<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi Adam,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Langacker’s writings on Cognitive Grammar touch on this, particularly his paper on “reference-point constructions”:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Langacker, Ronald W. 1993. Reference-point constructions. <i class="">Cognitive Linguistics</i><span style="font-style: normal;" class=""> 4(1): 1–38. Available at </span><a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cogl.1993.4.1.1/html" class="">https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cogl.1993.4.1.1/html</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">He introduces the concept of “reference points” in the context of his semantic analysis of possessive constructions, and then notes a broad range of parallels in other areas of grammar, including “topic and topic-like constructions, pronoun-antecedent relationships, metonymy, and the discrepancy typically encountered between those entities that figure most directly in a relationship and the explicitly coded relational participants”. He <i class="">doesn’t</i><span style="font-style: normal;" class=""> use the notion of “reference point” to analyse agenthood or subjecthood—but given that subjects are often grammaticalised topics, there is at least an indirect relation.</span></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">One of the early chapters of volume 2 of <i class="">Foundations of Cognitive Grammar</i><span style="font-style: normal;" class=""> (1991) contains a discussion of nominalised clauses, and in particular the fact that the agent often appears with possessive marking, (Unfortunately, this book is no longer available on Google Books, and I don’t have easy access to my physical copy, so I can’t provide a page reference.)</span></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">More generally, analogies between nominal and verbal structure are a recurring theme in Cognitive Grammar (particularly in volume 2 of <i class="">Foundations</i><span style="font-style: normal;" class="">; see especially the discussions of “grounding”, “quantification”, and “instantiation”</span>), and in functionalism more generally. (In fact, I think Van Valin & LaPolla 1997 explicitly cite Langacker on this point.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Hope this helps.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Siva<br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 19 Mar 2022, at 9:28 pm, Adam James Ross Tallman <<a href="mailto:ajrtallman@utexas.edu" class="">ajrtallman@utexas.edu</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">Hello all,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">I thought there must be sources on this - but I haven't really found anything specific. I'm looking for sources that discuss potential semantic links between possessors in the nominal domain and agents (A subjects) in the verbal domain. Or just semantic explanations for structural homologies between noun and verb structure in general.<br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">I am aware of diachronic works that discuss the development of verbal alignment systems from (clausal) nominalizations. For instance, Gildea's work <i class="">On Reconstructing Grammar </i>gives a good explanation as to why we might find structural similarities between nouns and verbs for diachronic reasons (today's verbal structures were reanalyzed from a nominalized structure).<br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">Generative works, at least dating back to Chomsky's <i class="">Remarks, </i>explain structural homologies between noun and verb structure based on abstract formal schema (like X' theory).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">But, I was wondering if there were works in cognitive grammar or metaphor theory that have attempted to give a more synchronic explanation for potential symmetries between noun and verb phrase structure, based on the idea that noun and verb structures might have some common schematic form - or based on the idea that there is some metaphorical mapping between referential and event (verby) domains. <br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">The idea would be that somehow possessors in the nominal (referential) domain are at some abstract level like agents in the verbal (event/situation?) domain (and perhaps analogies with other arguments could be made, but those seem less obvious). Maybe there's nothing like this, but I assumed that there must be, given discussions of "transcategoriality" in the literature. Any leads would be appreciated.<br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">best,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130">Adam <br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:#4c1130"><br clear="all" class=""></div><br class="">-- <br class=""><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><font face="times new roman, serif" class="">Adam J.R. Tallman</font></div><div dir="ltr" class=""><font face="times new roman, serif" class="">Post-doctoral Researcher <br class=""></font></div><div dir="ltr" class=""><font face="times new roman, serif" class="">Friedrich Schiller Universität<br class=""></font></div><div class=""><font face="times new roman, serif" class="">Department of English Studies<br class=""></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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