Hi, Bruce,

You write "There are then no rules of syntax outside of rules of
semantics, which quickly leads to a contradiction.  "

What's the contradiction? Even Jackendoff has put syntactic rules in the
lexicon.

As I said in my last post, Cognitive Grammar defines word classes like
noun and verb based on semantics; the syntactic behavior of such words
stems from their semantics plus discourse considerations, nothing else.
The theory is extremely sophisticated; such categories are structured
around prototypes and schemas, and there is a range of features which
make a concept more or less noun-like. There is no syntactic component
in this theory; there is a semantic component: our entire stock of
concepts--and a phonological component, comprising specific and
schematic concepts of sound that are recruited as symbols of the
conceptual units. Since the phonological component is also made up of
concepts, it is in fact part of the semantic component. So all of
language is in the semantic component.

Also, acc. to Cog Gr, there is something between the person Clinton and
the name "Clinton" -- our concept of the person Clinton, which is what
the name refers to. Words have no inherent connection to anything in the
outside world; they refer to concepts in the minds of the language
users. The pairing of the concept of the person with the phonological
form that is the name is a symbolic unit, CG's term for any meaningful
linguistic expression, including sentence patterns. When we say the
name, it activates the concept. The rest of the sentence specifies
particular relations between the concept of Clinton and other concepts,
such as the role of President of the US (here it is especially clear
that this is a purely abstract concept, existing only in the minds of
language users). Categories are conceptual constructions. All people,
including biologists, create categories based on conceptual criteria
which may or may not be solidly grounded in physical reality. What they
are solidly grounded in is our minds' predispositions for analyzing our
input from experience of  the world.

I would need to look back into my primary Cog Gr sources to fully
elucidate the use of the term 'token'. It might not be used in CG as you
define it. How we best use it in general grammar pedagogy is a matter of
achieving consensus, which might be easy or impossible.

***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~  E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
***************************************************

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