis can be understood as indicating a close connection between the functional affordances of ‘die’ and


51

of ‘dead’, as shown by the angled broken line. We can now better understand the purport of the word ‘die’ in parenthesis on Template 16 for ‘kill’: the link between the functional affordances of the two words ‘kill’ and ‘die’ could be indicated in the same way as on Template 17, with a broken line. This assumes only that their functional affordances lie close enough in frontal cortex for such short-distance associations to be established. V change of state NP_: anim.

Adj

final state (dead) [dái] NP_ (anim.)

mot.

vis.

state [ded]

aud.

spat.

mot.: immobile vis.

Template 17

aud. spat.

Die and dead

Observe that this does not necessitate introducing a new macro-functional scenario (a specific context) as with Template 16 above, since the relationship is quite general, corresponding to a ‘meaning postulate’ that allows a direct inference from ‘die’ to ‘dead’ (it is not a synchronically transparent ‘derivation’). The parenthesis around ‘anim(ate)’ on the ‘dead’ template indicates of course that the nominal subject must have that (cancellable) inherent feature. The vertical broken lines map down to the word’s sensory affordances − the subject’s lack of movement (manifest perhaps as an inhibition of a call tree along the motion dimension). However, that is not enough to indicate death with certainty − it could be sleep or coma. For that the link to the word column for ‘die’ is essential, indicating that this is the final state pertaining to that verb. There will also be a link to antonym ‘alive’ that could be marked on the adjective’s paradigmatic axis. The vertical broken lines on the ‘die’ template suggests that dying may be conceptualized as a form of movement (from one state to another). Limbic affordances on both templates are also probably relevant, but omitted. Of course ‘shooting’ does not necessarily aim at killing, nor is the result always the death of the patient (that is why the relationship between the two verbs on Template 16 is one of intent, not of actual result). Much of the interpretative process will depend on context, but there are linguistic means available to make such features of events more explicit. How then do we represent

52


‘shooting at’ (but not killing)? The solution is again one of derivation as on Template 8, but this time it involves a higher-level process that changes telic verbs (like ‘shoot’) into non-telic equivalents with a progressive or iterative interpretation by replacing the object NP with a PP headed by ‘at’, as on Template 18, which could also be interpreted as a kind of ‘locative (or path) applicative’ construction.50 D2 V _NP2: pat. NP1: ag.

V

telic (action)

NP1

[šu:t]

mot.

vis.

aud.

non-telic (activity) [šú:tat]

mot.

spat.

Template 18

_NP2

vis.

aud.

spat.

Shoot at

This same kind of schema could be used to depict the relationship between ‘fly’ (as on Template 4) and ‘fly over’, that is as a completive/telic equivalent of the former (a reading that was put aside in Chapter 2.2), although in this case the effect of the derivation is the opposite: it converts an activity to an action or telic ‘accomplishment’. Both constructions are fairly general, and of course not limited to the two verbs here. Like FG ‘predicate formation rules’, such derivational processes take a certain input (verbs with an inherent (non-)telicity) and produce the given outputs. On the template we can label the inter-template arrow ‘D2’, to indicate the higher- level process involved. The process involved in converting ‘fly’ to ‘fly over’ (let us call it ‘D3’) requires of course a PP rather than an NP object (not just the adverb/particle ‘over’) in its output. In its most general form it takes (as far as I am aware) any activity verb of motion and adds any PP indicating path plus endpoint, just as D3 takes a telic action verb and replaces its NP object by a PP to produce the non-telic reading (there are restrictions on the verb type and the preposition involved in this case, however). These ‘input/output’ features could be spelled out in various ways (e.g. as labels on the arrows themselves), but need to be indicated one way or another on the relevant valency-adjusting patterns to ensure matching with general grammar templates in (pre-)frontal cortex. Note that I would not want to treat every different predicate/argument frame adhering to a given verb as a ‘derivation’. The plain transitive verb ‘shoot’ does need at least two such frames


53

directly indicated on its syntagmatic axis, however, namely that with a weapon as ‘instrument’ role treated as object by the grammar (‘shoot a gun’) and assassin (X) motive (e.g. political) method: by surprise victim (Y): public figure

X kill Y

murderer (X) (weapon) illegal act with intent victim (Y)

V

mot.

vis.

_NP2

[ sásineit]

aud.

spat.

Template 19

NP1_ e2: result [m´ :d ]

e

_NP2: pat.

e1: cause NP1_: ag. e2: result (die)

e e

e1: cause

V

mot.

vis.

aud.

spat.

Assassinate and murder

another with an animate being as object (‘shoot the sheriff’). Nor would I want to treat an optional paradigmatic feature (such as ‘intentional’ with the verb ‘drop’) as a matter of derivation. Not only can one verb have several associated event structures, but the same event structure can be shared by several related verbs. Thus the event structure of ‘kill’ (on Template 16) is shared by the two verbs on Template 19, ‘murder’ and ‘assassinate’ (I leave out the sensory affordances).51 These are distinguished from ‘kill’ by more specific macro-functional scenarios. The two scenarios involved overlap as shown (‘assassination’ is a form of ‘murder’). Neither verb can undergo derivation ‘D2’ above, which suggests that those that do, like ‘shoot’, need to be so marked. The elements named inside the scenario circles are loosely positioned (essential elements only). The structural relationship between these elements could be shown, and their mapping onto the respective (micro-)functional affordances of the two respective verbs could be indicated by individual lines in the manner of Blending theory (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 2002).

54


5.2 Nominalizations and abstract nouns Now ‘murder’ is a noun as well as a verb, and ‘assassination’ is a nominalization of ‘assassinate’. How are these to be represented? Clearly two different processes are relevant in English here, both derivational, namely zero ‘conversion’ and nominalization with suffix -(at)ion. Neither is fully productive in English today, and although they can both be represented as the output of a D-rule (or process) schematized like those associated with ‘shoot at’ and ‘fly over’ above, one would also want to treat them as separate lexical items.52 In fact the convention above does both things already. The output of a ‘conversion’ derivation (however restricted in productivity) would transfer all the affordances and relationships on the template for ‘murder’ (the verb) onto a ‘bare’ noun template, i.e. one oriented vis-à-vis the grammar templates of the frontal cortex ‘as if’ it were a ‘thing’ entering along the ‘what’ route, but with unchanged sensory affordances. (The object synthesis dimension is irrelevant, the motor-spatial one shared with the verb is not.) I hypothesize that it is stored in close proximity to the verb, linked to it via the shared ‘e1’ causal event node of the verb’s functional affordances. This would leave the word marked functionally as a noun but containing two unchanged NP arguments, which is just what one wants in order for the grammar templates to produces phrases like ‘Oswald’s murder of John F. Kennedy’. Similar arguments can be made for ‘assassination’ derived from ‘assassinate’. This naturally leads to the question of the representation of abstract nouns in general. How should ‘love’ or ‘liberty’ be schematized in a neurolinguistically plausible manner? These are words with a wide array of associations, both sensory and macro-functional, the latter corresponding to what Jackendoff (2002: 322f.) calls ‘inferential features’. But how much of this is essential for their grammatical functioning? Not much more, it would seem, than with the types of nouns we have already encountered. This is represented, much simplified, on Template 20. As with the nominalizations discussed above (and for similar reasons), a ‘verb’ template is more appropriate for ‘love’ than a ‘noun’ one, although both templates must be marked functionally as nouns (without the functional arrows indicating time-extension). Whether neuroimaging will confirm that such nouns are anchored principally along the ‘where/how’ route rather than the ‘what’ one remains to be seen − the scant data available to date is ambiguous, apparently also implicating the right hemisphere (cf. Démonet et al. 2005: 69). This may be due to the elaborate cultural scenarios/frames associated with such concepts.53 I shall return to this in Chapter 13. Also the template for ‘liberty’ is oriented as for a verb, since the motor-spatial axis (the position of the body in space and its ability to move freely) is more relevant than the object synthesis one as regards its sensory affordances. Strictly speaking, it is the whole syntagma ‘be at liberty’ that determines this (the nature of ‘constructions’ as such will be returned to in Chapter 8).


55

I have indicated by bold lines that the limbic dimension is the principal one for ‘love’, and the spatial one for ‘liberty’ (note the broken line mapping the feature ‘no constraints’ onto the paradigmatic feature ‘state’). I shall not attempt to specify the ‘encyclopedic’ socio-cultural affordances or the mysterious limbic affordances of these nouns.54 I limit myself to indicating their essential (micro-)functional affordances, plus the collocation ‘be at liberty to −’ on the syntagmatic axis of ‘liberty’. The verb ‘love’ is closely associated with the socio-cultural associations…. X (loved one) Y (lover)

socio-cultural associations.... free indiv. or group X

N

N be at _ (to V)

state

_of NP2: stim. (of emot.)

e

(aud.) spat. (no constraints)

vis. limbic

emot. state [l ^v]

[líb ti]

mot.

NP1_s (exp.-er)

mot.

aud.

spat.

vis. limbic

Template 20

Liberty and love

noun, which is the result of a ‘conversion’ derivation from it, and would have the paradigmatic functional arrow restored, emphasizing the transitive or directed nature of the verb’s semantics. It would also have the optional syntagmatic feature of an infinitive clause complement (‘love to V’). ‘Liberty’ on the other hand has no associated verb, but its macro-functional scenario overlaps with that of ‘freedom’. Both stylistic and content differences distinguish the two, but perhaps the most important feature is the added social or political element characterizing ‘freedom’, which contrasts with the more personal nature of ‘liberty’. The features and scenarios involved are complex, however, and culturally very specific, varying even between individual speakers. Let us take just one more example of an associatively rich, abstract word, namely ‘holiday’, as on Template 21, which displays multiple social affordances and arguably ‘where/how’ route orientation. Since the word ‘holiday’ is itself a noun, it will be handled by the grammar ‘as if’ it referred to a ‘thing’ like other abstract nouns, as discussed in relation to Templates 14 and 20. This is in fact the meaning of the N symbol. Note the crossed-out arrows pointing from some


56

of the macro-affordance ‘scenarios’ towards related, contrasting affordances (this convention can also be used for relating antonyms). In effect these complementary regions constitute unitary, homogenous sets of contrasts (e.g. the year divided up into working and non-working days), which in turn refer to an overall calendar of the year. This is largely a matter of social convention – i.e. what ‘counts’ as holiday and what it allows the individual to do during such periods (including not to go to work). The division of weeks (themselves arbitrary periods of seven days) into five working days and two days of ‘weekend’ is of course also a purely social convention. Note the arrows leading further to the key word ‘week’ (also the links to the words ‘work’ and ‘school’ in italics within scenarios). term time

work X days off work

holiday places

summer holidays

week days

X no school

X weekend

week

N V_ (take a_, go on _, etc.)

NP_ (school_, bank_, etc.) time period e

[hól dei]

(mot.) (vis.)

(aud.)

spat.

Template 21

Holiday

The overlapping affordances here are intentionally represented so as to suggest ‘molecules’ of chained scenarios/frames set within still wider contexts. The overall context of use will determine which of these affordances is/are activated, as features of the situation being described map onto more specific features − not here represented − within one sphere or another. Thus a context of ‘school’ will activate most readily the ‘no school’ affordance set. Also specific phrasal collocations marked on the micro-affordances of the word, such as ‘go on holiday’, will map most readily onto one or more of the macro-affordances (in this case ‘holiday places’ and ‘summer holidays’). As with all such scenarios, there may well be numerous further links to episodic ‘tokens’ of the types involved, but such subjective associations are not directly relevant to the normative use of the word ‘holiday’.55


57

The broken line between the paradigmatic feature ‘time period’ and the spatial dimension of the word’s sensory features reflects the general ‘metaphorical’ construal of extension through time as being similar to the spatial extension of objects in space. Recall that the non-extended time expression ‘a moment later’ (Template 14) was represented without any sensory affordances at all, but this too reflects a metaphorical mapping of space to time (one could replace it with ‘a moment after’, where ‘after’ has both spatial and temporal senses). A similar vertical line down to the spatial sensory dimension of that expression could have been added, but this would reflect a purely diachronic source. I assume that ‘holiday’, by contrast, is actually conceived of as directly mappable onto a two-dimensional calendar. Note that this line continues as a slanting broken line to the level of macro-affordances: all of the affordances here are treated similarly as ‘periods in time’ (or periods spent at a place). I could also have added a line for limbic affordances adhering to the word – these are presumably of a diffuse but predominantly pleasurable, relaxed nature. It is instructive to compare the situation in English with that in French, which has several more specific words corresponding to the single word ‘holiday’ in English. Thus congé is leave from work (or from military service), but enters collocations similar to those of the English word: être en/prendre un congé (‘be on/take a holiday’), whereas les vacances refers today to the summer holidays (from work or school − i.e. les grandes vacances), and un jour férié (or, with a specific religious content, fête) is a day officially recognized as free from work. There is also − somewhat outdated today perhaps − jour de sortie, typically a day off, an excursion to the country, and (être en) villégiature, used of a stay in the country or at a resort. What is shared by all these words with the English one is the implication that ‘being on holiday’ − or congé, or vacances, etc. − precludes ‘being at work’. There is both a degree of cultural commonality between England and France here but there are also important differences (e.g. as regards the official status of local saint’s days and the ways specific ‘holy days’ are celebrated). The only significant structural difference is that whereas in English the overall range of affordances associated with ‘holiday’ are narrowed down solely by collocation and context, French already has pre-selected labels for a number of such sub-parts of the range.

5.3 Some loose ends A number of other issues raised and skimmed over earlier remain to be fleshed out. One of these concerns the choice of ‘what’ versus ‘where/how’ routes in connection with the predicative use of adjectives. We have seen that basic attributive adjectives relate to the ‘what’ route; some (such as ‘green’) indicate properties relevant to the ‘object synthesis’ dimension, others (such as ‘wide’) do not. But what of the predicative use of adjectives? This would appear a priori to

58


implicate the verbal ‘where/how’ route. The orientation along one route or the other is at all events important since it determines the orientation essential for the intermeshing of argument terms and predicates in forming predications. A reasonable way to handle this is to accept that adjectives (in English and many other languages) are Janus-like, partaking both of nominal (‘what’ copula support Adj attrib. _N

_Adj (green)

pred. (of S) quality

V_: be

[gri:n]

(aud.)

(spat.) colour (green)

(obj.)

vis.

Template 22

Green

route) and verbal (‘where/how’ route) characteristics. Both diverging routes have their starting point in the parietal association cortex involved in spatial orientation. Adjectives like ‘dead’ on Template 17 are already conveniently anchored to act predicatively – all that need be added is a higher-level ‘derivational’ link which will introduce the copula. On Template 22 I suggest the way adjectives like ‘green’ as well as ‘dead’ can be represented, incorporating the notion of derivational ‘copula support’ (Dik op. cit.: 161ff.) to account for their predicative use. Like the templates for ‘dead’ and ‘wide’, this one lacks the arrow pointing along the object synthesis axis − the property ‘green’ may be involved in object synthesis, e.g. of plant types, but is not itself subject to individuation (except as an abstract nominalization, which involves another kind of derivation). The effect of activating the syntagmatic feature ‘predicative’ (through the top-down context of a clause/sentence S with the adjective as head) is precisely to activate copula support, the function of which is to orientate the adjective plus copula combination ‘as if’ it were a verb coming from the ‘where/how’ route for integration with a nominal subject (hence the additional arrow). This function is required not only for adjectives but for any non-verbal predicate requiring the introduction of a copula. There is one further kind of adjective we need to consider, namely that where there are virtually no sensory affordances at all to help decide whether to use ‘where/how’ as opposed to ‘what’ route templates to capture their semantics. Such an adjective is ‘right’ (the opposite of ‘wrong’, not of ‘left’).56 As can be seen on Template 23 below I have chosen to use a ‘where/how’ route (verblike) template, since the adjective can be said to represent the resultant state


59

of an action or judgement (with moral or epistemic ramifications), analogous to ‘dead’ on Template 17. This is again subject to neuroimaging (dis)confirmation. It is likely at all events that the macro-functional (contextual) aspects of the network concerned are located in the (frontal) right hemisphere. The important thing to notice on the template is the word’s association with an abstract macro-functional ‘frame’ defining the notion of ‘truth’. This ‘frame’ (i.e. static ‘scenario’) overlaps with at least two other frames, that for moral (or

moral rectitude’

truth’

reality’

right vs.wrong Adj

moral/epist. quality

(the) _ NP

[ráit]

Template 23

Right

legal) rectitude, and that for epistemic − or purely logical − reality. Both of these have complex inner content, the former reflecting the moral code of the surrounding society, the latter in terms of the conformity of an aim with a result, including, more specifically, the construed correspondence of a verbal statement (or argument) with reality (i.e. a situation conceptualized as ‘real’), or the fit of one object with some other object or purpose. Both presuppose an element of social validation, of consensus – which is of course presupposed by the learning of all word meanings and by communicative behaviour in general. Observe the association to the word ‘wrong’ as well as ‘right’ within the frame. The link to ‘contradictory’ antonym ‘wrong’ could be indicated at the microfunctional level by a ‘cancelled’ paradigmatic association blocking simultaneous activation of the two words.57 The ‘contrary’ (gradable) antonym link between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, on the other hand, could be indicated by reference to a macro-functional ‘measuring spatial dimensions’ scenario (as suggested in 2.3), to which the relationship is ‘metaphorical’. (This is what the feature ‘gradable’ actually refers to.) The general interpretation of this scenario is that increasing one such paired dimension leads to a commensurate reduction in the other. This relationship could be handled on the model by a derivation, whereas the contradictory relationship is best treated by direct introduction of a ‘negative’ inhibiting feature on the paradigmatic associations linking the

60


words concerned. The epistemic notion of ‘reality’ leads us in another direction, which I shall return to in a moment, but note here that the present template involves a more active ‘scenario’ than that term suggests: it reflects the result of a process of judgement of fit and/or the comparison of alternatives. To ascertain whether the word ‘right’ can be appropriately applied to an entity (as ‘assertion’ ‘assertion’ conditions: …………... factuality: factuality: neutral dubious

V speech act NP_: ag. (human)

V

_that S

[séi]

speech act NP_: ag.

_that S

[kléim]

(mot.)

(vis.)

aud. (mot.)

aud.

(spat.) (vis.)

Template 24

(spat.)

Say and claim

in ‘that is the right one’) presupposes a choice. That choice may be a verbal formulation of a situation, in which case there will be further links to speech acts of ‘saying’ (or ‘stating’), which again suggests the involvement of the right as well as the left hemisphere. The ‘frames’ here are to be understood procedurally, as ‘scenarios’ after all. Now speech acts are themselves best represented on the model as ‘scenarios’, and speech-act verbs take such scenarios as their macro-functional affordances. On Template 24 the most general verb of this kind, ‘say’, and the more specific ‘performative’ verb ‘claim’, are represented in this way. (I ignore the ‘locutionary’ sense of ‘say’ introducing direct speech, and the ‘demand’ sense of ‘claim’ requiring a nominal object.) There is an overlap between the two: the macrofunctional affordances of the more general verb (including the speech act preparatory and sincerity conditions, not here spelled out) are shared by not only ‘claim’, but by many other performative verbs of the assertive type that add more specific features to the basic pattern. Note the difference in the ‘factuality’ feature between the two scenarios: in the case of ‘claim’ the speaker


61

of a sentence containing the performative (not the ‘claimant’ himself) expresses a dubious attitude towards – or at least one of disassociation from − the factuality of what is claimed. This is not the only additional feature of ‘claim’ that distinguishes the two verbs, but it is probably the most important one (there is also an expectation that the claimant has some specific backup or justification for his claim, bolstered no doubt by association with the other sense of ‘claim’ that takes a nominal object). The mediatory columns of both verbs are presumably located in the vicinity of the position of the tongue and lips on the body map (to follow Pulvermüller’s logic). Another matter that needs to be clarified is how subjective and pragmatic adverbials like ‘apparently’, ‘frankly’ (modality and attitudinal ‘satellites’ in FG) and epistemic modal auxiliaries like ‘must’ or ‘may’ are to be represented, and where they are likely to be located, since they belong at a more abstract level than adverbs like ‘swiftly’ in Chapter 2.3 or ‘a moment later’ in 4.1, which can simply be assigned to the ‘where/how’ route, where they are mappable orthogonally to the verbs they modify for manner, etc. First the higher-level adverbials. The logical solution is to associate them directly with the highest level of grammar cortex directly interfacing with the ‘story’ circuit. Such words have both micro-functional and macro-functional discourse affordances, but again no sensory ones, as seen on Template 25. The syntagmatic feature indicates that the adverb typically takes a whole following sentence/clause in its discourse management Adv _S

subj. modal. e

e

[ pár ntli]

Template 25

Apparently

scope, and the paradigmatic one ‘subj. modal.’ indicates subjective (epistemic) modality. At the higher level the expression is slotted into the ongoing discourse sequence (hence the short arrow, orthogonal to the ‘time’ axis of narrative sequence). I shall return to related verb ‘appear’ below. As regards modal auxiliaries, which have been treated in depth by Sweetser (1990), following Talmy’s lead, in terms of Force Dynamics, the present model can be used to illustrate graphically the relationship between the ‘dynamic’, ‘deontic’, and ‘epistemic’ senses of modal verbs, as on Template 26 for ‘must’.58 The central column indicates the ‘dynamic’ sense of physical necessity (prototypically resulting in motion) – it is the only one mappable directly onto sensory


62

affordances (the relevant Force Dynamic ‘schema’). The paradigmatic functional affordance feature ‘necessity’ indicates causality with a diffuse external source (it is the latter that is directly mappable downwards). From this central column two processes derive clear-cut deontic and epistemic senses, by associating the root sense ‘metaphorically’ with the two macro-functional ‘domains’ of, ‘social’ space (source of obligation)

‘mental’ space (source of evidence) epistemic

deontic

Vmod

Vmod necess. (oblig.)

necessity (source)

_V

_V

Vmod necess. (evid.)

_V

[m^st]

mot. (force behind)

(aud.)

spat.

(vis.)

Template 26

Must

respectively, social and mental space, thus specifying the kind of ‘source’ as indicated. (I shall suggest in Chapter 13 that ‘space’ is not quite the right term here.) Neither of these senses has non-present tense forms (‘have to’ is required instead). This information should also be indicated on the paradigmatic axis of the word’s functional affordances (it is a typical modal verb trait ‘inherited’ from the dynamic to the other two senses of the word). Of course the ‘derivations’ here although systematic are not at all productive ‘on line’. In the above we have seen how perceptual (or other) ‘source of evidence’ is relevant to the epistemic reading of ‘must’. Related to this is the perceptual ‘mode’ pertaining to verbal expressions of similarity. Austin (1962) discusses the quite subtle distinctions between collocations like ‘look guilty’, ‘appear guilty’ and ‘seem (to be) guilty’. We need to be able to capture these distinctions on the model. This can be done in the following manner. First, on Template 27 ‘look’ is represented as a matter of perceptual similarity based on purely visual evidence − note the dotted line linking that feature with the nominal argument plus the broken line mapping the latter onto the bolded visual dimension of the word’s sensory affordances. The various syntagmatic constructions into

Further Dimensions of the Model perceptual similarity mode: visual NP1_

V

V _Adj; like NP2/ V-ing/S

_Adj; _like NP2

vis.

(aud.)

(spat.)

Template 27

NP1_ mode: aud. percep. similarity [saund]

[luk]

(mot.)

63

(mot.)

(vis.)

aud.

(spat.)

Look and sound

which the verb enters in its similative sense are indicated: these are of course different from those of the verb used in its basic perceptual sense, which patterns much like ‘see’ on Template 10 but with an additional feature of control/ intention (and potentially marked for durative aspect). For simplicity I do not indicate the experiencer of the similarity perception (expressible by a ‘to X’ phrase). There is one other important sense of ‘look like’ not indicated here, namely that with meteorological NP2s or with sentential complements in the future tense that refer to events that are likely to happen (as in ‘it looks like rain’ and ‘it looks like John is going to come’).59 In the case of ‘it looks like rain’, this meaning is actually predictable from the unification of the qualia of ‘rain’ and the semantics of the verb as given (there will be more on such processes in Chapter 10). The verb ‘look (like)’ is contrasted on Template 27 with ‘sound (like)’, which is much the same though based on the auditory dimension (it also enters into more limited syntagmatic contexts). Note that for graphic convenience I have reversed the position of the paradigmatic features ‘perception’ and ‘similarity’ compared with the template for ‘look’ – for stative verbs of this kind there can be no question of distinguishing initial action and resultant state along the arrow of time. The important thing is that the specific evidential feature cuts across the general feature of similarity in both cases. Both of these verbs can be compared with ‘appear’ and ‘seem’ on Template 28. Austin contrasts these with ‘look (like)’, by suggesting that ‘seem’ appeals to general evidence (not necessarily visual alone), whereas ‘appear’ applies ‘in special circumstances’, i.e. refers to a superficial judgment of ‘appearance’ that may not correspond to ‘reality’. The case of ‘seem’ is easy to handle by simply replacing ‘visual evidence’ with ‘general (including purely inferential) evidence’ and removing the direct mapping to visual affordances. The case of ‘appear’ is more subtle: rather than being based on ‘general’ evidence, it is like ‘look’ in being primarily visual, but that sensory link is nevertheless weak or superficial, since the use of this verb can trigger the implication ‘but is not


similarity mode: general NP_

V _Adj; to VP

similarity mode: visual NP_

V

[ pí ]

[si:m]

(mot.)

(vis.)

(aud.)

(spat.)

Template 28

_Adj; to VP

e e

64

(mot.)

vis.

(aud.)

(spat.)

Seem and appear

really’ – hence the lack of bolding of that dimension. This gives us a further handle on what the bolding of a sensory dimension actually means: it implies a ‘reality check’ (mapping down to it from the functional level) that is obligatory as regards the dimension concerned. It is obligatory in the case of ‘look (like)’ but not ‘appear’. Moreover, ‘appear’ has another more dynamic intransitive sense that does not take a following complement (as in ‘the ghost appeared’). If this is not directly marked on the syntagmatic affordances of the same template (as it probably should not be), at least it is accessible as a homonym via the word’s form.60 This second meaning of ‘appear’ is further associated – via a nominalizing derivation – to the noun ‘appearance’, which in turn has a link via a macro-functional relationship to the contrastive item ‘reality’. All this adds to the likelihood of ‘appear’ rather than ‘look’ being chosen in a given context. I assume that the mediatory columns of all three verbs ‘seem’, ‘appear’ and ‘look (like)’ will be located somewhere in the same general vicinity as ‘see’ (Template 10), but this is again open to (dis)confirmation by neuroimaging investigation. Compare the derived adverb ‘apparently’ on Template 25 above: like ‘appear’ this implies ‘but it is not necessarily the case’, but unlike the verb it is mostly used of hearsay, not of visual evidence. This justifies its representation as a separate template, with only a historical (and formal) relationship to the verb.

Summary of Part 1

All the basic dimensions of the model have now been presented. I first introduced the graphic conventions used for representing nouns, verbs and other major parts of speech in the form of three-dimensional ‘word templates’. These reflect the layered structure and symmetrically organized axes of cortical ‘columns’ (or aggregates thereof), as described by Burnod. Although these templates are meant to suggest the structure and connectivity of the cortex in general terms, it is to be understood that they are abstractions and actually conflate several cortical columns that are connected via long-distance as well as short-distance links into distributed networks or ‘multi-modules’. In particular, the sensory and functional affordances of words – which are carefully distinguished on the model – are taken to be linked through long-distance, partly sub-cortical, links, and not to be situated in immediate proximity one to another. ‘Micro-functional’ affordances of words relevant for grammar are represented on crossing paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. The core of the template represents a mediatory word column (or way station) in association cortex, mediating, that is, between sensory affordances in the more posterior parts of the cortex and micro-functional affordances in specialized areas of the inferior left frontal cortex, where grammatical patterns are stored. The templates contain information on the (minimal) semantic and collocational features distinguishing the individual word from all others: these features correspond to active, synaptically instantiated ‘call trees’ rather than to static labels. ‘Call trees’ have goals which may – in the case of a mediatory word column activated by a phonological word form – be the reconstruction of a corresponding image. An image may in turn be ‘translated’ into the activation of the relevant word form via the mediatory word column. A word column may itself initiate calls ‘upstream’ towards higher-order macro-functional scenarios (mostly contralateral) defining the appropriate context for the word’s use and may activate (through long-distance links, probably via the thalamus) frontal cortex columns that instantiate its grammar-relevant micro-functional affordances (through further call trees into ‘grammar’ cortex). We have seen that there are two major ‘routes’ between posterior and anterior cortex involved in perception, namely the dorsal ‘where/how’ route and the ventral ‘what’ route, and that these have their linguistic counterparts. The model distinguishes templates for words whose sensory affordances are probably anchored along the ‘where/how’ route (mainly verbs and adverbs) and

66


templates for words anchored along the ‘what’ route (mainly nouns and adjectives), and offers a solution to how words anchored along the two diverging routes can mesh together in grammar cortex through the mechanism called by Burnod the ‘combination matrix’. Templates for basic verbs were distinguished from those for basic nouns by having their phonological input (from Wernicke’s area) swivelled through 90 degrees (to reflect the two orthogonal ‘routes’) and by the addition of an arrow along the paradigmatic axis of verbs (reflecting their relationship to a higher, narrative-level time axis). Also their respective sensory affordances were distinguished by the replacement of the ‘object synthesis’ dimension relevant to nouns (as marked by an arrow pointing from less to more ‘individuated’ on all but ‘mass’ nouns) by the dimension of motion through − or position in − space. Related conventions for prepositions, adjectives and adverbs were also illustrated. Conventions were then introduced for representing inflected forms of words on templates and transparent derivational relationships between words, also for indicating the ‘limbic’ or affective dimension of sensory affordances. This was followed by a sketch of how the information gathered in mediatory word columns, as on the example templates presented, could be strung together into a well-formed sentence by production processes in frontal cortex. The transparent meshing of grammar and the micro-functional affordances of individual words is, as argued throughout this book, a major justification for the approach that is advocated. In the Chapters that followed, the array of word types was extended to proper nouns, artefact and body-part nouns (the latter forming a typical ‘meronymy’), transitive verbs (including ones taking clausal complements), and adverbs and pronouns lacking sensory affordances altogether. During the course of this, further conventions were introduced whereby secondary features cross-cutting those along the main affordance axes can be indicated (by short orthogonal feature lines), and mapping relations between different levels of affordance can be shown by broken lines. A further feature-combining convention was introduced using dotted lines to join up related paradigmatic and syntagmatic features at right-angles to each other. It was also illustrated how columns for verbs and suitable noun arguments can be mapped and linked via higher-order macro-functional ‘scenarios’. A discussion of the production of a complex sentence combining some of these new words with the simple sentence already presented demonstrated how lexical implications interlock with sentential inferences that require reference to a broader discourse context. This too is a matter the model can capture. The model was then further expanded by considering cases where the same verb may have different event structures attached to it (characterized in terms of various ‘derivations’), as well as cases where the same event structure may be shared by a number of related verbs. Nominalizations, whereby prototypically

Summary of Part 1

67

‘where/how route’ concepts are treated as ‘what route’ ones, were seen to represent another species of derivation. This led to a discussion of how abstract nouns in general should be treated on the model. Here the macro-functional scenario plays a central role, as illustrated by the example of a particularly complex word involving several alternative ‘scenarios’ (‘holiday’). A number of loose ends, touched upon but not fully elaborated during the introduction of the model, were returned to in order to round off this part of the book. These included the question of adjectives used predicatively as well as attributively (and in general their ‘Janus-like’ status as regards the two ‘routes’ between posterior and anterior cortex); abstract adjectives; the treatment of speech-act verbs; and the treatment of modal and evidential verbs. In Part 2 we shall see how this basic descriptive apparatus can be applied to a number of specific topics currently debated within competing theories of semantics, and to ‘exotic’ data that pose a challenge for all such theories. It will be demonstrated how the present model can cast its own light on a number of these issues.


Part Two

Applications


6

Semantic Fields and Lexical Categories

An important matter mentioned en passant in Chapter 2.1 is the representation of hypernyms on the model, for example of ‘bird’ in relation to ‘parrot’ on Template 1. This has a direct bearing on the compatibility of contemporary prototype approaches to categorization and a feature-based ‘schema’ approach, which is what might seem at first sight to be what has been chosen on the present model. The suggestion made earlier is followed up in Template 29 below. The ‘square’ made by the word’s sensory affordances along the four major dimensions are carried upwards by slanting broken lines, as indicating the abstraction of the natural ‘basic level’ type, here dubbed ‘avian’ (a perceptual category), from the sensory affordances involved. This is the level that is the most easily visualized and that most fully exploits the real-world correlation of attributes, maximalizing the number of attributes shared by members of the category (Rosch 1975: 197ff.).61 Note the bolding of the ‘object synthesis’ dimension. One should envisage the cortical columns as corresponding to specific bird words like ‘parrot’ (= the small ‘p’) falling within the square, since call trees aimed at reconstructing an image that corresponds to such a word will, according to Burnod, start by activating the overall area ‘bird’ then pull back ‘inwards’ towards more specific affordances (as hinted at in connection with the object synthesis feature ‘bird’ on Template 1). However, ‘inwards’ is perhaps best understood as ‘towards the temporal pole’, along the object synthesis dimension, with the more posterior temporal area corresponding to the superordinate category (the ‘square’) containing bidirectional links to sub-categories N animate being e

[b :d] aud.

obj.: avian

spat. p

vis.: wings, etc.

Template 29

Bird

72


(defining hyponyms) in more anterior temporal cortex. This would be consistent with the specificity gradient model of Tyler et al. (2004). Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind the argument from activation spreading evoked in Chapter 1.2, whereby there would be a clear advantage as regards lexical access to be gained by locating word columns close to cortical areas that contain their principal sensory affordances – and thus also those of related words. The template here can be compared directly to the frame semantic representation for the same word in Barsalou (1992: 48), which goes directly from general ‘attributes’ like ‘size’, ‘colour’ and ‘beak’ to specific values in delineating a prototype of the category ‘bird’. This does not seem to allow for the possibility of an individual speaker having several competing ‘bird’ prototypes, depending on context (e.g. the seaside versus inland). Moreover, the only way in which ‘bird’ can be seen to encompass sub-types or species is, implicitly, via co-occurrence links (e.g. one connecting ‘small size’ with ‘straight beak’). This can, however, be spelled out as on his further schema given as Figure 6 below, where clusters of ‘values’ are linked to specific species or ‘subordinates’ (like ‘duck’) via ‘type’ links.62 The only problem with this is that there is no guarantee that these type links (if they have cognitive reality at all) will in fact result in sub-categories emerging in proximity one to another from implicit ‘value nesting’, for while ‘duck’, for instance, requires type links from its own attributes (e.g. ‘colour’) to those of the general attributes of the hypernym via specific values such as ‘white’, general attributes like ‘colour’ and ‘size’ are relevant to distinguishing an open-ended number of different types of living beings and inanimate objects, not just ‘birds’. The relationship of such ‘attributes’ (corresponding to dimensions accessed by call trees on Burnod’s model) to ‘values’ is different from that of types to sub-types. What Barsalou’s model presupposes, in fact, is a set of local attributes relevant just to birds (‘bird size’, ‘bird colour’, ‘beak size’, etc.), which is not incompatible with at least one respectable theory for the distribution of lexical categories, namely the ‘Domain-specific theory’ mentioned under 4.1. That theory remains, however, to be extended convincingly to this degree of specificity of ‘grain’. Note on Template 29 that the higher, non-basic level hypernym ‘animal’ or ‘animate being’ is not simply represented by a still broader ‘square’ enclosing the basic-level semantic field. There is an indirect link, however, since the feature ‘animate being’ (a ‘formal quale’ in Pustejovsky’s parlance) needs to be indicated on the paradigmatic axis of the functional affordances of ‘bird’ to capture its collocation restrictions, and this will match the major paradigmatic functional affordance of the word ‘animal’ (which I take to have its own mediatory column).63 Whereas Jackendoff (1985: 144) gives ‘can fly’ as an instance of a ‘typicality condition’ for the category ‘bird’ (a default feature, an ‘invited inference’ that can be contradicted), ‘animate being’ would in his system be a necessary feature – it is a functional affordance on Template 29, whereas ‘(can) fly’ is a (typical) sensory affordance. Abstract categories like ‘animal’ are in any


73

type

SIZE

type

SIZE

small

as

pe ct aspect COLOR ct pe as

e typ

type

typ e

large

FOWL

ect asp

brown

e

type type

typ

COLOR

type

typ

e

BEAK

white

SIZE

typ

asp

ect

e

COLOR

as pe asp ct ect

WATER FOWL

t

BEAK

large

BEAK

ct

e

typ

pe

small

t type

LOCOMOTION

SIZE

e

typ

COLOR e

typ

NECK

type type

BEAK short long

ty pe

as p asp ect ect

aspect ect asp

LOCOMOTION

DUCK ct

runs

pe

paddles

type

type

e

typ

LOCOMOTION

type type

aspect

aspect

e

typ

as

aspect

as

BIRD

aspec

ype

NECK

Figure 6 Example of using frames to represent subordinates (Barsalou 1992: 52)

case more prone to top-down ‘book’ definitions, the exact interpretation of which may vary according to cultural background, degree of familiarity/expertise, etc. (cf. Taylor 1989: 71f. on ‘expert’ vs. ‘folk’ categories). A book meaning is a variety of what Taylor calls an ‘imposed schema’ (op. cit.: 242). On the present model also functional categories such as ‘furniture’ and the higherorder feature ‘artefact’ that embraces it are imposed ‘from above’ onto the paradigmatic micro-functional axis of individual words such as ‘chair’.64 This top-down nature of such abstract categories is most graphically seen in the game of ‘Twenty Questions’, where the category ‘animal’ initially supplied may be variously sub-divided in ensuing questions, for instance as ‘living being’ vs. ‘animal product’ or ‘human’ vs. ‘non-human’, ‘two-legged’ vs. ‘four-legged’, ‘found on farms’ or not, etc. (cf. Fortescue 1980: 116f.). The questioner’s accreting ‘property lists’ as he or she attempts to narrow down the ‘search set’ for the target object in Twenty Questions may in fact throw some light on the

74


nature of call trees. Of course in the game it is a matter of dynamic – and ephemeral – lists maintained only for the duration of the game in the mnemonic form of individual key words in the language concerned (as recapping suggests), whereas the call trees embodied in cortical columns (or modules) are more long-lasting, automaticized pathways. Nevertheless, they generally combine ‘top-down’ aspects (e.g. from high-level hypernym categories) and ‘bottom-up’ ones (from candidate individual things or persons), much as word columns may combine functional and sensory affordances. The successive combination of properties on Twenty Questions property lists by no means reflects a clear-cut progression from hypernym to hyponym (erratic leaps from one visualizable ‘basic’ category to another through a sequence of ‘collapses’ of the search set is more typical), and there is reason to believe that this may also be so for call trees associated with word columns. Both processes are organized in such a way that in the search for their respective ‘goals’ a broader top-down category is first established then narrowed down successively, but the particular features involved (e.g. tested for) may be idiosyncratic and affected increasingly by bottom-up sensory salience. Trying to guess a game object from increasingly specific features is broadly analogous to trying to access a word column from sensory (and other) input. The maximally efficient top-down strategy of attempting to reduce the search set by about a half is constantly strived for in the game, but there are always alternative sequences of ‘tests’ (depending largely on context) that eventually will lead to the same goal – as perhaps also in the case of call trees. It is possible, then, that Twenty Questions property lists consist of clusters of pointers towards the word columns concerned, accessed via their phonological forms and held in temporary frontal working memory ‘stacks’. Note that I am not claiming that ‘animal’ (or ‘animate being’) cannot be a relevant feature for call trees from particular animal words (e.g. in summoning up a corresponding image), but a single feature is not the same as a visualizable object category along the object synthesis axis. In Twenty Questions, for example, a visualizable category would be ‘human being’ (corresponding to a basic-level term) rather than ‘animal’. One would nevertheless expect that columns for animal words would be situated close together because of the shared features of the early stages of searches for their call-tree goals. A particular class of animals is in fact treated on Template 31 below, but before looking at that we need to consider a structured category involving almost purely functional dimensions, namely that for human kinship terms (not a matter of ‘natural kinds’ but of ‘social kinds’, according to my definition). First, a terminological matter concerning the difference between lexical fields and what I call semantic fields. Lexical fields (for which see also Lyons 1977: 268) are, by definition, formed by individual words in a given language that contrast with others sharing certain (often culturally defined) core features.65 The limits of a word’s ‘basic’ meaning can, as a rule of thumb, be defined as the extent of its contrast with others in the same lexical field (although a


75

single word can belong to multiple lexical fields – as well as refer to overlapping semantic fields). In the present context, a lexical field can be taken to be a purely linguistically determined field, as learnt by verbally accompanied ostension or by book learning, whereas a semantic field is perceptually based and limited to ‘natural kinds’, including natural part/whole meronymies (this differs from Lyons’ definition). Sometimes (but only in restricted areas) do the two coincide. Artefacts (to be treated more fully in Chapter 10) are a special case, involving both prototypical sensory affordances and determinate macrofunctional scenarios that reflect their ‘telic’ purpose. The lexical field of kinship terms is structured along clear binary lines and, unlike natural kinds, does not really display prototype effects, although the meanings of such terms may, like any others, be extended metaphorically or to other less basic, more technical frameworks involving somewhat different top-down definitions or ad hoc blends (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 141ff.). The present approach allows all non-criterial connotations of what fatherhood entails to remain at the macro-functional level, to be drawn upon in specific contexts of use that highlight some particular aspect of fatherhood that is relevant. Essential for the correct grammatical use of the noun (forming the persistent basis for more metaphorical extensions) are the three traits given on the paradigmatic axis of Template 30. The essential relationship ‘parent of’ is not directly mappable onto the sensory affordances − it is only explicit at the functional level. However, the sensory affordances (including the name) of individual fathers – in particular one’s own − may be associated with the word, and that justifies anchoring the mediatory column on the ‘what’ route. The whole lexical field ‘human kin’ (the social kind ‘family’) is defined by the

‘kinship’ parent/child M ¬'¬ F ¬'¬ ¬'¬ N male parent human

_of NP (child)

e

[fá:ð ] aud.

spat.

obj.

vis.

Template 30

Father

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hierarchical and contrasting relations of sanguinity (the small brackets) contained within the macro-functional frame, which can be projected onto all kinship words as well as to a wide array of sensorimotor experiential associations of what a family group looks like and what the relationships between its members typically are. M and F stand for ‘male’ and ‘female’ (the former bolded as criterial here). We have now seen an example of a typical ‘natural kind’ and one of a ‘social kind’, but many words are hybrid in this respect, combining both ‘bottom up’ (sensory) affordances defining the semantic field to which they belong, and ‘top-down’ ones, that locate the word within a lexical field defined by sociocultural macro-affordances. An example is ‘bull’ within the field of cattle, as illustrated on Template 31, which combines recognition of a natural kind (sensory affordances of a particular species of animals) with knowledge about the function (including sexual) of such animals in the overlapping framework of farm animals in general. This can be represented as shown, by combining the two previous types of field relationship in the upper and lower part of the template, referring respectively to farm animals and to large cow-like mammals (let us call the perceptual category ‘bovine’). Prototype effects adhere to the latter (is an aurochs ‘bovine’? is a musk-ox?), but not the former, where a bull contrasts with a cow and a calf in the lexical field of ‘cattle’ (and parallel sets of terms for other domestic animals), in a determinate, definitional manner. The word ‘bovine’ is of course not common in everyday speech − it refers to the assumed natural kind, not the dictionary definition, just as ‘avian’ does on

‘cattle’ M F ¬'¬ offspring

‘farm animals’

N animal mature

male

[bul] aud.

spat. (size, etc.)

obj.: bovine

vis. (shape, etc.) limbic: fear, caution, etc.

Template 31

Bull


77

Template 29. Note that the square forming the semantic field ‘bovine’ links up the outermost sensory features – ones lying further ‘inwards’ specify ‘bull’ in particular. There could, for example, be additional visual affordances for a ring in the nose and, dynamically, of a bull charging and butting with its horns (as seen in pictures or films if not in reality). The superordinate feature ‘animal’ (equivalent of ‘animate being’ on Template 29) is again treated as a functional feature, not as a natural kind itself. Mapping between the different levels of affordances is possible here, e.g. between the functional feature ‘male’ and a certain visual aspect of the creature in question, but the association is not essential to the correct use of the word. Knowledge of the appearance and behaviour of large bovine animals may be distinct from knowledge of animal husbandry if one has not been exposed to the latter socio-cultural frame.66 From the preceding it will, I trust, be clear that the model is indeed compatible with a prototype approach to categorization, but that it adds to such an approach the possibility of distinguishing (and combining) bottom-up and top-down projected categories in a manner relatable to what is known of the representation of lexical categories in the mental lexicon. Top-down categories, unlike ‘natural kinds’, do not necessarily display prototype effects.

7

Compositionality

7.1 Nominal composition We are now ready to take a closer look at the question of compositionality that was adumbrated earlier in relation to compound nominals, and which is still a live issue in semantic theory. Thereafter we shall look at some of the most basic verbs of the language, whose functional affordances can be directly mapped from their sensory ones (‘action schemata’). These form the basis for the building up of more complex verbal meanings, to which they contribute their own simple implicational ‘logic’. They share the property of compositionality among themselves: their ‘atomic’ meanings can be added to and subtracted from each other to form various ‘molecular’ clusters, each associated with a single verb. The relevance of compositionality to a single highly complex verb will be investigated in Chapter 7.3. Let us start with nominal compounding, as illustrated in Template 32 with ‘shoulder strap’ (briefly mentioned in Chapter 4.1). This consists of a modifying/ ‘specifying’ part (‘shoulder’) and a ‘specified’ nominal head indicating the type of object referred to. Note that the meaning of the specifier itself is also typically narrowed down in the combination, although this does not necessitate any special marking on the affordances of the lexical item ‘shoulder’ itself. The actual semantic relation between the two components of such compounds (here one of position) is very vague and notoriously idiosyncratic, as determined by general expressive relevance. This is a straightforward instance of nominal compounding in English, with its regular stress on the first element, as also in ‘bláckbird’ as opposed to ‘black bird’ (with even stress). The prosodic aspect of the process should also be indicated in the full description of the derivational relationship here. The first element can be an adjective or virtually any other part of speech (e.g. ‘hót drink’ as opposed to ‘hot drink’), but the lexicalized compound itself (in so far as it is endocentric) has the nominal status of the final, head element. Other kinds of compounding could also be treated this way, e.g. verbal compounding (as in many East Asiatic languages but not common in English), and at least some forms of incorporation. The bidirectional horizontal arrow indicates the ‘compound head specifying’ rule of nominal compounding (we can call it ‘D4’). The result of this

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79

macro-functional linkage is to highlight which of the multiple macro-affordances of ‘strap’ is most relevant to the present combination, a particular kind of semantic mapping or ‘blending’ according to compatibility and relevance. Simple arrows point to the ‘clothing’ and ‘rifle support’ scenarios, which are the most relevant ones here (the highlighted element ‘shoulder’ is already ‘female attire’

‘hunting’

means for hanging rifle from shoulder

clothing: support from shoulder

‘riding’

means for securing, wrapped around s.th. strap [V]

specifier: N 1 (D4) + specified: N 2 N1

N2 artefact N1_

e

[šóuld ]

flexible object

[strap] (aud.)

obj.

spat.: body (arms) vis.

(aud.)

spat.: long

material: leather, etc. obj.

Template 32

vis.

Shoulder strap

highlighted there). Observe the overlap between the various macro-affordance scenarios of ‘strap’ (they all involve the securing of an object to a larger body), also the arrows pointing off towards still broader ‘scenarios’ or ‘frames’ in which the concept is involved (and towards the verb ‘strap’, which can be taken as having its own ‘where/how route’ column elsewhere).67 Only a few important associations are indicated. There is of course no reason why a word – or phrase − should not be associated with more than one kind of higher-level functional affordance, as here, e.g. one or more ‘flat’ (i.e. local) derivational relationships as well as various hierarchically organized or overlapping contextual scenarios such as those for ‘hunting’, ‘riding’, or ‘soldiers training’ (and even ‘lounging on the beach’ as regards the ‘female attire’ sense). The micro-functional feature ‘flexible object’ is mapped up from the sensory affordances of ‘strap’ (where it represents the conjunction of spatial, visual,

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tactile and other relevant object-synthesis features), and is relevant both to the content of the scenarios above (hence the slanting broken line) and to restrictions on the grammatical compounding process itself. In this way it acts as a kind of bidirectional collocation restriction: it both delimits the nouns by which it can be specified in compounds (their referents must be capable of having a flexible object slung over or around them) and delimits the particular sense of such specifying nouns to those that give the compound interpretability and experiential relevance. Thus it delimits the fuller array of affordances of ‘shoulder’ to the middle, upper surface of the shoulder from which a flexible object can be suspended when one is in an upright position. The compound is treated here as an ad hoc combination or ‘blend’ of two independent elements, although it could also be represented as a unified template with its own affordances, the result of frequent usage (doubtless this would be justified in the present instance). Its own emergent mediatory column would presumably be located in close proximity to the cortical column for head noun ‘strap’, its affordances being a sub-set of those for that word used independently.

7.2 Verbal decomposition Now let us turn to the compositionality of basic ‘action’ verbs – those that most directly reflect ‘image schemas’ relating to the sensorimotor ‘body map’. This involves a different sense of compositionality than with nominal compounds in so far as it does not usually manifest itself formally (by the conjoining of more than one lexical unit), but solely semantically, in relation to other lexical verbs or verb phrases.68 The derivational processes concerned do not change or restrict the meaning of the verb but rather add to it. First, note that basic verbs of motion in English are generally ambivalent as to telicity – if not basically atelic (as ‘activities’) – and need to be converted if they are to represent telic actions by the addition of a satellite (a prepositional phrase) to indicate a goal that is reached. In Functional Grammar this corresponds to a predicate formation rule. On Template 33 it is represented by the arrow labelled ‘add goal’ − let us call it ‘D5’, in line with derivations discussed earlier.69 These two templates are ingredient in a good many other basic verbs semantically ‘derived’ from them by a kind of molecular agglomeration. Thus the distinction between ‘take’ and ‘take to’, as on Template 34, is parallel with Template 33, although ‘take’ (here in its ‘pick up’ sense) is inherently telic, unlike ‘go’. Some languages transparently keep the compound meaning as two conjoined verbs, as in Japanese motte iku ‘take’ (lit. ‘holding go’) vs. motte kuru ‘bring’ (literally ‘holding come’). The result of the derivation of ‘take to’ here (‘add motion + goal’) is not just the addition of a goal – in fact the goal need not be explicit in suitable contexts at all, so the template could simply be

Compositionality

81

D5: add goal V motion

NP_: ag.

motion

V NP_: ag. goal

_PP: (to) loc. [góu]

mot.

(aud.)

[góu(tu)]

mot.

spat.

vis.

Template 33

(aud.)

spat.

vis.

Go and go to

labelled ‘take2’ – but the combination of the entire ‘go to’ and ‘take’ templates, producing an extra layer of event complexity. This can be seen by comparing the two templates: besides adding a goal PP, the process has added motion on the part of the agent (not just of the patient argument taken up), as indicated both on the sensory affordances onto which it directly maps and on the functional affordances of ‘take to’, where an extra, more peripheral line now crosses the paradigmatic axis to indicate the motion of the agent. Note that this now encloses the causal action on the part of the agent, namely taking hold of an object (the patient) and causing it to move from an original position to within the agent’s hand, as already indicated on the plain ‘take’ template. For the ‘hand’ feature compare Template 4 for ‘fly’, where the feature ‘wings’ could have been added to indicate the particular (body) part of the agent involved. D6: add motion + goal V

V action: causal move _NP2: pat.

mot.

vis.

NP1_: ag. motion (ag.) hand causal act. end posit. move (pat.) (in hand) [téik] _PP (to)

NP1_: ag. (in hand) goal [téik(tu)]

(aud.)

spat.

Template 34

mot.

(aud.)

vis.

Take and take to

spat.


82

We see here a general principle: when such ‘derivational’ processes occur, new elements are always added outside of already existing features on the ‘host’ template. These templates are quite complex, as are the actions they refer to, though their ubiquity and importance for everyday human activity may obscure the fact. The meaning–postulate relations linking them justify this complexity (thus if X took Y, Y is in X’s hand, and if X took Y to Z, both X and Y are at Z). They can also be logically ‘decomposed’ in another way, namely into ‘causal action’ plus ‘go to’, as will be seen in Template 37 below for ‘put’. As always with these basic action verbs, analysis according to ‘derivation’ will be paraphrasable using the ingredient words literally (e.g. ‘take and go to’ for ‘take to’). This reflects the basis for the ‘collapsing’ of paradigmatic features described below.70 Consider now the following series of templates, all interrelated with those of ‘go’ and ‘take’ as well as among themselves. The relationship of Template 35 to ‘take’ (Template 34) and of ‘carry’ to ‘go’ (Template 33) as well as to ‘hold’ should be clear (note that the motion added by the derivation is atelic ‘go’). The sensory affordances for ‘position’ verbs like ‘hold’ are presumably located in parietal (spatial) cortex. D7: add motion V _NP2 (obj.)

NP1 : ag. hand/arm parad.: position [hóuld]

mot.

vis.

(aud.)

spat.

Template 35

motion

V NP1 hand/arm

_NP2 [kári]

mot.

vis.

(aud.)

spat.

Hold and carry

Template 36, for ‘get’, is also related to those for ‘go’ and ‘take’. Note that ‘get’ here could be called ‘get2’, close in meaning to ‘fetch’ and ‘bring’, as opposed to a more passive ‘get1’, which combines ‘go to’ with an inanimate ‘thing’ as subject − or ‘theme’ − and a human recipient as end-point. The bolded motion dimension of ‘take’ here again refers to the motion of the theme, not to the motion of the agent causing that motion. ‘Fetch’ (= US English ‘go get’) combines ‘get2’ with ‘go to’ plus the goal specification of ‘towards speaker’ or ‘back to starting point’ – i.e. ‘come’; ‘bring’ is similar but without the initial ‘go to’ element. In the present sense, ‘get’ consists of ‘go to’

Compositionality

83

D7: add motion

V

V action: causal move _NP2 : pat.

mot.

vis.

NP1_: ag.

motion (ag.) causal act. hand move (pat.) posit. _NP2 : (in hand) pat. [téik]

(aud.)

mot.

spat.

Template 36

NP1_: ag. hand posit. (in hand) [get]

(aud.)

vis.

spat.

Get

and ‘take’, but in contrast to ‘take to’ it does not add motion plus goal (encompassing the act of taking an object into one’s hand): the motion is of the agent prior to taking an object into his/her hand and the goal is implicit (and may be the same as the starting point). Though the default patient is a thing, it could be a human being, in which case ‘in the hand’ must be understood as ‘by the hand’ (figuratively or literally). All these basic schemas are subject to extension by analogy/metaphor, to varying degrees of abstraction. What is inherited in figurative extensions is the basic logic, just enough to ensure correct inferences (e.g. as to the position of the referent of NP2 after the action). Some of these elements are also ingredient in the following template for ‘put’.71 The ‘derivation’ involved here, D8, is for the addition of a cause to the telic ‘go to’ movement of an object (the latter template is not repeated here). Compare ‘put’ on Template 37 to ‘take to’ on Template 34 (I have left out the obligatory PP to avoid over-complicating the template). The former could well combine with the latter to indicate its completion in a unified but more complex action. Note also that ‘take’ on Template 34 already has incorporated the event-structure feature ‘causal action’ which conjoins with the ‘hand’ feature to produce the ‘cause by direct handling’ sense, and could itself be the product of the present derivation. It thus differs from ‘put’ only in the final position of the patient argument. In fact ‘put’ presupposes ‘take’ (into hand), so it can be decomposed into ‘take’ (not ‘take to’, which implies movement of the agent) and ‘go to’, conjoined by D8. One further addition can be made to the finalposition feature here, namely the release of the positioned object from the agent’s hand (indicated in parenthesis, as it is not an obligatory part of the meaning).72 Again, it is only the core ‘logic’ that is captured by these derivational/ compositional relations, not the entire meaning potential of the words involved, enriched by context.

84

Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization D8: add cause by handling V go to

NP1 : ag. (by) hand final posit. (free of hand)

action: causal move _NP2 : pat.

[put]

mot.

(aud.)

spat.

vis.

Template 37

Put

Template 37 can be compared with Template 38 for ‘give’ (similarly abbreviated), where the final position of the object moved is joined up by a dotted extension to (the place of) an added recipient. There are numerous more explicit or specialized verbs reflecting this basic template of ‘transferral’, such as ‘donate’, where a macro-function scenario must be added indicating that the ‘recipient’ is a public (especially charitable) or political organization. Note that this template contains the abstract feature ‘recipient’s possession’ (at least as a default), without which it would correspond rather to the verb ‘hand (someone something)’.73 Although this feature is relevant for the grammar (the transferred object can now be referred to as ‘X’s’, where X is the recipient), it is also part and parcel of a macro-functional ‘socio-cultural’ scenario defining what D9: add recipient V put

action: causal move _NP2 : pat. _ to NP3 : recip.

mot.

NP1 : ag. (by) hand final posit. (recip.’s possession) [giv]

(aud.)

vis.

Template 38

spat.

Give

Compositionality

85

‘possession’ actually means in the cultural framework concerned. A link to a macro-functional circle containing that information (which would in turn contain a pointer to the ‘give’ word column) could therefore be added. Now the paradigmatic feature complex ‘cause move patient to recipient’ here can be collapsed to ‘transfer patient to recipient’, with which it is semantically equivalent (cf. the ‘transferral’ feature amongst those listed in Appendix 2). This reflects the general redundancy relationships that may hold between paradigmatic (clusters of) features – and which need to be listed. This is important, since there is an ‘inheritance hierarchy’ holding between such collapsed paradigmatic features and corresponding syntagmatic frames, such that, for instance, all verbs of transferral (not just ‘give’) can be associated with either the neutral frame as given above or the ‘dative shifted’ one ‘NP1: ag. give NP3: recip. NP2: pat.’ (cf. D19 in Appendix 3). This is at present assumed to be redundantly indicated on the syntagmatic frames for each such verb, but an alternative way of looking at it would be to say that the feature ‘transferral’ potentiates the two alternative patterns (as linked predicate frame types in grammar cortex). The one actually activated in production is at all events determined by top-down information-structuring choices. I shall return to this in Chapter 12.1. Finally, on Template 39 I present ‘look for’, a verb requiring a non-realized or ‘virtual’ object (a type of ‘goal’ argument), side by side with related ‘find’ (in the sense ‘look for and find’). The latter combines the meaning of ‘look for’ and (the momentaneous sense of) basic sensory word ‘see’ (as on Template 10) – observe the reference to ‘see’ (perceptual event type e2) on its paradigmatic axis. In the process, the ‘virtual’ goal is replaced by a ‘real’ one, as perceived. This is a different kind of combinatoriality from that analysed above. Nor does it represent a productive kind of derivation as tight-knit as the relationships between the ‘basic’ action verbs we have looked at so far. But the two verbs V activity: e1

NP1_: ag.

virtual _NP2: goal

V activity: e1 _NP2: goal (virtual)

[lúkfo:]

mot.

vis.

(aud.)

mot.

spat. vis.

Template 39

Look for and find

real

NP1_: ag./exp. result.: e 2 (see) [fáind]

(aud.)

spat.

86


are nevertheless mutually interdependent, both via the link between the goal of ‘look for’ and that of ‘find’, as indicated, and via the meaning postulate readable from ‘find’, namely that the object found (in the present sense of the verb) was first looked for (this is what event type e1 indicates).74 Note that the first argument of ‘find’ combines the roles ‘agent’ (from ‘look for’) and ‘experiencer’ (from ‘see’), and that the feature ‘virtual’ that cross-cuts the goal argument on the ‘look for’ template indicates that the entity towards which the activity is directed is ‘in the mind’ only, not yet matched by an external object satisfying the activity (this is reflected in the grammar by choice of article, amongst other things). There is nevertheless a vertical broken arrow to a visual image of the goal in the sensory affordances of the word.75 As Talmy has shown in detail, there are further common types of modification and extensions to basic (sensory) schemas such as those we have been discussing that are reflected in the varying lexicalization patterns of the world’s languages (Talmy 2000: 2, 21–146). Amongst the parameters concerned are: Path (both to or from a deictic reference point or in a general direction); Ground (including both Goal and Source); Aspect (including Bounded or Continuous, Inchoative, Resultative, etc.); Manner (e.g. fast or sloppily or by rolling); Figure (e.g. particular class of object manipulated); Final position (the same or different from at the outset, or lying as opposed to standing, etc.); Instrument (including the specific body parts involved in an action); and Purpose (e.g. in order to do something specific with an object). In the case of ‘find’, for example, there can be varying construals of the schema’s path and ground relations across languages.76 I shall return in Chapter 11 to Talmy’s important distinction between two types of language that organize the distribution of these elements differently, either integrated into individual verb stem meanings or in separate framing ‘satellites’.

7.3 More on causal derivation A little more needs to be said at this point concerning the derivation of extensions of basic meanings through the addition of causal features. This was illustrated above on Templates 34 and 36–38 for motion caused by (intentional) handling, but, as stressed in 5.1, this model does not presuppose a single abstract feature CAUSE attached to all representations of verbs that contain such a relationship. Causality on the model is reflected in specific processes relating events to events (and the event-structure of verbs to those of other verbs and adjectives). I follow Talmy’s (1988: 68) rejection of the treatment of causation as a single semantic feature. Causality is a complex matter and can, for instance, be unintentional as well as intentional, and indirectly as well as directly affecting a patient’s actions or state. Thus compare the relationship between ‘fall’ and ‘drop’ (in the sense of unintentionally dropping an object)

Compositionality

87

D10: add involuntary cause V causal act. motion NP1 _ (theme)

path: down [fo:l]

mot.

vis.

(aud.)

spat.

Template 40

motion _NP1: pat.

mot.

vis.

V NP2 _: invol. ag. path: down [drop]

(aud.)

spat.

Fall and drop

on Template 40. ‘Involuntary cause’ here is virtually the same as ‘involuntary withdrawal of hindrance’ in terms of Talmy’s Force Dynamics, i.e. a situation where an ‘antagonist’ withdraws his opposition to the natural tendency of an ‘agonist’ (say a dish) to move in the direction ordained by gravity. Causality is construed by Talmy as a relationship between two events in which an agonist and antagonist are involved, rather than directly between the actants themselves (compare Template 8).77 So e1 (the cause) and e2 (the result) could perhaps be explicitly added on the paradigmatic axis of the ‘drop’ template, although there are many event types that could cause dropping something. Regardless of how this is represented, the withdrawal of hindrance here is involuntary, and this needs to be indicated on the template (alternatively in terms of a feature ‘– control’), since the template for voluntary dropping would, apart from the switch in this feature, be the same. That feature – shared by one sense of ‘let’ − is indicated here by a semantic role ‘involuntary agent’ (not the same as ‘theme’, which refers to a thing or person undergoing involuntary motion – the FG ‘processed’ role). On Template 41 I present one of the most general everyday verbs of causation in English, the verb ‘make’, first, on the left, as referring to a factive ‘accomplishment’ or what Pustejovsky calls a ‘constitutive causative’ (1995: 103). Note the semantic role feature ‘factive goal’: this indicates an argument referring to an artefact of any kind (corresponding to Pustejovsky’s ‘telic’ qualia type). The verb itself is assigned another kind of qualia by Pustejovsky, namely the ‘agentive’ one of bringing about something (compare op. cit.: 82 for the verb ‘build’), but this falls out directly from the combination of event structure and argument structure on the present model. The relationship between event types e1 ‘activity’ and e2 ‘result’ is by necessity one of ‘bringing about’ when linked to respectively an agentive and a factive goal argument in the manner diagrammed.


88

V e 1: activity _NP 2: factive goal

NP1_: ag. e 2: result [méik]

mot.

vis.

e1: causal activity means (threat) _NP2 : causee _VP

(aud.)

NP1_: ag. e2 : result event [méik]

mot.

spat. vis.

Template 41

V

(aud.)

spat.

Make

Note how the latter are related by dotted lines to respectively the activity event and the result. Now this template only differs significantly from that of the more abstract causative use of ‘make’ on the right (as a verb of Talmy’s ‘caused-agency’ type) in so far as the factive goal NP2 has been replaced by a clausal NP + VP sequence where the NP is the causee (in the object case if pronominal) and the result is an event, not a thing. However, as Talmy (2000: 1, 536) discusses, there is a further nuance adhering to the causal use of ‘make’, namely the implied threat of causing pain of some sort if compliance with the causer’s wishes is not achieved.78 The relationship between the two templates is not one of derivation, note, but is best regarded as one of homonymy, although the two words are obviously historically linked in a motivated way (I shall return to this in 9.1).

7.4 Complex word meaning: a test case for compositionality We now have all the tools necessary to attempt an analysis of a much more complex word, namely ‘conquer’ as in ‘Caesar conquered the Gauls’, where we seem to come up against the limits of compositionality. The definitions given in Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1974 edition) and Collins English Dictionary (1985 edition) are respectively:79 z to gain by force or with an effort: to overcome or vanquish z to overcome (an enemy, army, etc.), to gain possession or control of by force

or war; win This word is mostly used metaphorically today, as in ‘he conquered his fear’ (which will be discussed below), but it is still used ‘literally’ when referring to events of (especially ancient) history, and has many associations both with the

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historical past and with other words in the language to do with armed struggle and competition. It seems to combine component parts corresponding both to other English words and to a number of underlying ‘event’ schemata. How can such things be combined on the model? As a first approximation to dismantling the core meaning of this verb into simpler aggregates we could say that it consists of the following major components (with ingredient meanings put in capital letters): (a) A ATTACKs B (where A and B are political collectives or – metonymically – their representatives, typically their military leaders or the countries they represent), plus (b) A BEATs B In turn, we can decompose ‘attack’ and ‘beat’ in the following manner (somewhat in the manner of Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage – cf. Wierzbicka 1992): (c) ATTACK = A GOes to B, plus A STARTs to FIGHT B (d) BEAT80 = A CAUSEs B to ACKNOWLEDGE DEFEAT Going further, one can attempt to decompose FIGHT and ACKNOWLEDGE DEFEAT in a similar manner. The former might be analysed, for example, as STRIKE REPEATEDLY plus TRY TO HARM/KILL/RENDER DEFENCELESS – but which of these alternatives is definitional? Are they all specific variants of an underlying force dynamic EXERT FORCE AGAINST? And what about GO (to) in (c): should it not be associated with a more specific feature such as WITH UNIFORMITY OF PURPOSE, presupposing that A is an army or the like? And should it not also specify that the motion concerned is rapid and intense? An obvious way to circumvent these difficult questions is to say that FIGHT is a holistic semantic unit, i.e. a ‘primitive’ corresponding to the core meaning of the English word ‘fight’, which can only be further decomposed when a more specific context is given, e.g. for the type of combat involved – between primitive hordes, gladiators, boxers, modern mechanized armies, etc. (this is a sine qua non for imagining the sensory affordances of the word at all). If there is only a ‘family resemblance’ between the various scenarios associated with the word ‘fight’, one can at least say that they all share the sensorimotor (and limbic) ‘feel’ of engaging in or witnessing this kind of activity, although the result intended and the motivation leading to it can vary. But what of the more abstract feature, ACKNOWLEDGE DEFEAT? One could certainly decompose this into something like X RECOGNIZEs Y as WINNER, i.e. X GIVEs IN to Y, which may in turn entail that X PROMISEs to GIVE Y what Y WANTs by ATTACKing X, where X can by default be the leader or representative of group X. This is all essential information in providing the


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entailments that X is bound thereafter to do as Y wants and that X is committed specifically to handing over whatever the object of Y’s attack was − e.g. territory, sovereignty, treaty money, or just the glory of subjugating inferiors (a contextdependent and not a definitional matter). Here we clearly need reference to a macro-functional scenario which will contain those context-dependent traits whereby one can recognize that acknowledgement of defeat has actually taken place. If, as suggested above, we agree to treat FIGHT holistically, then the same ought to apply to BEAT − but in fact BEAT is arguably a part of the definition of FIGHT (referring to the prototypical purpose aimed at in fighting), just as FIGHT is part of the definition of ATTACK and is presupposed by ACKNOWLEDGE DEFEAT, which is itself part of the definition of BEAT. Instead of aggravating this circularity by attempting to push decomposition still further, we should stop and consider how to represent the English word ‘fight’ as a template, and then the word ‘beat’, which presupposes the meaning of ‘fight’ but ‘a fight’ reason for dispute opponents: X

‘defeat’ result of fight: winner (Y) cause loser (X) acknowY ledge defeat purpose: beat (give in) opponent

activity arm(s) NP1_ : ag.

V V _NP2: pat.; _PP (with/against NP2) [fáit]

mot.

action NP1_: ag.

end state (defeat) [bi:t]

aud. mot.

vis.

_NP2: pat.

aud.

spat. vis.

Template 42

spat.

Fight and beat

adds the socio-culturally agreed definition of who wins and who loses a fight (something not relatable to any exclusive set of sensory affordances). Template 42 indicates the relationship between the two verbs (via overlapping macro-affordances). The linkage between the two verb templates makes it clear that the purpose of a ‘fight’ is the ‘defeat’ of one’s opponent. Only a few

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of the syntagmatic possibilities here are indicated. Thus the subject (agent) can be singular, plural or (inherently) reciprocal, and the object (patient, or literal antagonist) is either a person or a higher-order entity (or included in the subject if reciprocal). Only the sense ‘fight against/with (NP)’ is indicated, not ‘fight for’, nor the intransitive, ‘middle voice’ sense of ‘fight’. The linkage also represents the implicit presupposition of ‘beat’, namely a fight. The highlighting of the sensorimotor axis of ‘fight’ is not carried over to the sensory affordances of ‘beat’, since these concrete affordances are less important there (the resultant state more so). The ‘defeat’ scenario linked to ‘beat’ is, on the other hand, necessary to explicate what ‘counts’ as being beaten, and its end history ‘defeat’ result of fight: style: literary winner Y victor exact & cause loser X vanquished acknowledge promise Z (condefeat ditions of surrender)

V action NP1_

_NP2 end state (defeat)

V action NP1_

[bi:t]

vis.

aud.

spat.

Template 43

end state (surrender) [kó k ] e

mot.

_NP2

mot.

vis.

aud.

spat.

Conquer

result can in principle be mapped down to sensory affordances (the beaten antagonist’s being immobilized). Note the general meaning element ‘cause’ within the ‘beat’ scenario: at the level of macro-affordances the particular type of causation involved is determined by the context supplied by the scenario itself. The ‘default’ version of the scenario here can be taken as the outcome of a fight between two boys, but the essential ‘logic’ is extendable to armies clashing, etc., by specifying X and Y accordingly. In fact the template for ‘beat’, including its macro-affordance, the ‘defeat’ scenario, is directly ingredient in that for ‘conquer’, as represented on Template 43. From it we can derive the crucial inferences that one needs to draw from any

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normal usage of the word ‘conquer’. For instance, that Y, having conquered X, can now tell X what to do (and not the reverse), which is entailed by the concept ‘winner’ in the ‘defeat’ scenario (and by the affordances of the explicit phrase ‘give in’). Also the presupposition of ‘fighting’ linked to ‘beat’ (and the aim of beating one’s opponent) is drawn along via its relationship to ‘conquer’. The fact that the subject of ‘fight’ can be singular or plural will also carry forward, through ‘beat’, to ‘conquer’. One testable consequence of this is that words like ‘conquer’ should be more difficult to access (e.g. via priming) than ones like ‘beat’, since it is at one more remove from the imageable sensory affordances shared by both. This is not just a matter of frequency or abstractness but (also) of level of compositionality. Consider more closely now the additional (but overlapping) scenario associated with ‘conquer’ but not ‘beat’. First, it is linked to the wider context of ‘history’, secondly it is indicated as being literary in style, and thirdly it specifies within the historical context the roles of ‘victor’ and ‘vanquished’ (more literary expressions for ‘winner’ and ‘loser’, as in the Chambers definition above), which, like ‘exact’, ‘promise’ and ‘surrender’, ‘point’ towards distinct mediatory columns for these actual words. They are each associated with their own sociocultural macro-functional scenarios and are each paraphrasable to some degree by more basic words. Of course there are many more associations linked to this word, e.g. to concepts like army, kill, maim, drive back, revenge, ideal, territory, gain, sovereignty, border, defences, glory, weapons, armour, war, battle, etc. (both the words themselves and some of the wide array of sensory affordances they evoke). However, the ones represented give the essential ‘skeleton’ of the word’s meaning that is necessary for drawing correct inferences from its use. In fact, the essential relation between ‘beat’ and ‘conquer’ is stylistic, and the thick arrow added here can be understood as a ‘stylistic derivation’.81 All the elements within the ‘conquer’ scenario map onto elements with similar functions within the ‘defeat’ scenario in a manner reminiscent of the general way in which more literal meanings may metaphorically map onto more abstract ones in another target domain according to most cognitively oriented forms of linguistics (including Mental Space theory). For such theories all meaning is schematic, describable in terms of ‘spaces’ or ‘frames’, whereas on the present model, schemata (‘scenarios’), though important, are only involved with certain types of lexical words at a ‘macro-functional’ cognitive level where bridging inferences and blending, amongst other processes, take place. From this perspective, the meanings of words referring to objects and properties, for example, are not ‘spaces’, although they may be typically associated with particular cognitive or physical spaces. One would hardly wish to say that ‘conquer’ is metaphorically related to ‘beat’; it is simply linked to a more specific style and context. Actually, as mentioned earlier, ‘conquer’ is indeed used in an extended, metaphorical sense (as in ‘conquer one’s fear’) − in fact this appears to be its only widespread use today. Also metonymical extensions of the ‘default’

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template are possible, for example by replacing the name of the enemy (in NP2) with the name of the land to which they belong − in fact ‘Gaul’ in ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’ is just that, and ‘Caesar’ here is also in a sense metonymical for ‘the Roman army led by Caesar’. This suggests that the default agent argument of ‘conquer’ as a military leader representing a particular land or nation should be added to the scenario. If we have satisfactorily characterized the core meaning of ‘conquer’, the question still remains as to how it is related to other similar words in English. How are we to determine its exact borders with the meanings of, say, ‘defeat’, ‘win’, ‘subjugate’, ‘overcome’, ‘vanquish’ and indeed ‘beat’ (on Template 38)? We have already examined the core meaning of ‘beat’, but it could be added that although this verb may be used of a single battle it refers more commonly to a one-to-one fight or sporting contest. It is a more general word than ‘defeat’ and does not imply that the loser necessarily acknowledges his defeat in any way. ‘Defeat’, on the other hand, while prototypically involving the outcome of a single battle, does not necessarily refer to a permanently ensuing state as is the case with ‘conquer’ − all resistance has simply been put down for the time being, with no promises or undertakings necessarily exacted. It is also more commonly used in the passive voice (‘be defeated by’), indicative perhaps of the perspective of the vanquished rather than that of the victor. So should any of this be added to templates for ‘beat’ and ‘defeat’? I prefer to say that ‘beat’ is underdetermined on such matters of detail (context will decide its exact interpretation); it is the macro-affordances of ‘defeat’ and ‘conquer’ that must be marked for features distinguishing them from ‘beat’. As for ‘win’, it is intransitive (when not taking a second-order entity object such as ‘the match’), and is equivalent to ‘be the winner’, i.e. it profiles the status of the successful belligerent after the fighting event. ‘Subjugate’ profiles in turn the persisting state in which the winner stands vis-à-vis the loser of the event, which is usually a more socially determined matter than one of purely physical submission and typically involves the submission of a whole population. ‘Vanquish’ is the nearest synonym to ‘conquer’ but again has associations to single armed combat (especially in a medieval context of knights and jousting) that ‘conquer’ does not have. Finally, ‘overcome’ − a decidedly more common verb in modern English than ‘conquer’ − is mainly used of an abstract or intangible object, but in Force Dynamic terms can be taken as referring to an ‘agonist’ winning over an ‘antagonist’ as strong as or stronger than himself. It is the only verb here, apart from ‘conquer’ itself (and near-synonym ‘vanquish’), that can be used metaphorically of overcoming fears and the like, although there are metaphorical uses of ‘defeat’, as in ‘the task defeated me’, which suggest crushed aspirations or attempts to achieve something − perhaps reflecting the common passive use of ‘defeat’ mentioned above. In fact it may well be the case historically that ‘conquer’ inherited the figurative function that ‘overcome’ − a more general and abstract verb − already had, in order to generate a more

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graphic and lively alternative metaphorical figure.82 There are further distinctions between these and still other similar verbs and phrases as regards valency, aktionsart and aspect (e.g. ‘continuous’ vs. ‘inceptive’). In sum, all these verbs share a basic-event-type logic (that of ‘beat’) and are linked via overlapping macro-functions. The more complex (and abstract) ones need to be linked explicitly to more basic ones, while at the same time their additional distinctive features need to be indicated among their own macro-functional affordances. From the present perspective there is no reason, then, why the meanings of words of any degree of complexity should not be comprehended holistically, as functional ‘atoms’ in the lexicon, and at the same time be analysable into simpler meanings associated with more ‘basic’ words in the language, all the way back – not necessarily via metaphor − to the first words learned by children. The latter, however, are themselves too fluid and divergent from later adult usage to be regarded as true ‘primitives’ − only the experiential image schemas with which they are associated can be that, and these are by definition pre-linguistic as well as universal. The method of analysing the meaning of specific English verbs illustrated above differs from the kind of universal compositionality that Wierzbicka advocates by assuming that there are not only intermediate levels of ‘molecular’ meaning between ‘atomic’ items (e.g. basic cognitive schemas such as those treated in Chapter 7.2) and complex word meanings built up from them, but that the ‘atoms’ may themselves be languagespecific (isolated as expressible concepts), and only indirectly linked to cognitive universals. One cannot simply leap from a truly universal ‘atomic’ base to language-specific lexical items defined in terms of the former.83 These intermediate structures − corresponding to the meanings of ‘fight’ and ‘beat’ for example − are only semi-universal: widespread but to some degree culturally specific in so far as when articulated verbally they profile only certain aspects of the overall action or event type concerned. Which particular semi-universal schemas are involved in the accretion of adult lexicon is ultimately a cultural matter, determined by which words are most frequent, formally simplest, and learnt earliest in the speech community concerned. It is these intermediate − and for the individual language holistic − meanings (or, rather, their internal ‘logic’) which may be projected by further metonymical and/or metaphorical extension into more complex and abstract lexical items.84 This is largely compatible with Jackendoff’s brand of limited (non-exhaustive) compositionality, which represents a compromise between the holistic meaning postulate approach to word meaning (as advocated by Fodor and others) and the universal primitive approach of Wierzbicka. Compare also Langacker’s ‘partial compositionality’ (Langacker 2000: 152), and Levinson’s ‘dual level’ theory, which superimposes a ‘molar’ level prone to Whorfian effects above an ‘atomic’ one of conceptual quasi-universals (Levinson 2003: 298f.).

8

Constructions

We have seen how lexical compositionality should be represented on the model, but now we need to look at clausal composition, i.e. phrase- or clause-level items consisting of more than one word. This can be illustrated with one of the many constructions containing the simplex verb ‘have’ in English.This verb has many functions in English, some of them purely grammatical, but these may be ignored here. The basic possessive sense of ‘have’ is illustrated on Template 44, side by side with the noun ‘snooze’, already nominalized from the verb of that form via a Ø-derivational process (‘conversion’), hence the maintained ‘verbal’ orientation and argument (the semantic experiencer or ‘undergoer’) – compare ‘love’ on Template 20. Together they produce the phrase ‘have a snooze’,

V _NP2: poss.-um

NP1_: poss.-or state

brief a_ have(V)_

N

mot.

(vis.)

activity (sleep) [snu:z]

[hav]

(mot.)

NP: exp.

aud.

(aud.) spat. (at/on self)

vis.

spat.

limb. (pleasant)

Template 44

Have a snooze

as discussed by Wierzbicka (1988: 293ff.) along with many variations upon this constructional type. For her the ‘noun’ is actually a verbal infinitive and hence also the syntax is idiosyncratic. Note that the article ‘a’ is supplied by the syntagmatic axis of ‘snooze’, on which also ‘have’ is indicated. In a sense, the adding of the complete template for ‘have’ is superfluous here, since it is ‘called’ by the corresponding lexical feature on that axis of the column for ‘snooze’ (just as ‘be at’ was indicated on the syntagmatic axis for ‘liberty’ on Template 20). But

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the point is that this is a productive construction in English, and the compositional pattern can form the basis for further neologisms. ‘Have’ is almost devoid of sensory affordances, although in its most concrete sense of ‘having about one’s person’ a spatial feature can be added as shown (mappable down from ‘state’). In all of its more socio-culturally determined senses a further macrofunctional scenario determining ‘possession’ is required. The linking of the ‘experiencer’ of ‘snooze’ and the ‘possessor’ of ‘have’ is the essential constructional link here that ensures that the subject is perspectivized in the construction in the way that Wierzbicka describes. The four ingredient semantic elements in the ‘ Y had a V’ construction are (using her primitive-based summaries): (a) for some time, not a long time, X was doing something (V); (b) it could cause something (good) to happen in X that nobody else would know about; (c) X was doing it not because X wanted anything to happen to anything other than himself; and (d) X could do it more than one time (Wierzbicka op. cit.: 349). Element (c) is the one relevant to the subjective, experiential aspect of the construction, while (a) relates to its nondurative sense, (b) to its pleasant aspect, and (d) to the potentially iterative nature of the activity. On the template, (b) is covered by the limbic affordance and (d) by the indefinite article, but also by the paradigmatic combination ‘brief’ plus ‘activity’ (any activity that can be done more or less briefly can also be done more than once). The other complex sensory affordances of ‘snoozing’ (spatio-motor, visual, even auditory) have been left out, although the lexical link to ‘sleep’ can also activate these. Now Wierzbicka’s formula is meant to cover variants like ‘have a bite to eat’, ‘have a bath’, ‘have a drink’, and (transitively) ‘have a look at’ (all acting much like an ‘antipassive’ construction with just one highlighted argument, the experiencer). How is the construction as such to be transferred to other nominalized objects? One way to do this on the model is to isolate the ‘skeleton’ of Template 44 as the starting point for a further ‘predicate formation’ derivation. This can be achieved by simply removing all lexical traits unique to ‘snooze’ and irrelevant to the ‘inheritance’ of the construction, and specifying the N template thus abstracted as being a nominalization (Vnom). This derivational process will presumably be stored redundantly on the syntagmatic axis of ‘have’ as one of its possible contexts of use, as well as on that of ‘snooze’. The construction is thus lexically (and redundantly) ‘distributed’. Observe again my broad use of the term ‘derivation’: the construction is not literally derived from ‘have’ as an extension of its meaning, it is a fully-fledged ‘constructional derivation’, lexical as opposed to morphosyntactic, in which ‘have’ itself is sometimes replaceable (e.g. with ‘take’). In fact it is arguably rather a derivation (or expansion) of the simplex verb ‘snooze’.85 The subtle variation in sub-types discussed by Wierzbicka falls out − as she herself mentions − from the semantics of the particular lexical items involved (other than ‘have’ itself).

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English ‘have’ represents only one kind of ‘schema’ for expressing possession common among the world’s languages, as investigated in detail by Heine (1997). Much of the idiosyncratic behaviour of that verb reflects its source in an original dynamic sense of grasping (Heine’s ‘Action schema’), for example its lack of ‘durativeness’ in the ‘have a –’ construction (cf. disallowed *‘May I have a take of your pen?’), as discussed by Wierzbicka (1988: 348).86 Languages which utilize other possession schemas than this also have parallel constructions with meanings rather far removed from prototypical possession. This can be illustrated with Gaelic, which expresses possession by a copula-plusprepositional phrase construction, as in Tha peann aig Màiri ‘Mary has a pen’ (literally ‘(there) is a pen at Mary’), an example of Heine’s ‘Location schema’. As an example of how the same kind of schema (with varying preposition and copula) can be extended to non-prototypical possession, consider the expression tha an t’acras orm ‘I am hungry’ in Gaelic – literally ‘(the) hunger is on me’, with copula tha ‘be’ and pronominal prepositional expression orm ‘on me’. Celtic languages are replete with such syntagmas, especially when the subject is an experiencer (note also, with a different, ‘assertive’ copula, ‘s aithne dhomh ‘I know’, literally ‘it is known to me’ and ‘s toigh leam ‘I like’, literally ‘it is pleasing with me’). The logical subject (the experiencer) of tha an t’acras is in a syntactically subordinate position (as prepositional object), and the whole construction could be placed on the syntagmatic axis of the nominal template for acras ‘hunger’ rather than on that of auxiliary tha. The verbal construction would be activated whenever the story circuit context required an expression predicating such a bodily state of an experiencer. As a further – and perhaps clearer − example of the status of constructions on the model, consider the ‘inchoative’ construction, ‘become Adj’.87 This can be regarded as the default realization of a more general derivation of change of state (‘Add inchoative to Adj’), which we may call ‘D 12’. But what of the more limited variants where ‘get’, ‘grow’, ‘turn’ and ‘fall’ (usually obligatorily) replace ‘become’? Note that ‘default’ here does not equal ‘most frequent’ − ‘get Adj’ is probably more frequent in the spoken language than ‘become Adj’, usurping the default version, but if a new combination arises it is the default that will be activated (and can always be understood unambiguously). The difference between the variants here is partially a matter of fixed lexicalization (‘grow’, ‘turn’ and ‘fall’, in particular, can only be used with a restricted number of adjectives, like ‘grow tired’, ‘turn green’ or ‘fall ill’), and partly one of semantic nuances. Thus ‘get Adj’ suggests a further feature of direct affectedness of the subject, whether benefactive or adversative, reflecting influence from other uses of ‘get’ (e.g. in the ‘get’ passive construction). There is only a very limited degree of choice between them, and that is usually stylistically determined (‘he got drunk’ vs. ‘he became intoxicated’). The more basic meanings of the verbs concerned often ‘show through’ in this way.

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The variants together form a ‘family’ of related constructions, but it is hardly appropriate to say that they all ‘derive’ from the default, either diachronically or synchronically. Do they still ‘inherit’ the basic structure and meaning of the default, as Construction Grammar suggests (cf. Goldberg 1995: 98ff.)? Since the meaning comes almost entirely from the nominal expression, I prefer to characterize them simply as varying results of the general derivation type, triggered by additional, specified semantic and stylistic features where there is a choice, but otherwise ‘usurped’ by lexicalized collocations marked on the functional affordances of the individual adjectives involved as the result of applying D12 to them. ‘Constructions’ are from this perspective derivations that are in the first instance built up around (an) individual word(s), although in many cases they are generalizable to a more abstract frame involving a sub-type of verb (or other part of speech). In this case they lie on the borderline with fully abstracted syntactic derivations.88 So far we have looked at constructions that are fairly open and productive, but let us look at one that is on the verge of being a fully ‘encapsulated’ (invariable) idiom, namely ‘(it) get to you’ as in its primary exemplar ‘Don’t let it get to you’. This construction has little leeway for extension or variation, but the model should be able to reflect and explain the restricted variation that it does allow. On Template 45 the basis of the expression, the verb plus preposition combination ‘get to’ (in the sense ‘arrive at’), is represented on the left, treated as a transitive verb. This is related historically to ‘get’ on Template 36 in Chapter 7.2, but has a completely different event and argument structure, corresponding more directly to ‘go to’ (Template 33), which is itself ingredient in the more complex ‘get’ on Template 36, but with the addition of a ‘with effort’ manner feature.89 This verb’s predicate frame can be mapped as shown onto the specific idiom ‘Don’t let it get to you’, which brings with it its own speech act, that of giving advice to an addressee not to allow a bad situation (or activity) to have a negative effect on his or her psyche (for tacit reasons that may be further elaborated by the speaker). Note that the template to the right is not marked for part of speech (it is a whole clausal unit that could have been marked as ‘S’); it is also without its own sensory affordances, or, rather, these are contained in the speech act ‘scenario’ associated with it. The sequence indicated on its syntagmatic micro-functional axis constitutes a lexically specified whole under the illocutionary control of the speech act marked on its paradigmatic axis. The ‘don’t let’ part is of course mappable to the predicate frame of the verb ‘let’, whose syntagmatic requirements are also reflected in the construction, but that is not relevant here. What is more important is the correlation of the pronouns ‘it’ and ‘you’ with, respectively, the agent and location (goal) arguments of the predicate frame of ‘get to’. These are involved in the restrictions on possible variation for the idiom. The idiomatic expression is isolated in the sense that it does not form an extended ‘family’ cluster of constructions generatable by

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simply replacing one open class lexeme with another, but there are nevertheless limited variations and extensions possible. What exactly is it that can vary here? Note that the subject of the embedded verb ‘get’, namely ‘it’, limits the ‘agent’ to a higher-order situation or activity, though it could be replaced by animate ‘him/her’ of an individual causing the situation. The core of the construction, ‘(it) get to you’, has a limited flexibility ‘speech acts’ advice to addressee X: X resist negative psych. effect of bad situation Y

V with effort motion NP1_: ag.

_NP2 : loc. goal [géttu]

sp. act: advice NP1_: it let don’t

mot.

vis.

_NP2: you get V to

(aud.)

spat.

Template 45

(Don’t let it) get to (you)

of its own in so far as it can be used in indicative statements (in any tense) without the framing ‘don’t let’ (as in ‘it will get to you (in the end)’, ‘I can see it’s getting to you’, ‘it’s really getting to him’, etc.). The quasi-agent ‘it’ (agentive NP1 on the template) can be replaced in such cases by a full noun phrase such as ‘this lousy weather’, and the ‘goal’ (NP2) is by necessity a person, or rather their psychological state. The fact that the latter can only be referred to by a pronoun, not a full noun phrase (at least in my usage), suggests strongly that this is still a highly restricted construction and is not simply one of the fully generalizable, context-free meanings of the predicate ‘get to’. What is probably the most common variant, however, involves inchoative ‘begin’: ‘it’s beginning to get to her’. This is presumably because the event referred to is a (psychological) state which can be gradually built up towards (note again the feature ‘with effort’ on the basic verb template to the left). In fact the use of ‘get to’ in all these close variants can be regarded as metaphorically projected from its basic motion sense.

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So how does the information on the template above help us delimit the variations that it is possible to play on this construction? The answer lies in the particular kind of scenario to which ‘get to’ is associated: the ‘advice’ context shown on Template 45 is only one possibility and in fact it overlaps with/ contains a more general one, that of ‘a bad situation Y effecting X’s psychological state’, independent of any particular speech act. The type of mapping represented by the broken line between the abstracted higher-level functional affordances of the two templates above can be regarded as a general convention for indicating a metaphorical relationship. If the relevant scenario were of the non-illocutionary type, there would still be restrictions on what arguments can fill the NP1 and NP2 slots mapped from the basic verb – namely those that are also directly mappable from that scenario. The restriction of NP2 to a pronoun follows from the nature of ‘X’ in the scenario: it refers to a pragmatically given topic in the ongoing discourse context. In the ‘advice’ context shown above X is inherently a given topic, a presupposed discourse participant, and could generally be subscripted ‘XDT’ to indicate a discourse topic. What the addition of the speech act specification (as illustrated) does is to further delimit NP2 to the immediate addressee, 2nd person ‘you’ (and of course it also introduces the ‘don’t let’ element). The important thing for the model of the mental lexicon presented here (as opposed to a theory of lexico-grammar), is that constructions be indicated at the right level, e.g. on the syntagmatic axis of the core verb’s functional affordances, which must in turn delimit the paradigmatic features of the nominal expression(s) completing it (cf. Wierzbicka’s (a) to (d) above). This defines a derivation that is specific for that construction, which has both a structure and a content, as required. Only the structure may further be derived or inherited from a higher-order syntactic template, although such inheritance will generally be semantically motivated (at least historically). In the case of the completely ‘encapsulated’ construction, there is no need for a productive derivational relation to be indicated between the predicate frame of the verb ‘get (to)’ and the whole construction (though there is a metaphorical relationship). There is no intermediate level of abstraction between it and the overall syntactic template − what is essential is the association of the whole idiom to a sociocultural scenario (or ‘frame’) within which it gains its full meaning potential. Thus we should expect a strong right-hemisphere component in idioms, as is indeed reported for figurative language in general (cf. Joanette et al. 1990).90 The present idiom nevertheless inherits its general structure from fully productive top-down syntactic templates under a highest node which corresponds to an illocutionary imperative (here specifically the speech act of giving friendly advice). What is ultimately needed is a full taxonomy of derivations for English, both top-down from sentence syntax and bottom-up from specific lexical frames (both must of course mesh): these constitute the essential ‘glue’ that holds the

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lexico-grammatical system together. Typically, top-down derivations are synchronically purely structural (though historically and/or typologically motivated), while bottom-up ones are semantically based and tied to specific lexical items. ‘Constructions’ are the result of conventionalization at their intersection.

9

Polysemy

9.1 Polysemy and context We have already seen instances of words displaying different but related meanings in different contexts, i.e. of polysemy, for example that of ‘over’ in Chapter 2.3. I shall not repeat here Lakoff’s detailed discussion of the semantics of this word in terms of ‘idealized cognitive models’ and their extension by ‘conceptual metaphors’ (Lakoff 1987: 418ff.), but more does need to be said of the various basic meanings adhering to it. Polysemy can be contrasted with clear cases of homonymy (as between the two senses of ‘bank’) through its greater overlap of meaning and contexts of use. Some approaches to semantics have attempted to ‘maximalize homonymy’, others (including those of the majority of cognitive linguists) to ‘maximalize polysemy’ (see Taylor 1989: 99ff. for a discussion). Common to all approaches is the need to implicate context, yet there are many problems with how one should formalize context – if it is even possible (cf. Lyons 1977: 607 ff. for a structuralist viewpoint). The relevance of context (both syntactic and situational) for distinguishing homonyms is obvious, but for many semanticists it would appear to be less so in the case of polysemy, where ‘family resemblance’ chains (Lakoff’s ‘radial categories’) and prototype extension may range widely over context types (Taylor op. cit.: 116ff.). On the present model, contexts have been introduced in the form of macro-functional ‘scenarios’, and also of micro-functional collocations, both of which are involved in distinguishing polysemous senses of words. The problem of ‘unconstrained extension’ is overcome by multiplying context ‘scenarios’ just enough to cover all (and only) conventionalized ‘basic level’ meanings − plus those metaphorical extensions that enter into fixed micro-functional collocations or macrofunctional scenarios independently required as contexts for other words of the language. Further extensions are relegated to more or less productive imaginative processes (‘semantic derivation’ – typically via metaphor or metonymy). These reflect the fundamental human ability to recognize similarity on multiple dimensions and to categorize experience accordingly. Thus the sense ‘foot of a mountain’ should in principle appear associated with the template for ‘foot’ (via the micro-functional collocation with ‘mountain’ and/or a macro-functional

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frame for describing the parts of a mountain or hill). Likewise, ‘foot of the page’ and ‘foot of the bed’ (implicated in macro-functional frames associated with books and beds) should appear, but not ‘foot of the cupboard’ (which is not conventionalized but is interpretable) – nor should ‘foot’, the length, which has non-overlapping affordances (a matter of synchronic homonymy, despite the history of the word and residual subjective associations). In the case of ‘over’, for which Taylor (op. cit.: 110f.) gives 17 distinct ‘basic’ senses based in part on Lakoff’s analysis of the word, I would, on a more complete version of Template 7, associate a number of (dynamic) scenarios and (static) frames to cover the major meaning contexts besides the ‘skeletal’ microfunctional and sensory affordances already indicated there. That this means links to a rather wide array of scenarios need not worry us unduly, given the huge array of contextual situations human beings can distinguish. Taylor discusses this word in terms of a ‘family resemblance chain’ with no clear prototypical or core meaning, but it is important to note that the scenarios/frames I propose will overlap in just the way that ‘family resemblance’ theory suggests. At the same time they will reduce the number of relevant context types considerably (e.g. to those that involve position or motion over a surface, overlapping with those that involve crossing a barrier, and those that involve contact with a surface). There are just three parameters that can vary: the nature of the ‘trajectory’, the nature of the ‘landmark’ (or ‘ground’), and the nature of the movement of the trajectory (if any). Of the 17 example sentences, all except the static sense in ‘The lamp hangs over the table’ involve motion or action of a kind indicated by the verb, and these combinations are usually not in themselves polysemous (‘The plane flew over the city’ and ‘He put his hands over his face’ surely have only one sense each). Taylor (op. cit.: 127f.) regards the static senses as ‘metonymic’ extensions of the motion (path) sense, i.e. from path to any point along the path (especially the end-point), since lines may be construed as a series of points. This suggests that the motion sense is basic. One could just as well argue, however, that the static sense is more ‘basic’ than the path one − just as a series of punctual events may be construed as a single temporally protracted event (op. cit.: 129). This is part and parcel of the much-discussed extension of spatial meanings to include temporal ones. At least the static sense includes the most stable and unvarying element ‘vertical to, not in contact with’, abstracted by Taylor himself (op. cit.: 117). This is the basic meaning – with movement added as the optional feature ‘path’ − that I have indicated on the micro-functional affordances of Template 7. Note that its meaning is defined in contrast to its antonym ‘under’ (i.e. it enters a structuralistic lexical field of relative position), which Taylor (op. cit.: 120) finds problematical with many of the other senses of the word. The only other static sentence among his 17 is ‘He lives over the hill’, which is a case of construing the position of an object in terms of imagined movement towards it (so it can be read: ‘He lives in a place you will reach by going over the hill’ – the

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same meaning as ‘He walked over the hill’). I would claim that this perspective – and its consequences – are contained in a macro-functional scenario of ‘describing a location to somebody’. Of his remaining 16 sentences, ‘Come over here’ can be disregarded (‘over here’ is a lexicalized variant of ‘here’ when motion from a distance is involved), as can ‘He turned over the page’ and ‘He turned over the stone’, since these contain a ‘prepositional’ verb where the meaning of the preposition is incorporated in the verb itself; 5 of them are instances of motion, as in ‘He jumped over the wall’ (distinguished by the trajectory and/or landmark); and 7 are (transitive) instances of ‘caused motion’, like ‘He pushed her over the balcony’ (again distinguished by trajectory – here the thing moved – and landmark). There is much more predictability here than the ‘family resemblance’ analysis brings to light. Where more than one sense is associated with the same verb, as with ‘He walked over the street’ versus ‘He walked over the hill’ and ‘He walked all over the city’, it is the ground (landmark) that determines the difference in interpretation. In this way the 17 contexts can be reduced to just a handful, and the interpretation of the combination of trajectory, landmark and motion type will productively produce the correct meaning in a manner similar to Pustejovsky’s ‘co-composition’, to be treated in Chapter 10. Let me illustrate polysemy and the contexts determining it with a somewhat simpler case, namely the verb ‘climb’, which Taylor (op. cit.: 106ff.) uses to illustrate his family resemblance approach. The question is, how many distinct senses need to be indicated on a complete template for this word? A start is indicated on Template 46, where I have focused on the ‘basic’ meaning of the ‘climb down (tree/ladder)’ path: down

‘climb tree’ climber effort using limbs path: up

‘climb along (limb/narrow surface)’ path: along

V activity limbs

(NP2: tree, etc.) ground path: up

NP1: ag. [kláim]

mot.

(aud.)

spat. vis.

Template 46

Climb

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verb, as in ‘The boy climbed the tree’, which Taylor regards as ‘central’ and (following Fillmore) analyses in terms of the two features ‘ascend’ and ‘clamber’, where the latter indicates ‘a fairly laborious manipulation of the limbs’. The first element is – unlike with pure ‘path’ verb ‘rise’ – defeasible, so that the senses in ‘The boy climbed down the tree and over the wall’ and ‘We climbed along the cliff edge’ are also fairly close to the prototype. I distinguish these senses on the template by overlapping scenarios, all of which represent common enough types of experience – note that they are distinguished from each other by just one crucial feature (to do with type of ‘path’), though there is variability as regards the ‘ground’ (or ‘landmark’). This again reflects Taylor’s ‘family resemblance chain’. A fourth scenario for ‘climbing out of a container’ could also be added to Template 46 to cover the sense of his example sentence ‘He climbed out of his clothes’ (in so far as that really is a common expression).91 Wittgenstein’s cardinal example of family resemblance, recall, involved the various senses of the word ‘game’ (Wittgenstein 1974: 31), a noun rather than a verb. He could equally well have compared the various senses of the verb ‘play’, as in ‘play cards’, ‘play football’, ‘play the flute’, etc., and a similar format as above could be applied to these, though perhaps with more than one ‘basic’ scenario anchored directly to the verb. All can be said to share a common limbic affordance (‘pleasurable utilization of leisure time’?). Note that the syntagma ‘play X (game)’ is itself a mutually unifying feature of the meaning of both the verb and the noun. I do not indicate the various context-dependent aspectual construals of the verb ‘climb’ (like many action/activity verbs this is underdetermined in the lexicon and requires syntagmatic specification), nor am I concerned here with the overtly metaphorical senses of the verb, which, as with ‘over’, I regard as the productive result of the imaginative faculties. In other words, such meanings as in ‘The temperature climbed into the 60s’ and ‘Prices are climbing day by day’ given by Taylor could be produced for the first time (and understood) from the ‘basic’ sense of the verb, irrespective of whether these phrases have become recognizable clichés (if they have, they can be added to the micro-functional affordances of the verb as collocational associations in the normal way). Taylor’s further discussion of this verb draws upon its less central senses, which are not so obviously metaphorical, as in ‘The locomotive climbed the mountain’, ‘The plane climbed to 30,000 feet’. How are these to be accounted for on Template 46? There is simply a substitution of the prototypical human ‘agent’ in such collocations with a less than prototypical one that nevertheless is capable of upward movement and thus fits into the essential paradigmatic event structure of the verb. Though the relevance of the feature ‘limbs’ is lost with this kind of substitution there remains a trace of ‘effort’ as in the prototype (hence the unacceptability of, for example, *‘The plane climbed (down) to 20,000 feet’). Such extensions of sense always appear to be based on the ‘central’ sense of

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‘climb’ (i.e. with upward path). Another reading is forced, however, in Taylor’s starred sentence *‘The snail climbed along the top of the wall’ – here the prepositional phrase forces the horizontal ‘scenario’ and it is the creature’s lack of limbs that renders the sentence unacceptable.92 Whether one regards such substitutions of prototypical arguments as ‘metaphorical’ or not strikes me as just a terminological matter. In all these cases it is the specific macro-functional scenario context that distinguishes the sense intended, just as with homonyms (‘bank1’ vs. ‘bank2’). The difference is that the macro-functional contexts overlap here, thus giving the impression of ‘family resemblance’, whether or not the range of meanings is organized around a central ‘prototype’ scenario. Polysemy requires overlapping sensory and/or macro-functional affordances, in each of which the word still plays an analogous central role (the word ‘climb’, for example, refers to the core activity in all the associated scenarios, whatever the nuance of meaning involved). Different micro-functional collocations alone (i.e. syntagmatic contexts) cannot distinguish it from homonymy, hence the difficulties that may arise when higher-level contexts are not taken into account. A useful way of looking at this is in terms of the various discrete ‘eigenstates’ in which a word column can be activated. The mediatory column of a polysemous word (or the network it ‘pilots’) is tuned, I would suggest, so as to be potentially activated in several different equilibrium states, depending on input conditions. The decisive input will be from the distinct (but overlapping) scenarios involved.

9.2 An excursion into metaphor and metonymy In a number of ways the present model is compatible with recent approaches to cognitive linguistics and shares with them such key concepts as ‘scenario/ schema’ and ‘prototype’. Metaphor, as we have seen above, is central to such approaches. The notions of ‘similarity’ and ‘analogy’ lying behind that of metaphor also play an important role in the present model, but in a somewhat more concrete fashion than in the abstract schemas of cognitive linguists. In a sense this is a dimension that is limited to the sensory affordances of individual words and to the macro-functional scenarios to which they are associated, not to their (grammatical) micro-functional affordances. Sensory affordances are, by the very nature of the call trees forming them, organized along ‘prototype’ lines, with a given word being ‘more or less’ appropriate for describing a given entity or event, and macro-functional scenarios are, as we have seen, open-ended as regards the degree of detail of their associations – only a limited number of crucial elements are mapped onto the micro-functional affordances of individual words expressing elements within them. Moreover, scenarios (or ‘schemata’) overlap and may contain others in much the same way as semantic fields formed around sensory affordances may overlap or form hierarchies.

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Both Langacker and Lakoff discuss in various contexts the hierarchical organization of schemata. Langacker does this in terms of successive ‘domains’, the most abstract and general being of a culturally defined nature (cf. Langacker 2000: 2ff., where it is claimed that individual lexical words ‘rank’ the various domains to which they are relevant). Talmy (2000: 1, 42ff.) posits the two basic domains of Space and Time, but also speaks of such domains as those of colour, kinship and discourse, and Lakoff (1987) distinguishes ‘generic level’ metaphors from more culturally determined ‘specific level’ ones. But none of these approaches gets us close to an actual taxonomy of the specific scenarios/ frames/domains relevant even to a single language. Much remains to be done in this respect. This is hardly surprising, given the known – but complex − involvement of the less linguistically organized right hemisphere in the interpretation of metaphor (cf. Démonet et al. 2005: 72).93 Arbib et al. (1988: 343ff.) talk of the ‘hundreds of thousands of schemas enriched by language’ that any speaker has at his or her disposal in their permanently accreting and changing ‘personal encyclopedia’. That these might nevertheless be more systematized than we suspect is a possibility I shall return to in Chapter 13. Rather than claiming that metaphoric projections from more basic image schemata underpin our everyday construal of the world, I would say from the present perspective that while a large part of the lexicon of any language reflects metaphorical origins (an open-ended, analogy-based kind of ‘derivation’), once such extensions are established, ontogenetically and/or historically, online relevance for comprehension and production ceases. Thus the fact that the usual Arabic expression for ‘find’, ʕathara ʕala-, means literally ‘trip over’, does not imply that the literal scenario of tripping over something is evoked by the everyday use of that expression, any more than the expression ʔas,bah-a ‘become’ (as in ʔas,bah-ta ʕa-liman ‘you have become learned’) should evoke its origin in the meaning ‘do something in the morning’. Language is typically deployed in an automated, rapid manner, in part dissociated from the semantics of its sensory origins, in such a way that whole narratives and abstract arguments can be carried out at high speed along ‘worn tracks’ without interference from the slowly activated sensory affordances of individual words.94 This represents the ‘as if’ mode of normal mental functioning, upon which the ad hoc results of creative ‘blending’ are occasionally superimposed. Perhaps the only obvious point at which ‘similarity’ plays a crucial role on the syntagmatic axis of the micro-functional level of words and corresponding ‘grammar’ templates is in the mutual relationships between construction types: constructions may overlap and/or resemble other constructions (for example, the ‘in NP’ and ‘for NP’ temporal expression types are both ‘like’ constructions expressing spatial or benefactive satellite types). This may lead to interaction (or interference) between similar constructions, but it is a highly constrained kind of similarity, with only a finite number of contrasting ‘emic’ (grammatically relevant) choices existing between patterns similar or otherwise. The ‘prototypical’

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nature of grammatical categories like ‘subject’ should also be mentioned. In English this allows for the treatment of less than typical candidates for subjecthood, like inanimate things, as subjects of verbs otherwise requiring ‘control’ on the part of their subjects, like ‘fly’. This indirectly reflects the prototypical nature of the sensory affordances of the verb itself, e.g. the ‘default’ (but extendable) association of the activity of flying with birds.95 A more general kind of ‘similarity’ lies, however, behind all paradigmatic choices (cf. Deacon 1997: 305). A paradigmatic feature on a word template’s micro-affordances is (by definition) ‘similar’ – if not identical − to all other instances of that feature on other templates, but also different features aligned along the same paradigmatic axis may be ‘similar’, by being subsumed one by the other (e.g. ‘weapon’ by ‘artefact’). What is common here is the process of comparison that the word ‘similarity’ presupposes, namely the registration of paradigmatic compatibility between two entity or event types, which allows an ongoing goal – say of lexical access − to be attained without having to search for an alternative, better fit. Something similar can be said regarding the relevance of metonymy to the different kinds of lexical affordances on the model. Here the concern is with relations of temporal, spatial and causal proximity. Metonymy is also involved in some of Pustejovsky’s qualia, in particular the telic qualia of words like ‘newspaper’, which allows for the interpretation of sentences like ‘the newspaper angered him’ (Pustejovsky op. cit.: 211). The ‘agent’ argument of the verb can be an event, and there is a suitable event type associated with the telic quale of ‘newspaper’, namely the purpose of such an item being that people should read it (to gain information). This is an instance of what he calls ‘qualia coercion’. On the present model it would be contained within a macro-functional scenario associated with the word ‘newspaper’. Macro-functional scenarios contain a wide range of metonymic associations, both internally (as between ‘kill’ and ‘die’) and externally, to other scenarios (as between ‘shoot’ and ‘(to) kill’). As regards sensory affordances, there may be associations of this kind involving any dimension along which call trees are deployed (e.g. between a bird’s taking off and a warning cry uttered by it). On the micro-functional, grammatical level, metonymy also has relevance. Along the syntagmatic axis, it is a matter of one ‘slot’ in a template activating other potential ‘slots’ in a particular default linear order (as in the predicate frames of verbs). On the paradigmatic axis of templates there are metonymic part-whole and cause-result relationships, as well as the hierarchical relationships of successive category features. Some cognitivists (such as Taylor) see the roots of metaphor in metonymy, with the latter representing the more basic dimension from which metaphors are extended (cf. Taylor op. cit.: 139). For an analysis of verbs of mental activity as a metonymically organized domain in which individual language-specific metaphors are ‘embedded’ see Fortescue (2001a). Here the English verb ‘think’

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is treated as polysemous, being broken down into three basic senses, ‘thinking = believing’, ‘thinking = considering/judging’, and ‘thinking = general mental activity’. This can nevertheless be represented on a single template, following the principles discussed in the previous Chapter, since the three separate senses have overlapping (metonymically interrelated) macro-functional contexts. Related to each of these are specific syntagmatic constructions and restrictions that can all be represented on the common micro-functional plane. All verbs of ‘mental activity’ are assumed on the model to be anchored (i.e. to have their mediatory columns) in frontal cortex, like other verbs, though with a notable contralateral component. This would combine a ‘metaphorical’ view of verbs of mental activity (i.e. one that is ‘parasitic’ on concrete sensorimotor actions of holding or manipulating) with one relating them to a right hemisphere ‘context’ of mental activity − mediated perhaps through the temporal pole, which in turn has strong limbic connections. I suspect that such a limbic component may include the mid-line cingulate cortex, which is involved in the representation of the ‘proto-self’ according to Damasio (2000: 192f.). This can be understood as a holistic ‘feel’ of conformity/continuity of present with past experience. Now languages often exploit transparent metaphors based on more ‘publicly accessible’ sensory and physical activities to express such purely internal mental meanings, though this is by no means universal. Take the English verb ‘understand’, as on Template 47, where ‘Y’ indicates the source of the meaning, reason or intention understood. Historically this is indeed a matter of metaphor (‘stand before and inspect’), though few speakers would recognize this today. There is in fact a deeper metonymic relation, as with all mental verbs of cogitation, namely that between cause and effect, the effect being at least potentially transparent in overt behaviour (think of the nod signalling that one understands what is being said). There is also a metonymic link to ‘know’, as indicated. This can be expressed as a ‘meaning postulate’: if you understand something, you know its meaning (the intention behind it).96 In the case of ‘understand’ one is tempted to further map the functional affordances down to sensorimotor affordances on the basis of metaphor, but the question is: which ones? Some languages construe understanding as being like standing close to something (as English originally), others as like grasping something (Russian ponjat’, French comprendre), while others construe it as being like seeing something (as in English ‘I see that’, French je vois) or hearing something (Italian intendere), etc., variously based on one sensorimotor dimension or another. These are hardly living metaphors today. Similar remarks can be made concerning expressions of ‘knowing’ (and indeed of ‘remembering’). The spatial (parietal) dimension is presumably more important in the case of ‘know’ and the frontal ‘motion’ one in ‘understand’ (for the prevalence of mirror neurons in premotor cortex see Appendix 1). In both cases I would suggest that the


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‘word meaning’ understand

‘intentions’

‘contents of think mental know memory’ activity

V

NP1: exp.-er

NP2: Y meaning, intention, etc.

mot.

mental state final state: know NP2: fact, (meaning, etc. of Y) person, etc. [^nd stánd] e

V mental act

aud.

spat.

vis. limbic

Template 47

mot.

NP1 : exp.-er [nóu]

aud.

spat.

vis. limbic

Understand and know

limbic affordances concerned (cf. the ‘feel’ of conformity of present with past experience mentioned above) are crucial to their distinctive meaning, not metaphorical projection alone. Another non-metaphorical approach to words of mental activity is that of Dik (1989: 98f.), who marks one of the arguments of the predicate frames of such verbs with the semantic feature ‘experiencer’ (someone who perceives, feels, wants, conceives or otherwise experiences something), superimposed on or combined with a more basic (physical) semantic role. Such predicate frames correspond to experiential states of affairs. Thus ‘believe’ is an experiential Position SoA (minus dynamic, plus controlled), whereas ‘know’ is an experiential State (minus dynamic, minus controlled). This is suggestive of the findings of Perani et al. (1999), mentioned in Chapter 1.2, to the effect that ‘psychological’ verbs like these are distributed in (roughly) the same areas as corresponding non-psychological verbs. Perhaps subtle differences in limbic affordances are what make the difference.

10

Some Further Questions of qualia

I suggested in Chapter 1.2 that the aspect of Pustejovsky’s theory of qualia that is most relevant to the present approach is that of the ‘telic’ and ‘agentive’ qualia of nouns. Key examples that Pustejovsky uses to illustrate how these can account for differences in interpretation of contextualized instances of use are ‘John baked the cake’ vs. ‘John baked the potato’ (Pustejovsky 1995: 122) and ‘John opened the door’ vs. ‘John walked through the door’ (op. cit.: 223). In the following I shall show how such matters are accounted for on the present model with the analytic apparatus already introduced. I shall then briefly touch on the various senses of verbs like ‘begin’ when taking object nouns of varying qualia structure. Pustejovsky treats all of these examples under the heading of ‘co-composition’, involving an operation he calls ‘qualia unification’ which reflects aspects of the qualia structure of both constituents in a construction.97 I present the first two ‘co-compositions’ on Template 48, with ‘constitutive causative’ verb ‘bake’ and object noun ‘cake’ (I leave out of consideration the article, a referential matter not relevant here).98 The template represents the result of the combination, which has the status of a semi-lexicalized collocation (‘semi-lexicalized’ in the sense that it is a frequent, conventionalized phrase but the meaning is perfectly predictable from its components, given the qualia of the object concerned). The link between the two components can be taken to be permanent, with an associative ‘pointer’ to ‘bake’ from ‘cake’ and vice versa. The essential thing here is that the qualia of ‘cake’ should include the ‘agentive’ feature that such an object comes about by being baked (also the ‘telic’ feature that its purpose is to be eaten − both events of a certain type). This contrasts with the case of ‘bake a potato’, where there is no such agentive feature adhering to the noun (a potato is not a man-made thing, just an affected ‘patient’). As with ‘make’ (Template 41), the verb has two components, an agentive activity and a resultant state (together representing an ‘accomplishment’). The factive result corresponding to ‘goal’ NP2 could again be mapped via a vertical broken line onto its visual affordances as before (all affordances of ‘cake’ can in any case be accessed via the word itself, ‘pointed towards’ from the functional affordances of ‘bake’).


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‘eating cake occasion’ (dessert, tea, party, etc.)

‘baking a cake’ ingredients mix put in oven remove

N food

V e1 : activity

NP1_: ag.

mot.

_NP2 : factive goal V_ (cake); pat. (potato, etc.) (bake) [kéik] e : result.state

prepared

2

[béik]

(aud.)

(aud.)

obj.

spat.

vis.

limbic: taste (sweet) vis.

spat.

Template 48

Bake (a) cake

Note that two ‘scenarios’ are called for here: one for baking a cake (which consists of different steps from those involved in, for example, baking a potato), and one for the occasion of eating cake (the social frame within which such food is typically consumed). This latter information is not covered by Pustejovsky’s qualia, but is, I would claim, a pertinent part of the meaning of the word since it must be invoked to decide on some borderline cases at least, i.e. whether a specific kind of food can suitably be called a ‘cake’ (what of savoury rice ‘cakes’ and the like?). It is the feature ‘factive goal’ that corresponds to Pustejovsky’s ‘agentive’ quale ‘bake act’, which he indicates both on ‘bake’ and on ‘cake’ (and ‘food’ on ‘cake’ corresponds to his telic quale of being intended for consumption). I prefer to indicate ‘cake’ on ‘bake’ as well as vice versa, which achieves the same effect and avoids having to talk about verb qualia at all (I shall return to this below). In the case of ‘potato’, the feature ‘factive goal’ would be replaced by the ordinary ‘pat(ient)’ marker on the second NP argument. I agree with Pustejovsky that it is not a matter of two different meanings of ‘bake’ here (at least the activity e1 and the resultant state e2 are in essence the same in both cases), but of two different interpretations of the verb emerging from the composition process (‘co-specification’). However, I nevertheless mark both kinds of object (the factive and non-factive type) on the template for ‘bake’ since the choice of filler

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for NP2 is open-ended, depending on the nature of the ‘co-specifying’ argument. The template thus indicates in principle the full compositional potential of the verb. The two templates are bound together by two kinds of links: a lexical one connecting the qualia of ‘cake’ with the ‘factive goal’ argument of ‘bake’, and a contextual one via the shared scenario of ‘baking a cake’. Actually, from the perspective of the ‘bake’ template, the first of these would serve also for ‘potato’ or any other kind of food prepared for consumption by baking (both types of ‘object’ argument are marked there) – it is the scenario that is specific for ‘cake’. I leave out, as usual, the many other sensory affordances of ‘cake’ that could be added, such as (typical) consistency, specific shapes, icing, layers, decorations and macro-affordances for specific ingredients and special events/ purposes (e.g. for weddings or birthdays), relevant to the prototypicality of tokens but not to their semantic interpretation and grammatical functioning. On Template 49 is illustrated the contextual interpretation of a noun which is both a ‘physical object’ (my ‘obj.’) and a (functional) ‘aperture’, namely ‘door’, which constitutes a ‘dot object’, to use Pustejovsky’s term for such a conjunction of features.99 The ‘telic’ quale ‘walk through’ is introduced by Pustejovsky to ensure the correct interpretation of a sentence like ‘he walked through the door’. This combined with the word’s ‘dot object’ characterization as a ‘physobj.aperture’ is enough to ensure the correct interpretation of the sentence ‘He opened the door’. The same information is contained on the template below – going through a door is enabled as a result of the action of opening it. I ignore again the (variable) article contained in the construction. 'go through door' grasp handle open door go through aperture

V e1: action

_NP2 : pat. (obj.) closed state e 2 : open state

obj.: artefact

N

NP1_: ag. e

[óup n]

V_: open

V_: go through aperture

[do:] (aud.) mot.

vis.

aud.

spat.

Template 49

material (wood) obj. synth.

Open the door

spat.: in house wall (hinged) vis. (shape)

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The situation is somewhat simpler here than with ‘bake a cake’, since just one kind of link between the two templates would appear to be sufficient – that via the scenario for ‘going through door’ (which contains ‘opening door’, as bolded). It is not a matter of two different types of ‘patient’ argument affecting the interpretation of the verb, but of two different aspects of the same argument, interrelated as specified in the scenario. The semi-colon between the two features along the syntagmatic axis of ‘bake’ indicates an either/or relation, while the two elements of the ‘dot object’ ‘door’ – ‘obj.’ and ‘aperture’ – occur on the same paradigmatic axis and are therefore in a both/and relationship. The ‘telic’ quale (Pustejovsky’s ‘walk through door’) adheres to ‘door’ by virtue of the information in the associated ‘going through door’ scenario. The fact that the action associated with opening a door is different from that associated with, say, opening a book, is irrelevant to the ‘open’ template itself. All more or less literal uses of ‘open’ involve essentially the bringing about of a state of some object being in an ‘opened’ state, i.e. a particular position relevant for the functioning of the kind of object involved (and its own telic qualia). Thus the interpretation of ‘open’ in conjunction with ‘letter’ would involve a three-fold action of slitting open the sealed edge, removing the letter and unfolding it along its folds, and all information contained in the related scenario of ‘reading a letter’. Also contained within that scenario would be the telic quale adhering to a ‘letter’, namely that of reading information contained in it. The highly frequent association with the word ‘read’ could be indicated on its syntagmatic functional axis, just as ‘open’ is on that for ‘door’ on Template 49. The activation of the ‘door’ template via the combination ‘open (the) door’ automatically allows the inferred possibility of a consequent ‘go through door’ action, since both are contained within the same scenario. I have omitted from the ‘door’ template the different states a door can be in (open, closed, ajar, etc.), but these too could be added both to the sensory (visual and spatial) affordances and to the further syntagmatic functional affordances, in the form of potential combinations with adjectives ‘open’, ‘closed’, etc. Observe the spatial affordance feature ‘in wall of house’. Both ‘door’ and ‘house’ refer to artefacts, but they are associated through a relationship of meronymy: a door is part of a house (or other building). Unlike the meronymy for ‘shoulder’ illustrated in Chapter 4.1 (and more like ‘rifle’), ‘house’ has clearly demarcated sets of sensory and functional affordances (at least within cultural bounds). Houses as objects could in principle be recognized by their sensory affordances alone, even by people/beings who have no idea what their function is, but that would not be complete recognition. The question here is how the relationship between ‘door’ and ‘house’ is to be represented on the model. As with other ‘man-made’ meronymies, that constituted by ‘house’ (its ‘constitutive’ qualia) can be assigned to the spatial-object synthesis axis on the ‘what’ route (compare Template 12 for ‘rifle’), since its parts (‘roof’, ‘door’,

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‘window’, etc.) all have clear sensory affordances of the ‘object’ type, but it also requires a macro-functional ‘scenario’ or ‘frame’ representing the function of the whole (roughly ‘for dwelling in’), and through this also – redundantly − the specific functions of its typical parts, including its individual rooms and the parts common to most rooms. ‘Door’ and ‘house’ must therefore be connected via both their sensory and their macro-functional affordances, as indicated on Template 50 (much simplified). The exact way that ‘door’ and ‘house’ are related at the sensory level can be handled by the feature ‘in house wall’ on the ‘door’ template being connected to the template for ‘house’ via a sub-feature ‘door(s)’, marked across the general feature type ‘parts’ on the spatial-object synthesis axis. Note the graphical convention for the expansion of the general spatial feature into specific parts, each indicated by a short crossing line. The call trees these represent can reach and activate the columns involved. The overlapping macro-functional circles should be understood as implying that ‘living in a house’ includes going in and out of doors between the different spaces constituted by the house and its rooms. The vertical broken lines indicate the mapping between the spatial sensory affordances and the relevant micro-functional features − and the macro-functional scenarios beyond them. The paradigmatic micro-functional feature ‘contained space’ is necessary for collocations with prepositions, for example.

rooms: kitchen, bedroom, etc.

‘live in house’

‘enter/ ‘go through leave’

door’

activity in rooms

N artefact

N

artefact contained space

aperture [do:]

[háus]

(aud.)

obj.

V_: go through

spat.: parts (walls, rooms, etc.) doors vis.

Template 50

(aud.) obj.

House and door

spat.: in house wall vis.

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As a final example of how the present model handles semantic relations of the indirect, compositional sort to which Pustojevsky’s qualia approach is geared, consider the combination of ‘begin’ and ‘novel’ (cf. Pustejovsky, op. cit.: 78 and 116). Pustejovsky’s point here is that the sense of verbs like ‘begin’ and ‘finish’ can be ‘contextualized’ by the qualia of specific nouns. Thus the agentive quale adhering to ‘novel’ is that of its coming about by an author writing it. On another reading − in another context − the telic quale of the same noun (a reader reading it in order to extract information/a story) would be relevant. On Template 51 it can be seen that the meaning of ‘begin’ can be kept quite uniform and general (the inception of a time-extended process or state), while allowing for specific readings in combination with words of different qualia structure. In contrast to ‘bake a cake’ on Template 44, I do not indicate the full array of ‘second argument’ types on the template for ‘begin’ since this is completely open-ended, that argument being an event type, not a referent type. There is, in other words, no particular conventional phrase ‘begin (to write) a novel’ corresponding to ‘bake a cake’. This makes sense if, as I argue, only nouns have qualia: ‘write a novel’ does not have a quale, it is one (of ‘novel’). Observe that I treat the relationship between the two templates here as a particular kind of ‘derivation’, where integration with a scenario associated with one of the elements is crucial for expanding or ‘extracting’ the missing process predicate (the bolded part of the scenario’s contents).100 The verb’s sensory affordances are minimal (though the possibility of construing ‘beginning something’ as ‘setting it in motion’ is there). Pustejovsky’s ‘formal’ quale for the noun ‘novel’ indicating that a novel is a (type of) book is covered by the feature ‘book’ (a sub-type of ‘physical object’), as marked on the microfunctional affordances of the word, in turn mappable onto its sensory affordances (though this is not directly relevant to interpreting the present combination). The functional feature is essential, since the sensory affordances of such a physical object alone do not reveal its function (e.g. to an illiterate perceiver). A further broken vertical line could be added between the syntagmatic feature specifying the verbs ‘write’ or ‘read’ and the object synthesis feature ‘words’ (or a short line crossing it). To conclude this Chapter, let me add a few further remarks on my decision to limit the representation of features corresponding to Pustejovsky’s qualia to nominal (potentially referring) expressions, and not to extend this to verbs as he does. He argues, for example, that agentive qualia are necessary for analyzing ‘stage level’ predications like ‘break’ which involve reference to the bringing into being of a resulting state (op. cit.: 80), hence the associated quale ‘agentive = break_act (e1, x,y)’. He also assigns to the same verb the ‘formal’ quale (‘that which distinguishes it within a larger domain’) ‘formal = broken (e2, y)’, though it is difficult to see why it should precisely be the specification of the resultant state that distinguishes the verb ‘within a larger domain’ in a manner parallel to the relationship of nouns to their hypernyms. One might

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purpose: reader (X) read author (Y) write content: story, characters (book-length text)

D13: extract process V

_NP2 ; _to S e2 : process [b gín]

N story V_ (write, read ) [nóv l]

e

(aud.). (mot.)

(vis.)

(aud.)

(spat.)

Template 51

phys. obj. (book)

e

e1: initiate NP1_: ag.

(words)

spat. vis. (shape)

obj.

Begin a novel

also object that the physical making of an object for some purpose is rather different from causing a state (of an object) to come about through an action (both ‘agentive’ qualia in Pustojevsky’s terms). At all events, on the present model the essential ‘qualia unification’ process of co-composition does not need to take into account this doubtful higher-order similarity, since ‘verbal’ qualia are all contained in or defined by the combination of event type plus (nominal) argument type − only the latter (i.e. arguments of verbs) have qualia in the original Aristotelian sense of ‘modes of explanation’.

11

Extensions to Languages of Different Morphological Type

Almost all the examples given so far have been for English, a typical modern European ‘analytic’ language as regards its parts of speech and lexical organization. Burnod’s model is strictly limited to English and (the original) French. His somewhat over-rationalistic approach to linguistic categories (as on his Figure 5-8, op. cit.: 274) needs to be counterbalanced by a typologically more adequate perspective. The present model can easily be extended to languages of very different morphological type – in fact I would ultimately demand from it ‘typological adequacy’, just as Dik insisted on for his theory of Functional Grammar. In principle it should be applicable to any language at all, taken individually, if it is also to be psychologically adequate. Nuuchahnulth (formerly known as Nootka), a polysynthetic Wakashan language from British Columbia, is about as different morphosyntactically from English as one can get. Let us take just two examples of complex words from that language, in order to see how the bound morphemes ingredient in it can be handled on a model developed initially for independent lexemes. Languages from this area are renowned for their vague or – according to some analyses – completely lacking word class distinctions. Although most stems can be seen as functioning principally either to refer (in noun-like fashion), or to predicate (in verb-like fashion), or to modify (in adjective-like or adverb-like fashion), there is no clear-cut lexical distinction (let alone marking) between these functions, and most lexical stems can act as predicates, only broader morphological and syntactic context rendering the function clear. All words consist of a lexical stem followed by various optional suffixes (only aspect needs to be marked on predicates, if it is not inherent) and, finally, optional enclitics. The suffixes include semantically heavy ‘lexical suffixes’ of two kinds, ‘governing’ ones (determining the word-class function of the whole), and ‘restricting’ ones, modifying or coordinate with the stem (plus any suffix). Most sentencelevel grammatical morphemes are enclitic in a fixed order at the end of the word that they are attached to (not necessarily the head of the clause or phrase). Consider the following two word-sentences: (1) c’itk-ʕaaʔat’-as-ʔatł (roll-move down-on ground-then) ‘It rolled downhill’ and (2) ʔuu-h-w’ink-ckwi (it-use-having

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done) ‘He had used it (a gun)’ (from Davidson 2002: 197 and 188). The first consists of a stem primarily used in predicate function (‘roll over, twist, lie on one’s side’) followed by two ‘restrictive’ lexical suffixes, of which the first indicates path downwards (inherently perfective) and the second indicates location ‘on the ground’, followed in turn by a sentence enclitic meaning roughly ‘then’. The second word consists of an ‘empty’ anaphoric stem ‘it’, one of a number of such stems required to form independent predicates from lexical suffixes, as here with -h-w’ink ‘use’, a ‘governing’ affix which converts the stem into a transitive predicate. The final suffix -ckwi means ‘remains of’ when added to a (functional) nominal stem, but when added to a (functional) verbal one (as here) it means ‘having V-ed’, a kind of perfect participle which may have a pluperfect temporal sense in context. How is one to indicate these various elements – both the stems and the lexical suffixes − on templates of the type the model proposes? The stem in (1) presents no particular problem (except that its dynamic as opposed to static aktionsart interpretation will depend on following suffixes, so it must be either under-determined or marked for both possibilities in the lexicon), and the sentence enclitic can simply be treated as an adverb, albeit one that is bound and that has very specific distributional properties.101 Of more interest are the two lexical suffixes. Since there are several hundred lexical suffixes in the language, and path suffixes such as that in (1) determine the aspect and telicity of the whole word, this cannot be simply a matter of derivation: the suffix must be treated as a lexical item in its own right (albeit a bound one). This can be represented as on Template 52. Locative suffixes are presumably located on the parietal Chapter of the motor-spatial route, just like the more limited array of spatial prefixes in European languages (cf. Burnod, op. cit.: 278). The essential functional information here is that the morpheme is a suffix and is generally attached to a stem (‘st’) that is (functionally) verbal. The feature ‘stV’ is thus not strictly an indication of (structural) word class. As will be discussed in Chapter 12.2, all such grammatical features are defined relationally, whatever the language. Here it indicates any stem in verbal function combinable with a dynamic path meaning to produce a predication (with implicit or explicit nominal subject). The paradigmatic feature ‘path’ maps directly down onto the corresponding spatial sensory affordance. The second suffix indicated on its own template, -’as ‘on the ground, outside’, is a ‘locale’ suffix (one of four common items indicating general types of area where an event takes place), which must come last in any sequence of spatial restrictive suffixes (the preceding apostrophe indicates ‘glottalizing’). It always indicates a ‘place’, not a ‘thing’ (so it does not refer to a geographical ‘dot object’). Unlike path suffix -ʕaaʔat(u), it can be attached to a wide range of stems, not just functionally verbal ones. It also displays a number of suppletive forms in its perfective, causative and iterative allomorphs − only the first of these, -‘ii(tł), is indicated on the template (in a manner parallel to ‘flew’ on Template 4).


120

Suf

Suf perf. perf. stV _

path (down) [-÷aa/atu]

mot.

[-’ii(tl)]

mot.

(aud.)

[-’as]

(aud.)

spat.

vis.

spat.

vis.

loc. (on ground)

st (+suf...)_

Template 52 Nuuchahnulth -ʕaaʔatu- (‘move down’) and -’as (‘on ground’)

On Template 53 is represented the combination of ‘empty stem’ ʔu- plus ‘governing’ suffix -h-w’ink ‘use’ that produces the stem of (2) above. The two parts are shown linked since the second morpheme requires the first (and the suffix often does appear in this semi-lexicalized combination), although the latter is a (bound) anaphoric stem, which may occur as an independent demonstrative in the form ʔuh- ‘he, she, it, they’. The ‘derivational’ process here I have labelled ‘bind’. Note that the empty stem is actually ʔu-, with the short vowel being lengthened in this combination due to the effect of the suffix, which is consequently marked for this property (‘+L’) on its functional affordances.102 The suffix is marked ‘SufV’, indicating that it is of the verbalizing kind that requires a (functionally) nominal base to attach to. It has its own aktionsart (namely ‘activity’), mappable onto its major sensory affordance axis. Note that the stem, as a pronoun, has no sensory affordances. bind Pro anaph.

Suf V _suf +L st N_

[/u-]

[-hw’ink]

mot.

vis.

Template 53

activity

(aud.)

spat.

Nuuchahnulth ʔuu-h-w’ink (‘use’)


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As for the suffix -ckwi ‘having V-ed’ in (2), it need not be represented on its own template, although it is not just a sentence-level tense marker introduced top-down (despite having a default perfect or pluperfect interpretation in context), nor does it represent a purely aspectual value (‘resultative’) that could be treated as an ‘operator’ on a ‘grammar’ template. It can be attached to nominal as well as verbal stems in the sense ‘remains of’, and is best treated as derivational (compare ‘frightened’ on Template 8), albeit with two distinct functions, one producing a derived (resultative) verbal meaning, another producing a derived nominal meaning. In theory one could nevertheless represent this on a template linking the phonological form with its purely functional affordances. This could indeed be done with the past participial morpheme -ed (and its allomorphs) in English, and the other ‘derivational’ processes symbolized in earlier Chapters by ‘D1, 2, etc.’, in so far as they introduce or change phonological material. The location of the columns embodying them must at all events be in proximity to frontal ‘grammar’ cortex, unlike the case of the Nuuchahnulth lexical suffixes above, which are anchored in sensory affordances. To return to the question of the minimal distinction between word classes in languages like Nuuchahnulth, there is, as mentioned, good reason to distinguish nevertheless between lexical items that have an essential or default predicating function and those that have a (potential) referring function, in other words between verbal and nominal entries.103 This reflects the position taken by most Wakashanists today (e.g. Davidson, op. cit.: 91f.). These verbal and nominal entities can be envisaged as located along the ‘where/how’ and the ‘what’ routes respectively, such that they can be integrated orthogonally in frontal grammar cortex, just as hypothesized for English. Thus although an essentially nominal stem like quuʔas ‘person’ can be used predicatively in the sense ‘be a person’ simply by adding appropriate sentential clitics such as 3s indicative -ma (most of which are optional in context anyway), this is clearly rather a matter of ‘Ø-derivation’. In fact the situation is not so different from English after all, since both languages are typified by widespread ‘conversion’, whereby the same form can be either a noun or a verb, depending on sentential context (compare English ‘water’). In both languages one may envisage one of the two functions of such items as being fundamental, the other being linked by a Ø-derivational process, even if they are embodied in two separate columns, each on one of the two major ‘routes’ between posterior and anterior cortex. This is an empirical matter which neuroimaging might help resolve. Both related items would at all events be potentially activated by input from Wernicke’s area corresponding to the isolated phonological word. Patterns of lexical organization diverging strongly from those of ‘standard European’ are also displayed by the almost exclusively prefixing Athabaskan languages, earlier mentioned in connection with their ‘classificatory’ verbs of location and handling. These are chosen according to the ‘figure’ (shape and/ or consistency or number) of the object concerned (a phenomenon found in a

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number of polysynthetic language families of North America). This is distinct from the use of noun classifiers, a much more widespread phenomenon, whereby numerals and demonstratives (in particular) require the presence of a classifier morpheme in order to indicate the category of the noun when it is treated as countable, e.g. Mandarin Chinese sa-n beˇ n shu- ‘three books’, with classifier beˇ n (‘volume’) for books. Such classifier morphemes need their own word columns, just as Athabaskan classificatory verbs do, only located perhaps at the posterior end of the ‘what’ route rather than on the ‘where/how’ route, where classificatory verbs may be anchored.104 The same applies presumably to word columns for numerals and quantifiers like ‘all’ as well (cf. Martin and Caramazza 2003: 202 as regards the former). Classificatory verbs can be illustrated as on Template 54 below for two of the 12 classificatory verbs of Koyukon (18 if one includes those for ‘falling/throwing’), namely -‘o for a compact object (as in tseetl le‘onh ‘a snowball is there’) and -ton for a flat, rigid or stick-like object (as in dekenh daaltonh ‘a piece of wood is there’) – cf. Thompson et al. (1983: 132ff). The verbs themselves (more precisely ‘verbal themes’) consist of a final root preceded by discontinuous prefix slots in the templatic morphology, e.g. G + Ø + ‘o for a compact object being somewhere (G indicates an obligatory ‘gender’ prefix and Ø a zero valency marker).105 This would be preceded by ‘O(+)’ for a grammatical object (incorporated or external) in the transitive ‘handling’ sense. I have added on the templates for -‘o and -ton the momentaneous perfective form of the root – this is just one allomorph of a paradigmatic ‘stem set’ for combinations of aspect and aktionsart that every Koyukon verb root displays. All this needs to be spelled out on the functional affordances of the verbs. Note that the syntagmatic axis contains both syntactic and morphological information: this can be divided between the two halves of the axis as shown.

V classif. mom.perf. NP_ [-’onh]

mot. vis.: compact

Ø_ G_ posit.

classif. mom. perf. NP_

V

Ø_ G_ posit. [-ton]

[-’o] [-tonh]

(aud.)

spat.

mot. vis.: stick-like

(aud.)

spat.

Template 54 Koyukon -‘o (of compact object) and -ton (of stick-like object)


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The problem of how to relate such verb roots to the entire range of prefixes allowed or required by the general morphological template for verbs is still more severe than with Nuuchahnulth, since some of the slots are obligatorily filled and verb themes are themselves often discontinuous, with additional prefixes interdigitated between the obligatory ones. How can the link between individual verbal stems/roots and the whole morphological template – with its approximately 28 positions − be indicated? The simplest solution reflects actual usage among Athabaskanists: on the syntagmatic axis of the verb only those slots that constitute its ‘theme’ are indicated (the ’O’ position for the transitive ‘object’ could be added if the transitive ‘handling’ sense were to be conflated on the same template). The overall morphological template itself must be elsewhere within ‘grammar’ cortex, and this will determine, top-down, how the elements of individual verb themes are interdigitated with (obligatory) inflectional and (optional) derivational prefixes (plus the few suffixes of the language). The external subject is also marked, and a broken line has been extended to the essential visual affordance dimension, which, together with the spatial one (mapping down from the paradigmatic feature ‘position’), defines the type of object to which the verb applies. Since all 12 classificatory verbs are in a paradigmatic relationship, their syntagmatic frames and semantic content being identical apart from the difference in ‘figure’, the model needs somehow to reflect their close interrelatedness. This can be done by linking the feature ‘classif.’ between all the verbs of the series, as indicated by the broken horizontal line. The selection of one of the chained series of verbs for ‘bottom-up’ integration with a subject noun to form a predication will be determined by the figure features adhering to that noun. There are challenges for the model also from languages ‘nearer home’ that display rich morphological systems, languages of the ‘fusional’ types such as Russian or Arabic (of respectively the ‘flectional’ and ‘symbolic’ sub-types). This was briefly touched upon earlier in connection with the suggestion that allomorphs of forms in flectional languages may be redundantly stored in Wernicke’s area. As I have suggested, the phonological form of whole paradigms of individual stems may well be represented adjacently in that area (especially if they share most of their phonological shape), but the information also needs to be represented on the functional affordances of the words in frontal cortex where the lexical stem is integrated with top-down grammatical demands for tense, etc. (This must also be true of the Koyukon allomorph sets discussed above.) That information need not be stored there in overt phonological shape, but could be in the form of ‘pointers’ towards the forms gathered in paradigmatic sets in Wernicke’s area, i.e. as call trees whose goal is a specific allomorph stored in that area. On Template 55 can be seen how the model handles aspectually and derivationally related pairs of Russian verbs, each belonging to a particular conjugation


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class (and displaying some irregularity). Compare English ‘take’ on Template 34, which is similar in semantics but is specified as an action, not an activity (I leave out most of the functional features that could be copied over from there). Aspect is an obligatory category in Russian and most verbs have an imperfect and a perfect correlate, usually around a common stem, but sometimes, as here, with suppletion − brat’ is imperfect in contrast to perfective vzjat’. This is not in itself a matter of derivation, and is therefore added to the paradigmatic axis of brat’ (the reverse representation is also feasible, taking vzjat’ as the basic form). By contrast, the addition of a path-indicating prefix is indeed derivational, and therefore the two related templates, brat’ and otbirat’, are linked in the manner by now familiar for derivations.106 Note that the forms are irregularly related also here (not by suppletion, however − the deviation from regular patterning is slight). There is in fact a good deal more irregular morphology that needs to be added to the paradigmatic axis of both brat’, otobrat’, and vzjat’. For example, vzjat’ is conjugated 1s voz’mu, 2s voz’mjoš, 3s voz’mjot, and brat’ has add path V perf. NP 1_ (ag)

mot.

vis.

Template 55

V

_NP2 (pat.) activity: imperf. [vzjat’] [brat’]

(aud.)

spat.

perf. NP1_

mot.

vis.

_ NP2 imperf. path: away [otobrat’] [otbirat’]

(aud.)

spat.

Russian brat’ (‘take’) and otbirat’ (‘take away’)

1s beru, 2s berjoš, 3s berjot, etc. The question again arises as to whether this should be indicated on the functional affordances of these words, or in an array of phonological forms in Wernicke’s area, or both. A further complication is that imperfective otbirat’ is regular (according to the usual a-stem conjugation for verbs). Following Occam’s razor is probably not a good idea here – facilitating processing is surely more important for the brain than (descriptive) economy. I would suggest that all this information is indeed indicated on the functional affordances of these verbs, where it is required to react to triggers from higher sentential context. This can again be handled on the model by ‘pointers’ towards the relevant forms gathered also in Wernicke’s area (around the most ‘entrenched’ phonological forms of the stems concerned – cf. Bybee 1985: 117ff on ‘lexical strength’). This does not entail that forms like voz’mu and beru


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(with no phonological overlap) need be adjacent in Wernicke’s area: the relationship there is indirect, via the functional affordances of the two related verbs. As regards regular otbirat’ (1s otbiraju, etc.), this need only be marked on its functional affordances as ‘a-conjugation’ (the default for infinitives in -at’), which points it towards the general conjugation template within frontal ‘grammar’ cortex. Arabic (like other Afro-Asiatic languages) displays another kind of morpholexical organization which, although rather rare, is highly significant for the general hypothesis of orthogonal interaction of the two ‘streams’ upon which the present model is premised. On Template 56 is represented the past and present (‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’) verbal forms of lexical root k-t-b ‘write’ in (Cairene) Arabic, plus the singular and plural nominal forms (‘book’, ‘books’) of the same root. There are many more such templatic derivations, but these are typical. In all cases the consonantal framework gives the abstract lexical root and the framework of vowels gives the grammatical function of the combination (there is also a prefix added in the ‘present’ form). This is in a sense the most extreme kind of paradigmatic integration – not just affixes are of a ‘portmanteau’ kind like the suffixes of Latin and Russian, but whole words. The two verbal forms are related by a slanting broken line to the macrofunctional level since their choice is determined by discourse/narrative level tense requirements (unlike the purely aspectual distinction in Russian on Template 55). The same convention is applied to the relationship between the singular and plural nominal forms, the referential situation requiring the one or the other. Note that the feature ‘plural’ has a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic aspect, since such a subject must agree with a following plural verb (the same graphic convention is used here as on Template 15 for the possessive form of ‘he’). The (redundant) short arrows to ‘predic.’ and ‘ref.’ indicate the relationship between the (static) functional affordances of the words concerned and the ongoing ‘story’ circuit processes of (time-extended) predicating and (spatial) referring. Both sets (and many more) are related by a higher-level ‘derivational’ link as well as by the common scenario for ‘writing’ onto which they both map. The derivation here is of a ‘resultant object’ or artefact noun − recall Pustejovsky’s ‘telic’ qualia. To the syntagmatic axis of the verbal template could be added the optional feature ‘ _NP2 obj. (book, etc.)’ and to the nominal one a similar feature ‘V (write, read, etc.)_’. This all assumes that the basic meaning of k-t-b is verbal, but it is not actually necessary to do so: one could insert a ‘neutral’ k-t-b template between the two halves of Template 56, with derivations going out in both directions. Other relevant derivation types will be for ‘abstract activity noun’, ‘agent participial’, etc.107 The significance of this for the hypothesis of the orthogonal integration of activation flows on the model lies in the interdigitation of lexical template and grammatical template that languages like Arabic so egregiously display. If the mechanism is necessary here it may be utilized elsewhere, for example in the


126

‘writing’ ‘reading’ reader (Z) writer (X) result.: book (Y) (book) text text

ref.

derive result. noun V pres. past

predic.

vis.

_Vpl artefact

[yiktib] [katab]

mot.

N

NP_: ag. activity

aud.

spat.

Template 56

plural [kitaab]

[kutub]

aud.

spat.

obj.

vis.

Arabic k-t-b (write)

crossing of ‘where/how’ route verbs and ‘what’ route nouns, as hypothesized. Compare further the Koyukon morphological template for verbs discussed above, involving the interdigitation of discontinuous ‘themes’ and prefixes, and indeed English ‘strong verbs’ like ‘fly/flew’ in Chapter 2.2, where the change of vowel signals the grammatical feature ‘past’. All such phenomena are eminently suitable to analyses in terms of Burnod’s notion of the ‘combination matrix’. Whether grammatical markers are integrated with lexical items morphologically or syntactically is a language-specific matter: the two fall in fact on a typological continuum according to degree of linear rigidity and morphophonemic integration. The same holds for purely derivational processes – compare English phrasal verbs like ‘put on’, where the verb and the adverbial particle may be separated by other material (as in ‘he put his new silk tie on’), with Russian path prefixes, as on Template 55 above, which cannot be separated from their stems but perform a similar path-indicating function. My conclusion is that morphological and syntactical templates must lie close to each other in frontal cortex. Indeed the way they overlap and impinge one upon the other must be taken account of even in theoretical models of grammar, as Sadock has demonstrated for West Greenlandic (Sadock 1991). One final example of the different ways lexical items may be organized across languages must suffice, this time concerning neither verbs nor nouns but


127

demonstratives. Central Alaskan Yupik (like all Eskimo languages) is known for its fine-grained distinctions between demonstrative stems (or roots), which have both adverbial function (when taking plain locative case inflections) and referential pronominal function (with a special set of nominal case inflections). This is not just a matter of broad pronominal items required by the grammar (like English ‘he’ or French enclitic ‘l(e)’), or of general spatial adverbials like English ‘there’ (or French enclitic ‘y’), for each item is lexically ‘heavy’, being associated with a particular conjunction of topographical features of the landscape (and is not grammatically obligatory in any context). The stems form a system of 28 items, a matrix of five spatial orientations − further sub-divided into ‘more accessible’ and ‘less accessible’ − that cut across the three general dimensions of ‘extended’, ‘restricted’ and ‘obscured’.108 The five orientations are (giving the ‘more accessible’ item before the corresponding ‘less accessible’ one): ‘near speaker’/‘near listener’, ‘over’/‘across’, ‘inside’ (or ‘upriver’)/ ’outside’, ‘down below’ (or ‘downslope’)/‘downriver’ (or ‘towards exit’), and ‘upslope’/‘up above’ (cf. Jacobson 1984: 653ff). It should be mentioned that the Alaskan Yupiit live along rivers − the broad, salmon-rich rivers of southwestern Alaska. The initial question is whether to place these items upon the ‘where/how’ route like ‘over’ on Template 7 (as suggested by their adverbial function) or on the ‘what’ route, as suggested by their demonstrative referring function. Clearly the spatial dimension (and the parietal area of the cortex) are implicated here, but this is precisely the area that is common for both ‘routes’. As will be seen from Template 57, I have chosen to indicate (a sub-set of) these items on the ‘where/how’ route as a tightly interrelated sub-system of spatial adverbial stems (‘accessible’ items only, so collapsing that dimension). These are av-, ing-, am(‘over’), pav- (or paug-), ping-, pam- (‘above’), and un-, kan-, cam- (‘down below’). This could be expanded to embrace all 28 items, all tightly interconnected with broken lines. Since the ‘extended’ feature covers ‘in motion’ as well as spatially extended, the whole of the motion-spatial axis has been bolded on those three templates. The corresponding pronominal demonstratives should then logically occur separately on the ‘what’ route, despite sharing exactly the same system of stem distinctions. Actually this is not a bad solution: it reflects rather nicely the mutually constraining relationship between the two routes described by Burnod with regard to visual processing on the ‘image’ circuit as involving a ‘combination matrix’ that allows for continuous adjustment to the position of an object. The relationship between ‘object’ and ‘position’ on the ‘image’ circuit is exactly parallel to that between demonstrative and adverbial on the ‘word’ circuit here. The arrangement chosen also makes it easy to map the paradigmatic functional features of the ‘where/how’ route items directly onto their spatial sensory affordances. Conceptually, it is also reasonable to see the referring function (with obligatory marking of both pronominal and case functions) as secondary,


128

Adv

Adv ext.

same plane

Adv

rest.

same plane

obs.

same plane

[ing-]

[av-]

mot.

(aud.)

(aud.)

[am-]

(aud.)

mot.

mot. spat. vis.

spat.

vis.

Adv

Adv above

ext.

rest.

(aud.)

mot.

rest.

below

vis.

(aud.)

above

spat.

[pam-]

mot.

(aud.)

spat.

vis.: inv.

Adv

[un-]

mot.

(aud.)

vis.

Adv ext.

obs.

[ping-]

spat.

vis.

Adv above

[pav-]

mot.

spat. vis.: inv.

Adv below

obs.

[kan-]

mot.

spat.

Template 57

(aud.)

vis.

spat.

below [cam-]

mot.

vis.: inv.

(aud.)

spat.

Yupik demonstrative adverbs

i.e. as consisting of a general referring function modified by the specifics of the spatial (adverbial) system. On Template 58 the relationship between just one pronominal template, paugna ‘that up there’, and its corresponding adverbial template is illustrated − it is one of referential derivation. Here the ‘accessible’ dimension has been indicated. Note the two sensory dimensions highlighted on the pronominal


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refer to object Pro (_N_; _V_)

Adv loc. all. [pavani]

(_V) ext. above acces. [pavanut] [pav-]

loc. rel. [pauggum] [pauggumi]

[paugna] aud.

mot.

spat.: up

aud. obj.

vis.

ext. above acces.

vis.: ext. object

spat.

Template 58

Yupik pav- and paugna (‘that up there’)

template − besides the spatial one shared with the adverb it is the visual one that is bolded, not that of object synthesis (which concerns the specific semantic type of object referred to). The dotted lines joining up the spatial and visual features here define an object situated in an upward direction from the deictic centre (not just the direction alone, as with the adverb). I have added to both templates some typical paradigmatic inflected forms (these are probably gathered, as earlier discussed, in Wernicke’s area, but are triggered from the functional affordances of the pronoun in context). The absolutive case singular (with addition of inflection -na to the bare stem) can be considered the basic citation form of pronouns − only this plus the relative and locative case singular forms are given from the more extensive paradigm (the adverbial forms lack the absolutive, but I have added the allative). Note the features on the syntagmatic axis indicating that the demonstrative stem takes pronominal case inflections in specific syntactic/semantic contexts (these could be spelled out). They are joined up via dotted lines to corresponding features on the paradigmatic axis that label the relevant case suffixes. This provides a representation for the fact that demonstratives both fall into content-based paradigmatic relations with other demonstratives, and enter into formal paradigms with an array of case endings (the two opposite ends of the paradigmatic axis can be utilized to distinguish these dimensions). Only the syntagmatic contexts for the default ‘absolutive’ form is given, namely ‘_N_; _V_’, which indicates (in a very abbreviated manner) that the demonstrative may follow or precede either a head noun or – as intransitive subject or transitive object – a head verb.109 Moving away from morphology as such to the distribution of lexical meaning between morphology and syntax, let me return briefly to Talmy’s distinction between ‘verb-framed’ and ‘satellite-framed’ languages (Talmy 2000: 2, 222), which was mentioned at the end of Chapter 7.2. Since this is a major dimension of lexical organization on which languages differ, it is important to see how it

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relates to the present model. The former type of languages (typified by Spanish and the other Romance languages) integrates Path but not Manner into the meaning of its verbs of motion (Manner being expressed adverbially), whereas the latter (typified by Mandarin Chinese but also polysynthetic Atsugewi) integrates Manner but not Path into them (Path being expressed by a ‘satellite’ affix or adverbial expression). English is somewhat mixed, the Romance type having been introduced via French on top of its satellite-framed Germanic base. In Talmy’s overall scheme of things the ‘macro-event’, the basic unit of conceptualization of happenings in the world, consists of a ‘framing event’ and a ‘coevent’ (plus the relation between the two). The framing event is what articulates the activity of the co-event according to general categories of ‘temporal contouring’ (for aspect), ‘change of state’, ‘realization’, ‘coactivity’, and − the basic dimension, from which the others analogically project − ‘motion’. Satelliteframed languages map co-events onto main verbs (of the type ‘X floated [into the cave]’), whereas verb-framed languages map co-events onto adverbial expressions and map the framing event onto main verbs (of the type ‘X entered the cave [floating]’). This suggests that what needs to be translated back and forth between languages of different framing type is not individual verbs severed from their clausal frames but whole predicate frames involving syntagmatic as well as paradigmatic features. This is indeed what is supplied by the micro-functional features of individual verbs on the present model. The apparatus of ‘derivation’ is also there in order to add, remove and change framing event features − which individual verbs such features adhere to is a languagespecific matter. One general conclusion that can be made concerning the various applications of the model to more ‘exotic’ linguistic phenomena is that in order to do justice to individual languages (and the type of processing they imply) it is not strictly possible to maintain the requirement of both psychological and typological adequacy at the same time in searching for universality, however desirable that goal may be (cf. Dik 1989: 13f.). The morphosyntactic templates and lexical categories that are used on the model (interpretable in both production and comprehension terms) must remain strictly language-specific. In other words, psychological adequacy – or at least plausibility − is paramount. This is particularly true when it comes to varying patterns of lexical organization and the parcelling out of similar information between syntactic and morphological (also prosodic) means. However, it is desirable that the overall set of functional choices of categories and features available for such language-specific modelling should constitute a framework as close to typologically adequate as possible in order for the model to be applicable to languages other than English. From the present perspective this must remain a secondary desideratum since the principles and tendencies with which linguistic typology is concerned are higherlevel abstractions across language types and not directly involved in the actual processing of utterances in a single language, even though they often do appear to reflect processing universals.


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The concerns of the present model lie rather far from the search for the inherent principles of Universal Grammar; but it nevertheless seeks to delineate the universals of lexical organization which constrain the ways in which individual languages process meaning.110 These constraints are ultimately those of the organization of the human cortex. But beyond that, the model may also contribute to the question of linguistic relativity: do differences in the partitioning of grammar, phonology and lexicon (especially as regards the role of morphology) reflect different modes of processing in different languages? Though the basic apparatus reflected by the model is indeed intended to be universal, it brings to the fore certain patterns of information clustering that must somehow be contained in mediatory word columns or modules organized differently from those required by ‘standard’ western European languages. This should in principle show up in suitably framed neuroimaging investigations.

Summary of Part 2

Applications of the model to a number of aspects of semantic theory were discussed in Part 2. Emphasis was placed on problematic areas which all need to be addressed one way or another in any kind of overall neural network modelling of the lexicon. The first general topic taken up was that of semantic fields and lexical categorization. It was demonstrated in particular that the ‘featureas-call-tree’ approach to hypernym/hyponym relationships on the model is in fact compatible (within limits) with prototype category theory. A distinction was made here between true semantic fields (for ‘natural kinds’) and lexical fields imposed ‘top-down’ from socio-cultural scenarios and frames. The latter type does not necessarily display prototype properties. A case of a hybrid combination of the two types was also presented. The second area addressed was compositionality. The starting point was nominal compounding, where, as is well known, the meanings of both the modifying/restricting element and the head nominal can undergo mutual adjustment. It seems quite natural to apply the notion of the macro-functional scenario or frame in order to explain the changes that occur. This was followed by an investigation into verbal decomposition, that is into the way more complex verbs build on the semantics of more ‘basic’ ones (primarily of motion and action) whose underlying ‘logic’ – in terms of implications that can be ‘read off’ them in the manner of meaning postulates – they inherit. Much of what goes on in this area can be analysed with the help of ‘derivations’ in the broad sense employed in this book. ‘Causal’ derivations were given particular attention. The principle whereby additional layers of meaning are always added ‘outside’ the inherited core meaning was illustrated with a number of templates for more complex words built up from simpler bases. ‘Factive’ (or constitutive) verbs and verbs with irrealis/virtual objects were also introduced. Finally, the analysis of a highly complex verb (‘conquer’) was undertaken in order to test the theory of compositionality endorsed by the model and to engage with ongoing debates as to the role of ‘primitives’ in semantic theory. The next topic was that of constructions, the extension of compositionality to whole phrasal and clausal units. This is a subject which has received much attention in recent cognitively orientated linguistics. The manner in which the present model deals with this was illustrated with ‘have’ constructions in English (and Gaelic). This led to a discussion of inchoative expressions of the

Summary of Part 2

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‘become’ plus adjective kind, which served to further illustrate the factors behind the clustering of related constructions and the ‘inheritance’ relation holding between them. It was concluded that the extended notion of ‘derivation’, understood in a certain way, was also useful here. This solution avoids having to isolate a single central construction (directly linked to a ‘conceptual archetype’), but is nevertheless applicable to a range of constructional clusters, all the way from the lexically highly restricted to the completely general or ‘open’. Focus in the following chapter turned to the general question of polysemy. The assumptions the model makes are for the most compatible with approaches to that subject associated with cognitive linguistics (family resemblance chains, radial categories, etc.). Everyone working in this broad paradigm would agree, for instance, that context is of the essence for distinguishing polysemy from homonymy. The present model offers more specific criteria for distinguishing between the two in terms of overlapping sensory and/or macro-functional affordances (necessary for polysemy but not homonymy). This was illustrated with an analysis of the words ‘over’ and ‘climb’, often cited in the literature in this connection. A slightly different take on metaphor and metonymy was also proposed. Metaphor as such is less central to the present approach, although the general relationship of ‘similarity’ plays an important role, especially at the level of the paradigmatic axis of the micro-functional affordances of individual words. A clear line was drawn between active, cognitively relevant metaphor (mappable on the model) and fossilized metaphor (not so). The last area of theoretical application to be investigated was somewhat narrower, namely Pustejovsky’s theory of qualia, which raises important issues that the model should be able to deal with. Some of his key examples of ‘qualia unification’ (or ‘co-composition’) were taken up and analysed on linked templates. These illustrated the constrained mutual influence not only between modifier and head in nominal compounding (as shown earlier) but also between verbs and their nominal arguments. All of the major qualia types find their place on the model (including, crucially, telic ones of purpose), but it was argued that Pustejovsky’s extension of the qualia concept to verbs as well as nouns is superfluous, since the features relevant for qualia unification are contained in the micro-functional affordances of verbs, namely in the conjunction of the event structure features on their paradigmatic axes and the qualia features of the NP argument types indicated on their syntagmatic axes. An approach to delimiting the number of qualia features relevant to a single given language (something Pustejovsky does not even attempt) was suggested – and initiated in Appendix 2 – in terms of a listing (and subsequent partial collapsing) of the paradigmatic features needed for describing the interdigitation with grammar of a wide array of English words. The question of language specificity was taken up in the concluding Chapter of Part 2, where various phenomena from ‘exotic’ languages were introduced

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in order to show that the model potentially meets the criterion of ‘typological adequacy’ demanded of it: it is applicable not only to the languages of Europe but in principle to all the natural languages of the world. The phenomena chosen were mainly of a morphological nature, since this is where the greatest variety lies. Apart from this, some of the patterns analysed provided further evidence of the utility of Burnod’s notion of the ‘combination matrix’. It was suggested that the varying distribution of lexical, phonological and grammatical information between more anterior and more posterior parts of lexical ‘multi-module’ networks may be relevant to the question of linguistic relativity. In Part 3 we shall return to the cognitive nature of – and justification for – the model as a whole. En route to discussing how the model may be (dis)confirmed by further data (e.g. from neuroimaging studies), the interfacing of lexicon and grammar will be pinpointed once more. It will now be seen that also purely grammatical relationships can be represented on templates and at the same time treated in terms of ‘derivations’. Such ‘grammar templates’ will build on lexically specific ‘predicate frames’ that are projected ‘upwards’ to complex clausal templates and beyond. Also the important questions as to how context relevant to lexical meaning can be represented neurally, and how the kind of network the model assumes could be acquired by children, will be addressed.

Part Three

Cognitive Justification of the Model


12

The Interfacing of Grammar and Lexicon

12.1 Grammar templates The close association between lexicon and grammar which the present framework endorses has come to the forefront in recent decades within various theoretical frameworks, starting with the principle of the lexical projection of grammar in the generative tradition, and has been carried forward within a psycholinguistic perspective by Levelt’s ‘Lexical hypothesis’ (Levelt 1989: 181). The question now is whether the present lexically based approach can actually bring us any closer to understanding the neurological foundations on which the grammatical system is built up. Can it explain with reference to neuroscience the semantic and syntactic categories and features that it employs any better than other approaches claiming a degree of cognitive reality? I believe it can as long as we consistently interpret the model’s labelled features as processes and relations, not as ‘things’ or ‘addresses’. This will also help us avoid ‘misplaced concreteness’ (to use Whitehead’s famous phrase) in trying to envisage ways in which neural networks can code and transmit complex messages referring to these categories. First, the reader may be wondering what a ‘grammar’ template as such might look like within the present model. This is easy to illustrate, since the whole conception of the lexical word template has been formulated in such a way that it meshes directly with grammatical templates. Thus on Template 59 is portrayed the phrase structure ‘rule’ that defines an NP as consisting of ‘slots’ for a determiner, one or more adjectives, and a possible complementizer clause following the noun head. Beside it is the ‘rule’ that expands the complementizer slot into a relative clause (it could also be a prepositional phrase). These simple templates consist of generalized micro-functional affordances alone, and display recursivity in so far as the goals of the call trees that the various grammatical abbreviations represent may be higher-level sentential templates that can (re)call the lower-level template itself. Compare Burnod’s characterization of words as displaying strong transversal coupling between the upper and lower parts of columns (relating sensory images and phonemic forms, say), whereas sentence-level (grammar) columns display weak transversal coupling,

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Neural Network Model of Lexical Organization Rel Cl NP head adj._ det._

Template 59

_compl. Ni

compl. comp.-er_ (subj.) i

_VP

General NP and relative clause

allowing any suitable word or phrase to fill their syntagmatic ‘slots’ (Burnod op. cit.: 248f.). Sentence-level grammar templates of this sort could be integrated in an orthogonally organized ‘combination matrix’ of the type already discussed (a matter I shall return to in 12.3). The relation between the two templates is in fact one of ‘derivation’ (following my extended use of that term), here producing a recursive morpho-syntactic loop between static grammar templates, since ‘VP’ on the right-hand template can in turn be expanded to a V plus an NP (when this derived sequence is ‘called’ by that feature). In Appendix 3, I list further examples of syntactic ‘derivations’. At a still higher level, an initial ‘S’, summoned top-down by the ‘story’ circuit intention to produce a sentence corresponding to a relational ‘concept’, will also be expandable by the same ‘rule’ into calls for these and other templates as sub-goals (depending on illocutionary and other discourse-level factors). The NP template, note, has the same orientation as lexical noun templates, and the clausal one the same as that for verbs, indicating input from respectively the ‘what’ and the ‘where/how’ lexical routes. The paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of both templates are parallel, but the arrow on the clausal one remains to indicate the matching of the predicate frame of a lexical verb (which constitutes the head of the VP) with the orientation of the generalized template itself.111 The two templates given here are those relevant to the phrase ‘the parrot that flew over the river’, for example. The two are joined by a link between the ‘complement’ feature on the syntagmatic axis of the left-hand one and the corresponding feature on the paradigmatic axis of the right-hand one, as shown. This corresponds to a single Chomskyan ‘Merge’ operation (Chomsky 1992), but also, perhaps more pertinently, to the kind of unification process − binding syntactic with semantic and phonological information − assumed by LexicalFunctional Grammar (cf. Hagoort 2005, whose neurobiological design model implicates different sub-regions of Broca’s area in different levels of unification). The clausal template ensures that the complement consists of a complementizer (relative pronoun or conjunction), here in subject function, co-indexing the head noun on the phrasal template, plus a VP (as spelt out on

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a corresponding general VP template). Other matters that can be handled by such templates include agreement for number: that is what the co-indexing subscripts are meant to cover (the features ‘singular’ or ‘plural’ could be added).112 Also the recursive coordination of NPs by ‘and’ (and other phraselevel connectors) could be represented through the introduction of a syntagmatic feature ‘and NP’ into the general NP template. On Template 60 another aspect of grammatical templates is illustrated, namely the relationship between lexically specific predicate frames and general syntactic patterns at differing levels of generality. Recall what was said about the verb ‘give’ represented on Template 38 in Chapter 7.2, now shown in simplified form with the ‘collapsed’ paradigmatic feature ‘transferral’. This verb shares with other verbs of transferral the possibility of an alternative predicate frame in which the recipient rather than the patient is in some sense foregrounded or ‘topicalized’.113 The question here is whether that alternation frame (incorporating derivation D19) should be represented as a distinct grammar template to which calls from all individual verbs bearing that feature can be addressed, or whether it is a redundant ‘epiphenomenon’, relevant to grammatical description but not to cognitive processes and long-term memory storage. The solution presented assumes that the pattern is indeed productive enough to warrant the setting up of an intermediate alternative VP template for such verbs: it is a construction type of intermediate generality, specifying only a single paradigmatic feature required of verbs to which it applies. (It could be extended to new verbs of transferral, as in ‘He SMS-ed her his address’.) The mini-network presented indicates the relationship between the fully general phrase-structure template for indicative sentences (consisting of NP1 + VP, the latter splitting into V + NP2 + NP3 for ditransitive verbs) and the specific predicate ‘give’. The general expansion of the VP for verbs of transferral is shown containing the alternation in question. Note that such templates contain both syntactic and (syntax-relevant) semantic features. The parallel lines below the abstract grammar templates are simply added to ensure that they are oriented correctly in order to correlate with specific predicate frames entering from the ‘where/how’ route. To the (abbreviated) template for ‘give’ at the bottom left is added the top-down discourse-level factor that selects the dativeshifting pattern (the rearrangement of arguments along the syntagmatic axis is purely for convenience). This should remind us that grammar cortex (or ‘space’) is organized on the model hierarchically between specific predicate frames operating bottom-up and more general syntactic frames operating topdown. However, it is further assumed that top-down input from discourse context may directly influence (e.g. scramble linearly) specific default predicate frames as well as initiate overall template choices (e.g. for an interrogative rather than an indicative utterance type). Such input must be understood as percolating ‘all the way down’.


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VP S

V transfer

_VP _NP2/NP3: pat. _to NP3/NP2: recip.

NP1_

transferral

V

_NP2/NP3: pat. _to NP3/NP2: recip. final posit.

discourse topic (recip.) transferral

NP1_: ag.

[giv]

V NP1_: ag.

_NP3: pat. _NP2: recip. [giv]

Template 60 The choice of alternative predicate frames for verbs of transferral

12.2 The realization of grammatical and semantic features by call trees In this and the following Chapter I shall return more consistently to the ‘process’ perspective on language, specifically to the interaction between the patterns represented by templates and the processes represented by call trees. My basic claim as regards the grammatical and semantic ‘features’ on templates is that they are instantiated by something like Burnod’s call trees. These are not to be confused with word column ‘labels’: the mental lexicon as it is conceived on my model is ‘content-addressed’ − that is, word columns may be activated by resonance with an incoming input array (e.g. a phonological word form or other sensory configuration). The nearest thing to a neural ‘label’ is thus an input signal required to activate a column in a given ‘eigenstate’ by virtue of its synaptic tuning.114 In themselves the features marked on my word templates are to be understood as purely relational, and ‘messages’ bearing such features do not need to be transferred along neural pathways at all.


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What we know about the functioning of the brain points, it seems to me, towards two different modes of communication between non-adjacent areas of the cortex, first relatively slow ‘activation spreading’, as in the search for a word corresponding to an image displayed visually or for a past-tense form of a presented word stem (as in Dhond et al. 2003), and secondly the rapid passing of signals via myelinated fibre bundles (like down optic nerves). It is only the latter, I hypothesize, that actually conveys contentive ‘signals’, i.e. spatio-temporal patterns of firing that correspond to individual images, including, most importantly, phonological sequences. This is after all the principal raison-d’être of words and their combinations: their symbolic functioning in internal cognition (and external communication) as part of working memory, for example in the generation of a phonological word-form in Wernicke’s area, which may be sent rapidly, as a unitary signal sequence, to Broca’s area via the arcuate fasciculus. Something similar may apply to a sub-cortical component of the ‘image/relational circuit’ in connection with the functioning of the visuospatial ‘sketchpad’ mentioned in Chapter 9.2. Extensive bundles of pyramidal axons must be involved here, the combined output of a whole multi-module aggregate, not just on/off ‘firing signals’ from a handful of individual neurons. This aspect of the model (symbolic communication) is difficult to relate to connectionist approaches, whereas the activation spreading aspect (guided by cortico-cortical call trees) is indeed compatible with connectionist approaches to word meaning such as Elman’s (2004) proposal, which treats the mental lexicon as a multidimensional state space. It is token-based and context-sensitive, the system slightly adjusting its ‘weights’ every time a token of a word is perceived in a new linguistic context. Types (categories, etc.) are emergent from the ‘hidden layers’ of the system and may be ‘nested’ one within the other; nowhere do they require ‘labels’ as handles for activation. The actual ‘structure’ of a word’s meaning lies in the internal interconnectedness of columns and their aggregates (both in their sensory and their separate functional components), and this – to follow Burnod − is constituted by invocations of the goals of the call trees that the columns embody, that is, by an ordered sequence of transmission coefficients (corresponding to features) guiding the call to its goal. If it is a visual image that is invoked, then the route towards the primary visual area of the occipital lobe will be targeted; if it is another word, then activation of the mediatory column correlating that word’s sensory and/or functional affordances will be targeted. The symmetrical connectivity of the axes of Burnod’s model is what gives ‘calls’ along these pathways their initial direction, which may subsequently branch in any direction. The call trees involved, reinforced by accreting experience, will concretize the ‘meaning’ of the word to the degree needed, and as circumstances allow. The specific features defining such goals (whether sensory or grammatical) are not to be conceived of as directly linked to all other instances of that feature (e.g. along some specific neural pathway to be labelled ‘past’ or ‘NP’ or ‘animate’ in the

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manner of Lamb), but as indicating simply that the goal of the particular call tree concerned will not satisfy the overall goal of their initiating ‘pilot module’ until an instance of that feature is found (in combination with instances of the other relevant features embodied in the multi-module network). The feature itself is probably instantiated in the pattern of synaptic connectivity within the column that will match or ‘fit’ a corresponding pattern in the affordances of other words with which it is to be combined (e.g. in forming sentences in frontal ‘grammar’ cortex). The case of the phonemically analysed input to mediatory columns from Wernicke’s area is, as suggested above, different in this respect: this type of input does suggest a specific ‘message’ transferred (via the thalamus), namely the sequences of phonemes involved, passed from one part of the cortex to another as a unitary spatio-temporal signal. However, this is a process, not a thing. The phonological circuit over which these processes course permanently links Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas, in part via the arcuate fasciculus, in part across intervening more local cortico-cortical pathways.115 In fact one might say that individual phonemes – or whole syllables representing a single complex phonetic gesture – are embodied in the surface relationship between the two areas: particular columns in Wernicke’s area activated by the reception of signals from a specific constellation of primary auditory columns are connected to corresponding columns in Broca’s area, ready to recognize the more rapid, transitory signals sent directly via the arcuate fasciculus. There is no need for a complex coded ‘message’ to be ‘passed on’ across the cortical surface like in a relay race. When transferring this claim to the question of what ‘features’ might be passed back and forth between word columns and grammatical patterns in frontal cortex, I advocate maintaining a structuralist perspective. A noun, for example, is only a noun because of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships it enters, and what counts as an animate argument (triggering certain pronouns, for example), is only such by virtue of belonging to a (to some degree language-specific) category of animate beings that contrasts with one of nonanimate entities. In fact, everything at the level of functional affordances can be envisaged as a field of potential contrasts and compatibilities across which combinatorial processes run both over the cortical surface and through symbolbased ‘short-cuts’ beneath it. Functional affordances are there to provide expectations guiding the use of words and sentences in context according to communicative conventions. Feature tags do not need to be transferred back and forth all the time. In this respect my model is similar to Lamb’s, where labels are superfluous once the whole network of relations is mapped.116 That network is so complex, however, that we as linguists cannot do without the mnemonic assistance of feature labels. Let us consider some of the specific functional ‘features’ already introduced and how they might be embodied in frontal cortex (i.e. activated by long-distance connections from word columns situated in more posterior cortical areas).


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If, for example, it can be accepted that a word’s status as a ‘noun’ is a matter of its functional affordances being oriented so as to facilitate integration with ‘verbs’ in the ‘grammar’ area of frontal cortex, what then is an ‘NP’? How does the grammar cortex recognize such a category? One possibility is that the automatic ‘recognition’ of nouns and verbs could function, via their orientation, as a trigger for ‘bootstrapping’ to the grammar template concerned. This is germane to Pinker’s (1987) acquisitional concept of ‘semantic bootstrapping’ (about which more will be said in Chapter 14) in so far as it takes the universal prelinguistic ability to distinguish between ‘things’ and processes or relations as the basis for the recognition of the functioning of nouns and verbs respectively. However, unlike Pinker, I do not regard knowledge of the latter categories as in any sense ‘innate’ as opposed to ‘emergent’. I suggest instead that it is the natural distinction between ‘terms’ and ‘predicates’ (in Dik’s sense) that is crucial, i.e. between the acts of referring to (i.e. at first pointing at) things and the act of predicating (attributing a property or action to a thing, a matter rooted in perception). The ‘image/relational’ circuit is geared to recognize the semantic distinction (things vs. events) via the ‘what’ and the ‘where/how’ streams respectively and this is ‘translated’ to the parallel inner ‘word/sentence’ circuit. This mediates between the meanings of words and their forms in the Whiteheadian relation of ‘symbolic reference’ (cf. Fortescue 2001b: 17). Langacker (1987) also argues for a universal cognitive basis for the distinction between noun and verb, whereby all verbs are seen as instantiating dynamic ‘process’ schemas, sequentially scanned (as opposed to static relation schemas, which are construed by ‘summary scanning’). Nouns, by contrast, represent a region in some cognitive domain, either bounded (‘count’ words) or not (‘mass’ words) − both are construed by summary scanning. Givón, in discussing the cognitive basis for the major parts of speech, places them on a continuum from most time-stable (prototypical nouns) to least time-stable (prototypical verbs), with adjectives occupying a Janus-like mid-position (Givón 1979: 320f.). The kind of bootstrapping involved here would in turn require, amongst other things, items to fill the NP ‘determiner’ slot in order to specify a referential term. Such items must be contained within the grammar templates themselves (as ‘pointers’ to the phonological word-forms concerned) and be under higher ‘story’ circuit control. The only other basic correlations needed to be made are those between modifying properties and corresponding adjectives and adverbs (adjunct/satellite terms) and between higher-order entities (whole states of affairs or scenarios) and complement structures standing as arguments of predications. Specifically as regards adjectives, this category needs to be recognized and slotted into the right place in NP templates, so is not some matching of labels necessary? Not necessarily so: the syntagmatic affordances of noun heads and modifying adjectives must of course align correctly, but this information is precisely what is contained in the functional affordances themselves, namely that an adjective’s syntagmatic requirements lie orthogonally positioned across those of nouns, and vice versa. It is hypothesized that these affordances

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(activated from word columns in more posterior cortex) must lie adjacent to the region of the frontal cortex specialized for grammatical patterns − or else point directly ‘into’ a sub-part of that region. An adjective will automatically activate that region of grammar cortex which contains a general adjective phrase template, just as a noun will activate a general NP template. Adjectives and nouns will thus automatically be syntactically compatible in so far as the two general templates match in the same orthogonal manner. The label ‘NP’, then, refers to nothing other than the relational category compatible with the further activation of templates at successively higher levels of structure containing it, e.g. a VP, at least up to an overall ‘S’ node. The final output (‘instructions’ to particular sets of columns in the motor system corresponding to vocal activity) will be a linear orchestration of the activity initiated by specific word columns summated along the syntagmatic axis of the ‘sentence’ circuit and targeted towards the speech organs. The expression category ‘NP’ is a mapping route through a series of hierarchically organized, contrasting possibilities that shapes the production or comprehension processes running through it in a syntagmatically conformal manner. The corresponding content is that of potentially referring to an entity of the type specified by the head noun (and any dependent modifiers) that it contains. The same perspective can be applied to semantic (paradigmatic) features. We have already seen how features indicating a word’s large-scale categorization like ‘animate being’ or ‘mass’ can be mapped bidirectionally between the word’s sensory and functional affordances, but what of still more abstract features such as +/- ‘telic’ (as introduced in the discussion around Template 18)? This is relevant to the event structure of ‘actions’ or ‘accomplishments’ (with a definite end-point) and ‘activities’ (which lack one). Here the label ‘activity’ on a verb template relates both to the open-ended time-extension of its sensory affordances along the motor-spatial dimension and to the paradigmatic axis of its functional affordances (onto which the former maps). It is the latter, functional axis which is marked for the aktionsart ‘activity’ on the template, indicating the relevance of this semantic feature for grammatical choices. Specifically, it indicates that a verb like ‘fly’ is compatible with time satellites like ‘for an hour’ but not ‘in an hour’ − unless it is converted to a telic equivalent by derivational template D2, which adds an end-point. In other words, what the ‘label’ reflects is the potential association of the verb’s functional affordances (in frontal ‘grammar’ cortex) with the template for expressions of time extension rather than time limit (e.g. one of the shape ‘for NP’ rather than ‘in NP’). Such prepositional phrase templates are activated by input from the predicate frames of verbs with the appropriate sensorimotor affordances plus a ‘story/relational circuit’ context calling for temporal (adverbial) specification, and their ‘output’ consists of the activation of the appropriate preposition (presumably via Broca’s area) plus the general NP template, as relationally defined above. Again we are dealing with a process, not a ‘thing’ or a ‘rule’.


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Particularly significant for the model’s interfacing with grammar is the question of whether to attach semantic, syntactic or pragmatic role labels to the functional affordances of individual word templates, since these functions are treated as independent parameters, assigned to different levels of structure, in those typological-functional approaches to grammar to which I subscribe. It should be evident from the preceding that it is semantic roles or functions (such as ‘agent’ and ‘recipient’) that the semantic (‘story’ or ‘relational’) circuit recognizes. Syntactic roles/functions (such as ‘subject’ and ‘object’) adhere, on the other hand, to the intermediate level of ‘grammar’ templates, in so far as they are relevant for a particular language (if not, semantic and/or pragmatic functions will suffice according to FG theory). These are essentially generalizations across semantic functions, so they should be easily accommodated by the generalizing/ abstracting function of frontal column aggregates. But what of pragmatic functions like ‘topic’ and ‘focus’? These are part of higher level ‘discourse management’, more dependent on context than syntactic roles are. I assume that they crucially involve the ‘relational circuits’ of both hemispheres, which may co-determine initial template choice by the left hemisphere at an early top-down stage of sentence production. Burnod does not address this matter himself (he only deals with context-free declarative/ narrative utterances). However, he does suggest that calls are constantly being sent out by the ‘relational’ circuits of both hemispheres in order to ‘fill in’ missing information concerning ‘elementary situations’, trying to restore equilibrium (op. cit.: 279ff).117 These translate into linguistic form as questionwords, which are prototypical ‘focus’ items, and such calls can be seen as a major motivation behind the pragmatic modulation of sentences. Whereas the relational circuit constantly strives for ‘coherent situations’, the inner, linguistic one strives for ‘coherent narrative’. Pragmatic functions like ‘focus’ – plus the related distinctions between (contextually) presupposed and asserted, given and new information − represent the most superordinate level of linguistic function assignment (below that of the ‘discourse act’ itself, the speechact-in-context), and may, as suggested in Chapter 3, be right-hemisphere controlled. I have chosen to indicate on the predicate frames of individual verbs only semantic roles/functions (alongside word-class categories and event structure parameters). This is not just because this avoids assigning higher functions ‘too early’, but also because it allows direct mapping between the ‘outer’ relational/ image circuit and the ‘inner’ word/sentence one in connection with calls from the former to linguistic forms that express its (semantic) categories and structures. Only on Template 59, which is purely grammatical, does the relevant syntactic role ‘subject’ appear (it presupposes the process of subject-assignment in English). As regards which precise paradigmatic features − including those indicating nominal categories and verbal event types − need to be recognized and labelled

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on the model, the same overall criterion applies: if and only if the ‘label’ has grammatical consequences for the choice of a corresponding expression type (or ‘construction’) is it justified. This is in practice not such an easy matter to decide, however, since, as we saw in Chapter 8, there are constructions which are to some degree lexically open and others which are lexically closed or ‘encapsulated’, and more specific ones are related to more general ones by what construction grammarians term ‘inheritance’. My general approach is to minimalize the number of such categories as much as possible, starting from those that can be most simply mapped onto sensory affordances − this includes the ‘schemas’ for basic action verbs (as discussed in Chapter 7.2) upon which more complex verbal meanings can be built up containing the same inferential core. In Appendix 2 can be found a partial breakdown of English vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) according to necessary paradigmatic features, i.e. those that have a clear effect on grammatical choices, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic. They are all mappable onto the sensory or temporal features of the ‘image’ and ‘story /relational’ circuits, or onto socio-cultural ‘scenarios’ or ‘frames’. Some of the more abstract items (like ‘mass’, ‘shape’ and ‘energy’) refer to dimensions to which primary (somato-)sensory areas are geared to respond, and others (such as ‘gradable’ and ‘countable’) to actions based on perception, but all of these are pre-linguistically ‘testable’, i.e. represent general perceptual dimensions relevant to the functioning of those areas. Just like syntagmatic features, paradigmatic ones are part of ‘procedural knowledge’. The fact that many of them have corresponding English words ‘attached’ to them (the result of human introspection and science) should not obscure their subconscious, ‘routinized’ nature. In principle, the items given should suffice to cover all of Pustojevsky’s grammatically relevant qualia that are not individual words of English. This includes the ‘selection restrictions’ associated with nouns: these are limited to just those features that are necessary to define a class of nouns associated with a verb or group of verbs, and vice versa as regards such restrictions associated with verbs. Thus ‘object bought’ is not a general feature of any set of (common) nouns in English. Conversely, the object argument of the verb ‘buy’ is a semantically open-ended goal/patient NP – only the macro-functional scenario for buying limits what is socially recognizable (in any given time and place) as being the possible object of such a transaction. Note that some of the features listed are assignable to sensory affordances alone, some to macro-functional affordances alone, and some to both. Some – such as ‘game’ – can be mapped onto a whole family-resemblance chain of macro-functional affordances. It is important to bear in mind that individual features can be invalidated or overridden in particular derived combinations (as illustrated in Chapter 7.1), or by metaphorical/ metonymic extension (as discussed in 9.2). The delimitation of what is ‘grammatically relevant’ will be returned to in 15.1.


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12.3 How call trees and combination matrices might function How exactly might a call tree ‘searching’ for an abstract feature from the functional affordances of a word column actually work in neurological terms? And how might it interface with the other key neurological aspect of Burnod’s model, the ‘combination matrix’? Although I obviously do not have a complete answer to these questions, I can at least make a first attempt at getting closer to one. Let me start with Burnod’s general schema for the chaining of cortical columns into call trees (op. cit.: 123), reproduced here as Figure 7. These individual automata, starting from a ‘pilot’ column or module (upper right) which may be taken as equivalent to a mediatory word column on my model, form sprouting, tree-like connections to other columns, at first at random but with those that bring the call signal closer to fulfilling the network’s overall ‘goal’ (when cortical inputs and thalamic inputs are ‘in register’) becoming progressively selected and strengthened. The call tree, as schematized specifically for sensorimotor movements, has three dimensions: the set of possible actions called by the same goal (the striated lines), as determined by its weighted

Figure 7 A call tree linking columns (Burnod 1990: 124)

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connections; the actual sequence of incremental movements (leading back to the pilot module from the furthest reach of the call to the lower left); and the goal distance (each action, starting from the lower left, bringing the goal closer). Each step ‘back’ towards the pilot module represents a partial goal. The spreading activation is thus initially out from the pilot module towards the furthest reach established (lower left), which results in a sequence of actions (here physical movements), each step producing thalamic activation of the next module in the sequence back towards the pilot module, where such activation will satisfy the initial goal.118 Now Burnod’s characterization of a call tree in terms of successive stages towards satisfying an overall goal, which he primarily presented in connection with sensory affordances and somato-motor movements, can easily be extended to functional features, for example the feature ‘mass word’ on Template 3 for ‘water’. Activation of the column via phonological input (the word spoken or read in isolation, say) would initiate call trees of both the sensory and the functional sort. In the case of the feature ‘mass word’ this would correspond to a search for any frontal grammar template that ‘matches’ this feature, in particular the variant of the NP template that ensures correct singular agreement of non-countable subject head nouns with verbs (and limits the articles that may precede the head). Note that this feature, although it is language-specific as regards its functional effect and distribution, also potentially maps down to a wide array of sensory affordances, depending on the particular kind of substance involved. The common property is ‘unboundedness’ (a matter of lacking containment). This, however, is a very abstract concept, reflecting the general proclivity of the cortex as a whole to search for ‘gestalt’ boundedness (and compensate for its lack), and can hardly be assigned its own distinct localization (any more than the feature ‘animate’, discussed in Chapter 6, can). Similar remarks could be made concerning call trees realizing functional features of aspect like ‘iterative’ or ‘telic’, only in this case mapping to the potential sensory affordance involves the motor-spatial (frontal-parietal) axis for verbs. At a somewhat more general level, one can envisage call trees instantiated in the connectivity of lexical ‘multi-modules’ as functioning in the following manner, starting from the ‘bottom’, phonological level. Any sensory cortical column, according to Burnod’s model, will only be fully activated – i.e. produce axonal ‘firing’ − under certain conditions, namely (to simplify somewhat) when there is both strong thalamic input (from the sensory environment) and strong cortical input (from other columns). If the thalamic input is lacking, a call is sent out to find and activate one (however indirectly). In the case of a mediatory word column that has been weakly activated ‘top down’ via its meaning, if there is no thalamic input from the corresponding phonological column in Wernicke’s area a call will be sent out to reach and activate that column.


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Conversely, a column in Wernicke’s area activated by external auditory input will send out a call for the corresponding mediatory word column if there is no strong input from that cortical source. The resultant ‘feedforward’ action will result ultimately in the activation of the whole multi-module network embodying the meaning of the word (which, when returning as feedback, will provide the lacking strong cortical activation allowing the pilot module to fire). ‘Firing’, note, is equivalent to carrying out (via a series of axonal bursts) the action whose function the column represents – in the case of an aggregate of columns in Wernicke’s area that could be the potential production of the phonological word, activated via a long-distance connection to a corresponding articulatory instruction aggregate in Broca’s area. Moving up a level, if a column embodying the micro-functional (grammatical) affordances of a word that has been weakly activated is lacking input from one or more features of a grammar template in order to attain the compound strength needed to fire, that feature will be ‘called’ in order to initiate the feedback producing the missing input that allows full activation. This could, for instance, be the feature ‘telic’ on a verb’s paradigmatic axis, or ‘NP’ on its syntagmatic one (for its agent argument). Thalamic input to columns in association cortex, note, need not be from the external environment, but can be inter-cortical (Burnod op. cit.: 184), e.g. from grammar templates rather than from primary sensory input as in phonological columns. Similarly, if input from a macro-functional scenario is required to enable firing (e.g. that for ‘hunting’ in connection with the verb ‘shoot’) but it is lacking, a call will be sent out towards the column(s) embodying (or mediating) it. Once this happens it will provide by feedback the strong thalamic input necessary for the word column to fire. How many distinct features/affordances are required for a word column to ‘fire’ is presumably a matter of the tuning of coefficients in particular context types or eigenstates (via learning). Perhaps the most useful way to grasp how the call trees corresponding to micro-functional affordances in frontal grammar cortex might function is to see their ‘goals’ as initiating searches (via open-ended ‘weak transversal coupling’) for the nearest activated word representation bearing the matching (and suitably oriented) feature. This might be the predicate frame of a verb or some other part of speech already activated for expression by an early phase of the ‘relational/story’ to ‘sentence’ circuit translation process. It would not be necessary for the call to go all the way back to the mediatory column for the word concerned if its firing pattern has already been ‘copied’ into a temporary buffer close to grammar cortex – perhaps the same frontal area where the word’s micro-functional features are gathered according to the model. Such a call would not have to be directed individually to all potential word columns in the mental lexicon since it is assumed that only an already activated word will match the call’s goal (i.e. ‘gate’ it or resonate with it). This would limit the

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matching process to one or two candidates already in the buffer. If the match is not perfect, further searching amongst semantically related words in the lexicon (bearing the same feature) could be carried out. Micro-functional features are, remember, essentially constraints on the combinatoriality of words. It should be repeated here, to clarify a possible terminological misunderstanding, that ‘call trees’ in Burnod’s usage are spread over whole networks of columns interrelated by ‘modular transmission coefficients’ and fine-tuned by successive ‘continuous coefficients’. But there is flexibility built into them, especially as regards the grammar-lexicon interface. They should not be seen as mini-programs that are fully instantiated in the synaptic connectivity of individual word columns. They may be initiated by any column within the network once the ‘multi-module’ has been established.119 Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that the synaptic connectivity of the individual mediatory word column represents the basis for fairly deterministic (at least probabilistic) processes that will lead to the activation of further columns corresponding to individual ‘features’ as sub-goals, which in turn are necessary to furnish the thalamic input required to ‘satisfy’ the overall goal of the mediatory column itself. What now of the ‘combination matrix’? This is described by Burnod primarily for the integration of spatial and sensory information about visually perceived ‘objects’ in the posterior part of the ‘image’ circuit, but he applies it also to the orthogonal integration of vowels and consonants in Wernicke’s area (op. cit.: 209), as represented on Figure 8 below. This he locates at the intersection of the temporal and parietal lobes and assigns the specific property of ‘melodic memorization’ for learning fixed phonemic sequences (‘words’) in temporal cortex. The modular ‘bands’ of a cortical map matrix are often symmetrically orthogonal to each other across intervening sulci (op. cit.: 163ff), as in the case of the continuous adjustment of stable perceptual forms during changing retinal input, and this appears to be the case also around the supramarginal gyrus in the case of Wernicke’s area. As can be seen on Figure 8, every band of the temporal map (AT), which is specialized for combinations of frequencies (vowel formants), is directly related to every band of the parietal map (SA), which is specialized for formant transitions in time (consonants). M2 is the frontal motor area controlling the speech organs. Any combination of inputs from the primary auditory area that prove to be ‘meaningful’ can be reinforced by call trees and their weighted coefficients. I propose that such matrices lie at both ends of the ‘what’ and the ‘where/ how’ routes of Burnod’s ‘word’ and ‘sentence’ (sub-)circuits, linking them into a single broad ‘circuit’ or ‘tier’ within association cortex. In fact the ‘combination matrix’ (corresponding to Damasio and Damasio’s ‘convergence zone’) is a quite general principle of cortical organization: also the hippocampus, the cerebellar cortex, and much frontal cortex (including ‘grammar’ cortex) apparently displays the typical division into alternating bands where input from


Figure 8 209)

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A combination matrix for learning phonemic sequences (Burnod 1990:

different sources meet at the same transversal − i.e. ‘vertical’ − layer of the cortex (op. cit.: 161f.). Burnod specifically mentions the various redundant sets of frontal combinations between his ‘time’ and ‘sensorimotor’ axes (op. cit.: 165). The basic function of this organization is to ensure that a given cortical band of activation (or ‘information flow’) from one source makes direct contact with all points it traverses on an orthogonally oriented band. Thereafter it is a matter of the developmental principle whereby neural paths that cross (sharing perhaps some common neurons) will activate each other once a synaptic connection has been established by basic Hebbian correlation learning (roughly: ‘neurons that fire together wire together’).120 In terms of the ‘image’ circuit combination matrix described by Burnod, the parietal association area concerned ensures that a given sensory ‘object’ (registered along the temporal ‘what’ route) can be tracked through constant monitoring despite its ever-shifting position (as registered along the ‘where’ route). This function transferred to the inner ‘word’ circuit could be understood as ensuring that words referring to ‘objects’ on the ‘what’ route are held in a constant relation to their sentential context, i.e. the predicate frames of verbs referring to actions and movements, co-activated with them along the ‘where/how’ route, despite globally shifting discourse and real-world context.121 At the frontal, ‘relational’ end of the ‘image/relational’ circuit the combination matrix organization would presumably function so as to maintain constant focus on foregrounded events or states, despite shifting relational contexts. Transferred to the ‘sentence’ circuit, this same function could be understand as ensuring that propositional structures are held constant so that referring expressions

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(NPs) are consistently related to the correct syntactic ‘slots’ into which they fit (in predicate frames of verbs, other NPs, PPs, etc.). Something like this would be needed for tracking co-reference relations and forestalling the association of activated nouns (or the NPs they heads) with arbitrary slots in grammar templates all the time. How would the combination matrix principle of crossing ‘bands’ help support such functions in all four areas? Recall what was said about the transversal coupling of cortical columns in grammar cortex in Chapter 3, namely that the hierarchical relationship of successive syntactic branchings may be implemented by transversal couplings of upper and lower levels of cortical columns. Thus a phrase structure ‘rule’ could be implemented by a transversal coupling effected through a matrix combination of input from two crossing streams. Recall further Burnod’s characterization (cited in 12.1) of words as displaying strong transversal coupling between upper and lower parts of the implicated columns, whereas sentence (grammar) columns display weak transversal coupling, allowing any suitable word or phrase to fill their syntagmatic ‘slots’ (Burnod op. cit.: 248f.).122 A grammar template instantiated in a combination matrix could integrate lexical information from the ‘what’ and the ‘where/ how’ routes by projecting a constant information flow corresponding to activation of a nominal expression across the whole array of sentential/phrasal grammar templates, potential contact being made via weak transversal couplings of lower level (or thalamic) input from individual word columns to generalized abstract patterns at the upper level. Actual ‘contact’ (resulting in the accretion of a well-formed sentence) would only be made with those general patterns that have been activated by synchronous information flow from both routes at the same level, primarily the predicate frames associated with individual verbs and the functional affordances of nominals filling their argument slots, and would require the matching of all implicated paradigmatic and syntagmatic features. The relationship between combination matrices and call trees here should be evident and can be summarized thus: transversal coupling produces call trees by sequencing actions (Burnod op. cit.: 103ff). On Burnod’s Figures 3-19 and 3-20 (op. cit.: 164ff) can be seen how call trees create new functional circuits by relating modular bands of columns with different orientations such that each band in the one map crosses every band in the other. Surely then it is logical that columns forming grammar templates should be organized by call trees since these correspond to the processes that are involved in laying down such templates in the first place (according to ‘weak transversal couplings’). The relationship between word columns and grammar columns is bidirectional: the functional features of words call appropriate grammar templates, and grammar templates call words that fit their categories.

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The Neural Representation of Context

At various points during the preceding Chapters I have suggested that the contexts required to complete the semantic profile of individual words – the macro-functional ‘scenarios’ and ‘frames’ of the model − might be stored in the right hemisphere. This is also suggested by neuroimaging studies such as Martin and Weisberg (2003), which shows strong (anterior) right-hemisphere lateralization for ‘social vignettes’ (I shall return to this below). Now it is time to lay my cards on the table and make a bold hypothesis: I suggest that not only is non-verbal communicative context essentially a right-hemisphere matter (as claimed in Chapter 1.2, citing Joanette et al. 1990), but that the connection between mediatory word columns in the left hemisphere to relevant scenarios/ frames is instantiated through commissural links to corresponding contralateral areas.123 Let us call this the ‘Contextual Symmetry hypothesis’. Thus the short oblique double lines separating macro-function scenario circles from word templates can specifically be taken to indicate long-distance links to the non-linguistically specialized right hemisphere, as opposed to the left frontal lobe, where micro-functional grammatical relations are handled. This meshes nicely with another suggestion I have made, namely that the entities I have represented (in circles) as context-defining scenarios and frames actually correspond to mediatory columns (or their aggregates) in association cortex in the right hemisphere. These abstract away from a wider array of sensory affordances, just as mediatory word columns do, only here they represent essentially non-verbal event types, much simplified in their internal structure, that can be associated with mediatory columns in the left hemisphere − though by no means in a simple one-to-one fashion. It could be that they display different stable ‘eigenstates’ (i.e. discrete variants depending on still broader contextual input), just as I have proposed for mediatory word columns. They can be envisaged as stretching all the way from posterior to frontal cortex parallel to the ‘where/how’ and ‘what’ routes in the left hemisphere, where the ‘word/ sentence’ circuit is specialized for linguistic representations. Just as word columns anchored in more anterior cortex have a more time-extended, less perceptually concrete nature than those in more posterior areas, right-hemisphere context-mediating columns in frontal cortex would be of a more time-extended

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nature than those situated in more posterior areas. In particular, one would logically expect ‘scenarios’ of sequenced actions (such as stages in a ceremony or in any type of social activity) to be mediated by frontal right-hemisphere columns, whereas one would expect more static ‘frames’ (e.g. for animals typically found on a farm) to be mediated by more posterior areas, in an analogous manner to the linguistically expressed distinction in the left hemisphere. This arrangement would facilitate communication (and translation) back and forth between image-based and word-based representations, but the raison-d’être of mediatory context columns may not be geared specifically to language at all: even deaf-mutes and pre-linguistic children need to be able to abstract situation types from the complex world they perceive around them and to make inferences and preparations for further action on that basis. This should not be taken to imply that the left hemisphere has no representations of context at all (other than grammatical), nor that the right hemisphere has no representation of words at all. We are talking here of dominance, not of absolute differences.124 In both hemispheres one may expect the same basic functional division of labour between association cortex in the temporal lobe for the synthesis of objects and persons, in the parietal lobe for the location of objects/persons in places, and in the frontal lobe for spatio-temporal scenarios involving objects/persons doing things in places. Let us consider now the repercussions this hypothesis has for the interpretation of some specific ‘scenarios’ that have been proposed during the course of this book. The first, for ‘shooting game’, was introduced in connection with Template 12. The circle can now be seen as a mediatory context column relevant (and neurally connected) to the meaning of the verb ‘shoot’, but associated to a broader range of (right-hemisphere) sensory associations than the verb itself. From this broader array it abstracts only those features crucial to defining the scenario of shooting game associated with the use of that verb. It would be reasonable to suppose that it is situated in a right hemisphere association area that is level with − and symmetrical to − a corresponding area in the left hemisphere where the mediatory word column for ‘shoot’ is situated (presumably in premotor frontal cortex). It has become tuned by correlation learning to ‘resonate’ with it through bidirectional feedback. But what of the other elements in the circle apart from the core meaning of the verb itself – in particular the concept corresponding to the word ‘rifle’? The word column for this word may, as we have seen, be situated in a different part of the left hemisphere, in the parietal (or temporal) lobe, but with a secondary (functional) component in premotor (frontal) cortex. Here we can appeal to the notion of the ‘multi-module’, just as we have done for left-hemisphere verbal meaning networks. The scenario for shooting game must link many parts of the contralateral hemisphere, but the part of the network that I hypothesize to be situated level with that for the verb ‘shoot’ on the left hemisphere is just its mediatory column (= pilot module). The word column for ‘rifle’ is linked to that mediatory column more indirectly, via the sensory affordances of such an

Neural Representation of Context

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object, as represented in the ‘image’ circuits of both hemispheres. These can be reached either from the word column or from the mediatory column for the ‘game shooting’ scenario. The more abstract labels ‘instrument’, ‘agent’ and ‘patient’ in the circle are to be understood as perceptual/functional features of experience and not limited to meshing with grammar − the latter use of such semantic features is surely phylogenetically and ontogenetically parasitic upon the former. We can now better understand the relationship between this scenario and the related one, ‘shooting to kill’ on Template 16. It was stated in 5.1 that the latter ‘contains’ the former, much as a hypernym ‘contains’ its hyponyms. This kind of relationship – as well as more partial correspondences − has been consistently portrayed on the model through the use of overlapping scenario circles. It can now be more readily seen what this implies in the light of the Contextual Symmetry hypothesis. The scenarios ‘shooting game’ and ‘shooting to kill’ are just two of several contextual networks associated with the contra-lateral word column for the verb ‘shoot’, each one an abstraction from a wider array of sensory/perceptual affordances and anchored in its own mediatory column, presumably in adjacent association cortex. Each shares part of its respective network with the other. The ‘shooting game’ network adds to the ‘shooting to kill’ one the specific feature (among others) of the object killed being a game animal. The broadest, most inclusive scenario is the act of shooting any firearm for whatever purpose, but this is so broad that it is in fact unlikely to constitute a useful scenario at all – all the useful scenarios here involve shooting a specific kind of firearm for some significant purpose. It has the same status as an abstract hypernym like ‘animate’ discussed in Chapter 6, a feature of numerous specific scenarios but not one constituting a scenario on its own. More specific related scenarios are easier to understand as independent but overlapping, as for example those for ‘murder’ and ‘assassinate’ on Template 17, which both may further overlap with the ‘shoot to kill’ scenario, but do not necessarily do so. Note here that some of the crucial features abstracted by the respective mediatory columns are of a fairly abstract nature. This is typical of scenarios that depend on language for their existence: concepts corresponding to the abstractions ‘political’ and ‘illegal’ have no focused perceptual reality, only the scenario itself does, as the outward manifestation of social realities ‘moulded’ by words like ‘murder’ and ‘assassinate’. These secondary scenarios, dependant on words learnt in social contexts, can only be laid down after a speaker has grasped the more basic scenario of ‘killing’ (which is of course ingredient in both the more abstract scenarios). In other words, the scenarios for ‘murdering’ and ‘assassinating’ are ‘carved’ out of the pre-existent ‘killing’ scenario by association with the words as they are learnt, along with appropriate sociocultural contexts. The ‘scenarios’ attached to Template 20 for abstract nominals ‘love’ and ‘liberty’ are more static than the preceding ones (the term ‘frames’ would be preferable here), but the same principles adhering to mediatory context columns

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can be applied to them, in this case involving important limbic ingredients that are less easy to put into words. The contextual associations with these two words are extremely far-flung and complex, but there is nevertheless a core – just a handful of prototypical contexts plus the specific emotional reactions associated with them – which constitutes the essential meaning of the words and distinguishes them from, say, ‘captivity’ and ‘repression’ or ‘hate’ and ‘lust’. The case of ‘holiday’ (Template 21) is just as complex, but more easily rendered explicit, since the contexts involved do not rely so heavily on limbic affect as on socially circumscribed circumstances. The way in which the multiple scenarios and frames adhering to this word overlap was described in the adjacent text. Again it is a matter of partially overlapping contextual networks. Recall in particular how some of the scenarios pointed towards contrasting contexts, for instance ‘work’ from ‘(days) off work’ and ‘weekdays’ from ‘weekend’. Contextual networks can thus be seen to contain their own structural relations of contrast as well as of inclusion, just as the more fine-grained networks anchored in word columns can. The still more abstract scenarios or frames like ‘truth’ adhering to the word ‘right’ (Template 23) would appear at first sight to be more problematic to envisage in terms of perceptually based networks, but, as explained in the adjacent text, these should be understood procedurally. For the word ‘right’ to be used correctly requires testing for the ‘fit’ of the entity concerned with external (perceptual) or internal (memory-conformal) ‘reality’. These scenarios, I would therefore suggest, like the contralateral word column itself, are located in relatively anterior cortex, and are involved in a regulatory function in a wide range of social behaviours. Something similar can be said of speech-act verbs like ‘say’ and ‘claim’ (Template 24), though here with the features specific to speech acts represented in the relevant mediatory scenario columns (they are to be understood as call trees, as elsewhere). These have much to do not only with the conception of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ but also with ‘Theory of mind’, i.e. the speaker’s representation of the addressee’s point of view, plus knowledge of the conventions of communication − pre-frontal cortex is crucially involved in all these high-level contextual functions, which include the Gricean principles regulating communicative behaviour. The broader ‘say’ network is ‘included’ in that of more specific ‘claim’ in the sense that the mediatory column anchoring the network for the latter contains all the criterial features of the former plus more of its own – although in the ‘hypernymic’ sense of inclusion one can also say that ‘say’ includes or embraces ‘claim’. We see here the potential ambiguity of the term ‘inclusion’: it may well be that mediatory contextual columns for specific assertive performatives like ‘claim’, though anchoring more fine-grained networks, do literally fall within the cortical territory covered by the broader ‘say’ context (and/or stretch further in an anterior direction), in which case the situation is again as proposed in Chapter 6 for the relationship of verbally expressed


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hypernyms and their hyponyms. The contextual network for ‘claim’ would be carved out (or filled out internally) from that of the broader word in the process of learning its meaning, which presupposes knowing the meaning of ‘say’ already. ‘More inclusive’ should then be understood as defining the overall cortical territory within which the more specific, fine-grained networks are contained. It is only in a more abstract, logical sense that ‘claim’ includes (the semantics of) ‘say’. Compare also the relationship between ‘thinking’, ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’ on Template 47. The ‘scenarios’ associated with deontic and epistemic modals like ‘must’ on Template 26 also refer to the broad areas of socially sanctioned ‘truth’ on the one hand and ‘reality’ on the other. They too involve ‘testing against standards’, and calling them ‘spaces’ (as I did in Chapter 5.3) is thus rather misleading. By comparing these templates with that for discourse adverbial ‘apparently’ (Template 25) the distinction I am now making between ‘scenarios’ and other types of macro-functional relations should become clearer: in the case of adverbial words like this whose function is intimately tied in with grammar, including that of ‘translating’ events into sentences set in coherent discourse, there is no need of indicating a specific scenario. The word ‘apparently’ may nevertheless serve right-hemisphere pragmatic intentions, i.e. be ‘called’ by illocutionary (and broader perlocutionary) intentions that do constitute contexts in their own right. Such words are indeed ‘function words’, but ones functioning at the higher level of regulating ongoing discourse. Turning now to more static ‘frames’, such as those of social kinship and farmyard animals, relevant respectively to ‘father’ and ‘bull’ on Templates 30 and 31, I would suggest, following the line of reasoning presented above, that the mediatory columns corresponding to these may be symmetrically situated on contralateral (right-hemisphere) cortex, opposite to the mediatory word columns as analysed. The overlap of the ‘cattle’ and broader ‘farm animals’ contexts is analogous to the relationship between ‘claim’ and ‘say’ discussed above, despite the very different type of ‘context’ involved. The selection of just one of the several ‘scenarios’ adhering to ‘strap’ on Template 32 when it is combined with a specifying modifier like ‘shoulder’ illustrates the general process whereby multiple contexts adhering to individual words are narrowed down to just one by integration into broader ‘online’ contexts. The sub-cortical mechanism described by Pulvermüller for selecting competing networks (2002: 80f.) may be relevant here. The relationship between the scenarios for ‘fight’ and ‘beat’ on Template 42 is a little different from the kind of network overlap (‘inclusion’) between verb contexts discussed above, in so far as ‘beating’ is not a necessary part of the ‘fighting’ scenario. It is a possible result of it (as is ‘losing’). Nevertheless, the inner structure of the ‘fighting’ scenario is such that its purpose is either ‘beating’ or (causing) ‘losing’. The latter, resultative sections of the networks concerned probably lie in more posterior cortex than the dynamic ‘struggling’

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part, i.e. level with the extension of the ‘fight’ word network back along the ‘where/how’ axis that leads into parietal cortex in the opposite hemisphere, as described. ‘Conquer’ (Template 43) contains a further overlap with the broad context of ‘history’, since it will be activated rather than ‘beat’ in the circumstances defined by the intersection of the ‘beat’ context with the ‘history’ context, as specified still more specifically in the ‘vanquishing’ context directly associated with ‘conquer’. I characterized the choice of this word as ‘stylistic’ (i.e. suitable for use in historical narrative, not daily speech about fights between individuals).125 The processes involved in ‘qualia unification’, as illustrated on Templates 48 to 50, are essentially the same as those involved in determining the meaning of noun compounds such as ‘shoulder strap’, but note here that the result of combining ‘opening’ with ‘door’ on Template 49 is treated as an established scenario in its own right (‘opening a door’) with which both words are associated − this is surely justified independently of language. The same applies also to ‘baking a cake’ (Template 48), but note that ‘cake’ is further associated with another scenario, ‘eating cake’, which does not overlap with that for ‘baking a cake’ except indirectly (since both obviously refer to ‘cake’). The relationship between ‘house’ and ‘door’ on Template 50 is of a quite different kind: the mediatory column for the ‘frame’ for a house must, according to the Contextual Symmetry hypothesis, lie in more posterior right-hemisphere cortex, opposite to the word column for that word, whereas the scenario for ‘opening a door’ must presumably be in the frontal (premotor) territory opposite the mediatory column for the word ‘open’. How are the two connected? First, recall that the ‘meronymic’ relationship between ‘door’ and ‘house’ was treated at the level of sensory affordances of the respective nouns within the same overall left temporal lobe area, as indicated by the convention of a broken line linking the two templates at that level. But they are also linked via the higher-level scenario of typical daily activities carried out within a house (needed, amongst other things, to specify the functions of the individual rooms of a house). As an ‘artefact’ a door has a humanly defined purpose, and qualia of this nature are typically in the form of associations with actions undertaken with the artefact concerned, as we saw with ‘rifle’ being associated with ‘shoot’. The link between the word column for ‘door’ (in posterior left-hemisphere cortex) and the active scenario (in right-hemisphere frontal cortex) would then be via the symmetrical posterior right-hemisphere frame for ‘house’ (containing ‘door’), which is in turn involved in the extended network for ‘opening a door’, anchored in frontal right-hemisphere cortex. This contextual network overlaps with that for other activities undertaken in the house, and this brings us back to the word column for ‘house’ again. This array of connections between sub-networks forms a complex overall network that covers widely separated parts of the cortex but nevertheless functions (oscillates) as a coherent, self-contained whole.


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Finally, in Template 56 from Arabic, we have an example of a situation where two words are joined by both kinds of higher-level links that we have seen: a grammatical one of a derivational nature (in grammar cortex) relating a verbal and a nominal form from the same tri-consonantal ‘root’, and a shared scenario of ‘writing’, which contains both a writer and an object written, as well as the action itself. Though such multiple links are common in connection with derivational processes (it would be relevant for the relation of ‘writer’ to ‘write’ in English, for instance), it is rather rare amongst the languages of the world that the scenario itself should be explicitly symbolized by an abstract and generalizable phonemic frame as in the case of Arabic. To sum up so far, I have attempted to show in this Chapter that characterizing lexically relevant contexts in discrete, analytic terms rather than in a fuzzy and impressionistic manner is not an impossible goal. This has in fact proved to be a fundamental limitation of most forms of cognitive linguistics, which rightly stress the importance of context for semantics but cannot provide a detailed and motivated account of non-linguistic contexts beyond the most basic (thereafter resorting to ‘metaphor’). This is precisely what can be provided by the conceptual tool of the ‘mediatory context column’, which abstracts just those features of a wider, richer network of perceptual (and social, word-shaped) experience that are needed to recognize specific situation types relevant to the meaning of specific words. The Contextual Symmetry hypothesis that I have proposed states that the right-hemisphere mediatory columns for scenarios map both onto mediatory word columns in the left hemisphere and onto overlapping series of experiential scenarios in the right hemisphere that contain much more elaborate sensory associations, thus forming ‘hyper-networks’ distributed widely over both hemispheres. This provides an ongoing check on the functional ‘harmony’ between the two hemispheres as they engage in joint tasks involving both perception and language. This picture is corroborated by some recent neuroimaging studies of the cortical distribution of social scenarios. Let us focus in particular on that of Martin and Weisberg (2003) mentioned above. In a clever fMRI experiment, the authors compared the cortical activation in subjects following the presentation of animated sequences of neutral geometrical shapes that could be interpreted either as familiar scenarios of social interaction (‘social vignettes’ such as playing baseball, dancing, fishing, sharing, scaring, or playing on a seesaw) or as mechanical processes involving tools or machines. There was a clear predominance of right-hemisphere activity in the former case, in the same areas known to be active in the recognition of animate beings and human faces (including ‘biological motion’), as opposed to left-hemisphere dominance in the case of mechanical objects. The specific areas involved included the (right) superior temporal sulcus (known to be related to the movement of animate beings), the right amygdela (part of the loosely defined ‘limbic system’ known to be centrally

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involved in ‘social’ emotion, including the recognition of facial expressions), and the right ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (in close connection to the right amygdela), part of the wider network believed to be involved in the perception and regulation of social behaviour and in ‘Theory of mind’ (op. cit.: 583ff).126 The authors see this network as a core system for understanding social interaction, one that may have evolved for perceiving and knowing about animacy, causality, and agency. They add that higher-order concepts may have emerged ‘from the interaction of more elemental processing capacities’, which suggests the metaphorical extension of more basic ‘image schemas’. Another area that they mention as activated in the condition of ‘social vignette’ is the anterior portion of the right temporal lobe, an area known to be implicated in the retrieval of non-verbal information and reasoning (op. cit.: 584). It is possible that this last link in the network reflects a right-hemisphere analogue to the micro-functional affordances of words, only here associated with more coarse-grained combinatory contexts. By the same token, there may be right-hemisphere analogues to left-hemisphere ‘derivations’, here involved in more holistic, non-propositional reasoning processes of expanding, merging and changing experiential scenarios.

14

Acquisition

Having seen how the model could function in the individual adult brain, we need to ask how it might be acquired by young children. Burnod (op. cit.: 263–72) has a good deal to say on the broad subject of the acquisition of his adaptive neural network by children, starting with the embryology of the human cortex, but I shall not attempt to repeat that in detail here. The essential thing to bear in mind is that the symmetrical alignment of the auditory and visual dimensions on his model (forming a major sensory ‘axis’) is the precondition for the symbolic correlation of (phonological) sound and (visual) image. In this Chapter I shall focus upon the way a child could in principle acquire a mental lexicon in the form of ‘multi-modules’ of inter-connected ‘word columns’. I do not assume a completely ‘empty’ cortical lattice as a tabula rasa but start from a stage where it can be taken that the pre-linguistic child has already acquired a wide array of sensorimotor image and relational schemas on the ‘image-relational’ circuits of both cortical hemispheres. Unlike Pinker (as discussed in Chapter 12.2), I do not see the involvement of a genetically determined language acquisition device in the Chomskyan tradition as necessary, but only (a) the predisposition of the child to communicate verbally, and (b) the organization of the dominant hemisphere of the human cortex such as to facilitate the symbolic coding of images and relations onto a ‘privileged’ inner, phonological ‘circuit’ via association areas mediating word and sentence meanings. The general hierarchical ‘stacking’ properties of frontal cortex and the specific connectivity of the dominant inferior frontal lobe with the temporal and parietal lobes are, from the present perspective, sufficient to explain most of what goes under the rubric of ‘Universal Grammar’, but I shall elaborate no further on this matter, since it is only tangentially relevant here. More relevant to the present model is the discussion by Pulvermüller and Schumann (1994: 698f. and 714) of the onset of myelination in different parts and layers of the cortex of the developing child. They distinguish between A and B systems of cortical connectivity. The former involves the apical dendrites in the upper (supragranular) levels of pyramidal cell columns plus their far-reaching main axons, the basis of long-distance networks, whereas the latter, B systems form more local networks that involve the basal dendrites and axonal

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collaterals from the lower (infragranular) levels of cortical columns. Though the distinction is found in all cortical areas, it is logical to suppose that it is the exploitation of local B-systems in the ‘inner’ linguistic areas (around Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas) that instantiates phonology and syntax respectively, whereas the sensory and macro-functional associations of individual words are organized in more far-flung A-systems.127 It turns out that B-systems generally myelinate earlier than A-systems, which is consonant with what is known of the implicit, automatic nature of phonology and syntax as opposed to the more explicit and malleable nature of lexical semantics. This does not imply that phonology and syntax is necessarily fully innate, only that the associations forming the basis of the implicit sequencing of linguistic units – the ontogenetically earliest developed components of the language faculty – are laid down in local B-systems that are virtually impermeable to consciousness. The first stage involves the association of sequences of phonemes into syllables during the babbling stage (the consolidation of the ‘phonological circuit’), followed by the abstraction of reoccurring sequences of syllables into phonological words associated with specific situation/object types. (Later these will form the basis of the ‘word/sentence’ circuit.) Explicit, adultlike word semantics develops later through the exploitation of A-system connections distributed widely through the cortices. This implies that words learnt later in life (typically more abstract ones) will be anchored in those higher-order association areas that remain plastic, myelinating very late (if at all).128 Mediatory word columns in association cortex would serve the role of anchoring the expanding sensory (and macro-functional) affordances of words in the linguistic B-systems, where respectively their phonological form and their micro-functional (grammatical/sequential) affordances are stored more locally. A convenient starting point for considering how a specific word column might be ‘acquired’ is Taylor’s suggestion (1989: 242) that children first learn to abstract generalized ‘schemas’ (in Langacker’s sense of the lowest common denominator of features shared by token instances) only after they have learnt prototypes based on individual sensory tokens. This second stage, when phonological forms (a special kind of auditory input to which the human cortex is predisposed) begin to be associated with delimited combinations of sensory affordances, is surely critical. Evidence of just what ‘delimited’ means here comes from the extensive literature on over- and under-generalization in the child’s gradual adjustment of word meaning to adult norms. Taylor points out that the common over-generalization of word meanings at an early stage in language acquisition is what one would expect from initial linkages being made between word forms (heard primarily from adult caretakers) and meanings still strongly linked to individual ‘tokens’ (things or actions) experienced simultaneously with hearing the word. These would form prototypes to which other ‘things’ may be more or less similar according to various features or dimensions. In fact, it is hard to imagine any other way that word columns could

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become gradually more finely tuned, more subtle in meaning, than by continual minute adjustments of their weighted ‘coefficients’. These would link them into more and more differentiated call tree sequences as successive tokens-incontext are accommodated, a process that will continue throughout adult life. If one applies this usage-based perspective to acquiring a word such as ‘parrot’, one can imagine it initially applying, for example, to a stuffed toy thus referred to, as a result of the object − with all its sensory features − being associated with the phonological form of the word heard from adults in its presence (although the word is still not necessarily analysable into all its distinctive adult phonemes so that the child can produce it accurately). The word column mediating this symbolic linkage would, according to the Proximity hypothesis, be situated in association cortex close to the area in visual cortex where the object’s principal sensory affordances are handled (its other sensory features − tactile feel, weight, size, etc. − can be ignored for the moment as secondary). This position would not have to somehow be ‘measured’ by the child. The child will rather build on what he or she has already learnt, and in this case say the word ‘bird’ (or ‘birdie’) – whose own word column may already be established somewhere close to the perceptual prototype corresponding to that word’s sensory affordances. Further adjustments will presumably occur along the orthogonal ‘object synthesis’ dimension. Localization of new words will as a general principle depend on the localization of words already learnt that share major features with them. The earliest acquired word columns will in turn have been localized close to the relevant sensorimotor cortex (according to the Proximity hypothesis) − however un-adult-like and in need of adjustment to adult usage those initial sensory affordances are. In other words, a situation would arise whereby a call tree from the word would have the (prototype) image as its synaptically tuned goal, and, conversely, a call tree from the image would have the word as its goal. This would be relatively easy to establish given the orientation of the two dimensions along the same axis of symmetry and ordinary Hebbian correlation learning (long-term potentiation – involving the hippocampus – plus synaptic growth/pruning at the cortical destination).129 Actual calls between the two columns would probably not be directly along that axis at the cortical surface, but via a thalamic way station (as is generally the case for connections between primary sensory areas). In so far as the initial synaptic ‘tuning’ need not be highly differentiated, images of other objects similar to a toy parrot could also activate the word, say a small bird seen at a feeding table. Learning to associate some other word − say ‘bird’ − with that overlapping sensory image would lead eventually to a more adult-like approximation to the meaning of ‘parrot’, whose activation would thereafter be forestalled by that of the new word for referring to a small feeding bird. But it may still continue to be associated for some time with other objects sharing features with it, for example a cushion that happens to have similar colours and/or texture.

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It is here that the secondary sensory features of the image may begin to guide the meaning of the word in further non-adult directions, but two things probably conspire to stop that progressing too far (apart from lack of comprehension on the part of adults), namely the further integration of the visual parrot image with other sensory affordances along the ‘object synthesis’ dimension. (This is the beginning of the process of abstraction that will lead to generalized ‘schemas’ replacing prototypes.) Images on the sensory ‘image circuit’ will now be able to activate corresponding words on the ‘word circuit’, at first over-generalized from individual tokens but gradually reaching the degree of abstraction that approximates to adult usage through differentiation along the ‘object synthesis’ dimension. This abstraction process will be complete (or at least stable) only much later, when nominal categories have been organized along that dimension according to relations of hyponymy, antonymy, etc., into structured fields, the parameters involved themselves becoming associated with more abstract words, thus presumably facilitating rapid lexical access from multiple directions. By then the initial ‘word column’ will have become integrated into a more widely distributed, but still locally circumscribed, ‘module’. But we are still only at the first stage in establishing the chained network between widely distributed columns that typifies the adult lexicon. The stage at which basic mediatory word columns linking images and word forms can expand their associations to include micro-functional columns in frontal cortex (as regards verbs at least) may coincide roughly with the development of the ‘two-word’ (or for highly synthetic languages probably preferably ‘twomorpheme’) stage, whereby the relationship between images already recognized on the frontal ‘relational’ circuit can in turn be coded into sequences of words. At this stage, ‘horizontal’ collocational associations for the word will be more important than ‘vertical’ ones, which are still to come, linking it to hypernyms, antonyms, meronomies, etc. Such early collocations will involve a noun (or demonstrative) and any word acting as predicate − typically an action verb, though practically any word or phrase can act as predicate, including what in adult language would be an adjective or a noun.130 In fact, it has been argued by Tomasello (1992) that the first use of verbs is synchronous with the dawning of grammar (the combinatorial side of language). Certainly verbs typically come with their own predicate frames – the cardinal ‘stuff’ of micro-functional affordances that link them to suitable argument types. Filling in such a predicate frame is what is necessary to translate Burnod’s ‘elementary situation’ into an ‘elementary sentence’ on the ‘sentence’ circuit (op. cit.: 279f.).131 Only when the child is capable of expressing actors, actions and circumstances in such a complete sentence, ordered ‘correctly’, will he or she be approaching adult usage. As Tomasello puts it (op. cit.: 257ff), the process of ‘symbolic integration’ involves the construction of sentences out of already constituted (pre-linguistic) symbolic structures and categories in order to produce larger propositional wholes whose core is the verb (or other item

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constituting a predicate). For him language acquisition is ‘epigenesis’ built on socio-cultural learning, and this too is quite in line with Burnod’s perspective. But how exactly could a word indicating a sensorimotor ‘relation’ (e.g. ‘flying’) establish itself first as a mediatory column with only sensorimotor affordances, then as a fully-fledged syntactic verb with its own micro-functional affordances? We can assume that the sensory association between birds as reoccurring ‘things’ and a certain type of action typical of them – the motion of flying – has been established. Already at the ‘holophrastic’ stage this relationship will become associated with the word ‘fly’ uttered by adults in pointing out such activity, and a mediatory ‘word column’ will be set up as for nouns, only now on the sensorimotor ‘where/how’ route. The location of the mediatory column for ‘fly’ will probably lie in premotor cortex not far from the central sulcus (perhaps in a lateral position corresponding to the arms on the ‘body map’ if mental imitation is involved). The lack of a paired ‘resultant state’ column further back in the parietal lobe would mean that the verb describes an openended ‘activity’. At the onset of the ‘two-word’ stage, the repeated syntagmatic context of the verb in utterances by adults will probably have been noticed by the child, i.e. its association with an agent noun (typically ‘bird’ or ‘birdie’), and this – as similar predicate frame requirements appear in connection with other basic verbs − will result in the association of the initial (mediatory) word column with something approaching its adult micro-functional affordances. I hypothesize that these will be anchored in a column situated somewhere between the initial sensorimotor column in premotor cortex and the medial part of Broca’s area representing the emergent ‘sentence circuit’. It is here that the relevant association between an ‘image of relation’ on Burnod’s outer ‘story/relational circuit’, reflecting a whole ‘elementary situation’, and a corresponding verb already understood as an ‘elementary action’, could most easily be made. Its proto-predicate-frame could be established here on its way towards contributing to the formation of general syntactic templates in ‘grammar’ cortex, i.e. the more anterior part of Broca’s area intermediate between the ‘phonological’ and ‘story/relational’ circuits (cf. Deacon 1997: 303). The paradigmatic, ‘event structure’ affordances of the verb relevant to grammar (mappable back onto its sensorimotor affordances) could be projected forward together with its growing syntagmatic affordances. Just as early nouns, organized around prototypes, become abstracted as ‘schemas’, organized into categories and hierarchies displaying different (micro-)functional behaviour, so will individual verbs become generalized into types according to their inherent aktionsart and other event structure features. Ultimately, grammatical templates that are freed from association to the predicate frames of individual verbs will be abstracted, through repeated use of similar frames plus generalization across numerous verbs, as will productive ‘derivations’ among word and phrase types (and in combination with specific affixes).

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Grounds for uncertainty as to the exact location of the micro-functional affordances of nouns are discussed in Appendix 1. In the light of the acquisition perspective adopted here, it would seem a priori likely that the syntagmatic functional affordances of nouns are initially little more than pointers towards slots in the predicate frames of individual verbs and later to generalized syntactic templates in ‘grammar’ cortex, and do not need their own ‘way station’ en route there, as verbs seem to do. The paradigmatic affordances of nouns (indicating their various category membership properties and their qualia-like interaction with verbs) could be mapped forward from the ‘object synthesis’ dimension of their sensory affordances along with syntagmatic pointers to grammar templates, much as I have hypothesized for the micro-functional affordances of verbs. One way or another, the syntagmatic features of nouns must be available close to grammar cortex to allow for the rapid formation of collocations and constructions based upon them (just as for verbs and adjectives) − these are unlikely to be relegated solely to the posterior word columns embodying their sensory affordances. As can be seen in Appendix 2, the paradigmatic affordances of nouns are tightly bound up with their syntagmatic behaviour, and the separation of the information on the two axes would hardly be efficient as regards the orthogonal integration of verbs and nouns assumed by my model. Ultimately this is an empirical matter that neuroimaging techniques may eventually throw some light on. With both nouns and verbs the learning of new words grows exponentially once the two-word stage commences: this builds crucially on words already acquired (adjusting/changing their meanings in the process). This is reflected in, amongst other things, the ‘inheritance’ of the logic of basic verbs (anchored in sensorimotor ‘image schemas’) by more complex verbs that combine the meanings of the simpler ones, as described in Chapter 7.2. Modifiers and relators – adjectives and adverbs and prepositions – will soon follow, as the child attempts to ‘fill in’ the circumstantial material of ‘elementary situation’ frames. Note that adjectives, like verbs and nouns, have their micro-functional affordances. Thus ‘good’ is implicated in various constructions (e.g. ‘good for NP/ V-ing ’, ‘good at V-ing’, ‘good to V’, etc.). These patterns too need to become established in proximity to Broca’s area at the two-word stage, individual adjectives eventually becoming associated both with the predicate slot of a clausal syntactic frame (triggering ‘copula support’) and with the modifier slot of a phrasal one. (Both patterns are abstractable from tokens of adult usage.) Once the micro-affordances of major word classes are anchored in this way, purely functional words lacking sensory affordances altogether (conjunctions, pronouns, articles, etc.) can follow − this does not, of course, preclude their ‘rote’ use in phrases before their adult function is mastered. Finally, higher-level links to macro-affordance columns (or aggregates) can be established, associating more complex words with socio-cultural scenarios and frames, i.e. context types. Once again this is a matter of the recognition of

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a repeated association − here that of the use of the word within the context concerned. In some cases the phonological word itself constitutes an essential ingredient in the scenario (e.g. ‘guilty!’ in its court context). It is at this stage that ‘imposed’ top-down schemas and verbally supplied definitions (including those acquired through book learning) become particularly important, although they may already have started to become relevant with the transition from prototype-based meanings to ‘schemas’ (cf. Taylor op. cit.: 242).

15

Prospective Conclusions

15.1 The justification for separating affordance levels The justification for the separation of the micro-functional affordances of words from their sensorimotor and macro-functional affordances on which the present model is premised has by now, I trust, been amply illustrated. It is motivated in large part by the facilitation it provides for the efficient working of the grammatical system (in both its syntactic and semantic aspects). This system meshes directly with the micro-functional affordances of words, and the potential interference from the multitudinous and largely indeterminate associations incorporated at other levels of affordance is circumvented. Both grammar and micro-functional affordances of words belong to ‘procedural’ knowledge, as opposed to ‘declarative’ semantic knowledge. Paradis (2004: 178) makes a useful distinction here between ‘lexicon’ (corresponding to my micro-functional affordances of words) and ‘vocabulary’ (corresponding to the explicit association of phonological word-forms with sensory affordances). As we have seen, many words lack sensory affordances altogether. Micro-functional affordances are limited to just those features that are relevant to grammar and to logic (although, being instantiated by call trees, these may also be subject to prototype effects).132 Their separation avoids in large part the ‘exponential specter’ that worried Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976: 285) in connection with their ‘decision table’ approach to lexical access. The phrase ‘relevant for grammar’, note, has a natural limit at the level of collocations between individual words: one would not want to say that ‘miaow’ as in ‘the cat miaows’ calls for the grammatically relevant feature ‘feline’ on its agent argument, since no other (adult) feline produces this sound − it is rather to be bidirectionally associated with the specific word column for ‘cat’.133 Perhaps the most convincing argument for the division of labour here comes from the well-known facts concerning Broca’s aphasia. The kind of ‘telegraphic’, syntactically disjointed productions resulting from damage to Broca’s area (for speakers of English at least) is just what one would expect of attempts to use words to some degree severed from their micro-functional affordances. If this information were available on mediatory word columns themselves − in more


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posterior association areas of the cortex − then one would expect patients with this form of aphasia still to be able to construct well-formed predications on the basis of that information; in the case of a verb they could simply ‘read off’ the syntagmatic sequences indicated on it.134 This is not what happens. Function words which only have micro-functional affordances are of course totally disrupted by this kind of aphasia. There are in fact further neurological considerations. The alternative to having the micro-functional affordances of a word situated in frontal cortex, activated via long-distance connections from the column that mediates the word’s sensory affordances, would be to combine them directly with the latter. But this would suggest that call trees for complex grammatical goals would somehow have to be embodied in axonal signals to frontal cortex, e.g. for production of the word in a certain grammatical context. Efferent axonal signals are, however, basically a matter of all-or-nothing firing, and a cortical column incorporates a limited number of pyramidal cells, each with their single long-distance axon.135 Long-distance (extra-cortical) axonal efferents from the infragranular pyramidal cells of cortical columns are not involved in call trees, though corticocortical ones from supragranular ones are, according to Burnod (op. cit.: 71). Even allowing for time-extended signal differences and the ability of individual neural columns to ‘code’ spatial afferent patterns into temporal output patterns of frequency/intensity of firing (cf. Burnod op. cit.: 47), this would hardly seem on the face of it sufficient for transferring the complex information required every time the word was activated for combination with other words. A simple long-distance activation of a corresponding column in Broca’s area by a mediatory word column (probably relayed via the thalamus) would, however, suffice if that information were concentrated in the synaptic connectivity of the Broca’s area column itself, which could then send out its own specific cortico-cortico call trees in adjacent frontal cortex in the manner described by Burnod. Consider too that the separation of affordances allows for homogenous types of information to be encoded in the synaptic connectivity of a single column − it is hard to see how the same mini-system could simultaneously be ‘tuned’ to sensory features, grammatical behaviour, and involvement with higherorder scenarios. Moreover, the concentration of grammar-relevant information (the functional affordances of words) in one relatively limited area of inferior frontal cortex close to general grammar templates would in itself make for much more efficient and rapid processing (at least in production) than if reference had to be made all the time to more posterior cortex to retrieve that information. The organizing principle stated in 1.2 whereby the micro-functional affordances of words should be mappable from sensory and/or macro-functional ones through common abstracting processes comes into its own here. The grammatically relevant micro-functional features of words are either directly

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mappable onto sensory ones in the service of categorizing across natural kinds of ‘percepts’ (including action types) or correspond to those features of macrofunctional scenarios (‘contexts’) that render them distinct one from another. The whole raison-d’être of the mediatory word column is to abstract just those aspects of input arrays (e.g. sensory images) relevant to activating the corresponding phonological word form and its potential patterning at higher levels (e.g. in grammar cortex). Macro-functional scenarios too may in general be associated with a wide array of contingent sensory features (including outer signs of inner, mental values), but what is relevant for their mapping onto micro-functional affordances is that they supply the distinct context for the correct interpretation and use of the word concerned, and in this function just an abstracted sub-set of ‘core’ features is sufficient, anchored in mediatory context columns, as suggested in the previous section. The scenarios themselves may be either ‘metaphorical’ projections of more basic bodily action schemata (embodied in sensorimotor affordances in premotor cortex), or purely socio-cultural frameworks defined by ‘key’ words adhering to them. In both cases the scenario and the word itself mutually determine each other. If the word is for example a transitive verb requiring an agent, a patient and an optional instrument argument, like ‘shoot’, then just three corresponding elements of any associated macro-functional scenario will be highlighted as relevant for the mutual mapping. In this instance a direct, albeit incomplete mapping onto sensory affordances is possible (incomplete since the dimension of purpose, of intentionality − provided only by the scenario − is required to complete it). The distinction between affordance types also holds out promise for the analysis of different kinds of multilingualism. It has been suggested, for instance, that early, fluent bilingualism results in a more integrated network in frontal grammar cortex for the two languages concerned (presumably by tying the micro-functional affordances of individual words more efficiently to shared general templates). Late or less fluent bilingualism, involving second language learning after the full acquisition of the dominant one, may on the other hand require more widespread cerebral activation, perhaps even conscious translation back and forth between two only partially overlapping sets of languagespecific affordances (cf. Paradis 2004 for the greater involvement of the far-flung ‘declarative’ memory system in L2 compared to L1, and Démonet et al. 2005: 72f. for relevant neuroimaging findings).136 In either case it should be possible to model relationships between the micro-functional affordances of ‘related’ word columns for the two languages concerned using the templatic formalism I have presented, i.e. in terms of call tree ‘pointers’ to words in the second language as well as to full language-specific sets of affordances and categories. This is a dimension that is in theory testable by known methods of response latencies, etc. It would at all events simplify things to be able to limit investigations to differences at the micro-functional level, ‘bracketing out’ common conceptual image schemas and higher-level socio-cultural scenarios as far as possible.


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Finally, although I do not want to stray too far into the evolutionary ramifications of the model, it is important to point out that it is unlikely that the neural entities reflected by my templates, relating sensory and functional affordances, sprang suddenly into existence with language. Recall the mention in Chapter 12.3 of Ullman’s characterization of the original function of the ‘dorsal’ system as one of relating visual information to motor programs such as grasping or manipulating an object. The ‘ventral’ system performs the complementary function of recognizing the nature of the object interacted with. Language would seem to have utilized these pre-existing systems in building up a symbolic mental lexicon, with mediatory columns linking percepts (sensory affordances) to corresponding motor reactions (functional affordances) in widely separated regions of the cortex.

15.2 Potential (dis)confirmation of the model In general, if the model is to be taken seriously as directly reflecting a neurological basis, it needs to be in conformity with the ongoing results of a wide array of psycholinguistic (including aphasic) studies, especially newer forms of neuroimaging. In fact it highlights some specific areas where further investigations of this kind need to be undertaken. The hypotheses the model generates include the basic premise of the disassociation of the functional and sensory affordances of all ‘content’ words. Various studies point in this direction already (as I have indicated en route), but more focused tests could be devised to compare neural responses to words sharing the same syntagmatic behaviour (but quite different sensory affordances) with words sharing similar sensory affordances (near-synonyms) that differ in syntagmatic behaviour. Other specific predictions from the model as regards activity along the hypothesized linguistic ‘what’ and ‘where/how’ routes could be tested with relatively simple (and well-known) methods involving prompts for appropriate words presented to subjects while they are being scanned. The approximate positions of the mediatory columns corresponding to some of the word templates that I have proposed are very tentatively presented on Figure 9 (along with one ‘grammar template’). Compare the list of templates at the back of the book (and note that 12 is for ‘rifle’, 48 for ‘cake’ and 50 for ‘house’). It will be seen that the mediatory columns for ‘agent-like’ words tend to be situated in relatively anterior temporal regions, ‘place-like’ ones in parietal regions, and ‘action-like’ ones in frontal cortex. I leave open the possibility that ‘instrumentlike’ words are lexically anchored in two distinct areas (presumably temporal for their perceptual affordances and premotor frontal cortex for their manipulatory function, as Chao and Martin 2000 suggest). Recall the suggestion in Chapter 5.1 that resultative/telic verbs have both frontal and parietal components. In that case column 12 (‘rifle’) should be linked to the vicinity of

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16 (‘shoot’), just as 37 (‘put’) should be linked to a position in parietal cortex. The inter-connections could be marked by dotted lines. ‘where/how’ route 37 19

46 4 16

13 7 6

5

39 24

50 2 12 29 1 22

(59) 30 9

31

‘what’ route

Figure 9 The approximate position of the mediatory columns of listed templates

Recall also the suggestion made in Chapter 4.1, citing Pulvermüller (2002: 62), that verbs of physical activity are situated in an appropriate position near the sensorimotor ‘body map’ (around the central sulcus). Thus verbs referring to action with the legs, for example, will lie more dorsally positioned than ones involving the hands, which in turn will be more dorsally positioned than those involving the eyes (the specific case of ‘shoulder’ was considered in 4.1). Those involving the mouth (such as ‘say’) should lie still more ventrally, adjacent to the phonological circuit. These positions, it should be repeated, concern only the location of the mediatory columns anchoring the relevant sensorimotor call trees and do not undermine the claim that lexical meaning as such is more widely distributed. All these tentative locations are subject to further (dis)confirmation, although it may remain impossible with present imaging techniques to isolate a mediatory column from the widespread network(s) containing it. Such a column should in theory be the one ‘node’ of the network associated with a given lexeme that is always activated whenever that word is involved in either comprehension or production processes (other than simple repetition). Now it may be that the notion of the privileged mediatory ‘pilot’ module for individual lexical networks will turn out to be illusory, not just difficult to pinpoint experimentally. This would seem on the face of it unlikely, given that the mediatory function of linking sensory ‘images’ and an arbitrary phoneme sequence in a stable manner lies at the heart of the symbolic system unique to man, although the possibility that there may be more than one mediatory ‘node’ associated with a given ‘word web’ must be left open. The higher-order association areas of the left hemisphere are crucially involved in symbolic mediation, and the model


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locates word columns (or multi-modules) in the discontinuous ring formed by just these areas. The mediatory ‘nodes’ as conceived are relatively stable (thanks to their abstracted functional affordances) and relatively few (tens of thousands rather than millions), contrasting with the multifarious, open-ended nature of primary sensory associations. Without them there would be no arbitrary symbolic relationships possible, no Saussurian ‘signs’ translatable or paraphrasable with ease from one language to another. The distributed network conception of the lexicon and the notion of the locally anchored, mediatory ‘pilot module’ are by no means incompatible. Consider an alternative hypothesis which could be tested against my proposal, namely the possibility that the mediatory ‘pilot’ modules for lexemes are all located around the angular gyrus, where Lamb places his ‘lexical nections’ (op. cit.: 354f.).137 If Lamb’s position turned out to be correct (and lexical nections around the angular gyrus were always activated whenever a word was implicated in some process) it would require modifying the format of my word column templates somewhat so as to indicate longer-distance connections (marked by the small parallel lines) to sensory affordances rather than to micro-functional affordances − at least to those gathered in the vicinity of Wernicke’s area for comprehension purposes. I do not believe this will prove to be justified. I have already mentioned the likelihood of the redundant representation in posterior cortex of micro-functional information relevant for comprehension processes (including word class and valency/subjacency requirements). This would actually fit nicely on the model, paralleling the redundant relationship between phonological information in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, but now on the outer word/sentence circuit. By Burnod’s principle of cortical symmetry one would expect this information to be located posterior to (classical) Wernicke’s area − roughly where Lamb’s ‘Lexis’ is anchored − just as the evidence points towards the micro-functional affordances of words involved in production processes being located anterior to (classical) Broca’s area. This location would be well placed to fulfil the ‘way station’ function of directing activation from phonological forms in Wernicke’s area along, respectively, the dorsal or the ventral word circuit routes. The connections between micro-functional information here and the mediatory word columns as described on the model would still be relatively long-distance in so far as the latter are taken to be spread throughout association cortex, according to their dominant sensorimotor affordances, a supposition supported by most of the data cited in Part 1 of this book (cf. for instance Damasio et al. 1996). The raison-d’être for that organizational principle was stated already in Chapter 1.2 in terms of lexical access, namely the procedural advantage that the proximity of a mediatory word column to its principal sensory affordances provides: it ensures that it is activated as the result of spreading activation from associated sensory imagery more rapidly than are irrelevant words that would have to be suppressed again. As regards micro-functional

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affordances, it is logical that these should be concentrated in (or at least point towards) a much more circumscribed area in frontal (and perhaps also symmetrically located posterior) cortex. The grouping of functional affordances in frontal cortex adjacent to Broca’s area according to major syntactic class (noun, verb, etc.) would again facilitate lexical access (here in the process of lexically ‘filling’ grammatical templates). As regards other important aspects of the model, the proposed activation projected (initially) along particular orthogonal axes by call trees associated with individual words could perhaps be investigated using time-extended magnetoencephalographic (or other neuroimaging) techniques. In theory it should also be possible to study the activation (in both hemispheres) of higher-level ‘scenarios’ by various kinds of relatively abstract words, and to determine whether the activity evoked by words whose associated scenarios appear to overlap (as in the case of ‘assassinate’ and ‘murder’) does indeed occur in adjacent or overlapping frontal areas. In fact, the Contextual Symmetry hypothesis presented in Chapter 13 is as a whole subject to (dis)confirmation along these lines. Somewhat easier to investigate, however, might be the hypothesis that later learnt, more abstract word columns are located further into the late- or non-myelinated areas of higher association cortex than are more basic, concrete ones (from which they may be projected by ‘metaphorical’ association). It may even eventually be possible to investigate the crucial hypothesis concerning the orthogonal integration of the functional affordances of verbs and nouns in inferior lateral frontal cortex – the ‘grammar’ region of the cortex – by fMRI scanning techniques, in so far as the spatial and temporal resolution of this technique is being refined all the time. This would be difficult at present, given the anatomical superimposition (or at least close proximity) involved. The actual pattern of connectivity would, I surmise, be another example of Burnod’s ‘combination matrix’. At present all that seems reasonably certain is that there is input to the lower (anterior) part of the PIFG area of the dominant frontal lobe via the uncinate fasciculus − relatable to at least the ventral ‘what’ route of the word circuit − and input via the arcuate fasciculus to its upper (posterior) part − relatable to the phonological circuit (cf. Démonet et al. 2005: 77).138 More modest goals include investigating whether derived words are located in proximity to their non-derived correlates – and whether words derived by the same derivational process involve the same frontal areas of activity regardless of the individual words concerned (whose activation could be subtracted). This would also extend to the relationship between verbal nominalizations and the verbs from which they are derived. Other areas that could be investigated in the light of the model are whether the principal affordances of all words to do with time (including nouns) are located in frontal cortex as suggested, and whether expressions of subjective modality and attitude are associated with activity at the frontal end of Burnod’s relational or ‘story’ level circuit, as hypothesized. One might further address the question as to whether hypernyms consistently activate a broader area than their hyponyms in temporal cortex, literally


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containing them spatially (as supposed by Pulvermüller), as opposed to being located in a more posterior position along the object synthesis axis of the temporal lobe. And what of interrelated verbs forming something analogous to semantic fields, like ‘shoot’, ‘kill’, ‘die’, etc. – are they localized in proximity to each other? And how are telic verbal meanings like ‘kill’ topographically situated vis-à-vis resultant state expressions like ‘dead’, to which they can be related by ‘meaning postulates’? Is it true that all verbs containing a semantic component of resultant state have a component producing activity in the parietal cortex, and if so, is its activation subsequent to activity closer to the motor cortex that reflects the initiating action component? It also remains to be shown whether there really are two types of attributive adjective (e.g. ‘wide’ vs. ‘dead’) with respect to position along one or the other major ‘route’ (and whether their activation patterns are more similar in predicative than in attributive function). Needless to say, such investigations would have to be set within the framework of specific tasks and experimental designs requiring expertise beyond my own. Answers to any of these questions would be of intrinsic interest, regardless of whether they confirm or disconfirm the specific predictions of the model. Before summing up my conclusions as regards the overall organization of the ‘distributed’ mental lexicon, I should emphasize that it is not just premised on the relationship between isolated words and conceptual ‘image schemas’ or ‘scenarios’. I have stressed throughout the importance of semantic links between lexical words, in particular as regards relations of compositionality (mutually affecting the semantics of the ingredient words) and decompositionality (to words that are simpler in semantic structure). It is essential to take these ‘horizontal’ relations into account in order to know which features of images and scenarios are relevant to the analysis of the lexicon of a particular language. Typological generalizations across languages can then be abstracted to provide a general framework. Only the most ‘basic’ words have direct links to sensorimotor affordances (action schemata and primary sensory experiences) and have no need of further anchoring in other words. Just as bilingual speakers who have learnt their second language relatively late in life may continually resort to approximate translation back and forth between their weaker language and their stronger, native language rather than directly associating both to a common stock of semantic elements (as with fluent bilinguals), so we may envisage speakers of English relating the more complex and abstract words that they learn later in life to simpler words and their meanings already known. As Paradis (op. cit.: 187) puts it, translating between two languages corresponds to paraphrasing in the same language. The ‘logic’ of the more basic words persists in large part beneath the more complex ones acquired later, although they may be overlaid by further functional affordances, including – most importantly – contextual links to specific socio-cultural scenarios.139 What I have attempted to demonstrate in this book is how the distributed nature of lexis need not be a stumbling block for the modelling of the mental lexicon. Taking up Lamb’s challenge, I have tried to be more specific on this

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matter by focusing on what is known of the localization of the separate kinds of meaning associated with individual words and setting them within an overall framework provided in part by Burnod’s model, where ‘call trees’ in search of their ‘goals’ play across a symmetrically inter-connected neural substrate of ‘cortical columns’. The basic unit on which my linguistic approach and Burnod’s neurological one converge is the notion of the lexical ‘multi-module’, a distributed network anchored in a mediatory ‘pilot module’. The templates of the present model should thus be understood as each reflecting a number of interconnected cortical columns, with the component elements widely distributed but located in specifiable cortical areas, namely phonological forms in or close to Wernicke’s area, sensorimotor affordances in modally specific areas of posterior and premotor cortex, micro-functional affordances in inferior frontal cortex anterior to Broca’s area (and probably in part also redundantly in the more posterior part of Wernicke’s area), all concentrated in the dominant hemisphere, and finally macro-functional affordances predominantly represented in the right hemisphere. These are correlated by mediatory columns in the association areas of the dominant hemisphere. I have focused especially on the micro-functional component since this is what meshes directly with grammatical processes and can be abstracted away from the open-ended multiplicity of associations at other levels. This singling out should, in theory, make it easier to isolate aspects of the organization of the mental lexicon for comparison with the findings of neuroimaging studies and for setting up new ones. The adaptable format for word ‘templates’ that I have introduced should further make it easier to represent the essential features and internal relationships of particular areas of the mental lexicon in a neurologically interpretable way without having to resort to tangled skeins where virtually everything is connected up to everything else. This is the practical purpose I hope my model will serve.

Appendix 1

The Relationship to Burnod’s Neurological Model

Cortical columns are for Burnod ‘adaptive automata’ that generate a sequence of actions adjusted to external conditions in order to attain a goal, an equilibrium state, via a series of sub-goals (Burnod 1990: 64f.). They may exist in various states of activation (Burnod op. cit.: 91), which I call ‘eigenstates’ analogous to the discrete equilibrium states of atoms.140 My mediatory ‘word columns’ correspond to aggregates of inter-connected cortical columns of this kind. The relationship between my ‘word column’ templates and actual individual cortical columns can be characterized as indirect while at the same time reflecting a basic functional homology with them through the shared axes of symmetry and the ‘transversal’ or vertical levels of the overall cortical matrix. For those readers wondering how six dimensions of symmetry can be packed into a threedimensional object like the cortex, it should be pointed out that Burnod’s columns allow for different axes of symmetry (different orientations of input connections) at different vertical levels (op. cit.: 158f.). The essential notion is that every column is connected to exactly 26 other columns in 64 distinct regions of the cortex according to the symmetry across each of the six dimensions or folds, which in turn result from the logic of the embryological emergence of the cortex.141 This may be somewhat over-idealized, reflecting Burnod’s concern, shared by many artificial neural network modellers in the AI tradition, with the maximal efficiency of parallel computers, but something akin to this picture of the crystalline matrix of potential cortical inter-connectivity appears to be widely accepted among neurologists today. Burnod’s ‘word/sentence’ and ‘image/relational’ circuits (which my model adopts with modifications) can be compared with Deacon’s notion of concentric ‘tiers’ operating at different speeds. For Deacon these distinct tiers go from the innermost, fast phonological one, close to the primary sensorimotor areas around the Sylvian fissure, to outer ones in multimodal association areas (Deacon 1997: 291). His adjacent tiers are linked by short ‘U-connections’ (op. cit.: 282), which correspond to Burnod’s ‘couplings’ between his relational and sentence circuits and to Damasio and Damasio’s ‘mediation areas’ linking concepts (and relations) with words (Damasio and Damasio 1992: 70). Burnod,

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rather confusingly, divides his two circuits each into two halves to form four ‘convergent circuits’, the (exterior) ‘relational’ or ‘story’ one and the (interior) ‘sentence’ one forming the anterior continuations (or homologues) of the posterior ‘image’ and ‘word’ circuits respectively (op. cit.: 272ff.).142 Note that his outer ‘image/relational’ circuit (both hemispheres) crosses the part of the sensorimotor body map related to the hands, forming a privileged visionmanipulation linkage, whereas the inner ‘word/sentence’ one (left hemisphere only) crosses the part related to the mouth and tongue. Secondary association areas lie between these. The common denominator shared by these different models is an outer semantic circuit and an inner linguistic form circuit, the interaction between which represents the basis for all verbally expressed symbolic behaviour (compare Figure 2). The application of the distinction between the visual ‘what’ vs. ‘where/how’ routes or streams to linguistic processing is discussed in Chapter 1.2. As regards the posterior (occipito-parietal) end of the two visual streams, Burnod describes them as forming a crossing ‘combination matrix’ which allows continuous adjustment for the spatial position of an object (Burnod op. cit.: 229f.). Call tree networks here ‘anticipate’ the transformation of images produced by movement. I suggest that similar combination matrices lie at either end of the ventral and dorsal streams on both the word/sentence and the image/relational level, linking them up into two roughly parallel circuits (the frontal end of the word/ sentence circuit is discussed in connection with ‘grammar’ cortex in Chapters 3). Schematic examples of call trees and combination matrices (from Burnod) are presented in Figures 7 and 8 respectively. Those systematic associations which I call ‘functional affordances’ are instantiated in higher (supramodal) cortical columns hierarchically above and at a considerable physical distance from the word columns mediating sensory affordances, where local call trees are initiated through posterior cortex on the way to sensory ‘goals’ of increasing specificity (e.g. an image). Call trees are essentially ‘adaptive functions that can guide a sensorimotor system towards a goal’ (Burnod 1990: 123ff.), but there is no reason that these goals should not also include functional affordances. Whatever the goal, they function by successive exploratory approximations as they search for matching patterns in other columns, first ‘casting their net’ after the most general features of the goal (e.g. visual features typifying the category ‘animate being’), then drawing it in to successively more specific features (e.g. those characterizing a human being, and possibly further to a specific individual). These sequences of search actions are what the columns ‘learn’. On the level of motor actions the sequence could, for example, be (in reverse order) ‘chew − bite – put in mouth – catch – move towards’. Call trees effect chains of cortical action when they are ‘in register’ with thalamic inputs that selectively amplify them. The thalamus (the main source of sensory input to the mid-levels of cortical columns) is instrumental in guiding the recognition algorithms of call trees. This input may be from internal

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sensory sources as well as from the environment. Call tree activity spreads over chains of successive columns or modules, each synaptically ‘tuned’ to realize a ‘sub-goal’ (and therefore having its own ‘continuous coefficient’ or – in connectionist PDP terms − ‘weight’). The columns constituting the individual network are linked into the chain (or network) by successive ‘modular transmission coefficients’ that are implemented by the inter-neurons between pyramidal cells. These function by (de)coupling the layers of one column or those of two successive columns. The initiating ‘pilot module’ of such a call tree network is synaptically tuned and connected in such a way that it ‘fires’ when the search is narrowed down through successive sub-goals to the point where returning thalamic input matches its overall goal. Learning in individual columns occurs when the dendritic synapses activated by ‘weak’ input are changed in accordance with a synchronized strong thalamic input matching it from the sensory environment (‘weak’ and ‘strong’ in terms of spike frequency of the signal). Lower intensity cortical input can be said to ‘gate’ the thalamic input. This is a function of how ‘useful’ an input is to realizing the goal of the call tree initiated by the column (i.e. allowing it to fire).143 On my model the individual mediatory word column constitutes such a Burnodian ‘pilot module’, but one from which multiple call trees can be initiated, both ‘downstream’ into sensory cortex and ‘upstream’ into higher-order cortex. In the specific case of activating a phonological word from a sensory image, Burnod (op. cit.: 210) sees the starting point of a call tree sequence as the activation of the first syllable of the word, much as on the Cohort model (cf. Marlsen-Wilson 1987). Cortical columns within Wernicke’s area receiving input from the auditory (or, in reading, visual) channel relay phonologically analysed information to higher-order association cortex for further processing via both the parietal ‘where/how’ and the temporal ‘what’ routes. The precise location of word columns mediating between phonological form and semantic and grammatical information will, I hypothesize, depend on the dominant sensorimotor call trees involved. The sensory affordances of verbs are organized on the present model along orthogonal motor-spatial and (secondarily) auditory-visual call tree axes (see for example the lower half of Template 4 in Chapter 2.2). The motor-spatial axis links the (pre-)motor areas of the cortex with the corresponding inferior parietal region that Burnod (1990: 277f.) claims is involved in the sensory affordances of verbs of transferral and other telic verbs containing a resultant state component (note the parietal activation induced by at least some verbs according to Perani et al. 1999, mentioned in 1.2). More specifically, I hypothesize that the mediatory word columns of basic activity verbs lie in a position vis-à-vis the central sulcus (which runs between the motor and sematosensory parts of the ‘body map’) according, on the one hand, to their privileged (albeit metaphoric/ metonymic) relation to a particular part of the body map and, on the other, to their temporal relation to the motor-spatial axis, such that verbs like ‘fly’ or ‘walk’ will lie close to the sulcus on the (pre-)motor side, while those

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referring to slower, more long-lasting or socio-culturally determined actions will lie further forward along the same axis. Furthermore, by Burnod’s principle of symmetrical connectivity, verbs like ‘put’ with a resultant state component will have their parietal lobe ‘pendants’ (further columns associated with them) as far back from the central sulcus in a posterior direction along the same axis as their premotor mediatory columns (representing the initiatory action) are forward from it. In this way the sensory affordances of at least some verbs may be seen to ‘leap’ between higher-association areas across primary sensorimotor cortex. It needs to be emphasized that the ‘motion’ dimension of verbal meaning here should be understood as that of kinaesthetically ‘felt’ movement and bodily activity, not the purely visual tracking of the typical movement of animate objects, in which the superior temporal sulcus is apparently implicated.144 The axes defining the sensory affordances of nouns are the auditory-visual one (relating – at a distance − the primary auditory area in the superior temporal lobe to the primary visual one in the occipital lobe) and, orthogonal to it, the spatial (parietal)-temporal pole one (as in the lower half of Template 1 in Chapter 2.1). The latter, temporal pole constitutes a higher-level convergence zone related to the pre-linguistic object-classifying function of the inferior and middle temporal lobes. This ‘object synthesis’ dimension is presumably involved in the ‘binding’ of separately analysed sensory features of objects during perception.145 The hippocampus, which lies just below the temporal lobe, is no doubt crucially involved in this function of ‘object synthesis’ (cf. Burnod op. cit.: 180ff.). It is capable of recognizing sensory regularities separated in time, e.g. object types to which tokens can be assigned despite changing contexts as a scene is scanned. This may be particularly relevant to the dynamic affordances of object nouns, like a bird flying. It is also involved in recognizing the regular rhythmic or ‘melodic’ sequencing of phonemes (op. cit.: 195). ‘Natural’ semantic fields (organized by degrees of proximity/similarity on both orthogonal axes simultaneously) fall out from this view of sensory affordances, as discussed in Chapter 6. The (micro-)functional affordances of nouns are organized (as in the upper half of Template 1) into crossing paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. The former contains grammar-relevant semantic and referential features, while the latter contains associations to syntactic modifier types, etc., with which the noun typically combines. These features initiate call trees like those associated with sensory affordances, but now on a higher, abstract grammatical plane. It is less clear than in the case of sensory affordances where exactly the functional affordances of nouns might be cortically located, but the frontal and anterior temporal lobes are known to be connected via the uncinate fasciculus and this may be crucial in the semantic and syntactic integration of nouns (or of the referential expressions they head) with the predicate frames of verbs during the integration of predications (cf. Blank et al. 2002: 1839). The myelination of this bundle of axonal fibres may well be a prerequisite for the ability of the child

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to form adult-like propositions containing both predicates and arguments − an investigation into the onset of that process and the child’s ability to form multiple word utterances would be illuminating. At all events, it can be hypothesized that the functional affordances of nouns are anchored somewhere close to this juncture, probably in the inferior part of the left frontal lobe. Burnod implicates Brodmann’s area 10 in prefrontal cortex, which has connections to the temporal lobe, in the categorization of objects during the visual exploration of complex scenes (op. cit.: 232–4), so this may be where one should look for the functional affordances of nouns, or rather in the mapping from this region onto the corresponding section of the ‘sentence circuit’. The functional affordances of verbs (compare Template 4) are organized similarly, but now the paradigmatic axis contains temporally extended eventtype features while the syntagmatic one specifies particular argument types (and their default ordering) required for the verb to form whole predications. The syntagmatic axis is oriented orthogonally to that of nouns (when my templates are appropriately swivelled according to the conventions employed). The respective axes thus meet in the frontal ‘grammar’ area in such a manner that nouns are ready to fill the argument slots of verb frames, thus facilitating their integration into predications without having to stipulate abstract wordclass ‘labels’ adhering to them. The syntagmatic affordances of nouns may in fact be little more than ‘pointers’ into the grammar templates formed around (and hierarchically above) the predicate frames of verbs. The micro-functional affordances of verbs (embodying predicate frames plus ‘event structure’ information) are assumed to be located somewhere in those regions of the dominant frontal lobe that lie anterior and inferior to Broca’s area proper. In fact, they may constitute the lower level of ‘grammar cortex’ where generalized grammar templates are taken to be instantiated.146 They can thus be seen as lying further along the same ‘motor’ dimension on which the mediatory columns of (most) verbs are located. This corresponds to the ‘time’ axis of Burnod’s parallel ‘story/relational circuit’. A basic action verb’s paradigmatic affordances (relevant for grammar) can in theory be mapped forward from its sensory affordances via its mediatory word column. However, recent studies suggest that the actual predicate (or argument) frame information adhering to lexical verbs is stored in posterior superior temporal rather than frontal cortex, i.e. in (or adjacent to) Wernicke’s area (cf. Hagoort 2005: 419), in which case there will according to the present model most likely be redundant distribution of the functional affordances of words in both anterior and frontal cortex, the former involved in production, the latter in comprehension processes.147 One way or another, it seems likely that the axonal outputs of mediatory word columns are funnelled towards Broca’s area through the thalamus. There are further differences in the distribution of word columns according to the part of speech involved − thus prepositions appear to be primarily

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anchored in the parietal region and adjectives of shape, texture and colour in secondary occipital visual cortex. However, Burnod’s basic principles of symmetrical connectivity and the selective integration of bidirectional, orthogonally intersecting activation flows apply to all areas and all word types, including function words and pronouns that display anterior (functional) affordances only. In the course of the comprehension of an utterance, a phonemically organized word-pattern, once ‘recognized’ in Wernicke’s area, is taken to initiate call trees for the word’s sensory affordances throughout the temporal and parietal association areas at the same time as the corresponding production unit in Broca’s area is potentially activated (e.g. for feedback purposes) in anterior cortex. Broca’s area, as a part of pre-motor cortex, is known to contain ‘mirror neurons’, which may well be relevant to the rapid intercommunication between phonological reception and production (cf. Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998). This communication also involves a rapid myelinated link on the innermost ‘phonological’ circuit (via the arcuate fasciculus). In production processes, a combination of higher-order (top-down) intentions and specific semantic elements activated for expression in the posterior parts of the cortex is taken to initiate other processes that result (via the corresponding functional affordances of the words involved) in the assembly of a syntactically well-formed – and contextually appropriate – utterance. In both production and comprehension, the hierarchically organized nature of the frontal cortex, geared to general plan-formulation and execution, is exploited. Grammatical processing as a whole is assumed to be a function of the general ‘stacking’ ability of the (pre-) frontal cortex, and to crucially involve the inferior frontal region anterior to Broca’s area proper.148 This, according to Burnod’s principles of symmetry, also has its posterior counterpart in the corresponding parietal areas that handle spatial (and more abstract) relational configurations. It is presumably here that relational predicates (including basic prepositions and adverbs) have their sensory affordances. The two areas are assumed to be related, as elsewhere, by long-distance cortico-cortical ‘re-entrant’ connections as well as by slower, stepwise cortical ones. Burnod describes the general function of frontal cortex as ‘integrating sensory information into a much larger context that can change the meaning of the message’ (op. cit.: 237). Posterior association areas also display combination matrices where different input streams cross (op. cit.: 174f). This reflects the function of abstraction or generalization in all higher cortical areas (and is also the source of ‘blending’ and metaphor). Call trees instantiated in frontal cortex can specifically ‘search’ for combined/complex conditions (e.g. a sequence of two grammatical categories) and can transform a hierarchical branching structure into a motor sequence and, conversely, recognize a sensorimotor sequence as a branching structure (op. cit.: 240). Such processes can be suspended while intermediate sub-goals are spelled out (‘stacking’). Note that

Appendix 1

183

there are complementary ‘process’ aspects to all ‘patterns’ embodied in frontal cortex, both on the relational (semantic) and the sentential (grammar) circuits. What Burnod calls ‘transversal coupling’ between the upper and lower levels of successive columns in a chain produces call trees by sequencing actions (Burnod op. cit.: 103ff). Even moderate cortical input can trigger the firing of a frontal column, without thalamic amplification. This is the dynamic side of frontal cortex functioning, as opposed to the inhibitory pattern differentiations produced by what he calls ‘lateral uncoupling’ (op. cit.: 167). Burnod’s model further suggests that the higher-level (top-down) initiation of syntactic encoding may be a function of more extensive dorsal areas of frontal cortex that stretch above the PIFG (posterior inferior frontal gyrus ) along the ‘time’ axis of the ‘story/relational’ circuit, from the fastest level (next to the motor cortex) to the slowest (the inferior fronto-temporal pole). In fact, one can combine these various perspectives on frontal cortical activity in a unified scenario for the initiation of voluntary sentence/utterance production that starts in the anterior cingulate cortex and spreads via the supplementary motor region (on the medial surface behind the word ‘dorsal’ on Figure 2) down the left hemisphere ‘time’ axis towards the PIFG (cf. Deacon 1997: 282). This may trigger successively more fine-grained syntactic branchings in areas intermediate between the two circuits. Note that a call tree from the ‘relational’ circuit would go straight to the ‘highest’ syntactic level of the sentence circuit parallel with it, starting with the fronto-temporal pole (where speech acts may be initiated); the actions to meet its goal would however go in the opposite direction, via sub-goals back from the pole towards the motor cortex.149 The frontotemporal pole of the pre-frontal cortex is linked sub-cortically to slow rhythm/ long-term ‘fundamental programs’, including the global goal of communication (Burnod op. cit.: 283). Sub-goal calls to the sentence circuit pass according to Burnod through successively ‘faster’ regions back along the time axis, namely those for ‘nested phrases’, then for the relative position of word couples in a phrase, and finally for ‘action words’, the verb and its predicate frame. Given the reverse direction of calls and the actions they provoke between circuits, this is not inconsistent with the notion that it is the verb and its predicate frame that is first activated (i.e. as a bottom-up, word/sentence circuit action). The activation of an overall sentence-level template corresponding to the top-down illocution type would result in further ramifications to accommodate the predicate frame of the verb already activated ‘bottom up’. Although Burnod does not go into this, one can envisage successive calls back and forth between (semantic) story/relational circuit sub-divisions and corresponding (linguistic) sentence circuit sub-divisions in the process of integrating the remaining ingredient constituents. This ‘mapping’ process between the two circuits is presumably quite complex and indirect, involving choices of alternative conceptualizations that may shift in mid-stream. The involvement of

184

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powerful attentional mechanisms (probably involving the basal ganglia) in order to maintain the integrity of the ‘concrescent’ sentence through time must also be assumed.150 Finally, I should underscore the main points at which my model differs from Burnod’s. I do not equate Burnod’s auditory-phonation ‘word’ circuit with my ‘phonological circuit’. He claims that both this and the other ‘privileged’ circuit, the visuo-motor ‘image’ one, have redundant parallel connections in intermediate association areas between both their sensory (anterior) and their motor (anterior) sections (op. cit.: 153), whereas my ‘word’ circuit is mediatory in essence and therefore located entirely within association cortex, intermediate between the two ‘privileged’ circuits. The notion of a unitary outer ‘image’ circuit is difficult to maintain, since ‘images’ may also involve auditory cortex and the whole of the somatosensory ‘body map’ (for auditory and kinaesthetic images respectively) – his ‘image’ circuit is actually limited to visual imagery. Another way of putting this is to state that my ‘phonological’ circuit corresponds to Burnod’s privileged ‘word/sentence’ circuit, but that my own ‘word/sentence’ circuit lies in association cortex between this and his ‘image/relational’ circuit. My ‘word/sentence’ circuit is best regarded as a discontinuous ring of association regions intermediate between his ‘privileged circuits’ (which constitute the major cortical components of working memory). What completes the ‘circuit’ or ‘ring’ must be assumed to be sub-cortical pathways, via the thalamus and the basal ganglia.151 Moreover, Burnod separates left- and right-hemisphere functions in a somewhat too procrustean manner to be convincing, proposing in Chapter 4 (in particular op. cit.: 284) that the overall function of the right hemisphere is to model the ‘natural’ world as opposed to the symbolic one represented solely in the left hemisphere, with translation back and forth due to hemispheric symmetry. This has not been upheld by newer neuroimaging findings and is also at loggerheads with the prevailing view of the relationship (hardly oneto-one) between language and ‘physical reality’ (cf. Levinson 2003: 291ff.). I suggest in Chapter 13 of the present book an alternative way of looking at inter-hemispheric symmetry, namely that formulated as my Contextual Symmetry hypothesis.

Appendix 2

Paradigmatic Features of English Words

The following list is a first approximation of the micro-functional features called for by the model. They are associated with the paradigmatic axes of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as being grammatically relevant (beyond word-specific collocations). In other words only core features are listed (typical sensory features and macro-functional contexts of use could be added ad libitum). Those indented with a short dash in front are sub-varieties of the broader category given above them. Both isolated features and those forming semantic ‘classes’ are included (and mixed). Note that some general features crosscut − and are contained in − the properties of others, and that some features – like ‘path’ and ‘orientation’ − cover a range of specific values that could be listed (e.g. ‘up’ vs. ‘down’, ‘horizontal’ vs. ‘vertical’) in so far as they have distinguishable relevance for the grammar. Redundancy rules whereby clusters of simple features can be collapsed to simplex features need to be added (as with ‘transferral’ in section 7.2). Features can be combined together, and some, like ‘gradable’, can also take a negative value (i.e. combine with ‘negative’, itself a paradigmatic, instructionally based feature that cuts across word classes). Examples of the grammatical relevance of the feature concerned are added in square brackets (only for basic uses, much simplified in detail). A handful of words in which they play a role is added in parentheses for each feature. A given word may of course have multiple features and could be listed in several different places. This can be seen explicitly in the examples of conjoined paradigmatic features adhering to individual words at the end of this appendix, where an oblique separates different senses and parentheses enclose features combined with the preceding one. Polysemy and metaphorical extensions are otherwise ignored.

Nouns countable (co) [takes articles and plural; may follow numeral] (pencil, parrot, country)

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Appendix 2

mass (ma) [no indef. article; no plural] - liquid material (lm) [can be object of ‘pour’ or subject of ‘flow’] (water, oil) - solid material (sm) [can enter unit collocations like ‘piece of N’] (earth, iron, plastic) - gaseous matter (gm) [can be subject of verbs like ‘breathe in’] (air, steam) aggregate (ag) [countable, but the quantifier modifies the whole, not the constituent parts; singular/plural agreement variation] (family, population, crowd) abstract object (ab) [no article; not with verbs taking animate subject] (religion, liberty, wit, order) animate being (anb) [countable; physical object; used with verbs taking animate subj.] - human (hu) [with verbs taking human subj.; anaphoric reference by ‘he, she, his, her’, etc.] (man, Australian, rebel) - winged creature (wic) [with verbs of flying] (parrot, sparrow, butterfly) - crawling creature (cc) [with verbs of crawling] (caterpillar, crocodile, snake) - aquatic creature (ac) [with verbs of swimming] (salmon, carp, dolphin) - quadruped (qd) [with verbs of trotting, galloping, etc.] (lion, horse, dog) inanimate phys. object (ino) [countable; anaph. reference by ‘it, its’, etc.] (rock, sun, stick) name (n) [i.e. proper noun; no article (except in some geographical names, i.e. place names); fixed sing.or plural; not used generically] (Raoul, London, the Andes) body part (bp) [joined to ‘owner’ of body N in genitive construction; can be subj. of verbs referring to movement of that part] (shoulder, foot, tail) kinship term (kt) [enters possessive phrases with other kinship word or pers. pronoun, where ‘N1 of N2’ implies converse relationship ‘N2 of N1’] (father, daughter, wife) artefact (art) [countable; can be object of factive verb; can enter purpose phrases like ‘N for V-ing’] - instrument (ins) [can be used in instr. phrases ‘with N’ or ‘using an X’] (key, rifle, hammer) - building space (bus) [can be used in locative phrases; can be linked by presuppositional def. reference to typical contents/parts (‘the X (of Y)’)] (house, shed, bedroom) - furniture (fu) [def. reference presupposes building/room containing such items] (chair, bed, curtains) - clothing (cl) [can be used as object of verbs of wearing] (coat, socks, hat, necklace) - container (con) [can be used in ‘put X in N’ phrases] ( jar, box, saucepan) - means of transport (mt) [can be used in ‘go by N’ phrases] (bicycle, car, ship) plant (pl) [countable; can be used as subject of verbs like ‘grow’ and in possessive collocation with nouns like ‘seed’ and ‘root’] (tree, rose, grass)

Appendix 2

187

food (f) [can be object of verbs of consumption] - prepared food (pf) [can be object of factive verb] (cake, pizza, soup) - foodstuff (fs) [not countable without addition of unit N] (corn, meat, chocolate) - drink (dr) [not countable without addition of unit N; can be object of verbs like ‘drink’] (water, beer) geographical object (go) [countable, of considerable size with fuzzy natural dimensions; not artefact; can be head of locative (prepositional) phrase, in which case it indicates a place] (lake, mountain, island) natural phenomenon (np) [transient; not countable, though def. article possible for unit occasion; anaphoric ref. by ‘it’] (rain, sunshine, fire) extended natural object (ex) [can form path phrases with ‘along’] (path, river) perceptual object (peo) [can be object of perceptual verb] - sound (s) [can be used as obj. of verbs like ‘hear’] (shriek, roar, tick) - immaterial visual (vi) [can be used as obj. of visual verbs like ‘see’ but not of tactile or other sensory verbs] (appearance, shadow) - shape (sh) [not physical object; can be object of verbs like ‘draw’ or ‘measure’; can be modified for dimension but not material] (circle, square, line) mental object (mo) [cannot be modified for perceptual quality] (thought, intention, memory) metaphysical object (meo) [can be used as object of verbs like ‘believe in’ but not perceptual verbs like ‘touch’] (angel, luck, heaven) generic (gen) [not countable, but hypernym relat. to countables; no indef. article or plural] (furniture, food, mankind) mature animal (mat) [can be used in phrases of possessing or producing offspring X] (cow, adult, parent) gendered animate being (geb) [gender-specific anaphoric reference; can be used with verbs/adjs. referring to a specific gender] (uncle, woman, bull) number (nu) [inserted between determiner and adjective in full NP] (five, half, 7.3) emotional state (es) [not countable; may be object of verb ‘feel’] (fear, sadness, joy) state of health (sth) [can be object of verb like ‘suffer’ and enter phrases like ‘in X (body part)’] (illness, pain, rheumatism) time period (tp) [countable; can form temporal phrases with prepositions ‘in’ or ‘for’] (minute, year, day) transient (tt) [not with verbs needing physical object as subj.; can enter collocations like ‘N lasted X (time period)’] (event, feeling, shower) measure (mea) [countable; preceded by quantifier (including indef. article for ‘one’)] (inch, pound, kilometre) direction (d) [can be used in directional phrases like ‘to the N of X’ and ‘face the N’] (north, south, left) profession (pro) [human; enters collocations such as ‘work as a N’] (teacher, cobbler, farmer)

188

Appendix 2

monetary trade unit (mtu) [symbolic artefact; with quantifier can be used as object of ‘pay’ or in phrases like ‘worth N’] (dollar, pound) event type (et) [can be subject of verb like ‘take place’ but not of verb requiring phys. obj. as subject] (journey, crime, catastrophe) energy (en) [non-perceptual mass word; usually no article; may be subj. of causal verbs; can form manner phrases with ‘with’] (heat, effort, power) social entity (se) [cannot be subject of verb requiring animate subject (except by metaphor); aggregate] (club, party, aristocracy) spatial area (spa) [modifiable by dimensional adjectives referring to two-dimensional objects/areas; can form locative phrases ‘in (a) N’] (field, town, country) rule(s) (r) [abstract object; can be used as object of verbs like ‘break’ or ‘follow’] (law, etiquette, rule) ceremony (ce) [event type with social purpose; can be object of verbs like ‘go through’ or ‘attend’] (marriage, coronation, graduation) game (ga) [can be object of verb ‘play’ and enter collocations like ‘the rules of N’] (football, chess, hide-and-seek) social group activity (sga) [activity type; can be object of verbs like ‘conduct’ and enter phrases like ‘between/among N’ where N is plural or aggregate] (war, commerce) dimension (dn) [can form phrases ‘in N’ following adj. of size or ‘N of X’ where X is a quantified measure] (size, height, depth) text (t) [symbolic artefact, consisting of words and/or numbers; can be object of ‘read’] (poem, invoice, story) symbol (sym) [physical object referring to abstract object or type; can be subject of verbs ‘stand for’ or ‘mean’] (sign, word, name)

Verbs telic action (ta) [brief action plus resultant state (achievement), compatible with ‘suddenly’ but not ‘partly’ and with temporal phrase ‘in an X’ but not ‘for an X’ (where X is a time period)] (reach, die, break) gradual accomplishment (gra) [durative telic achievement, compatible with ‘take X to V’ (where X is time period)] (cross, descend, prepare) activity (act) [non-telic, durative; dynamic; compatible with temporal phrase ‘for an X’ but not ‘in an X’ (where X is a time period)] - bodily activity (ba) [requires animate subject/agent] (nod, sing, work) - consumption (cns) [takes object of food or drink] (eat, drink, smoke) - mental activity (men) [requires subject/agent capable of thought; not compatible with ‘with X’ where X is a body part] (think, plan, remember) - motion (mot) [compatible with ‘from X to Y’ (where X and Y are locations); requires subject/agent capable of movement] (walk, run, fall)

Appendix 2

189

- process symbols (ps) [object/goal must consist of words (text) or other symbolic or numeric entity] (read, count, interpret) state (st) [durative; no movement by subject, so not compatible with ‘from X to Y’ or ‘suddenly’] - bodily position (bop) [subject – prototypically animate − must display characteristic spatial orientation] (lie, sit, lean) - mental state (ms) [not usually found in -ing form; human subject; object/ goal argument is a higher-order entity] (believe, know, hope) - emotional state (ems) [requires human or at least animate subject/experiencer] (fear, enjoy, hate) - perceptual similarity (pes) [not used with -ing form; subject must have perceptual – typically visual – characteristics] (resemble, appear) - relational state (rst) [non-dynamic relat. between two objects or masses; compatible with phrases like ‘(to/with/between) each other’] (adhere, implicate, include) change state (cs) [followed by adj.; subject must have initial dimensional or qualitative characteristic different from that in subsequent state] (grow, turn, become) transferral (tr) [(direct) object; a thing caused to move from one location to another; may be followed by recipient or source phrase] (give, get, take) factive action (fa) [object/goal phrase is a resultant artefact] (make, write) produce sound (prs) [subject must be phys. object capable of producing an auditory stimulus] (squeak, rattle, rumble) perception (pe) [subject/experiencer must be animate and object/stimulus perceptual] (see, hear, feel) factuality (fac) [complement clause with ‘that’ refers to a real event or state] (know, find out) momentaneous (mom) [not compatible with ‘for an X’ (where X is time period) except in iterative sense] (flash, flick, shoot) iterative (it) [compatible with ‘X times’ (where X is quantifier)] (repeat, sparkle) durative (du) [requires implicit or explicit temporal duration (phrase); compatible with ‘for an X’ (where X is a time period)] (last, continue, stay) intentional (in) [compatible with ‘on purpose’] (throw, listen, speak) unintentional (uni) [not compatible with ‘on purpose’] (fall, drop, stutter) with effort (we) [not compatible with ‘unintentionally’, requires subject capable of planning] (try, reach) initiate activity (iac) [momentaneous action followed by resultant activity V or NP; can be followed by ‘and is (still) V-ing’] (start, resume) stop activity (sta) [momentaneous action resulting in cessation of previous activity; can be followed by ‘and is no longer V-ing’] (stop, finish, give up) withhold activity (wac) [state; followed by subord. clause ‘from V-ing’ (where V is potential or intended activity/action)] (prevent, refrain)

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Appendix 2

causal action (ca) [action followed by resultant state of patient/object; compatible with both manner and purpose expressions ‘by V-ing’ and ‘in order to V’; agent subj. is (prototypically) animate, intentional causer] (fell, kill, raise) epistemic (epi) [auxiliary; precedes non-finite verb head; not inflected acc. tense] (may, can, might) deontic (de) [auxiliary; precedes non-finite verb head; not inflected for tense] (must, can) inductive (ind) [causative; requires human subject and human object capable (potentially) of free will; followed by ‘to V’ sub. clause with implicit subj. = object of main clause V] (force, allow, persuade) directly affect (dia) [bodily action; cause change of state in patient/goal] (handle, push) speech act (sac) [subject/agent is human; intentional; can be followed by ‘in so many words’] (say, tell, proclaim) possession (pos) [state; subject/possessor is human; ‘Y Vs X’ implies that ‘X belongs to Y’] (have, own) reflexive action or activity (ra) [followed by reflexive pronoun ‘himself’, etc, if not implicit] (dress, wash) reciprocal activity (rec) [plural subject; followed by reciprocal expression if not implicit] (fight, compete, correspond)

Adjectives and adverbs gradable (gr) [may be used in comparative construction; negation does not imply contradictory sense] (short, light, pretty) material substance (mas) [can be replaced by ‘made of N’ (where N is a mass word); follows perceptual and qualitative modifiers in NP] (paper, wooden) material state (mst) [follows perceptual and qualitative modifiers but not ones of material substance in NP] (liquid, solid) perceptual quality (pq) [precedes material state and substance modifiers but follows qualitative ones in NP] - colour (col) [applicable to visual objects; can be derivationally modified by -ish] (grey, blue) - size (si) [gradable; dimensional] (big, little, long) - shape (sha) [applicable to visual or tactile objects] (round, oblong) - volume (vo) [applicable to auditory stimuli] (quiet, loud) - weight (we) [applicable to phys. objects that can (potentially) be lifted] (heavy, light) - brightness (br) [applicable to sources of light] (bright, dull) - speed (spe) [applicable to object capable of motion] (fast, slow) - taste or smell (tas) [applicable to gustatory or olfactory stimuli] (sour, sweet, fragrant)

Appendix 2

191

temporal dimension (tem) [applicable to expression of state, activity or action with temporal dimension] (long-lasting, sudden, habitual) subjective quality (sq) [precedes modifiers of perceptual quality and origin] (nice, horrible, good) moral/epistemic quality (meq) [cannot precede other adj. when used attributively; usually preceded by def. article] (right, wrong) quality of character (qch) [applies to human (or at least animate) being; precedes modifiers of perceptual quality or origin] (charming, clever, stuck-up) ease (ea) [may be followed by ‘to V’ clause of (with) respect (to)] (easy, hard) resultant state (rs) [presupposes preceding causal or telic action, and can form predicate complement of such a verb if explicit] (dead, drunk, terrified) causing reaction (car) [characteristic or action of object causing physical or emotional response in another] (frightening, impressive, worrisome) gender (ge) [can only apply to suitably gendered animate being; not gradable] (male, female) age (age) [precedes modifiers of perceptual quality or origin; gradable] (old, new, young) quantity (qun) [applicable to quantifiable object or mass; precedes other adjectival modifiers] (many, much) potentiality (pot) [followed by ‘to V’ or ‘of V-ing’ phrase indicating potential activity/action] (liable, able, capable) origin (or) [replaceable by phrase ‘from X’ (where X is a nominal expression of origin); not gradable; may follow modifiers of perceptual and subjective quality] (French, historical) orientation (ori) [applicable to objects with a distinct linear orientation] (horizontal, upright) modal status (mos) [applicable to a situation, action or fact; can be replaced by deontic verbal expression] (necessary, possible) degree (deg) [modifies following gradable adjective] (very, somewhat) manner (man) [usually precedes verb it modifies, but may also follow whole VP] (foolishly, elegantly, intensely) path (pa) [adverb/particle following the verb it modifies, but may form phrasal verbs, in which case it can appear separated from the verb by an object or a manner phrase] (up, away, downwards) temporal position (tep) [must correlate with tense of predication’s verb] (tomorrow, recently) repetition (re) [presupposes a preceding event or state of similar type] (again, similarly) epistemic modulation (ep) [may occur first in sentence or between subject (plus auxiliary) and verb; can be replaced by a modal auxiliary] (probably, certainly, perhaps) discourse modulation (dis) [in initial position of sentence if not inserted parenthetically; refers to speaker’s attitude] (incidentally, frankly)

Appendix 2

192

Examples of compound paradigmatic features of individual words door (ino, art/spa) bed (fu, spa) stamp (art, mtu) hair (ma, bp) progress (ab, et) cake (art, pf) holiday (tp, et) picture (art, sym) bank (go, ex) giggle (ba, prs) stir (dia, act) restrain (ca (wac)) open (ta, dia) bake (ca (cs)/fa) threaten (ba/sac) blame (men/sac, ca (rst)) conquer (ta, ca (cs)) catch (ba, daf) fetch (mot, ca (mot)) extraordinary (sq, deg)

Appendix 3

Sample Derivations

The ‘derivations’ referred to in the text (for English) are listed here together with the relevant template numbers. All are assumed to be realized in tightly knit networks of cortical columns. Others examples, broken down into ‘syntactical’, ‘morphological’ and (mixed lexico-morphosyntactic) ‘constructional’ types, are added to illustrate the full range of the ‘expand’, ‘add’, and ‘change’ functions involved. They range from fully productive to highly restricted in productivity – in the latter case, the individual words (or paradigmatic features of words) relevant must be indicated on both the word templates and the derivational template concerned. The formal input/output conditions could easily be added here. Note that the features appearing in the description of derivations constitute (ideally) a sub-set of the paradigmatic/syntagmatic microaffordances required for individual words, as analysed in Appendix 2 − unless they represent higher-level requirements (such as focus/topic assignment) that do not affect individual word meanings. D1 Change action to resultant state (Template 8) D2 Change telic action to activity (T 18) D3 Change activity to telic action (text to T 4 and 18) D4 (Change) compound head specification (T 32) D5 Add goal (T 33) D6 Add motion and goal (T 34) D7 Add motion (T 35 and 36) D8 Add cause by handling (T 37) D9 Add recipient (T 38) D10 Add involuntary causation (T 40) D11 Change verb to noun (text to T 19 and 20) D12 Add inchoative to Adj (text at end of Chapter 8) D13 Expand artefact nominal (extracting process) (T 51) D14 Expand RelCl to Comp.-er + VP (T 59) (There are also purely stylistic derivations of the ‘change’ type, as suggested in connection with ‘conquer’ (text to T 43))

Appendix 3

194

Further examples of syntactic derivations (These range from fully productive to limited to specific sub-classes of words) D15 Expand S to: NP + VP (+PP) D16 Expand VP to: V + NP D17 Expand NP to: Det + Adj + N (+ RelCl) D18 Change it + V + that S (NP + VP) to: NP + V + to + VP D19 Change NP + Vtransfer + NPpat + to NPrecip to: NP + Vtransfer + NPrecip+ NPpat

Further examples of morphological derivations (These vary in productivity) D20 Change adjective to adverb (with -ly) D21 Change positive adjective to negative one (with un-) D22 Add repetition to action (with re-) D23 Add tense to V (regular past -ed, etc.) D24 Add progressive aspect to V (i.e. ‘be V-ing’)152

Further examples of lexical/mixed derivations (‘constructions’) (This multifarious kind of derivation varies greatly with respect to productivity) D25 Add epistemic modality to V (i.e. ‘may V’, etc.) D26 Add inchoative aspect to activity verb (‘start V-ing’)153 D27 Add adversative result to action V (‘go and V’) D28 Add easy intensity to activity V (‘V away’)154 D29 Expand an activity verb to ‘go V-ing’ (for pleasant, potentially iterative activity) D30 Change a mass noun to a count noun (‘an X (unit)of N’)

List of Templates and Graphic Conventions

1. Parrot 2. River 3. Water 4. Fly 5. Wide 6. Swiftly 7. Over 8. Frightened and frighten 9. Raoul (name) 10. See 11. Raise 12. Rifle and shoot 13. Shoulder 14. A moment later 15. He and his 16. Shoot and kill 17. Die and dead 18. Shoot at 19. Assassinate and murder 20. Liberty and love 21. Holiday 22. Green 23. Right 24. Say and claim 25. Apparently 26. Must 27. Look and sound 28. Seem and appear 29. Bird 30. Father 31. Bull 32. Shoulder strap 33. Go and go to 34. Take and take to

196

Templates and Graphic Conventions

35. Hold and carry 36. Get 37. Put 38. Give 39. Look for and find 40. Fall and drop 41. Make 42. Fight and beat 43. Conquer 44. Have a snooze 45. (Don’t let it) get to (you) 46. Climb 47. Understand and know 48. Bake a cake 49. Open the door 50. House and door 51. Begin a novel 52. -ʕaaʔatu- and -‘as (Nuuchahnulth) 53. ʔuu-h-w’ink (Nuuchahnulth) 54. -‘o and -ton (Koyukon) 55. brat’ and otbirat’ (Russian) 56. k-t-b (Arabic) 57. Yupik demonstrative adverbs 58. pav- and paugna (Yupik) 59. NP and relative clause 60. Alternative predicate frames for verbs of transferral

Graphic conventions as first introduced, by template Template 1: orthogonal axes of sensory and functional affordances for nouns; short crossing lines for features; mid-level arrow for phonological input from Wernicke’s area (between square brackets); arrow towards temporal pole of object synthesis dimension; short parallel oblique lines for long-distance connections to functional affordances; italics to refer to other mediatory word columns; _ before (or after) word class abbreviation for syntagmatic context Template 2: dotted lines at right-angles joining up associated features of orthogonal axes Template 4: sensory and functional affordances for verbs; arrow of time along paradigmatic axis; bolded line for dominant/obligatory sensory dimension or axis; vertical broken line for mapping between functional and sensory affordances or between functional affordances and allomorphic input from Wernicke’s area

Templates and Graphic Conventions Template 5: Template 6: Template 7: Template 8:

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functional affordances of adjectives functional affordances of adverbs functional affordances of prepositions thick horizontal arrow above horizontal line for derivational relationship positioned above micro-functional level; slanting broken lines mapping specific micro-functional features up to that level; short parallel oblique lines for hierarchical separation of levels Template 10: alternative syntagmatic contexts separated by semi-colon Template 11: secondary crossing lines for attributes or parts of arguments Template 12: circles for macro-functional scenarios/frames; action sequences indicated by small arrows within scenario circle Template 14: functional affordances for temporal adverbs; macro-functional arrow pointing in direction of narrative sequence Template 15: functional affordances of pronouns; anaphoric arrow at macrofunctional level; broken vertical line to allomorphic variants of nominals from juncture of syntagmatic and paradigmatic features Template 16: ordering events along the paradigmatic axis of verbs Template 17: angled broken line connecting functional-affordance features of semantically related words Template 19: lexical items related by overlapping macro-functional scenario circles Template 20: abstract nominalizations maintaining ‘verbal’ orientation Template 21: further associations as arrows from macro-functional scenario circles; negative associations by X-crossed arrows Template 22: the predicative use of adjectives Template 23: adjectives with functional affordances alone Template 24: functional affordances of speech-act verbs Template 25: macro-functional arrow for discourse-management adverbials Template 26: functional affordances of modal verbs; secondary crossing lines for ‘source’ or ‘mode’ of abstract paradigmatic features Template 29: sensory features joined into square and mapped upwards by slanting broken lines to indicate hypernym-hyponym relations for natural kinds Template 30: top-down semantic fields as macro-functional circles Template 32: bidirectional arrow for nominal compounding ‘derivation’; bolding of compositionally or contextually relevant elements in macrofunctional scenario circle Template 34: further derivational specificity indicated by adding peripheral features around core Template 41: secondary crossing lines for manner (paradigmatic axis) and ‘internal’ arguments of clausal argument (syntagmatic axis) Template 43: stylistic ‘derivation’; circles for stylistic macro-functional affordances

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Template 44: angled broken lines for linking micro-functional features of lexemes entering into a constructional relationship Template 45: broken line at higher-level functional level for metaphorical projection of ‘basic’ word into a construction Template 48: ‘qualia’ unification between verbs and nouns Template 49: abbreviating several events along the paradigmatic axis of a verb; superimposing different senses of the same noun along its paradigmatic axis Template 50: linking sensory features of meronymously related lexemes via an angled broken line; using multiple secondary crossing lines to indicate individual parts of complex spatial features Template 52: lexical suffixes as independent word columns Template 54: morphological vs. syntactic features at opposite ends of syntagmatic axes Template 56: referential vs. predicative use of same roots indicated by short macro-functional level arrows; plural allomorph of nouns indicated by vertical broken line from juncture of syntagmatic and paradigmatic features (also reflecting agreement requirements) Template 57: the binding of tight paradigmatic sub-systems by angled broken lines between paradigmatic features Template 58: formal (case) categories vs. semantic features at opposite ends of paradigmatic axis of nominals Template 59: ‘grammar templates’; indexical sub-scripts on arguments Template 60: linking up alternative syntactic frames for verbs of transferral by broken lines; short input arrow from discourse context for topic marking

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Models of the lexicon as a network go back at least to Quillian (1968), which falls within the AI tradition of labelled nodes and relationships between nodes. The distinction between words and conceptual content is, however, quite blurred in such early models. Note that this is not a simple reductionist endeavour: I follow Burnod (1990: 3) in seeing the cortex as organized on four different levels, that of the individual neuron, that of the ‘cortical column’, that of the ‘cortical map’, and, finally, that of the overall network. Each level has its own ‘logic’ and functions, the relationship between which can be characterized as emergent. Such approaches all involve ‘activation spreading’ (cf. Levelt 1989: 211), as does my own. The present model appears to be most consonant with ‘Adaptive Resonance Theory’ (cf. Long et al.1998: 13ff), which has produced network simulations of prototype-based word recognition processes and learning that function simultaneously in a ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ fashion. Burnod’s concept of the ‘call tree’, discussed later, is also a matter of spreading cortical activation, but activation that is guided in specific directions. For a general introduction to the structural organization of the cortical column – the minimal functional unit of which the cortex is composed − see Mountcastle (1998: 165–96). I shall have more to say on their internal structure in Chapter 2.1. Pustejovsky’s use of the term ‘qualia’, note, is more specialized than that of the philosophical tradition, where it refers, broadly speaking, to the subjective experience of sensory qualities. His extension of the term to cover the meanings of verbs as well as nouns in order to ensure their semantic meshing (or ‘contextualization’) with different argument types is also not traditional (and a usage I shall not be following). The ‘procedural’ memory system, involving sub-cortical structures, is distinguished by cognitive psychologists from the ‘declarative’ or ‘explicit’ system. Paradis (2004: 139) relates vocabulary to this latter system, i.e. essentially Burnod’s ‘word’ circuit. Ullman (2004) specifically sees the mental lexicon as depending on the declarative memory system (mainly involving the temporal lobe and hippocampus), whereas the complementary procedural memory system (mainly frontal lobe and basal ganglia) subserves the automaticized combinatorial (morphosyntactic) aspects of language. ‘Functional’ should be understood as ‘grammatically functional’ rather than in a purely psychological sense (as in the functionality of tools), though there is an overlap in usage, since both contrast with simple ‘sensory’. Nor should it be equated with Lamb’s term ‘confunct’ (op. cit.: 138f.), which is the conceptual (trans-modal) representation of an activity (as opposed to a uni-modal ‘perfunct’).

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Hurford has been criticized for failing to suggest any mechanism by which the dorsal and ventral stream information could be integrated into whole predicateargument structures (propositions) – cf. Bickerton’s ‘open peer’ commentary to that article (op. cit.: 286). Hurford partially counters such objections by claiming (from his evolutionary perspective) that his use of the distinction has only the loosest connection with the linguistic noun vs. verb distinction, yet the role that he assigns the dorsal route – simply ascertaining that some object (the variable) is present, which the ventral stream alone analyses further in terms of predicate categories (whether nominally or verbally expressed) – runs counter to most of the neurolinguistic evidence. See Talmy (2000, 2: 418f.) for the notion of an overall ‘pattern-forming cognitive system’ that correlates overlapping linguistic, imagistic and discourse/narrative sub-systems, but compare also Jackendoff’s concept of ‘interface processors’ (Jackendoff 2002: 199). Although the latter are formulated in terms of sets of generative rules, not an approach I espouse (I prefer direct mapping relationships between modules), they surely amount to the same. Levelt distinguishes a ‘lemma lexicon’ from a ‘word form lexicon’, though warns that this separation should not be overstated, given our present state of knowledge. Whereas the former combines semantic and syntactic information about words, the latter combines morphological and phonological (including, in tone languages, tonal) aspects of words. Though the reason for this particular division of labour is transparent (in the close association between the first two in grammatical encoding and the last two in phonological encoding), and support can be found for it in tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, I see no convincing reason to associate sensory and functional levels of meaning together, nor to associate all morphological derivation preferentially with phonology. In other respects Levelt’s conception of the ‘lemma’ (a term taken over from Kempen and Huijbers) fits well with the present model. It is an extension of Morton’s notion of the ‘logogen‘, with which it shares the property of being a parallel lexical accessing device that collects ‘evidence’ from various sources until a threshold is reached when enough has been gathered to trigger activation of the word’s form. ‘Double dissociation’ is a standard methodological requirement when demonstrating that a particular mental function is localized in a specific brain area, namely that (a) damage to the area in question is associated with impairment of the function, and (b) that preservation of that area is associated with maintenance of that function, even when surrounding areas are damaged. This is defined by Damasio and Damasio (1992: 65) as an area of association cortex where feedforward from the axons of pyramidal cells from one region (e.g. auditory cortex) converge and join with reciprocally diverging (bidirectional) feedback projections from others (e.g. visual cortex). Mediational ‘micro-circuits’ consist of neural ensembles which learn to associate certain patterns of feedforward signals from many sources with feedback responses to the same sources and to other sites (cf. Damasio et al. 1996: 504). Cf. also Wise et al. (2001: 92). Lamb (1998: 357) defends Wernicke’s original interpretation of the function of this area, whereas Burnod (op. cit.: 265f.), following other dissenting voices of the time, saw it as the focus of ‘semantic structure’.

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Various terms have been used within artificial intelligence, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics for these world knowledge representations since Minsky’s (1975) original article. Usage ranges from the semantics of individual predicates, e.g. ‘eat’, to detailed action scenarios, e.g. for the sequence of actions one typically carries out in a restaurant. I generally prefer the term ‘scenario’ as combining the dynamic, temporally sequenced sense of ‘script’ with the more static, settinglike sense of ‘frame’, both of which it covers. In the simplest case, a scenario is directly associated with a specific conventional phrase, e.g. bumping into someone with the phrase ‘excuse me’. Cf. Jackendoff (1985: 141) for a discussion of frames/scripts as gestalt types that fill in default features that may be missing in individual tokens. For examples of a general ‘commercial transaction’ frame (containing several interrelated verbs) and of a frame adhering to one specific English word, namely ‘risk’, see Fillmore and Atkins (1992), and for the notion of frame applied to discourse modelling see Fortescue (1980). For some hints on how action scenarios may be embodied in the brain, see Feldman (2008: 227ff). The Fund in Dik’s model contains both the lexicon, restricted to basic – nonreducible − predicates and terms, and derived predicates and terms, the result of passing basic items through derivational processes of predicate and term formation respectively (cf. Dik 1989: 53). Basic terms are limited to pronouns and proper names, so all other nominal expressions are predicates that have been cycled through ‘term formation’. The notion of the Fund being ‘wrapped around’ the basic lexicon of predicates and terms in the manner of the FG model does not seem particularly useful here, since the lexicon itself cannot be located in one restricted place in the brain. Note that Pustejovsky (op. cit.: 86) regards natural kinds as a matter of ‘agentive’ qualia (a feature involved in the ‘bringing about’ of an object). Though this may distinguish between natural kinds and artefacts it is difficult to reconcile with the purely sensory recognition of objects. The details are not important here. For present purposes it is enough to realize that some of the pyramidal cells that form the core of the column are confined to the upper (‘supragranular’) levels of the column (or ‘mini-column’) and have bidirectional connections to other − relatively local − areas of the cortex (both ipsilateral and contralateral), while other (‘infragranular’) ones stretch all the way through the six cellular levels of the cortex and have connections to deeper structures of the brain (including the thalamus, the major ‘switchboard’ between cortical areas), and via them to the granular level of far-flung areas of the cortex. All of them have the same essential structure: branching dendritic trees taking input from many other neurons via synapses formed at their dendritic ‘spines’, and a single axon (which may itself branch) through which the cell ‘fires’, producing bursts of output signals. The upper and lower parts of a column (more local levels 2 and 3 and more distal levels 5 and 6 respectively) may be coupled or decoupled in various ways by inhibitory inter-neurons, each part potentially acting independently (Burnod op. cit.: 74ff). In all, a single cortical ‘mini-column’ contains about 80 to 300 neurons according to Mountcastle (1998: 165); cortical columns or ‘modules’ (on his definition) are formed by many mini-columns bound together by dense, short-range horizontal connections.

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As Lamb (1998: 218) puts it: ‘. . . a nection being recruited to integrate a combination of properties whose nections are not close to each other will tend to be in an intermediate location between the nections for these properties’. A lexical ‘nection’ can be understood as equivalent to a ‘mediatory word column’. Lamb points out that there is one general exception to the principle, namely when the connection to one of the ‘poles’ of the relationship is via a (fast) long-distance link, while the connection to the other is over the local cortical surface. Longdistance links to corresponding contralateral areas of the right hemisphere (probably activated in calls to the sensory affordances of most words) are for this reason ignored. He also admits that the principle seems to break down as regards the nections of verbs (op. cit.: 358), opting to locate them closer to the area of phonological production (Broca’s) than nouns (which are closer to the area of phonological recognition), i.e. along the motor-spatial axis, as I do too (cf. Appendix 1). See Damasio et al. (1996: 504f.) for a similar position as regards localization of mediatory ‘microcircuits’. This could alternatively be envisaged as expanding concentric circles, perhaps better expressing the ‘prototype’ relations involved, though this would obscure the specific types of call involved along the four orthogonal dimensions. Note that several different kinds of feature, all involving specific areas of visual cortex (e.g. for colour and shape), are aligned along the same visual dimension on the template here: different calls (with specific sub-goals) must be assumed to traverse the same broad channel towards primary visual cortex and back although they separate along distinct branching pathways. The important thing is that all such features along the visual dimension should link up with the object synthesis feature ‘bird’. The spatial dimension here is assumed, by the way, to include partwhole relationships such as the relative position between claws, beak, wings, etc., and these could be indicated by linking them up with dotted lines to the relevant features on the visual dimension in a manner that will be illustrated later. This is obviously an over-simplification of the situation, since some (unmyelinated) cortico-cortical connections are also relatively long-distance, e.g. the activating ‘feed-forward’ links between the upper layers of cortical columns in primary sensory areas and the medial level of corresponding secondary associative areas hierarchically ‘above’ or ‘upstream from’ them (Burnod op. cit.: 68). Both thalamic and cortical inputs impinge on the pyramidal cells constituting the core of all cortical columns and, according to Burnod, are both essential for the column’s full activation (otherwise call trees are sent out to find the strong input patterns enabling its axonal firing and a return to equilibrium). Different cortical maps can overlap non-competitively within the same limited region of the cortical matrix owing to the transversal (vertical) division of columns into layers: different streams of activation may pass through each other at different layers of the interconnected columns, often with differing orientations. When such streams arrive at the same columnar layer their bands alternate in parallel bands across the area of intersection (Burnod op. cit.: 163). I do not want to suggest that there is a hard and fast distinction between words defined by perceptual features alone and those for which human use (culturally determined) is relevant. Thus an essential element in the meaning of a word for

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another kind of waterway, ‘canal’, is the fact that it is artificially created in order to serve the specific purpose of transporting goods (e.g. by barges). This is handled on the model by an additional macro-functional ‘scenario’ of the type to be introduced below. Actually, it is not enough to characterize landscape words like ‘river’ as ‘geographical objects’ – they can also be treated as ‘places’ (in English typically by the addition of a preposition to form a prepositional phrase). They thus constitute what Pustejovsky calls ‘dot objects’ (I shall expand on this in Chapter 10). Other features of a ‘haptic’ nature, including texture, weight and temperature (to the touch) are all assumed to be associated with the somatosensory dimension of this axis, as are the bodily up/down/rotational dimensions supplied by the vestibular system. Kinaesthetic patterns of body movement are located along the corresponding frontal side of the central sulcus. The sense of ‘water’ in ‘a fizzy water’ – meaning a bottle of fizzy water – could be accessed from the affordances of ‘water’ either via a ‘derivation’ for referring to units of an ingestible (mass) substance in a container (‘an X of Y’), which allows an abbreviated form ‘a Y’, or via a higher-order ‘scenario’ for imbibing bottled drinks. In fact there is neuroimaging evidence for motion features of objects moving in their characteristic manner being located in the temporal lobes, i.e. as part of their sensory affordances along the ‘what’ route (cf. Martin and Caramazza 2003: 202). The variability in precise interpretation of the meaning of the verb is largely determined by the nature of the agent or ‘theme’: if it is a bird (as opposed to an aeroplane) it involves flapping of the wings, if a flag then suspension from a flagpole, and so forth. The transition to figurative/metaphorical uses is not clear-cut, however. This will be returned to in Chapter 9. Cf. Dhond et al. (2003) for MEG (magnetoencephalographic) evidence that there is stronger activity in Broca’s area during the retrieval of past-tense forms from visually presented infinitive forms for regular than for irregular verbs in English. Irregular ones evoke greater activity in posterior cortex (specifically in the angular gyrus, adjacent to Wernicke’s area). E.g. adjectives of colour close to inferior occipital cortex, those of sound quality close to (mid) superior temporal cortex, and those of taste close to ventromedial frontal cortex. Evidently there are further contextually-determined features that could (and should) be added to the micro-functional affordances of adjectives of this type, in particular the neutral or ‘impartial’ sense it acquires in question formulae with ‘how’ in syntagmatic sequences like ‘how wide is –’. (The linkage between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects here could again be represented by joining them up with dotted lines.) This contrasts with antonym ‘narrow’, which is ‘committed’ to its basic sense. Both may be related via a ‘measuring spatial dimensions’ scenario of the general type to be introduced in Chapter 4.1. There may well be a developmental reason for the predominance of the positive pole in such antonymic pairs here: children presumably first pay attention to the positive degree of ‘bigness’, ‘wideness’, etc., of objects before needing to express a lack of the same quality. I shall return to the question of antonyms in 5.3.

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I would suggest that there is in fact also a sensory affordance involved here, namely the limbic/somatic feeling of denial, anchored genetically in the earliest kind of gesture (or reaction) of rejection, or awareness of absence, on the part of the pre-linguistic child. ‘Limbic’, as used very broadly here, refers to the areas of the medial cortex connected to the more ‘primitive’ or ‘fundamental’ structures of the mid-brain (including the hypothalamus) responsible for emotional input, but also mediating reaction to general changes in the internal bodily environment. Only the most general kinds of limbic affordances can at present be localized further (e.g. fear to the amygdalae, happiness to the action of ‘reward’ neurotransmitters on ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex, etc.). It would appear that input from the limbic cortex goes to upper layers 2 and 3 of cortical columns elsewhere, as do other kinds of cortico-cortico input. However, it should be noted that layer 1, which lies closest to the cortical surface, has diffuse long-distance cortico-cortico and cortico-limbic connections (Johnson 2000: 242). Burnod (op. cit.: 87) characterizes the latter input as ‘reticular’ (borne by modulatory neurotransmitters), and Mountcastle (1998:70ff) as ‘involved in the regulation of . . . the affective tone of thought and action’. The position of limbic affordances on the templates is purely impressionistic but meant to be suggestive of this further ‘molecular’ dimension. Amongst verbs of emotion it is limited to ‘subject-focused’ ones like ‘frighten’, where the subject is the source or stimulus of the emotion, and does not apply to ‘object-focused’ ones like ‘fear’, where the object is the source. (Past participial ‘feared’ does not refer to a resultant state in the experiencer but to a quality of the stimulus object, thus reflecting a separate derivation.) Grammar templates (embodied in aggregates/networks of frontal columns) can themselves be seen as hierarchically organized at different levels extending from that of word-specific constructions up to that of the most general (phrase structure) rules. ‘Hierarchical’ here should not be understood literally as meaning layer upon layer of cortical structure: the cortex is everywhere of virtually the same thickness in terms of layers. The hierarchy is largely functional, topographically spread across frontal cortex anterior to (classical) Broca’s area. To this can be added the ‘vertical’ connectivity afforded by ‘transversal coupling’ (on which see further in Chapter 3). On Figure 2 note that most of the connections are bidirectional, though ‘feed-forward’ and ‘feed-back’ routes do not necessarily involve the same laminar levels of the columns implicated (cf. Burnod op. cit.: 68ff) – they have been collapsed for convenience here, though the ‘feed-forward’ links to frontal cortex should probably be understood as entering the relevant columns at the middle, ‘granular’ level. My approach to derivation is germane to Jackendoff’s recent ‘l-rule’ approach (Jackendoff 2002: 180ff), in which there is essentially no distinction between lexicon and grammar (much as in Cognitive Grammar), with phrasal constructions taking a middle ground as regards the preponderance of variables as opposed to specified lexical items. He makes a clear-cut distinction between lexical items (stored individually in long-term memory) and grammatical ‘words’ (generated online from rules). His l-rules explicitly exclude semi-productive morphological

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processes, however (they correspond to epiphenomenal lexical redundancy rules). I prefer to treat at least some semi-productive processes as derivations, since these can show partial productivity and still form the basis of extension of patterns by analogy. I assume that all morphological derivations that change the basic form of lexemes (e.g. forming complex or compound words), although anchored in frontal ‘grammar’ cortex, have symmetrically associated perceptual counterparts in Wernicke’s area (cf. also Lamb op. cit.: 357). Cf. Friederici et al. (2000) for magnetoencephalographic evidence for the converging of input from the inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area) and the superior anterior temporal lobe in the earliest, automatic stages of syntactic structurebuilding (reflected in the so-called ELAN or early left anterior negativity response). Burnod (op. cit.: 192) attributes this ability to handle different levels of processing (including syntactic levels) simultaneously to specific sub-cortical circuits from and to the frontal cortex, each with its own characteristic speed. However, it may be that the mechanism is already contained in cortico-cortical feedback loops of the type Burnod describes for the general functioning of call trees, only here linked to specific motor output (cf. op. cit.: 122 on the ‘waiting mode’ of modules, suspending their action). This would seem a reasonable a priori choice for the instantiation of all manner of ‘derivational’ processes at least. Deacon (op. cit.: 296f.) distinguishes a ventral prefrontal area crucial to grammar. Between this and Broca’s area as such in premotor cortex is a layer of input from the supplementary motor area as well as tactile information about the mouth (and speech organs). The same area is critical in the retrieval of action words but is not involved in the naming of familiar objects (op. cit.: 303). Burnod (op. cit.: 168) describes the successive sub-division of frontal cortex for grammatical categories as a matter of lateral uncoupling between neighbouring columns/modules, whereas the hierarchical relationship of successive syntactic branchings is one of transversal coupling (linking upper to lower levels of columns within the network). Thus the phrase structure ‘rule’ S −> NP + VP would on Burnod’s model presumably represent a transversal coupling effected through a matrix combination of input from the two major crossing routes. Note that frontal cortex in general forms ‘rules’ between categories by associating ‘sets of integrated actions’, at a higher level of abstraction than the modules formed by transversal coupling in sensory cortex (op. cit.: 174). Actually, however, this sentence is ambiguous between a telic and a non-telic reading (as so often with verbs of motion in English): on the telic reading (indicating completion of crossing the river) the phrase can indeed be taken as an (obligatory) argument. There are two alternative construals of the scene. The application of a (completive) ‘predicate formation’ rule in the manner of FG suggests itself. On the present, neurolinguistic model this is a matter of productive derivation (which may be phrasal as well as morphological). Note that the link to the mediatory column from Wernicke’s area in (a) and its connection to Broca’s area in (b) have been conflated into a single arrow on the diagram to emphasize the interconnectedness of these cortico-cortical links with the phonological circuit proper, where corresponding areas in Wernicke’s and

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Broca’s areas are taken to be in a direct mapping relationship (the broken line). As regards the distribution of the various ‘tiers’ of structure posited by autosegmental phonological theory (as in Goldsmith 1990), I assume that the output of low-level feature-extracting columns at the phonemic level is passed on to a combination matrix within Wernicke’s area, where arrays of tightly integrated columns form syllabic or moraic templates (analogous to the templates of ‘grammar cortex’) on to which the structure of individual words map. Their associated ‘metrical grids’, however, are presumably instantiated within Broca’s area in columns symmetrically related to the corresponding posterior phonological/syllabic representations, ready to interface with frontal production processes (cf. the motor theory of speech perception already proposed by Wernicke and supported by Hickok and Poeppel, op. cit., Chapter 6). Metrical grids, note, are incorporated in the later stages of phonological encoding within Levelt’s ‘Formulator’ production module (Levelt 1989: 297ff). But see also Plaut et al. (2000) for a connectionist approach to the distinction between morphologically rich and morphologically impoverished languages. The authors argue against the ‘dual mechanism’ theory whereby regular (systematic) and irregular inflected forms are taken to be stored in different locations, and present a model capable of accounting for the ‘gradable’ systematicity (partial productivity) of morphological processes. In such a model part of the input (an inflected word) can act to some degree independently of the rest and thus display patterns of compositionality that are learnable. Their model emulates the results of priming in morphologically rich languages like Hebrew which can be quite independent of semantic and surface phonological relatedness (op. cit.: 450). Actually ‘see’ has a number of different senses related by a ‘family resemblance’ chain according to Jackendoff (1985: 150f.). He analyses the two senses ‘direct one’s gaze at (without necessary awareness)’ and ‘come into visual awareness’ in terms of ‘preference rules’ (see further in Chapter 6). The default usage combines both senses. These should not be understood as literally orthogonal to dendritic branches of neural columns or the like: they simply indicate finer synaptic tuning of the corresponding dimension of the call tree involved, i.e. a finer definition of the goal satisfying it. In particular, my approach is compatible with the domain-specific approach for which Capitani at al. opt. They see the available evidence as pointing towards a coarse-grained sub-division of objects into animate beings, non-animate biological things (plants) and artefacts, all of which have distinct evolutionary significance (Capitani et al. 2003: 226). Similar templates could be constructed for temporal adverbs like ‘still’, ‘not yet’ and ‘already’. The principal difference there would be in the additional paradigmatic features related to expectation, namely ‘expect end’ in the case of ‘still’, ‘expect start’ in the case of the other two words. In the case of ‘still’, for example, the paradigmatic feature of continuing ‘activity’ or ‘state’ will be to the left of a (discourse determined) reference point ‘now’, and between them along the time

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axis will be indicated the ‘expect end’ feature (i.e. the point at which the activity or state was expected/likely to terminate has passed). The other two adverbs both involve a telic action (or inception of a state), but the relative position of paradigmatic features ‘now’ and ‘expect start’ for ‘not yet’ is reversed as compared to ‘already’. All these adverbs combine clause-internal aspectual meaning with contextual (discourse-level) expectation, which is a problem for their placement within a static grammar, but not for a model like the present one that may easily associate features on the (micro-functional) grammatical and the higher discourse levels. The use of the term ‘discourse’ here may actually conflate two types of relationship: Jackendoff (2002: 394ff) distinguishes a ‘referential tier’ which is not necessarily homologous to the ‘descriptive tier’ corresponding to Burnod’s ‘story/relational circuit’ (and which in turn is not necessarily mapped directly onto syntax and phonology). It projects both into the external world and into fictional worlds – or indeed any kind of ‘mental model’ that needs to be kept track of and updated – and refers to events as well as to objects. He also distinguishes an ‘information structure tier’, dealing with pragmatic functions Focus and Topic, etc. This and the referential tier function ‘online’ (and are, as suggested, perhaps controlled contralaterally), so they are not strictly part of the lexicon. Note that whereas the meaning of ‘he’ is assignable to the referential tier, Jackendoff assigns ‘identity-of-sense’ morpheme ‘one’ (as in ‘Joan bought a car. Fred bought one too.’) to the descriptive tier. This is because it denotes an individual entity with the same description as its antecedent but not necessarily with the same referential index. The construction can be analysed as one of subject-raising, but it also reflects a compromise between a first-order and a second-order entity reading (first-order ‘Raoul’ would be replaced by ‘him’ not ‘he’), but this is not particularly relevant in process terms, since it is the whole construction that is summoned in connection with the matrix verb. Of course in another real-life context involving ambient auditory input − the sound of a shot being fired – the inference would be that much easier to make and its probability would become (almost) a certainty. I shall, however, continue to use the general-event type labels ‘cause: e’, and (in Chapter 7.2) ‘action: causal’ – which is just a more abstract equivalent of ‘manipulate (in such a way as to −)’, i.e. a ‘physical act’ specifically employing the hands. I do not wish to deny that human beings have an implicit knowledge of general causality or efficacy of action, one perhaps based ultimately on the registration of the causal relationship between perceiving an object and the effect of the perception on the perceiver, as Damasio (2000: 170) suggests. What I claim is that this implicit (and therefore unconscious) understanding of causality is not simply mapped onto a unitary linguistic primitive CAUSE. My attitude is much like that of Jackendoff (2002: 337), who, while recognizing the multiplicity of event types related by a causal element, nevertheless operates with an abstract CAUSE primitive on the understanding that this (as with all such elements) is only meant to cover enough of the shared meaning to (a) account for combinations with other primitives and (b) to trigger inference rules (op. cit.: 369).

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This is an example of the general process that Talmy (2000: 2, 253) calls ‘resection’, whereby an inherent element of a verb’s basic meaning is removed by a suitable ‘framing event’, e.g. for aspect (treated on this model as a matter of ‘derivation’). The verb ‘shoot’ (as opposed to ‘murder’) only implies fulfilment of the action (which is defeasible). See Talmy (op. cit.: 268) for a discussion of the cline of strength of implicatures of resultative verbs of this kind. The information within the ‘assassinate’ scenario is obviously over-simplified – thus the core definition in Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary is: ‘to murder by surprise or secret assault: to murder (especially a prominent person) violently, often publicly’. In theory there should be just enough information in such a scenario to distinguish the accepted range of usage of the associated word from all others in the same semantic area (like ‘murder’). Compare Jackendoff (1985: 114), who argues that it is not possible to apply an exhaustive compositional analysis to verbs like ‘assassinate’ since there will always be an unanalysed residue that does not reduce to primitives (e.g. in this case the notion of political motives). For a rather similar treatment of these verbs in terms of ‘stepwise lexical definition’ and meaning postulates see Dik (1989: 84f). The problem with residual ‘completers’ (to use Jackendoff’s term) is at all events a matter of macro- rather micro-functional affordances on my model: they do not (necessarily) have any bearing on the micro-functional interface with grammar and logic. Such related items can involve semantic and syntactic irregularities that support the idea of separate lexical entries for them. It is important to realize that by ‘derivation’ I do not mean the same as the derivation of a surface form from some underlying representation, as in the generative tradition. Thus my convention of using linking lines between related templates, e.g. between a verb and its corresponding nominalization, is simply meant to indicate an association based on what is semantically and/or functionally common between them (and therefore forms the basis for the mutual priming that can occur between the two columns involved). Perani et al. (1999: 2342) report right-temporal pole activation with abstract words, and suggest that this may reflect the preponderance of limbic affect associated with these words (they point out the close connection between this area and the right amygdela). Note also that abstract nouns like ‘love’ and ‘liberty’ rarely occur as subjects (e.g. agents) to be directly integrated with predicates – when this does occur they are generally topicalized first (generic or proverbial comments then being added as in ‘love is eternal’), a grammatical process which (in English at least) may produce utterances with non-prototypical terms in subject position. As with other macro-functional ‘scenario’ affordances these will cover both verbal and non-verbal material – the latter including fixed phrases and/or clichés and quotations involving the words (‘loss of liberty’, ‘love and marriage’, etc.). It is interesting to compare Template 21 with Barsalou’s (1992: 38) frame for ’vacation’, which contains quite a different array of information. In fact it is not a lexical representation of the meaning of an English word at all, it is a dynamic, open-ended assembly of associations with no indication of the micro-functional affordances of the word provided. Unlike my template, Barsalou’s representation has no distinction between sensory percepts, abstract concepts and word forms

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(as pointers). Although it is cross-modal as regards the perceptual features indicated, its nodes are abstract ‘concepts’ connected by very general semantic relations like ‘aspect (of)’ and ‘type (of)’. He argues against undifferentiated ‘feature list’ approaches to semantics (within which he places connectionist models), but his approach does not actually replace feature labels as such – it emphasizes rather the online use of lexical associations in dynamic reasoning and planning, a rather different goal from mine. A number of the essential elements of my ‘holiday’ scenario are consequently missing (e.g. the contrast with working days or term time). Like most researchers working within a ‘frame semantics’ approach, he uses the notion of ‘frame’ to cover both individual word meanings and contextual constraints of the kind covered by my ‘scenarios’. What is common to both our approaches is the distinction between ‘attribute’ and ‘value’ (e.g. general-attribute type ‘duration’, which may be realized as value ‘short’ or ‘long’). At all levels of affordance on my templates specific values can be found following general-attribute types, either in parentheses or separated by a colon. As discussed in 12.2, such features are to be understood as relations of ‘resonance’ within networks and not as listed labels: they represent the composite goals of a word column’s call trees. Actually, there are no doubt limbic affordances associated with this word, i.e. satisfaction with something that ‘fits’ some preconceived criteria − see Template 20 for the limbic affordances of abstract nominals, but compare also the adjective ‘good’, which has strong limbic associations. Both adjectives share a potential functional affordance of ‘for – (a purpose)’, which could be added. There is much more to be said about the syntagmatic behaviour of ‘right’ that is not indicated on the template (though it could be). Take for instance the construction in ‘John is right to prefer French wines’, where the judgment of rectitude adheres to the whole constituent ‘right to VP’, and is not an attribution of a general quality to the subject, John. This is superficially reminiscent of what in the generative tradition is called ‘tough movement’, as in the much-cited sentence ‘John is easy to please’. There, however, the object of the verb (‘please’) appears to have been ‘raised’ to main-clause subject position: this is grounds for treating the construction on the present model as the result of a derivation applying to a small group of adjectives that need to have marked on their paradigmatic axes the feature ‘ease’. This relates the sentence given above to ‘It is easy to please John’ (where the logical subject is the action of pleasing John). ‘Easy’, like ‘right’, largely lacks sensory affordances, although it is relatable metaphorically to a Force Dynamic schema involving an ‘agonist’ applying effort to a weak ‘antagonist’ (a goal) that yields to it, i.e. to a basic sensorimotor schema of attaining a (physical) goal without significant hindrance. Sweetser (op. cit.: 49f.) lumps together deontic and dynamic modality as ‘root modality’. I follow Palmer (1986: 102f.) in distinguishing the two, with ‘dynamic modality’ as the most basic category (which also reflects the diachronic source of deontic modals in most instances). For a Force Dynamic treatment of ‘should’ and ‘have to’ (the latter the suppletive ‘surrogate’ of ‘must’) see Talmy (2000: 1, 447–51), in which an agonist (the subject) does not wish to do something but experiences direct social pressure from an antagonist counter to his/her wish (the latter can be the same person – the ‘self divided’ − or someone else). The

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contents of the scenarios in Template 26 can thus be seen as a set of the antagonist’s beliefs and values bearing on the agonist’s potential behaviour. In the case of deontic ‘must/have to’ this is generally a matter of external societal authority which poses an implicit threat of consequences or sanctions. The feature ‘obligation’ in the social-space scenario could accordingly be spelled out as ‘unpleasant consequences resulting from non-compliance’. As Palmer (op. cit.: 103) points out, ‘must’, as opposed to ‘have to’, also implies an element of speaker association with the source of obligation, so the ‘social space’ frame needs finer internal sub-division. These require a dummy subject ‘it’ in the NP1 slot and a clausal complement, as is also the case for ‘it sounds like’, ‘it seems that’ and ‘it appears that’. The construction is triggered by the feature ‘meteorological’ on the argument, or ‘future’ (or perhaps ‘potential’) on the complement proposition. This information should also be entered in principle on the syntagmatic affordances of the verbs concerned. Note that ‘it looks like John is going to come’ could be replaced by ‘John looks like coming’; rather than treating this as a general derivation (a quasi-transformation), I would prefer to indicate it directly on the template for ‘look’, since it is limited to this and one or two other similar verbs. An important syntactic trait shared by both ‘appear’ and ‘seem’ is their behaviour in raising constructions like ‘John appears to have bought a new car’ (compare the ‘meteorological’ and ‘raising’ versions of ‘look like’ above). Here the logical subject of the perceptual judgment is the whole predication ‘John has bought a new car’ (as in alternative impersonal construction ‘It appears that . . .’ with dummy subject ‘it’). Both constructions need to be marked on the syntagmatic axes of both verbs; this can be indicated economically by treating the raising construction as a derivation (namely D18 in Appendix 2), marked on the syntagmatic axis as an alternative to the basic non-raising construction. Note also Levelt’s approach to solving the ‘hypernym problem’, namely by limiting the activation of the lemma to ‘core conditions’ only (compare the microfunctional features of the present model) and positing a ‘specificity principle’ that ensures that out of the competing words that are potentially activated to fit a particular expressive context only the most specific will be chosen (Levelt 1989: 214). Another compatible approach is that of Jackendoff (1985: 140ff) in terms of ‘preference rules’. This defines categories by (a handful of) necessary conditions plus a wider array of defeasible ‘typicality conditions’ (also relevant to the ‘default’ values of frames). Systems of ‘preference rules’ self-adjust to ensure maximal stability, i.e. to reduce uncertain cases of belonging to a category to a minimum. A preference-rule system can derive a quasi-determinate result from unreliable data, and generally forms judgements from multiple converging sources of evidence (op. cit.: 157). This is compatible with the connectionist perspective of Tyler and Moss (2001), who present evidence that conceptual information is distributed according to clusters of shared as opposed to distinctive properties, such that ‘categories’ (here read ‘semantic fields’) fall out from tightly interconnected shared properties rather than from the cortex being divided up into distinct regions according to category (e.g. ‘animals’ vs. ‘plants’ vs. ‘tools’). The type of model they support

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is one of ‘lumpy semantic space’ (op. cit.: 247). But Barsalou’s model is also compatible with the more localist ‘multiple processing channel’ approach of Crutch and Warrington (2003: 369), whereby semantic categories are acquired through converging information from different specialized sensory and motor channels, variously weighted. Martin and Weisberg present neuroimaging evidence that ‘animacy’ is a whole higher-order network of features covering (in separate areas) at least what an animate object looks like, how it typically moves, and the affective value adhering to it (Martin and Weisberg 2003: 584f). There is also aphasic evidence from patients with damage in (or close to) Broca’s area for the relevance of such semantic features as ‘animacy’ to the functioning of (pre-)frontal grammar cortex (see Deacon 1997: 297). Such patients often have difficulty with hierarchically organized word categorization. Clearly this frontal area is concerned not only with the syntactic but also with the semantic well-formedness of sentences. Such functional categories do not form sensory-based semantic fields of the type associated with natural kinds. They nevertheless map down onto sensory affordances − recall the general principle that micro-functional features (including hypernym/hyponym relations) must be mappable either onto sensory or macrofunctional affordances (or, as in the case of artefacts, both). Note that category learning as such involves two different systems, a declarative, verbal or rule-based one, and an implicit, similarity-based one according to Paradis (2004: 140). Compare Miller and Johnson-Laird’s (1976: 291) somewhat different definition: ‘A semantic field consists of a lexical field and a conceptual core. A lexical field is organized both by shared conditions determining the denotations of its words and by a conceptual core, by the meanings of what the individual words denote.’ A ‘conceptual core’ is for them a folk theory (a ‘prototheory’) as to the (conceptual) class of objects a word can denote. A given word may belong to two different lexical fields, depending on the conceptual context (e.g. ‘chicken’ as kind of food or as kind of bird). The extensional rules for applying them are in the form of call-tree-like ‘decision tables’, whereas the corresponding intentional rules assign them to conceptual categories (these include the ‘object synthesis’ categories for natural kinds on the present model). Both kinds of ‘rule’ cut across the division between sensory and functional features of words, however. Different again is Jackendoff’s (2002: 356f.) conceptualist approach, whereby such general cognitive domains as spatial location/motion, possession, and ascription of property are regarded as semantic fields across which the same lexical items can be variously applied. Note that I regard all such ‘expert knowledge’ as inherently defeasible (or contingent) and therefore do not indicate it on the micro-affordances of the word. There will thus be no meaning postulates directly ‘readable’ between the word ‘bull’ and other (technical) words in which such knowledge is couched. I reserve the term, you will recall, for non-defeasible links like that between ‘bull’ and ‘male’ – non-defeasible in the sense of constituting a default (or prototypical) meaning. Obviously a bull can be neutered or even undergo a sex change (in myth or science fiction), but one would not even recognize the extended, divergent nature of this usage if one did not have some kind of default to compare

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with. This is a very limited lexeme-to-lexeme use of the concept ‘meaning postulate’ and I would not want to extend it into macro-functional scenarios or sensory affordances. I should clarify my use of the word ‘concept’ here: this I define as a network consisting of a mediatory cortical column (or multi-module) linking one (or more) sensory percept and/or macro-functional scenario/frame to a (phonological) word. Thus neither function words nor sensory percepts or higher-level frames/ scenarios not associated with particular words qualify as ‘concepts’ in this narrow sense. Burnod, note, uses ‘concept’ in the special sense of a relation between two or more images (e.g. a ‘giving’ scenario, but also covering such things as ‘absence’ vs. ‘presence’). His ‘relational’ circuit consists of such concepts. Lexical decomposition of this kind has a venerable background within classical Artificial Intelligence modelling, starting with Schank’s (1975) ‘conceptual dependency’ schemas, in which there are posited eleven specific underlying primitive types of ACT. These may seem today rather arbitrary (the eleven primitives include INGEST and PROPEL, which may not be at the most propitious level of abstraction in order to handle the meanings of, say, ‘eat’ and ‘send’ respectively), but Schank’s principal concern was with the generation of textual inferences rather than the exhaustive decomposition of lexical items. His primitives could in theory be augmented or enriched in open-ended ways, including via metaphorical extension. However, his approach was too rigid to account for context-induced variation in the meaning of individual lexemes. One could have added a spatial feature ‘away from speaker’ (and a link to its opposite, ‘come’), though this represents something of an over-simplification. ‘Go’ is actually not often used on its own as an activity verb, except in the progressive. ‘Walk’ would be a more typical example here, though it is less neutral since it contains − like many more specific ‘troponymic’ variants such as ‘stroll’, ‘hike’, ‘wander’, ‘march’ and ‘skip along’ − a secondary manner feature on the motion dimension of its sensory affordances over and beyond the common microfunctional feature ‘motion’ (by an agent) shared with ‘go’. And applies also of course to combinations of broad operational features such as ‘negative’ with individual lexical items, such that ‘not’ plus ‘let’ (where ‘not’ stands for the ‘inhibiting’ operator) is equivalent to ‘prevent’ and ‘not’ plus ‘alive’ is equivalent to ‘dead’ (cf. Template 17). For a different – but compatible − approach to the decomposition of ‘put’ see Jackendoff (2002: 366). He analyses the sentence ‘John put the food in the fridge’ as a hierarchically organized event structure CAUSE – JOHN – FOOD – INCH(OATIVE) – BE – FOOD – IN – FRIDGE divided into a superordinate event (JOHN – CAUSE – FOOD) plus a subordinate event (the rest). The verb ‘put’ corresponds to the combination of the superordinate CAUSE plus subordinate INCH – BE – IN (the subordinate event consisting of the inception of a ‘state’ in which an object is in a ‘place’). Exactly the same conceptual configuration can be realized lexically by incorporating still larger parts of the structure, for example in sentence ‘Bill buttered the toast’, where ‘butter’ also incorporates the type of object in the ‘place’ slot of the subordinate event structure. In other languages than English the final position of the object handled will determine the choice of one of a set of suppletive verbs. In the case of

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Danish this is a three-way choice between final ‘standing’, ‘lying’ and ‘sitting’ position − respectively stille, lægge and sætte. This is partly determined by standard proportions and positions of rest of the object type concerned. Apart from this feature these all share the same basic schema and logic of English ‘put’, a fact which needs to be reflected by some kind of connection between the three corresponding templates. One possibility would be to associate their ‘final position’ features via broken lines indicating a causal relationship to the corresponding position verbs (stå, ligge and sidde respectively), much as on Template 17 for the link between ‘die’ and ‘dead’. In Athabaskan languages the choice is much wider, namely between a range of ‘classificatory’ verbs for (any kind of) handling or being in a position, one of which is chosen according to the ‘figure’ (shape or consistency) of the object. This requires a different approach, which will be exemplified later in Chapter 11. The default feature ‘by hand’ can easily be negated or replaced in context (also ‘into recipient’s hand’ could be added as a default). Note that terms for giving in some languages (like the Athabaskan ones) directly reflect the compositional framework of Template 38, being analysable as ‘cause to move into recipient’s hand’. In other languages, going to the opposite extreme, even the ‘basic’ giving templates require macro-functional scenarios attached, e.g. Japanese kureru vs. ageru vs. yaru vs. kudasaru or sashiageru, the choice of which is specified by whether the giving is to oneself (or family) or to another and is sensitive to the respective social status of the recipient and/or giver. Compare the Danish Sign Language sign for ‘look for’, namely a stirring movement made by both hands shaped in the two-fingered ‘looking’ configuration. Expressions in other languages – besides English ‘look for’ itself − that directly reflect a relationship with ‘(trying to) see’ include Danish lede efter (related to Old English wlitan ‘look’ and Chukchi rel'uŋ - (literally ‘want/try to see’), and note the polysemy in, for example, Aleut affix -saaRu - ‘look for, hunt, try to’. Jackendoff (2002: 401ff) analyses irrealis expressions like this in terms of encapsulated worlds on his ‘referential tier’, along with conditionals, negation, epistemic modals and future tense. This suggests that a macro-functional level could be added to the template for ‘look for’ such that the object marked with the feature ‘virtual’ connects via a slanted broken line to a scenario circle containing reference to such an ‘encapsulated’ object. Thus Finnish happens to require the ablative case rather than the (from an English viewpoint) expected locative case on the noun phrase indicating the location of the found object, as in Löysin sormuksen lattialta ‘I found the ring on (lit.: from) the floor’. This is evidence that Finnish profiles the picking up from a source location of the object found − the actual ‘picking up’ is not ‘profiled’ in the same way as it is with ‘find’ in English, but can be inferred from context also in that language. Compare also Greek eurisko (from an Indo-European root meaning ‘seize’), Latin invenire (lit. ‘come in on’), Russian najti ‘come upon’, Chukchi l’u- ‘see, find’, Arabic ʕathara ʕala- (lit. ‘trip over’), and Japanese mitsukeru (lit. ‘attach one’s vision to’) – although these and similar historical etymologies do not necessarily reflect synchronic conceptualizations. The Danish Sign Language sign for ‘find’, note, is iconic of plucking up a small object (generalized to any sought object found).

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Consider Talmy’s example sentence ‘The water’s dropping on it made the fire go down’ (Talmy 1988: 57), where one event causes the other. This presupposes experience of a specific types of causality involving water and fire and their interaction, different from that in ‘The magician waved his wand and made the fire go down’ or ‘Throwing a blanket on it made the fire go down’. All that is common here is the succession: first fire, then (following a proximal action) less fire. This corresponds to Talmy’s ‘basic causative situation’ (SOMETHING-CAUSE-EVENT), from which the construal of more complex causal situations are built up (see Talmy 2000: 1, 471–549 for a much more detailed treatment of this subject in terms of Figure-Ground relations). Note that Force Dynamics includes other causal relations like ‘letting’ and ‘hindering’ besides ‘making’. Talmy contrasts this with ‘have’ in its causal sense, as in ‘he had the maid clean the kitchen’, which involves alternative means, namely by giving instructions that are to be followed. This in turn affects the kind of causee that verb can take, i.e. a sentient entity capable of following instructions. These features should consequently be indicated on the template for ‘have’ in its causal sense. The Chambers definition also contains an intransitive use of the verb (= ‘to be victor’) that must be regarded as archaic, except perhaps in subordinate clausal contexts, as in ‘She stoops to conquer’. I have only taken the ‘literal’, main clause senses given in the somewhat more complex Collins definition. This is distinct in meaning from the more basic activity verb ‘beat’, which shares some potential sensorimotor affordances with the present verb but not the functional ones involving defeat of the ‘patient’ (this argument may be a thing as well as a person in the activity sense, but only a person in the present sense). The two senses of ‘beat’ qualify as polysemous by virtue of their overlapping macroaffordances as well as sensory affordances, despite the relationship between them being (in origin) metaphorical (see Chapter 9.1 on polysemy and 9.2 on metaphor). Much more could be said about the dimension of style here. In general, style and register on the model are matters treated as macro-functional affordances. Such broad areas such as ‘literary style’ or ‘journalistic style’ (with further subdivisions) need to be treated as macro-functional ‘frames’ in their own right, which overlap with (and are ‘evoked’ by) more specific scenarios such as that given here for ‘conquer’. Both are ultimately a matter of context. I would imagine that the kind of scenarios involved here have a significant limbic (affective) component – the ‘feel’ of a word being archaic or an Americanism, for example. This is peripheral to core conceptual meaning but nevertheless relevant to lexical access. Consider the noun ‘yeoman’ for example – most readers of Thomas Hardy would recognize this word as being some kind of (small-scale) farmer and readers of Walter Scott as some kind of soldier (‘yeoman of the guard’), but however familiar the reader is with these kinds of novel, the word would presumably be less readily accessed via priming than either ‘farmer’ or ‘soldier’ (both of which, note, already have a ‘top-down’ socio-cultural aspect to their meanings). The word ‘yeoman’ (in one or other of its historical senses) can be said to contain these meanings plus further macro-functional affordances involving a limbic ‘tail’ and/or associations to the literary production of specific authors.

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This would then represent another dimension of relationship between ‘conquer’ and related verbs, namely that which Fillmore and Atkins (1992: 96f.) call ‘derivative syntax’, whereby some of the constructions into which ‘conquer’ enters can be seen to be ‘inherited’ from the more ‘basic’ verbs in this area. Thus the pattern in ‘He conquered despondency’ diverges from the usual syntagmatic behaviour of ‘conquer’ (by taking a generic, non-definite object) but is a normal option for ‘overcome’. In a similar manner, the intransitive use of the verb mentioned earlier (‘He has conquered’) may reflect the syntagmatic frame of ‘win’. Such extensions do not just follow ‘metaphorical’ uses of the basic verb (as if ‘beat the clock’ had lead to *‘conquer the clock’), although they may of course develop their own metaphorical usages (‘He conquered her heart’). Note in particular that my templates do not contain a feature corresponding to Wierzbicka’s ubiquitous action primitive DO (as, for example, in Wierzbicka 1992: 223f.). What they do contain is a feature indicating the inherent aktionsart of verbs, e.g. an action (telic and dynamic) as opposed to a position (atelic and static). It can be argued (in a parallel manner to the argument against a unified concept of CAUSE) that pre-linguistic children do not possess a generalized schema for action, only schemata for particular types of experientially significant action. Of course a distinct mediatory word column is nevertheless required for the pro-verb ‘do’ in English, but this is precisely deprived of all sensory affordances, minimally containing the micro-functional affordance ‘activity’ or ‘action’. For similar arguments applied to expressions of remembering see Evans (2007), who, in connection with the ‘primitive’ sememe beng ‘hearing, cognition’ in Dalabon, accepts the assumption that a given language can be used as its own metalanguage, but denies that an item like beng is further decomposable into purported universals THINK and KNOW in the manner of Wierzbicka (English ‘know’ will specifically be returned to in connection with Template 47 below). Note that this deviates from the narrow sense of ‘derivation’ in standard Construction Grammar definitions of constructions, such as Goldberg’s (1995: 4), which sees them as non-derivational, non-compositional form-meaning pairings. All constructions must be ‘derivational’ diachronically (even if their source is obscured), though I would agree that they are not synchronically compositional in any simple sense. And note the fact that many such expressions have an alternative with more dynamic ‘take’ instead of ‘have’ (especially in American English). This feature does not adhere to the word ‘have’ itself any longer (and therefore should not be indicated on its individual template), but only to the specific construction at hand. This suggests a considerable age for this construction, since the feature is clearly very archaic, a residue of its earlier ‘action’ sense. Another inchoative verb, ‘begin’, will be presented in Chapter 10 (Template 51). This may arguably reflect a distinct conceptual area, namely inchoative action (a matter of verbal aspect) as opposed to inchoative change of state, but the underlying ‘conceptual archetypes’ (or, as Goldberg puts it, basic ‘humanly relevant scenes’) nevertheless overlap if not coincide, in so far as they both concern ‘change’ in general (as do further related ‘change of identity’ and ‘change of location’ archetypes). They all fall under the framing category ‘State change’ in

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Talmy (2000: 2, 237ff); his core schema of the state change event combines transition with state, analogous to the Path plus Ground of a motion event. Such an ‘archetype’ has the same kind of status as that of CAUSE discussed in 7.3, and is too general to treat as a unitary ‘scenario’ on the present model. The difference between inchoative action and change of state lies in the emphasis on respectively the resultant state (whether it is static or dynamic, i.e. an activity) or the transition to that state. ‘Begin’ also typically involves intentional action on the part of an agent. The way from ‘conceptual archetypes’ to surface constructions can at all events be very indirect and language-specific. This includes the ‘caused motion’ construction of the type ‘she sneezed the handkerchief off the table’, made much of by cognitive linguists (cf. Goldberg 1995: 55). It is not tied to any particular lexical item, but represents a generalized kind of predicate frame (what is called a fully ‘schematic’ construction within Construction Grammar), one that presupposes a head verb either inherently containing the paradigmatic feature ‘cause motion’ or extendable via metaphor or metonymy to do so. Note that Talmy’s various ‘Change in state of existence’ and ‘Change of condition’ framing event formulae such as ‘to V away’, ‘to V up’ are restricted constructions that fall somewhere between these fully generalized ones and lexically rigid idioms (Talmy 2000: 2, 242–50). Again, I would treat them as ‘derivations’. There is another ‘get to’ in the sense ‘be enabled/allowed to’ (as in ‘he got to ride on the Metro’), which has a clear Force Dynamic nature distinct from the motion sense of Template 45 and also enters a different syntagmatic frame. This justifies treating it as represented on yet another distinct template (see further in Chapter 9 on polysemy). Perhaps equally important is the role of the contra-lateral cerebellum in rapid, relatively automatic collocations between words, including but not limited to idioms (cf. Deacon 1997: 275). This ‘off-loading’ function would reduce the density of information needed to be ‘flagged’ by call trees on the syntagmatic functional axis of individual words. As Deacon points out, there are strong connections between ventral prefrontal cortex (where the functional affordances of words are assumed to be located on my model) and the cerebellum. Note that the isolation of ‘climbing a tree’ as the prototypical kind of climbing, as Taylor assumes, would require empirical investigation – in fact climbing a ladder or stairs may be more frequent in adult urban society. One could in theory analyse the various alternative scenarios here as probabilistically weighted (say 90% ‘upwards’, 8% ‘horizontal’ and 2% ‘downwards’), but this is redundant information since the context is always going to be there to determine the relevant choice. The only occasions on which such usage-based weighting (though no doubt real) is likely to play a crucial role is in artificial elicitations of sentences by association with the isolated verb. But note that ‘The snail climbed the wall’ is quite acceptable: this may be because the ‘central’ scenario (here involving upward motion) will generally be more flexible as regards substituting prototypical arguments (and thus susceptible to ‘schematization’) than subsidiary ones like ‘climbing along a limb/narrow surface’, which are generally taken more literally, as specific divergences from the central sense.

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According to Joanette et al. (1990: 185) this is only really true of active, creative metaphor, not of frozen ones that have become conventionalized. This is parallel with the difficulties right-hemisphere damaged patients have with indirect speech acts – in particular those that have not been fully conventionalized. However, a spatially organized system under prefrontal control is probably also involved in – or intertwined with − most forms of linguistic/propositional thought and expression, as suggested by the spontaneous gestures accompanying speech. Goldman-Rakic (2000) discusses the prefrontal ‘central executive’ of working memory, with linguistic and spatial sub-components. The visuospatial ‘sketchpad’ component (in Brodmann’s area 46) has connections to the corresponding posterior ‘what’ and ‘where/how’ routes of perceptual analysis which may, I suggest, involve a specific sub-cortical link with the symmetrically positioned parietal area (and thus corresponds to part of Burnod’s ‘privileged’ vision-manipulation circuit). The proximity of the linguistic and the spatial executive components could well represent a pervasive source of online metaphor (i.e. the spatial basis of much propositional reasoning). It is here that Talmy’s Force Dynamics and Lakoff’s ‘conceptual metaphors’ probably impinge on everyday rational thinking. Dabrowska (2004: 211f.) specifically discusses the semantic network of the verb ‘fly’. This she does within the Cognitive Grammar framework in terms of the notion of ‘partial schematicity’ whereby a basic sense of the verb (directly related by ‘full schematicity’ to the superordinate ‘schema’) is related metaphorically to various polysemous senses such as hair flying, flags flying, or time flying, with only partial inheritance of the overall schema, i.e. partial similarity to it. Note that I would not regard the ‘time flying’ sense here as polysemous according to my definition in Chapter 9.1 (though it does belong to the syntagmatic functional affordances of the verb) since there is no overlapping of experiential scenarios, only transparent inter-domain metaphor. Moreover, the two superordinate schemas that she proposes on her Figure 10.3 for this verb are dubious: it seems rather arbitrary to claim that the senses ‘be suspended in the air (flag)’, ‘flutter (hair, clothes, etc.)’, and ‘move through the air by flapping wings’ are all instances of the schema ‘resist the force of gravity’ (which would surely include jumping, skipping, etc., to none of which ‘fly’ is appropriately extended). The other one, ‘move quickly’, would similarly have to include falling, swimming and entering (e.g. a house) quickly. My treatment of polysemy does not require this level of abstraction: it presupposes overlapping scenarios of an experientially entrenched sort rather than a single abstract schema. The ‘family resemblance’ relationship that results is the same. ‘Understand’ has another, static sense (to be permanently in a state of understanding something), which could be added to the paradigmatic functional affordances of the template here, i.e. with feature ‘mental state’ rather than ‘mental act’. In this case it is very close to ‘know’, but still implies (beyond the meaning of the latter verb) knowing the intention behind something, not just knowing a fact or a person/thing. Naturally the verb ‘know’ also enters various syntagmatic constructions, each with additional paradigmatic features, but the template here has been pared down to the minimum. ‘Know’ is also ‘aimed at’ as the final state of other verbs of mental activity such as ‘learn’, which is either a gradual accomplishment or a more or less momentary achievement, and (in one ˘

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of its senses) ‘realize’, which adds a further nuance of sudden or unexpected recognizing of a fact. In another, related sense, especially in the 1st or 2nd person in the present tense, ‘realize’ is closer to static ‘know’, sometimes with an added nuance of acknowledging a not very palatable truth − this is best treated in terms of a link to specific ‘speech-act’ scenarios. There is a further link between all these verbs and the static scenario or frame of ‘truth’ mentioned in connection with Template 23 (‘right’). To this can be compared the process of ‘superimposition’ within the Cognitive Grammar framework, whereby a ‘filler’ elaborates a schematically specified subpart of a ‘frame’: it is possible for for two units thus related to mutually act as filler as well as frame, both being ‘partially schematic’ (Dabrowska 2004: 215f.). This ‘symbolic integration’ has both a semantic and phonological aspect. Compare Pustejovsky’s own representation for ‘bake a cake’:

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As he describes the ‘co-composition’ situation here: ‘The verb itself is not polysemous. Rather, the creation sense of bake is contributed in part by the meaning of a cake, by virtue of its being an artefact [ARG2 in his representation] . . . The creation sense of bake embeds the change-of-state reading within it by systematic rules of composition. The sense arises not by lexical enumeration, but generatively in the semantics itself.’ Compare Lakoff’s parallel discussion of ‘window’ in terms of a ‘natural category of senses’ (Lakoff 1987: 417f.). For him this is a matter of polysemy, and the cognitive model of what a window ‘is’ motivates the various senses of the word in use. Actually, both windows and doors, although artefacts, are ‘dot objects’ in the same way that geographical objects like ‘river’ or ‘mountain’ are, i.e. ambiguous between ‘object’ and ‘place’. In English the addition of a preposition usually disambiguates the sense in all these cases by producing a locative (‘place’) expression. The verbs ‘write’ and ‘read’ will in turn be defined as processes on their own mediatory columns. Note that ‘begin’ is not itself contained in the ‘novel’ scenario, it is what Talmy would call a superimposed ‘framing event’ of the aspectual type – in fact in many languages (like West Greenlandic) it would simply be a matter of aspectual derivation (e.g. by affixation to a verb meaning ‘write’). As regards its cortical anchoring, the mediatory column for the verb is presumably located somewhere in frontal cortex along the ‘where/how’ route corresponding to the ‘time’ axis of the story circuit hierarchically above it (and/or the right

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hemisphere circuit symmetrically opposite it), where I assume all higher-level ‘temporal contouring’ (to use Talmy’s term) is organized. Talmy underscores the analogous relationship between aspect and path (in the spatial domain) in both verb-framed and satellite-framed languages (Talmy 2000: 237). Recall that the motion-spatial axis of verbs along the ‘where/how’ route stretches according to the present model from frontal action initiation to parietal resultative states. In terms of sentence production, it is reasonable to suppose that clitics in Nuuchahnulth all reflect top-down processes, being simply added to the end of major constituents resulting from the bottom-up generation from predicate frames − compare what was said about the successive stages in the production of sentences in English towards the end of Chapter 3. However, there are a number of differences from the production of English sentences here: first, there is an important distinction between purely derivational suffixes (including locativedirectional and aspectual morphemes) and items which lie intermediate between true derivational suffixes and true inflections (the latter are all clitic, partially organized into mood and person paradigms but mostly optional). Suffixes in this grey zone express such meanings (with sentential scope) as tense and voice. Since they are all discourse-determined they must at all events be applied topdown, like true clitics and unlike derivational affixes. Secondly, top-down processes may select virtually any constituent as the initial predicate (to which clitics are added) according to considerations of discourse focus, etc. All of this gives the grammar of Nuuchahnulth its peculiar emphasis on top-down organization. Finally, ‘incorporating’ structures such as that in ʔuu-h- w’ink-ckwi above must be integrated at the predicate frame level, bottom-up, just as full verbs and their arguments are integrated in English, only here the process results in a single morphological word. The involvement of phonological length and/or reduplication in derivational processes in languages like Nuuchahnulth is of interest in itself: these typically involve productive aspectual distinctions (also distributive plurals of nominals) but, as here, also adhere idiosyncratically to individual derivational affixes. This is a complex matter, with functional differences between partial and full reduplication, for example, and embracing a number of semi-productive patterns (some involving infixes). Storing all possible patterns (productive and semiproductive) on each separate word column potentially affected is clearly the wrong approach. As elsewhere with ‘derivations’ that involve fully or even partially productive alternation sets, I assume that individual mediatory word/affix columns contain pointers towards general ‘grammar’ templates corresponding to these derivations in frontal cortex, except when the resultant form is completely idiosyncratic/lexicalized. Sets of phonological variants may nevertheless be redundantly gathered in Wernicke’s area. This applies also to isolating languages like Chinese, where there is no morphological distinction between nouns and verbs. As Bates et al. (1991) have shown, there is nevertheless a difference in the problems that Chinese Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia patients have with verb-noun compounds, the former tending to display deficits with the verbal part while the latter display deficits with the nominal part. They suggest a semantic/conceptual explanation for this,

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Notes positing difficulty with respectively action and object words (rather than with verbs and nouns as such) in the two types of aphasia. Note that nominal classifiers define lexical rather than semantic categories (as discussed in Chapter 6) in so far as their mapping onto natural kinds is only partial and to some degree language-specific. The results of an interesting study with Chinese aphasia patients (Tzeng, Chen and Hung 1991) are compatible with the position that a link to an appropriate classifier is part of the functional affordances of nouns in frontal cortex, but that each classifier also has its own posterior word column (its phonological form in Wernicke’s area). The differences that were observed between Broca’s and Wernicke’s patients is one of access: the former stick to the easiest, default choice of classifier (when one can be accessed at all), whereas the latter almost randomly choose a classifier, as if lacking any inhibiting constraints. This underscores the dynamic, processual nature of the two major language areas: the relevant forms can be accessed in theory from either area but are not uniquely stored in either. The former cross-cuts the sub-categories of classificatory verb and adds a more precise indication of the nature of the subject or object involved (here with a l(e) - prefix); it must match the inherent gender class of the noun subject. The latter (historically indicating the valency of the verb) is confusingly called a ‘classifier’ prefix in the literature, but has nothing to do with classificatory function, all verb stems being associated with one of a small set of such morphemes. Such derivation by prefixation of a ‘basic’ verb often results in special lexicalized meanings, and otbirat’ can in fact also have the more abstract meaning ‘select’. Once the literal ‘path’ meaning has been completely lost (as with vybirat’ ‘choose, elect’, with vy- ‘out’), the resultant derived form is best treated as an independent lexical item. Cf. Boudelaa et al. (2004) for the results of a series of priming investigations that support the cognitive reality of these abstract (cross-modal) morphological ‘shapes’, which they identify, following a multi-linear approach, as representing a ‘CV-skeleton’ tier distinct from both the consonantal ‘root’ tier and the ‘vocalic melody’ tier of phonological word representations. Note that these prosodic entities do not produce priming effects in languages like English in which they do not contain any common morphological meaning. Only the obscured ‘near speaker/listener’ items are missing – though there are in fact two less systematized items for ‘coming towards speaker’ and anaphoric ‘aforementioned’ that make up for this. The ‘less accessible’ items are (roughly) ‘distal’ as opposed to ‘proximal’ (but also encompass ‘not contiguous with surface’ and ‘across a barrier’); the ‘obscured’ ones are out of sight. The relative case form would require indication of two major functions, as subject of a transitive verb and as possessor of a nominal head. Marking the exact function of case forms is superfluous here: it does not have to be spelled out on every pronominal template since there are corresponding general grammar templates for all NPs − the matching case ‘label’ is sufficient. It is not necessary to indicate this kind of syntagmatic information at all on the corresponding adverbial template since the relevant locational/spatial distinctions are purely semantic. This suggests, incidentally, that case affixes and particles in languages where these have both syntactic and spatial semantic uses, like Yupik, will have

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their own ‘word columns’ in parietal cortex besides their involvement in frontalgrammar cortex. One can thus ask how Hale’s ‘non-configurational parameter’ within the Parameters and Principles framework might be reflected on the model, since several of the ‘exotic’ languages I have introduced have this characteristic, i.e. lack a hierarchical phrase-structure configuration of verbal arguments such that an object NP is always projected to a position adjacent to the verb sub-categorizing for it (Hale 1983). Syntactic processing is treated on the model as simultaneously top-down and bottom-up, whatever the language − it is just that top-down control is more heavily weighted in non-configurational languages. The syntagmatic micro-functional features of verbs are only ‘hierarchical’ to the degree that the default linear order of their arguments is rigid. The expansion of the syntagmatic patterning of an English transitive verb happens to demand the continuing contiguity of the V and its object NP as it maps bottom-up through successive levels of templatic integration, whereas in Nuuchahnulth or Koyukon, for example, top-down requirements can override the default syntagmatic order of the lexical verb and its arguments at an early stage. As stated earlier, ‘grammar cortex’ is seen as organized on a bottom-up stacking principle from templates directly associated with the functional microaffordances of individual words (especially verbs), up through more general constructional templates to fully generalized syntactic templates. One must simultaneously allow for integration with top-down discourse templates embodying pragmatically determined organizational choices. These will include special illocutionary and topic/focus constructions and (at a somewhat more local level) framing templates corresponding to the ‘event integration’ categories described by Talmy, e.g. for aspectual choices (2000: 2, 213–88). Some of the latter needed for English will be of the progressive ‘be V-ing’ type, others will contain satellites of the ‘V up’ type. Compare the convention introduced in connection with Templates 15 and 56, whereby a paradigmatic feature of a nominal such as ‘plural’ is potentially associated with a syntagmatic feature such as a following plural verb via an extension of the line indicating the paradigmatic feature that joins up via a dotted line with the corresponding syntagmatic feature. This is not necessary on templates for verbs or prepositions, where requirements of case marking on arguments, for example, can be marked directly on their syntagmatic axes. There are constraints on which particular verbs of transferral this derivation can be applied to (it is not fully productive, though approaching it). Thus ‘donate’, which requires an institution or organization as ‘recipient’, resists it, presumably because the dative shift derivation normally requires an animate recipient, or at least one higher in animacy than the ‘patient’ or ‘theme’ transferred (there is a natural animacy hierarchy involved here). Neuroscientists may speak of whole cortical networks as being ‘labelled’. Thus Mountcastle (1998: 361f.): ‘. . . the synchronized neuronal activity within such a distributed system serves to label that particular neuronal set as evoked by a particular stimulus configuration . . . The frequency of the synchronized activity evoked by a single stimulus labels a linked ensemble as unique for a particular stimulus. More than one such ensemble may exist simultaneously within a

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Notes distributed system. Different ensembles may be identifiable by frequency or phase differences in the oscillations . . .’ Of the two routes, the cortico-cortical one extends, I assume, in a determinate pathway from initial analysis of the auditory speech signal into individual phonemes and/or syllables within one or more combination matrices in the anterior part of Wernicke’s area, and then on to a more posterior part of that general area where sequences of syllables (potential ‘labels’) are analysed. Also similar to Croft’s (2001: 105) Radical Construction Grammar perspective on linguistic categories, according to which all such categories are defined solely by their function within language-specific constructions. What commonalities exist are attributable to underlying (universal) cognitive reality. Burnod further suggests (op. cit.: 287f.) that the right hemisphere has its own form of ‘inductive’ inference (a kind of ‘reality check’ function), balancing the purely ‘logical’ or deductive inferences with which the left hemisphere operates. The latter involves the correlation of sets of symbolic relations organized as propositions and referring expressions. Relational/image circuit processes are ‘translated’ onto the word/sentence circuit with the help of abstract relational conjunctions like ‘if’ and ‘and’. Both hemispheres may cooperate in solving problems produced by a disequilibrium between imagery and (linguistic) symbolic representations, resulting in ‘anticipatory adaptations’ – the formation of hypotheses. For a specific example of a call tree producing and recognizing the phonemic sequence ‘papillon’ (‘butterfly’) associated with the image of a butterfly see Burnod’s figure 4-12 (op. cit.: 210). This starts with establishing a link to the first syllable, then extending the tree by successive syllables ‘back’ towards the final one, as it might be built up by a child learner. They may grow by further learning processes of cortical differentiation and (de) coupling followed by synaptogenesis (growth of new synaptic connections between co-activated neurons). See Hebb (1949) on ‘cell assemblies’ and their interconnections, also the discussion in Pulvermüller (2002: 150f.) on crossing ‘synfire chains’, in particular ‘reverbatory synfire chains’, which correspond directly to Hebb’s cell assemblies. These are oscillatory in nature and temporally organized through re-entrant loops, which would seem to render them particularly well suited to handling syntactic patterns in frontal cortex. The different elements of such a cell assembly fire in a specific sequential order depending on the state of activity of the whole assembly, which may remain oscillating for some time (Pulvermüller op. cit.: 157). This presumably allows for recursion when more than one related assembly is active simultaneously (or, in Burnod’s terms, when call trees are initiated from individual sub-groups of such an assembly). Note the suggestion by Ullman (2004, Chapter 3.2) that the original function of the dorsal ‘where/how’ route (as a component of ‘procedural memory’) was to transform visual information into an egocentric framework enabling the execution of appropriate motor programs such as grasping or manipulating an object. Both ‘weak transversal coupling’, and ‘weak transversal uncoupling’ (two of four inter-columnar relations that also include ‘strong transversal uncoupling’, or

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inhibition, and ‘strong transversal coupling’, or triggering of a fixed sequence) are treated by Burnod as a matter of ‘gating’. ‘Weak transveral uncoupling’ is of particular relevance to lexical organization and access since it is involved in lexical priming by preparing or ‘orienting’ a cortical column without triggering a strong axonal response (Burnod op. cit.: 104f.). For the different ways of integration of cortical and thalamic inputs by cortical columns in such a way as to function as ‘and’ or ‘or’ gates respectively see Burnod (op. cit.: 87ff). In the ‘or’ gate situation (handled by the upper pyramidal cells of columns) inputs from either source are sufficient for triggering an axonal response, whereas in the ‘and’ situation (handled by the lower pyramidal cells) simultaneous input of both kinds is required. The ‘or’ condition may be particularly relevant to sensory affordances with their prototypical ‘fuzziness’ (incorporating input from supragranular pyramidal cells − lowest on my templates), and the ‘and’ condition to functional affordances (especially syntagmatic ones). Along one of Burnod’s six dimensions of symmetry. I repeat them here: left-right (between hemispheres), associative-frontal (posterior-anterior), spatial-molecular (outer cortical surface-limbic system), visual-auditory, parietal-temporal, and primary-secondary (sensorimotor-associative). On his figure 2-2 (op. cit.: 71), it can be seen that supragranular pyramidal cells are linked to the opposite hemisphere via ‘commissural’ connections. However, there are also axonal outputs from infragranular cells (layers 5 and 6) to contralateral sites (cf. Arbib et al. 1998: 218). These could be particularly relevant to the mutual influence between macro-functional scenarios (as context) and micro-functional affordances of individual words in frontal cortex. I assume explicitly that right-hemisphere scenarios may indeed contain weak ‘echoes’ of individual words anchored in left-hemisphere columns and that activation of the word in one hemisphere may facilitate its activation contralaterally (cf. Joanette et al., op. cit: 50), and that, conversely, there are weaker – or less elaborated − ‘echoes’ of right-hemisphere scenarios also in the ‘image/relation’ circuit of the left hemisphere. This is again presumably mediated by the symmetrical links (via the corpus callosum) between the two hemispheres. According to Joanette et al. (op. cit.: 47, 65f.) the right hemisphere is more sensitive to the syntagmatic relations between word meanings (e.g. associations such as ‘shepherd’ – ‘pasture’) as opposed to the left hemisphere, which is more sensitive to paradigmatic ones (e.g. ‘bus’ – ‘train’), reflecting respectively holistic, experientially-based scenarios/frames and lexically organized fields. The right hemisphere certainly has an ability to comprehend words (especially concrete ones), but this information is more diffuse and connotation-based than is the case with the more lexically organized left hemisphere (op. cit.: 96f.). This may represent the intersection of still another general scenario that impinges on the contextual network for this complex word, namely ‘writing historical narrative’, which overlaps both with ‘history’ and ‘writing narrative text’ in general. There are also differences between the areas of ventral ‘fusiform’ cortex (the ‘underneath’ regions of posterior occipito-temporal cortex where the form and colour of objects is analysed) that are activated in the two conditions, but this could be ignored since the objects in both conditions were neutral geometrical

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Notes shapes. Also the exact temporal areas where motion is registered are different in the two conditions: left hemisphere mediotemporal gyrus for inaminate objects, predominantly right superior temporal sulcus for animate ones (op. cit.: 583). This suggests that the micro-functional affordances of words (their grammatical behaviour) must converge – unlike their semantics – on a more circumscribed local B-system (in ‘grammar cortex’ close to Broca’s area), which also contains higher-level ‘derivational’ templates. This view of what might be going on in ‘grammar’ cortex is compatible with Burnod’s ‘combination matrix’ approach. Pulvermüller and Schumann see a similar mechanism involved in the recognition of phoneme sequences in Wernicke’s area. Pulvermüller and Schumann see this as applying further to the learning of a (subordinate) second language, which will typically spread into the latemyelinating areas, relatively far from the perisylvian language areas. (The latter are only relatively plastic during first-language learning.) The higher-order association areas concerned fall essentially into three separate islands: pre-frontal cortex, the angular gyrus, and inferior temporal cortex (op. cit.: 712f.). I do not mean to imply that classical Hebbian learning (and gradual synaptic tuning as reflected in connectionist simulations) is the only way in which words are learnt. Fast, one-off learning is a fact that must be recognized. On the present model this is a matter of ‘inserting’ the new word or phrase in a pre-existing frame constituted by a situation type already recognized by the learner − either a ‘scenario’ recognized in the ongoing external context or a familiar syntagmatic linguistic frame (‘syntactic bootstrapping’ – e.g. the word ‘parrot’ appearing in the recognized frame ‘That’s X’ or ‘Where is X?’). This may accelerate transfer from episodic to long-term memory. Later, when systematic semantic relations between individual words have begun to be understood, new words related by, for example, hypernymy or antonymy to a new one used in the same frame will presumably inherit at least some of the common functional affordances of the earlier word. Some typical combinations involve a modifier plus a thing (a unitary referential act lacking a predicate), an agent plus a patient/theme (the action being understood) or an action plus a patient/theme (where the theme is part of a predicate corresponding to a whole adult VP). Production capacity limits what is expressible to just two units. What is common to all of these is a basic topic-comment structure (itself relatable to perceptual foregrounding), which precedes the emergence of adult syntactical categories. Note that referential topics are handled by the ‘what’ route and predicates by the ‘where/how’ route on my model − it is natural that this pre-existing division should be utilized as a starting point by the grammar system. Later the child must learn from repeated input that English requires ‘copula support’ if the predicate is not an action or activity word expressed by a verb. The ‘elementary situation’, note, corresponds to Talmy’s ‘macro-event’ and to Jackendoff’s ‘Event’, which correlates with the elementary sentence symbol ‘S’ and may recursively contain other events. Despite Jackendoff’s (2002: 290) caveat about it not being possible to delimit exactly those sensory features that play a role in grammatical structure, this is not an insurmountable problem for my approach: the features I propose are

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selected from a much more indeterminate array of features present in the sensory and macro-functional affordances that the model allows for. Like Jackendoff, I would not want to advocate setting up a distinct, universal level of ‘linguistic semantics’. For him, the semantic features relevant to grammar are those that are visible to phrasal interface rules (i.e. the syntactic-semantic ‘interface module’), and these, like my paradigmatic (and probably also syntagmatic) microfunctional features, can be language-specific (op. cit.: 292). That is not to say that there is not a certain amount of individual variation as regards the ‘normal’ usage of (especially) less common words. Of course much work remains to be done in isolating a finite set of features (and the ‘redundancy rules’ relating them internally) for even one language. And similarly with ‘dog’ and ‘bark’. The syntagmatic axis for ‘bark’ should contain reference specifically to agent arguments ‘dog’ or ‘fox’ (the latter imposed for most people by specialized or book learning). Such collocations can of course be extended from their prototypical arguments by analogy/metaphor, but that is true of most collocations. This can be contrasted with the case of the word ‘bird’ on Template 4 for ‘fly’, which could have been replaced by the more general feature ‘winged creature’ since it is a requirement of the correct use of the word ‘fly’ that it should apply to a winged agent (whether bird, insect or, by extension, a plane), not just to the single class of ‘avian’. There should be no trouble locating suitable nominal arguments to fill the predicate frame’s ‘slots’, since indication as to part of speech would, according to this alternative scenario, be stored together with functional information on all mediatory columns, including those for nouns, far from Broca’s area. Of which there are three to five lower-level, infragranular ones that, according to Arbib et al. (1998: 210), form the core of the column. Supragranular pyramidal cells form shorter-distance feedback loops with their ‘horizontal’ collateral axonal efferents (cf. Arbib et al. op. cit.: 229 for their role in visual cortex in providing stability under shifting orientation and size). The latter may be crucial in, for example, the functioning of frontal grammar columns, and would seem, a priori, to provide a reasonable basis for the embodiment of ‘derivational’ processes. Paradis (who is somewhat sceptical of the applicability of neuroimaging techniques to the investigation of bilingualism) proposes a ‘Three Store’ model with separate lexical sub-systems for each of the bilingual individual’s languages within the same broader cortical areas. In terms of the distributed network approach the present model is premised on, this would mean that for bilinguals the same overall areas for functional, sensory and phonological affordances/ representations would be involved as for monolingual speakers, but that there would be separate sub-systems within each of these for the individual languages, in other words, coherent language-specific networks intimately intertwined but separately activatable or inhibitable as wholes (Paradis op. cit.: 196ff). These would emphatically not be limited just to the classical language centres. The distinction between fluent/balanced bilinguals and those who learn their second language late in life is, according to Paradis, a matter of the greater online reliance on conscious ‘declarative’ memory in the latter case, this drawing on pragmatics and context (presumably in the right hemisphere) more than on

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Notes automatic ‘procedural’ memory. What L2 lacks for most speakers may be the deep limbic anchoring of L1, on which the learning of a second language must piggyback (op. cit.: 24f.). Like my mediatory columns, Lamb’s lexical nections do not in themselves constitute a mental lexicon: they mediate between sounds and meanings, etc., but as he himself implies (op. cit.: 358) one cannot both have strict adherence to the Proximity hypothesis and concentrate Lexis in one area. The many separate kinds of information converging on this area according to his model would in fact seem to render it impossible ever to apply the Proximity principle strictly, since every lexical nection would have to locate itself with regard to (at least) separate phonological, conceptual and grammatical production dimensions, of which at least the conceptual dimension is widely distributed according to word class, etc. The Proximity hypothesis would seem to apply much better to the location of his distributed sememes (uni-modal ‘percepts’ and ‘perfuncts’ and multi-modal ‘concepts’ and ‘confuncts’), and that is in fact how I have applied it in so far as my mediatory word columns can be taken to involve nections integrating sensory affordances. To this should be added the conclusion of Blank et al. (2002: 1839) that propositional speech ‘is dependent on interactions between the rostral left temporal cortex, the left pars opercularis and the left superior frontal gyrus’, also Deacon’s distinction mentioned in Chapter 3 of a sub-area within Broca’s general area which is critical in the retrieval of action words but not involved in the naming of familiar objects (Deacon 1997: 303). Recall also what was said in 12.3 as regards how frontal cortex displays the structural organization typical of combination matrices, with alternating bands where input activation from different sources may cross. I am not suggesting that more complex words have to be translated literally to simpler ones ‘online’, merely that the logical frames of the latter are passed on in the process of acquiring more complex lexemes, such that the meaning of the more complex items can always be broken down and paraphrased using simpler words. Since relatively simpler words are also interrelated amongst themselves in a variety of ‘molecular’ ways, more than one paraphrase is usually possible. The practice of dictionary makers confirms this! This term corresponds to ‘eigenmode’ in oscillatory network theory (cf. Werning 2005: 213 for a detailed mathematical treatment). Different eigenstates are assumed to be distinguished by distinct firing frequencies (the result of different input configurations), and thus to ‘label’ the different networks in which the column participates. Burnod’s Figure 3-17 is important in this respect, but it is unfortunately confusing to interpret. My understanding of it is that there can be four different axes of symmetry relating a column at transversal level 3 to other columns (e.g. the left-right (hemisphere) one, the associative (posterior)-frontal one, the auditoryvisual one and the spatial (outer)-molecular (internal) one, while at level 2 there may be four symmetrical axes involved, e.g. the parietal-temporal and primarysecondary ones plus two local orthogonal axes to columns within the same region (but not immediately adjacent). This allows every column to be potentially linked to 64 other columns at a distance (in different regions), as well as to immediately adjacent columns. Whether these connections are strengthened

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and ‘utilized’ will depend on learning and experience. Thus any column in the left hemisphere, for example, will be connected to a symmetrically positioned one in the right hemisphere and any column in frontal cortex will be symmetrically linked to one in posterior cortex. Note that the ‘visual-auditory’ axis of symmetry involves the more dorsal parts of both of Burnod’s ‘privileged’ circuits, the vision-manipulation one and the audition-phonation one, and his ‘parietal-temporal’ axis involves the more ventral sections of both. He further refers to the frontal ‘sensorimotor’ axis (crossing the orthogonal ‘time’ one) as consisting of various ‘concentric’ or parallel circuits between frontal and posterior regions (temporal, receptive/visual, parietal and sensorimotor), each with its characteristic ‘speed’ or time stability (Burnod op. cit.: 233ff). For an alternative neural mechanism that could have these properties see Ryder (2004). According to his SINBAD model, what a pyramidal cortical cell learns is embodied in the connections of its principal dendritic branches, of which it typically has from 5 to 8. Each of these can respond to a particular sensory (or higher) feature. Combinations of these in an equilibrium state − say those for ‘feathers’, ‘wings’ and ‘beak’ − would correspond to the goal of a call tree in the image of a parrot, for example. The synaptic pattern corresponding to the concept embodied in a word column would thus match the pattern in visual cortex columns involved in recognizing or producing the image of a parrot. Ryder (op. cit.: 14) provides, by the way, a description of what I mean by ‘synaptic tuning’ that may be useful: ‘Like any other neuron, a pyramidal cell receives inputs from other neurons via synaptic connections on its dendrites, elaborate tree-like structures covered in thousands of synapses. Each principal dendrite . . . produces an activity determined by all of the excitory and inhibitory inputs that it receives … The input/output profile of a dendrite, and thus its contribution to the whole cell’s output, can be modified by adjusting the strengths of both excitory and inhibitory synaptic connections.’ See also Démonet et al. (2005: 77) for the involvement of part of the anterior superior temporal cortex in the semantic processing of at least some verbs. It may well be that ‘allocentric’ motion and action is represented in temporal cortex (in association with typical argument types), whereas ‘egocentric’ motion and action is represented in sensorimotor cortex close to the implicated body map region (compare the involvement of the hippocampus – below the temporal lobe – in the allocentric mental frame of reference and that of the parietal lobe in the egocentric frame of reference according to Levinson (2003: xviii, 322). Burnod assigns the visual tracking of the movement of objects to the parietal lobe, but more recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that this may not be the whole story. A more anterior part of this temporal area is apparently active in the recognition of complex mouth and hand movements, and is predominantly located in the right hemisphere, whereas the motion of inanimate objects (like tools) activates an area in the medial temporal gyrus of the left hemisphere according to Martin and Weisberg (2003: 583). These authors also point out an overlap in activation patterns for tools and the areas implicated in the action of grasping and manipulating objects, namely the left intraparietal sulcus and ventral premotor cortices, the two components hypothesized above for verbs of transferral along the ‘where/how’ route (op. cit.: 575).

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Notes Cf. Tyler et al. (2004) for the involvement of the perirhinal cortex (the inferior medial part of the temporal pole) in synthesizing complex object recognition from the output of simpler feature-recognition functions further towards the posterior end of the temporal lobe, back along the visual ‘what’ route. With its multi-modal links to other sensory areas (and to the hippocampus) this region is well suited to storing complex semantic information about objects. Compare also Bussey and Saksida (2002) for a connectionist model of object synthesis in temporal cortex, which although non-locationalist in spirit integrates the notion of a gradient from more coarse-grained object categories (posterior) to more fine-grained ones (anterior). Note that I am not claiming (any more than these authors are) that the ‘binding problem’ of perception (the holistic recognition of perceptual objects analysed through distinct parallel pathways) is handled by this cortical area alone. There must logically also be a locus for ‘place-binding’, the spatial organization of background landmarks into ‘places’, presumably along the ‘where/how’ visual route through the parietal lobe (cf. Burgess et al. 1999: 12ff). According to Mountcastle (1998: 376f.) binding is in general probably a matter of the transient synchronized firing of the various components of distributed networks, linked by ‘re-entrant’ connections, which may be ‘recognized’ by a global scanning device reflected in repetitive fast EEG oscillations. To this might be added the rider: ‘when encapsulated/stabilized by continuing feedback from the environment’. This is compatible with the position taken by Damasio and Damasio (1992: 71), who equate their ‘verb mediation’ area with a circumscribed inferior left area of frontal cortex containing information on grammar (syntax) and function words. I would hesitate to call the relevant columns/aggregates here ‘mediatory’, however, since they arguably instantiate only the micro-functional affordances of verbs. The corresponding mediatory columns (linked to their sensory affordances) may well be located in more posterior regions of frontal cortex, closer to the central sulcus (pre-motor cortex), as other neuroimaging studies suggest (cf. Pulvermüller 2002: 45). What they label as ‘noun mediation’ is, by contrast, distributed widely across the left temporal lobe (op. cit.: 66), and that corresponds more directly to my own conception of mediatory columns (for nouns). Bornkessel et al. (2005) see the posterior superior temporal sulcus as involved in ‘argument hierarchization’. This allows inferences as to which NP argument of a sentence is the semantic agent when morphological rather than linear order is crucial by mapping onto the stored lexical frames of verbs (especially relevant to morphologically rich languages like German). Other data discussed by Kuperberg et al. (2000) suggest that the subcategorizing frames of verbs (i.e. which semantic arguments they require) may be processed in inferior temporal cortex, i.e. separately from their actual syntactic integration in frontal grammar cortex. The specific area crucial for grammar on Burnod’s model is labelled ‘FA’ on his cortical ‘map’ (op. cit.: 148), and corresponds to Brodmann’s area 44, which links syntactical patterns to ‘phonation’ (my fast ‘phonological’ circuit). He further relates area FSA, in pre-motor cortex on the ‘sentence/word circuit’, to actual syntactic structure (reflecting the classical conception of Broca’s area), but this may contain more specifically the sensory affordances of action verbs. The more polar area FAT (below and slightly anterior to FA) he relates to the global organization of language (perhaps including the initiation of speech acts).

Notes 149

150

151

152

153

154

229

This is no doubt over-simplified. Since also the right hemisphere is known to be involved in recognizing and producing speech-act intentions (Paradis op. cit.: 51ff), it is probably more realistic to envisage the two frontal poles acting ‘in tandem’ in the process of initiating utterances, the left hemisphere dealing with linguistically expressed propositions, the right with the broader speech-act intentions behind them (also the overall prosodic ‘packaging’ of utterances). In fact, it would appear likely that all aspects of pragmatics are right-hemispherecontrolled and that speech acts are initiated by the inferior frontal right hemisphere cortex, whereas the corresponding left hemisphere area ‘spells out’ such global intentions verbally (during production). This would also cover cases where pragmatic choices are grammaticalized, e.g. where the choice of pronouns (or in the case of Japanese even basic verbs) depends on the degree of politeness/deference required in specific communicative contexts. Pulvermüller (2002: 80f.) describes such a sub-cortical mechanism involving the neostriatum and thalamus which may allow the cortex to distinguish overlapping cortical networks (‘functional webs’) that share neural ensembles. It functions by way of sustained feedback that inhibits the less relevant ones. Complex networks of cortical and sub-cortical components of this sort are called by Pulvermüller and Schumann (1994: 703) ‘cortico-striato-thalamic (CST) cell assemblies’. One might also wonder what could correspond to Burnod’s inner ‘word/sentence’ circuit (and to my ‘phonological circuit’) on the right hemisphere. (Compare the passage from module to module of the ‘image’ and ‘word’ circuits in his Figure 5-8 (op. cit.: 274) with the cortical network map in Figure 3-8 (p. 148).) This may well be explained by reference to the neuroimaging results of Thierry et al. (2003) that indicate involvement of the (posterior) superior right hemisphere temporal lobe in the recognition of non-verbal but meaningful environmental sounds (as opposed to the auditory analysis of spoken words in the corresponding left hemisphere area). This area is also known to be involved in musical perception, and could extend functionally to recognizing the ‘meaningful’ intonational shapes of words and sentences as well as non-verbal calls/cries. However, see Corina and Knapp (2006: 537f.) for evidence that the ‘inner’ circuit on both hemispheres developed from a general observation/ execution matching system involving mirror neurons. Note that D23 and 24 must either be ‘chained’ in a fixed order to ensure ‘affix hopping’ (to get the right order of lexical stems and suffixes in ‘he must have been watching the film’, etc.) or − perhaps more simply − be combined (also with D25) into a matrix producing different output chains according to specific input combinations (features of tense/aspect/modality). Note also, in more specialized senses/combinations, ‘take to V-ing’, ‘set about V-ing’, where the former construction adds the feature ‘habitually’ and the latter ‘fulfilling a determined task’. ‘Easy intensity’ combines (i.e. is an abbreviation for) the paradigmatic features ‘speed’, ‘iterative’ and ‘ease’.

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Index

A and B systems 6 abstract words 54–7 accomplishments 52, 93, 111 acquisition 143, 161–7 activation spreading 34, 141, 199n.3 activity verbs 23, 50, 58, 182 adjectives 15, 21, 41, 107 adverbs 24, 61 affordances 7, 14 agreement 139 aktionsart 10, 94, 120 angular gyrus 4, 173 antonyms 25, 56, 59, 203n.28 aphasia 11, 34, 41, 168, 219n.103 Arabic 107, 125–6 arcuate fasciculus 7–8, 34, 47, 141–2, 174 artefacts 11, 39, 114, 125 aspect 94, 124 Athabaskan 121–3, 213n.72 auditory input 33, 39, 149 axes 10–17, 126, 141, 226n.141 Barsalou, L. 72–3, 208n.55 basic level 71–2 blending 53, 182 body part words 41–2 bootstrapping 143 bottom-up approach 5 bottom-up processes 36, 74, 139 Broca’s area 10, 39–40, 141, 165, 173–82 Burnod, Y. 5–10, 147–52, 177–84 call trees 6, 17–20, 31, 42–3, 65, 140–2, 147–52, 169, 179 causality 26–7, 48–50, 83–7 cerebellum 18, 216n.90 Chinese 122, 219n.103, 220n.104 circuits 7–8, 18–19, 178

classificatory verbs 122 classifiers 122 coefficients 149, 179 coherent narrative 179 Cohort model 134 collapsing features 82, 133 collocations 42, 56, 111, 164, 216n.90 colour 58, 172 combination matrix 33, 35, 126–7, 147–52, 178 complement clause 38, 46 complementizer 137–8 compositionality 78–94, 175 comprehension 18, 173, 182 conjugation class 123–4 conjunctions 25 connectionist modelling 6, 34, 141, 206n.41, 210n.62, 228n.145 Construction Grammar 98, 146, 216n.85 constructions 95–101 content-addressed memory 140 context 28–30, 92–3, 106 Contextual Symmetry hypothesis 153–60, 174 contradictory 59 contrary 59 convergence zone 10, 135, 150, 180 conversion 54, 121 core meaning 89, 103 Correlated Feature theory 41 cortical column 6, 9, 15–16, 147, 177–9, 204n.17 countable nouns 18, 21 Damasio, A. 10, 32, 109, 177, 228n.146 dative shift 85 Deacon, T. 7, 177, 205n.36

236

Index

decision tables 6, 211n.65 demonstratives 127–9 dendritic trees 18, 201 derivations 21, 54, 78–83, 86, 96, 133–4, 193–4 determiners 21–9, 137 Dik, S. 9, 12, 43, 110, 124, 200n.15 discontinuous morphemes 123 discourse context 28–30, 35 distributed representation 49, 162–4, 175–6 Domain-specific theory 41, 72 dorsal stream 8, 30–1, 171, 178, 212n.121 dot object 113–14, 203n.22 double dissociation 10, 41 eigenstate 22, 106, 140, 226n.140 elementary situation 153 encyclopedic knowledge 3–4 entailment 90 episodic memory 56, 224n.129 event structure 49–53, 66, 87, 144 evidence 62–3 experiencer 26–7, 96–7 factive goal 87–8, 111 family resemblance 89, 103–6 feature detectors 41 figure 24–5, 86, 214n.77 folk categories 73 Force Dynamics 61–2, 87, 93 frames 59, 72, 115, 154, 157 French 63, 109 frontal cortex 9–11, 30, 48, 66, 144, 169, 171, 182–3, 228n.146 function words 25–6 functional affordances 7–11, 14, 142–3, 168, 174, 178 Functional Grammar 12, 32, 80, 118 Gaelic 97 gating 6, 223n.122 grammar cortex 21, 28, 32, 35, 139 grammar templates 18, 28–31, 134, 137–40 grammatical relevance 168–70, 185

Gricean principles 11, 156 ground 24–5, 86, 104–5, 214n.77 gustatory affordances 26 Hebbian correlation 151, 163 hippocampus 163, 180 homonymy 102–3, 106, 133 hypernyms 17, 71–4, 155 idioms 98–100 image circuit 3 image schema 7, 157, 184 imposed schema 73 inchoative aspect 97–9 inclusion 156–7 inference 47–8, 222n.117 inheritance 85, 100, 146 instructional semantics 6, 12 instruments 39–40 Jackendoff, R. 72, 94, 200n.9, 201n.14, 204n.33 Japanese 80, 213nn.73,76 kinaesthetic affordances 23, 180, 203n.23 kinship terms 75–6 Koyukon 122–3 Lamb, S. 4–6, 15, 173, 202n.18 landmark 25, 104 Langacker, R. 3, 21, 94, 107, 143 lateral uncoupling 183, 205n.37 lemmas 9, 200n.10 Levelt, W. 9, 34, 200n.10, 210n.61 lexical fields 14, 74–5 Lexical-Functional Grammar 138 lexical suffixes 118–20 limbic affordances 10, 26, 204n.30 localization 4, 41, 163 logogen 6, 200n.10 macro-functional affordances 11, 28, 148, 170 mass words 20, 148 meaning postulates 3, 82, 94 mediation areas 9, 177, 228n.146

Index mediatory columns 8, 22–3, 33–4, 141, 171–2 mediatory context columns 153–7 mental lexicon 3–5 mental model 12, 25, 47–8 Mental Space theory 92 Merge 138 meronymy 42–3, 114 metaphor 57, 106–10, 133 metaphorical mapping 92–4 metonymy 108 micro-functional affordances 11–12, 168–70 mirror neurons 182 modal auxiliaries 61 motor-spatial axis 20, 179 multi-modules 9, 148–50, 176 myelination 161, 180 natural kinds 13, 75–7 neural networks 4, 6, 161 neuroimaging 141, 159, 171–8 nominal compounding 78–9 nominalization 54–5 noun phrase 143–4 nouns 13–15, 18, 21, 112 numerals 122 Nuuchahnulth 118–21 object synthesis 10, 16–17, 71, 164, 180 olfactory affordances 26 orthogonal axes 10–11, 23, 174 orthogonal integration 125, 131, 143, 149–51 paradigmatic axis 10, 150 paradigmatic features 85, 144–6, 185 parallel processing 6 parietal lobe 10, 47, 154, 180, 227n.144 parts of speech 23–5, 118, 143 path 38–9, 103–4 phonological circuit 7, 19, 33–4, 132, 184 phonological form 9, 22, 123–4 phonological input 17, 21 phrase structure rules 137, 152 pilot modules 9, 148, 179

237

plural number 46, 125 pointers 6, 18 polysemy 102–6 possession 84, 96–7 posterior inferior frontal gyrus 31, 183 pragmatic adverbials 61 pragmatic functions 145 pragmatics 11, 229n.149 predicate formation rules 58, 96 predicate frames 11–12, 30–3, 139–40, 164 predicative use of adjectives 57 prepositions 24–5 primitives 90, 94, 207n.49 procedural approach 6, 156 procedural memory 7, 199n.6 production processes 172–3, 182 productivity 193 pronouns 45–7 property lists 73–4 prosody 34, 220n.107 prototypes 43, 71–2, 75–7, 105–6, 162–8 Proximity hypothesis 15, 23, 63, 226n.137 Pulvermüller, F. 9, 26, 42, 161, 222n.120 Pustejovsky, J. 6, 87, 108, 111–17, 199n.5, 218n.98 pyramidal cells 18, 200n.12, 201n.17 qualia 6, 39, 62, 87, 108, 111–17 qualia unification 112, 158 recipient 84–5 recursivity 137, 139 redundancy rules 191 re-entrant connections 182, 222n.120 referring expressions 11, 45 relative clause 137–8 resultant state 10, 27, 50, 179–80 right hemisphere 11, 34, 47, 100, 153–60 Russian 109, 123–4 satellite-framed languages 129–30 satellites 32, 43 scenarios 11, 28, 39–41, 53, 90–2, 103–6, 159–60

238

Index

second language learning 170, 225n.136 selection restrictions 22, 146 semantic fields 71–7 semantic roles 87, 145 sensory affordances 7, 9–10, 164, 171 Sensory/functional theory 41 similarity 62–4, 106–8 simulation semantics 12 size 23, 78–9 social convention 56 social kinds 74–5 social vignettes 159–66 somatosensory body map 7, 184, 203n.23 spatial dimension 23–4, 42–3,187 speech acts 60, 98–100, 156, 229n.149 stacking 30–1, 182 story/relational circuit 12, 44, 48, 165, 183 stylistic derivations 92 subcategorization 21 subject 32, 108, 145 symbolic reference 143 symmetrical connectivity 5, 141, 157–8, 173, 180 synapses 140, 179, 201n.17, 227n.143 synonyms 93 syntagmatic axis 10–11, 100, 138 tactile affordances 20 Talmy, L. 86–8, 107, 129–30, 200n.9 Taylor, J. 102–5, 162 telicity 10, 39, 52, 80, 111–13 templatic derivation 125

temporal lobe 10–11, 37, 154, 227n.144 temporal phrases 43 temporal sequence 39, 48 thalamus 14, 178 Theory of mind 157, 160 time axis 32–5, 50, 183 tool words 40 top-down approach 5 top-down processes 30–2, 36, 73, 139 topic 100, 145 trajectory 103–4 transitive verbs 52–3, 139 translation 33, 175 transversal coupling 143, 152, 183 uncinate fasciculus 8, 19, 180 Universal Grammar 131 usage-based approach 34, 169 ventral stream 8, 30–1, 200n.8 verbs 9, 21–2, 80, 144 verbs of mental activity 109 verbs of transferral 50, 91, 179 virtual object 85 visual processing 8–9, 181 weight 42 weights 6, 141, 179 Wernicke’s area 14, 22, 33–4, 123–5, 142, 148–9, 200n.13 ‘what’ route 8, 31, 138 ‘where/how’ route 8, 31, 41, 138 Wierzbicka, A. 89, 94–7, 215n.83 word circuit 7, 35, 151 Yupik Eskimo 127–9

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