From the Guest Editor: “Creating the Contours of Grammar”

Abstract

We are pleased to present Aspect in Slavic: Creating Time, Creating Grammar as a special issue of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics. Here we offer some of the research results of the CLEAR (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian) group at the University of Tromso and our collaborators. This research was sponsored by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council for a project entitled Neat Theories, Messy Realities and by a grant from the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for a project entitled Time Is Space: Unconscious Models and Conscious Acts. (1) All of the contributions to this special issue approach topics relating to the metaphorical representation and evolution of grammar, particularly with respect to verbs and their interpretation. In this introduction I will situate these works with respect to relevant research on the role of cognitive processes in structuring grammar (e.g., Coulson 2006, Fauconnier and Turner 2002 and 2008, Langacker 2006 and 2008), and on the metaphorical structure of aspect (Croft 2012). As human beings, we tend to think of reality as something objectively separate from ourselves that is delivered to our perceptual organs in conveniently discrete units. However, there is ample evidence that this is a naive and incomplete view. Instead, external input is processed in an interactive fashion that creates structure beyond what is out there. As Coulson (2006) points out, vision is an excellent example of this interactive process. At the place where the optic nerve passes through the retina, there are no photoreceptor cells, so we have no visual input. Yet we do not experience a hole in the visual field, because our brains fill in what would be missing. Blinking also disrupts visual input for about 100-400 milliseconds about 10 times per minute, but we don't notice any discontinuity thanks again to the completion effected by our brains. Researchers in robotics face enormous obstacles due to the differences between our human experience of vision, in which boundaries and objects are easy to see, as opposed to cameras, which are unable to detect the relevant discontinuities. Various optical illusions are made possible by the constructive nature of vision, which is context-sensitive and able to interpolate where input is inadequate due to differences in lighting, viewpoint angle, or obstructions. Language is similarly context-sensitive and constructive. Fauconnier and Turner (2002 and 2008) present a detailed model of how cognitive processes such as conceptual integration and compression make the construction of meaning possible. The full meaning of an utterance is not encoded in the linguistic string. Instead, background knowledge and context are essential resources in making meaning possible. More crucially, use of language often involves partitioning and organizing information in creative ways, given that new structure can emerge as a result of cognitive processes. We can create distinctions: the perfective versus imperfective distinction is not something that exists objectively; instead, it is creatively projected onto perceived events, and different language communities are free to construct such distinctions in different ways. Thanks to blending, we can integrate mental spaces that clash with reality and thus conceive of things that don't exist, as in the use of modals, counterfactuals, and future tense (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: chapter 11). We can even assign multiple interpretations to a single item of realia, such as snails (which evokes a biological frame) vs. escargot (which evokes a culinary frame; Langacker 2008: 49). Coulson (2006) makes the case that parallels between the fundamentally constructive processes of vision and of language are not merely accidental. They likely rely upon the same neurological mechanisms of connectivity, in which the behavior of any given neuron is influenced by others that connect to it, yielding networks of cells that fire simultaneously. …