Kryshtaliuk H.A.

Aspects of Communicative Grammar

Lecture 3

Main notions of Cognitive Grammar

Construals or cognitive operations

Grammar is not only meaningful, it also reflects our basic experience of moving, perceiving and acting on the world. Cognitive Grammar reflects and is determined by cognitive operations which are crucial for the way language is used. Main types of cognitive operations: the construal of one’s thoughts in speaking and building of mental spaces in communication.

In viewing a scene, what we actually see depends on how closely we examine it, what we choose to look at, which elements we pay most attention to, and where we view it from. Construals are operations that help select the appropriate structural possibility among various alternatives. An expression imposes a particular construal, reflecting just one of the countless ways of conceiving and portraying the situation in question (R.Langacker Cognitive Grammar 2008: 4). Construals are strikingly similar to principles of perceptual organisation.

1.

Let me cite Julius Caesar by Shakespeare: But men may construe things, after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

There is, as a rule, more than one way of thinking of a particular scene and describing it in language. In choosing one conceptual or linguistic alternative rather than another, the speaker “construes” his/her thoughts in a specific way. This is what is meant by the notion of construal. For example, I may describe the contents of a bottle of whisky as being half full or half empty. In describing it as half full, I am looking at the drink that is (still) left in the bottle, and in describing it as half empty, I am thinking of the drink that is gone. The descriptions clearly differ with respect to the perspective adopted: from the perspective of a full bottle or from the perspective of an empty bottle. Adopting a particular perspective is one of many possible construal operations. Perspective is defined by the point from which we observe the situation (left- right; up-down, etc.).

If conceptualization (metaphorically) is the viewing of a scene, perspective is the

viewing arrangement, the most obvious aspect of which is the vantage point

assumed. Under the rubric of perspective I also consider dynamicity, pertaining to

how a conceptualization unfolds through processing time.

3.4.1 Viewing Arrangement

A viewing arrangement is the overall relationship between the “viewers” and the

situation being “viewed”.

Here we will look at nine dimensions of construal that are relevant in grammar. The first six relate to viewing operations:

1) viewing frame, 2) generality vs specificity, 3) viewpoint, 4) objectivity vs subjectivity, 5) mental scanning, 6) fictive motion; the latter three relate to prominence: 7) windowing of attention, 8) figure and ground, and 9) profiling.

1) Viewing frame

In viewing a scene I may take a more distant or a closer position giving me a wider or more restricted viewing frame. Imagine the scene of a train travelling from Norwich to Peterborough. An observer looking at the scene from an aeroplane has a maximal viewing frame: she has the whole train route in her view, including its termini in the two cities and the surroundings. We also have a maximal viewing frame of the train route when we study a map of the railway network and trace the connection between the two towns with our finger. When travelling on the train, however, the view from the window of our compartment only lets us see that part of the route which we are passing at any given moment. The endpoints of the section fall outside the viewing frame, even though of course we know that the train journey has a beginning and an end. We now have a restricted viewing frame (means seeing only part of the scene).

These two viewing situations are evoked by the grammatical structures used in sentences:

a. This train goes from Norwich to Peterborough.

b. This train is going from Norwich to Peterborough.

The use of the non-progressive in sentence (a) makes us see in our mind the whole route and schedule of the train in the British railway network; it is a construal which provides a maximal viewing frame of a scene. The use of the progressive aspect in sentence (b), by contrast, only lets us see part of the scene: it is a construal which provides a restricted viewing frame.

So, our visual apparatus limits what we can see at any one time. Experientially, we have a restricted “viewing frame”—the visual field—delimiting what we can visually encompass when “looking out” at the world. At any one instant, only a limited portion of our spatial surroundings falls within the scope of vision.