From Construction Grammar to Evolutionary Linguistics

lecture 10 From Construction Grammar to Evolutionary Linguistics

Thank you very much for coming. I know that a lot of you have been following the lectures since the three of us came to Beijing. And others of you are join- ing the lecture series for the first time, some of you who are students here at Beijing Foreign Studies University. The lectures that I have been giving have been on the topic of construction grammar. Construction grammar is a model of representing syntactic struc- ture in Cognitive Linguistics. I spent most of the lectures discussing a particular version of construction grammar which I have proposed, called Radical Construction Grammar. In this model, I have focused my attention on how much diversity there is in grammatical constructions across the world’s languages. In the last three talks that I have given yesterday and this morning, I focused on the relationship between form and meaning. And I argued that when we look at meaning, we also have to respect essentially the diversity of languages and how they pay attention to meaning. And that in fact, when we look at the analysis of the meaning of linguistic forms, we have to take an ex- tremely fine-grained perspective on that, to describe the range of very specific kinds of situations that human beings express in language. And I concluded by arguing for essentially a radical version of what’s called the usage-based model in Cognitive Linguistics, the idea that the linguistic knowledge that speakers have is derived from language use. But in fact, perhaps not so much derived, but added up in the sense that speakers actually can pay attention to and track the frequency of the use of different linguistic forms for situations that are expressed in language. So, in some sense I’ve wrapped up on that, on the first nine lectures that I gave. But all of that discussion was based on looking at language from a

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© William Croft, Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004363533_011 274 lecture 10 synchronic perspective. Now I’m going to turn my attention to looking at language from a diachronic perspective. And so this last lecture will be a bit different from the other three. I’m going to start from the endpoint of my first nine lectures, this usage-based approach to linguistic knowledge, and then situate this in a broader model of essentially human linguistic behavior and the social context of linguistic use. Obviously I have only one hour here, so there will not be any details. I will focus my attention on some of the kinds of linguistic problems that I talked about in previous lectures. But I will be painting a very broad picture, and that’s what I call “evolutionary” linguistics. I should start by saying that the usage-based model itself is diachronic in its character because the language use that the speaker has changes over time. When the speaker learns a language and comes to use a language, in the usage- based model the idea is: through the speaker’s lifetime, their knowledge of language is evolving, is changing. So all we are really doing here is taking what the speaker is doing in his or her lifetime and then embedding it in a speech com- munity where there are lots of speakers whose lifetimes overlap and extend for much longer than any one person’s lifetime. Ok, so that’s my little introduction. So the approach that I have been advo- cating is exemplar semantics or exemplar grammar. And this is the idea that speakers’ knowledge of language is actually influenced by every single usage they have. So every time they hear someone use a particular expression to express a particular kind of experience, that essentially influences their knowledge of language. And in my last lecture, I emphasized how speakers contrasted different frequencies of forms and that reflects subtle semantic differences in the situations they communicate. And it also influences their knowledge of the language, how the language is used, and the different constructions in the language and the different words in the language that are used to express meaning. So I want to stay with this exemplar-based view. An exemplar is a particular occasion of use of language, like me talking right now, that influences your knowledge of English. But now I’m going to take the view that exemplars are what are called “replicators”. So the exemplar model of grammar is basically a kind of usage-based model. It represents linguistic knowledge as the frequency distribution of particular constructions across the situations or meanings for which they are used. That’s what I talked about this morning [Lecture 9]. So this knowledge is based on language use to which the speaker has been exposed. Think of yourself in terms of your native language, which is Chinese for most of you, and think about it in terms of your own way of learning the language where essentially you are exposed to people using the language around you. You started using the language yourself as an infant or as a child