Abstract
While many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon of the third kind”, emerging from the interaction of a micro-level and a macro-level. Such a dual perspective helps us understand some otherwise puzzling phenomena, including “non-psychological” generalizations, or situations where a pattern which is arguably present in a language is not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. This paper discusses two very different examples of such generalizations, genitive marking on masculine nouns in Polish and some restrictions on questions with long-distance dependencies in English. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns. Thus, a cognitively realistic usage-based construction grammar needs to distinguish between patterns in the usage of a particular speech community (a social phenomenon) and patterns in speakers’ minds (a cognitive phenomenon).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Petar Milin, John Newman and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research-Articles
- Individuality in complex systems: A constructionist approach
- Language as a phenomenon of the third kind
- Cognitive accessibility predicts word order of couples’ names in English and Japanese
- What predicts productivity? Theory meets individuals
- Research-Articlse
- Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation
- Cognition in construction grammar: Connecting individual and community grammars
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research-Articles
- Individuality in complex systems: A constructionist approach
- Language as a phenomenon of the third kind
- Cognitive accessibility predicts word order of couples’ names in English and Japanese
- What predicts productivity? Theory meets individuals
- Research-Articlse
- Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation
- Cognition in construction grammar: Connecting individual and community grammars
- Lifespan change in grammaticalisation as frequency-sensitive automation: William Faulkner and the let alone construction