Phrase structure
Recall from the previous chapter (Figure 16.1) that symbolic units are divided into simplex units and complex units in Cognitive Grammar. In this theory, it is only complex symbolic units that are called ‘constructions’. In this section, we begin to explore these constructions. We approach the idea of a construction in Cognitive Grammar by looking at how words combine to make phrases, and find out how Langacker accounts for the relationships within the phrase that are traditionally described in terms of heads and dependents and in terms of valence. We will then come back to words in the next section and investigate how the Cognitive Grammar account of phrase structure can be extended to morphological structure or word-level constructions. While it may seem counter-intuitive to go from word classes (in the previous chapter) to phrases and then back to words again, our rationale for approaching constructions in Cognitive Grammar in this way is that it is often easier to think about rela tionships between words than to think about relationships between subparts of words. We therefore establish the Cognitive Grammar approach to phrases first and then apply the same line of reasoning to words.
In Cognitive Grammar a complex composite symbolic structure is a construction, which could be a complex word, a phrase or a clause. It follows that constituency– the combination of smaller subparts into larger, more complex units – is the result of the combination of symbolic structures. As Langacker (2002: 293) observes, ‘in this regard, the only difference between morphology and syntax resides in whether the composite phonological structure . . . is smaller or larger than a word.’ Most theories of grammar explicitly attempt to account for constituency, because for many theorists constituency represents a fundamental structural property of language. In Cognitive Grammar, constituency receives a semantic account in terms of TR-LM organisation.
For example, a phrase like pink fish brings together two semantic poles: pink designates (in other words, profiles) a subpart of the COLOUR SPECTRUM, and brings with it as part of its structure a schematic TR. This schematic TR is specified only as PHYSICAL OBJECT, which is a schematic instance of THING. In other words, part of the meaning of pink, which is an instance of the lexical class adjective, is that it relates to some entity, a TR, which is pink. While the TR is not specified, we know that pink is relational in this way (it has to be a property of something), which is part of what it means for pink to be an adjective. Fish designates a specific type of PHYSICAL OBJECT among its other far richer semantic specifications. The association of these two semantic poles within the phrase maps the semantically specific fish onto the schematic semantic TR of pink. At the phonological pole, the association of the two simplex symbolic units entails that they are pronounced sequentially, one after the other.
