Alternate Construals, Iconicity, and Grounding: The Case of Nominals with the Noun Part

Abstract

In the earlier studies of nominals with the noun part, the choice between the construction with the indefinite article and the construction wherein part appears without any determiner or modifier, i.e. as a simple bare noun remains unexplained. On the basis of the LOB-corpus analysis, it becomes evident that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, the usage of the construction with the bare noun part is by no means sporadic, but, on the contrary, constitutes the most frequent case. On the other hand, when tested about a sample of the LOB-corpus data with a part / part, the native speakers of English were able to detect differences in meaning whenever these expressions were interchanged in a given context. From the perspective of cognitive grammar (cf. Langacker 1987, 1991, 1999), which expects that the difference in form be symptomatic of some difference in meaning, this finding is, by no means, surprising. The present paper aims to show that Langacker's theory is also fully equipped to express, on the one hand, the relevant differences in meaning, and on the other hand, various grammatical properties of the two constructions in a systematic and motivated manner. The proposed description crucially relies on the reference-point relationship inherent in the overall part-of-X N construction (cf. Gorska 1999). The need to postulate two constructions with part - one of which is called grounded and the other iconic - falls out from the analysis. In the iconic construction, the phonological form of the phrase with part - equivalent to the bare noun stem - is reduced to minimum (of course, as compared to the form of the a-marked nominal); this phonological minimality is said to be iconic for the minimal conceptual distance between the participants of a part-whole relation which is evoked by the part of X N construction. It is argued that, in its conceptual content, the iconic construction overlaps with a-marked nominals in which part is modified by adjectives s