27.1482, Review: Cog Sci; General Ling; Philosophy of Lang: Taylor (2014)

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Subject: 27.1482, Review: Cog Sci; General Ling; Philosophy of Lang: Taylor (2014)

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Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 15:53:09
From: Ross McLachlan [r.mclachlan.2 at research.gla.ac.uk]
Subject: The Mental Corpus

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-4832.html

AUTHOR: John R. Taylor
TITLE: The Mental Corpus
SUBTITLE: How Language is Represented in the Mind
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Ross Deans McLachlan, University of Glasgow

Reviews Editor: Robert Arthur Cote

SUMMARY

In this book, “The Mental Corpus”, John R. Taylor is concerned with a single,
overarching question – what does it mean to know a language? In contrast to
conventional accounts, Taylor argues across thirteen chapters that linguistic
knowledge is a conglomeration of the individual’s experiences with the
utterances of a language. Taken together, this body of usage events is the
eponymous ‘mental corpus’ of the book. Drawing on data taken primarily from
the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA), Taylor presents a sustained argument for a radical
reconceptualization of the nature of language.

The first chapter, ‘Conceptualizing Language’, introduces the generative model
of linguistic knowledge (cf. Chomsky 1986, 1995) which Taylor aims to replace.
Specifically, Taylor frames the discussion as one between external language
(E-language) and internal language (I-language). This distinction leads
generative approaches to prioritise the I-language as the proper subject of
linguistic enquiry at the expense of E-language (Isac & Reiss 2013). In
contrast to this, Taylor instead argues that the relation between E-language
and I-language is instead a dialectic one. On one hand, E-language is the
output the I-language of individual speakers; on the other, a speaker’s
I-language is a result of their exposure to the E-language. As I-language can
only be inferred, so Taylor argues that the primary source of evidence must be
found in E-language. Taylor rounds off this opening chapter a discussion on
what constitutes representativeness in corpora, including an interesting
section on the World Wide Web as a ‘fabulous linguists playground’ (Kilgarriff
& Grefenstette 2003: 345).

Chapter 2, ‘The Dictionary and the Grammar Book’, continues with a rejection
of the generative model of linguistic knowledge or what Taylor perhaps
somewhat flippantly refers to as the ‘dictionary-plus-grammar-book model’. He
notes that this bifurcated model of linguistic knowledge has dominated the
research agenda of academic linguistics for the past half century. As Taylor
sees it, the widespread popularity of this approach has been as a result of
the way it accounts for linguistic creativity, offering a certain undeniable
and intuitive appeal. However, there would seem to be a number of flaws in
this approach, with the generative model unable to account for a number of
linguistic phenomena. For instance, drawing on attested corpus data, Taylor
shows the regular occurrence of ‘explain’ within a ditransitive frame which
would seem to violate certain principles of grammaticality. He argues that by
labelling such occurrences as ‘idiomatic’ and shifting them to the periphery,
the generative model undermines its own validity.

In Chapter 3, ‘Words and their Behaviour’, Taylor turns his attention to the
distribution of words in actual language use. In this case, the argument is
that the simple sorting of lexical items into lexical categories is in fact
fraught with inadequacies. From the corpus data he employs, Taylor argues for
example that the various usages of ‘much’ and ‘fun’ are not exhausted by their
respective categorizations as quantifier and (singular) mass noun. Instead,
the argument put forward is that a word’s syntactic distribution may be
entirely sui generis. In this respect, this chapter presents important corpus
based evidence in favour of a position such as Croft’s Radical Construction
Grammar (2001).

Returning to the earlier theme of idiomatic language, Chapter 4, ‘Idioms’, and
Chapter 5, ‘Speaking idiomatically’, treat the phenomenon together and at
length. It is across these two chapters that Taylor’s use of corpus data is at
its strongest and most convincing. Evidence of the pervasiveness of
‘idiomatic’ expressions is shown, with examples falling under one of four
categories: semantic, syntactic, lexical, and phrasal. The conclusion we are
led to accept in Chapter 4, therefore, is that a great deal of everyday
language usage could be classed as idiomatic in one way or another. In this
respect, Taylor argues that the generative model ‘undergenerates’, failing to
predict a non-trivial amount of language used by proficient speakers.
Similarly, the model often ‘overgenerates’, resulting in perfectly grammatical
sentences which sound unnatural to speakers of the language. In contrast to
this, Taylor proposes an alternative conceptualization. On this account, we
understand the idiomatic in terms of conformity with usage norms. These usage
norms are contextually situated (Halliday & Matthieson 2014) and statistical,
rather than categorical, in nature (Firth 1957). One of Taylor’s main
contentions is that, although it is impossible to ‘teach’ these usage norms
fully, they have clearly been learned by proficient native speakers in
constructing their own mental corpus.

Chapter 6 goes by the title ‘Constructions’. Here, Taylor expounds a more
explicit account of the notion of ‘construction’, with a particular emphasis
afforded to Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (1987, 1991, 2008). Building on the
slightly different notions of constructions as internally complex entities and
constructions as form-meaning pairings, Taylor presents a third view of
constructions as ‘units’. A unit, in this respect, refers to ‘whatever a
speaker of a language has specifically learned’ (p.126). While such a broad
definition of constructions may seem to reduce the descriptive relevance of
the concept, Taylor presents a robust case against rule-based approaches and
the autonomy of syntax hypothesis. To quote his provocative claim – ‘It’s
constructions all the way up’ (p.145).

In Chapter 7, ‘Frequency’, unpacks some earlier claims regarding the
statistical nature of usage norms. Specifically, this chapter address the
question of where exactly frequency information belongs in a descriptive
theory of language. As in earlier chapters, this discussion is framed by
Chomsky’s position, which is that frequencies are part of E-language and
therefore irrelevant to linguistic analyses. Taylor works through a wide range
of psycholinguistic research, showing the relevance of frequency phenomena in
relation to verb complements, word frequency, collocations, phonology,
ambiguity resolution and ‘garden path sentences’, and productivity of
schematic generalizations. Through a detailed and sophisticated review of this
research, Taylor ultimately concludes that frequency effects are not merely a
by-product of the E-language. Rather, these effects are an inherently central
aspect of a person’s linguistic knowledge.

Chapter 8 expands this discussion, arguing in favour of the chapter heading,
‘Skewed frequencies as a design feature of language’. Focusing here on
markedness and categorization, Taylor argues that frequency effects are
fundamentally responsible for each of these phenomena. In this way, his
approach touches on the nature of prototypicality (Rosch 1975). However, this
leads to somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. On this account, one would assume
that non-prototypical units with a low-frequency may not be learned by new
generations of learners, ultimately resulting in less skewed frequency until a
stable period of equilibrium. However, this is not the case of any language.
Therefore, perhaps controversially, Taylor proposes that skewed frequencies
are an absolutely central feature of human languages. 

Chapter 9, ‘Learning from Input’, builds on this claim. Arguing from the
perspective of phoneme acquisition, Taylor holds that this in-built skewing of
frequency has a functional explanation. Focusing primarily on phoneme
acquisition, the assertion in this chapter is that ordinary human development
and learning requires this statistical disparity. Making further reference to
a body of experimental research into ‘recency effects’ (syntactic priming),
this chapter seems to present strong empirical evidence in support of Taylor’s
claim regarding the dialectic relationship between E-language and I-language.

Chapter 10, ‘Polysemy’ represents a change of tack, shifting the focus to the
nature of linguistic forms with two or more related meanings. Despite being a
central feature of cognitive linguistic theory, Taylor argues that this
definition of polysemy proves to be problematic. Having read through the
previous chapters, the reader is in the position to anticipate the main thrust
of the argument. Put simply, words do not represent discrete chunks of
form-meaning associations. Instead, words should be thought of in terms of
their ‘contextual profile’. Alongside their conventional conceptual content
and referential value, this also covers the kinds of items with which they
collocate, the constructions in which they feature, and the types of text in
which they occur. Therefore, knowing a word involves knowing the contexts in
which that particular word can occur. Intriguingly, the word ‘pragmatics’ does
not seem to occur anywhere in this discussion.

In Chapter 11, ‘Creativity and Innovation’, Taylor returns to an earlier
argument put forward by generativists as unassailable. In this chapter, the
individual capacity for seemingly unbounded linguistic creativity is
contrasted with the nature of linguistic innovation. Taylor concedes that the
generativist position is well-founded in the case of creativity, which remains
strictly within the rules of a language system. In contrast, innovation
involves going outside of and beyond that system of rules working on a
lexicon. The position developed in this chapter is that there are problems
with the generativist position in relation to the distinction between
creativity and innovation. Taylor deftly returns to earlier discussions of
idioms, illustrating that in the case of ‘all over’, there are clear features
of ‘idiomatic creativity’, an oxymoron according to the orthodox accounts.
There is therefore no clear, logical relation between the existence of
linguistic creativity and innovation and the necessity of a generative model
of linguistic knowledge.

Not content to stop there, Chapter 12, presents an alternative approach to
linguistic creativity and innovation which complements the rest of the book.
This alternative is ‘Blending’ which forms the title and focus of this
chapter. Taylor draws on Fauconnier & Turner’s (2002) highly influential
outline of Conceptual Blending and Fauconnier’s (1994, 1997) related research
into Mental Spaces Theory. A full account of the principles behind mental
spaces and blending would not be possible in this review. However, whereas
Fauconnier and Turner focus primarily on the nature of ‘conceptual’ blending,
Taylor here makes a persuasive case for word blending and phrasal blending as
a motivating factor behind linguistic creativity and innovation. Most
interesting is the discussion of phrasal (or constructional) blending with a
number of corpus examples such as ‘keeping an eye out’, ‘ever since I can
remember’, ‘time and (time) again’, and a call-back to the earlier
ditransitive ‘explain me this’. Taylor maintains that this approach accounts
for the same phenomena as the traditional generativist approach, while
simultaneously explaining those features that had been relegated or deemed
marginal.

Finally, Chapter 13 called ‘The mental corpus’, summarizes the main arguments
advanced throughout the book. In this short concluding section, Taylor brings
together the individual threads of his monograph: a usage-based approach to
language; commitment to corpus data and experimental research; the centrality
of idiomatic language; the importance of frequency; and the dialectic between
E-language and I-language.

EVALUATION

Building on Taylor’s earlier monographs on cognitive linguistics (Taylor 1996,
2002, 2003 [1989]), this book represents a formidable contribution to the
literature. Taylor’s writing is lively and accessible and his arguments are
well supported by an expanding body of cognitive and corpus approaches to
linguistics. Marrying these approaches together so effectively hopefully
represents new steps in the maturation of these disciplines.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is in the way that it builds
upon and adapts the well-known metaphor of ‘the mind is a machine’. What
emerges from the text is the innovative, blended metaphor of ‘linguistic
knowledge as searchable corpus’. This idea of (linguistic) knowledge as a sort
of ‘hypertext’ is something which could potentially open up new avenues of
research and enquiry.

Finally, Taylor’s style of presentation makes this text suitable for a large
body of readers. It will appeal to cognitive and corpus linguists alike, as
well as students and lay readers interested in contemporary linguistic theory.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New
York: Praeger. 

Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in
Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in
Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Fauconnier, G & Turner, M. 2002. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the
Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Firth, J. R. (1957). Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951. London: Oxford
University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. & Mattiessen, C. (2014). Halliday's Introduction to
Functional Grammar. London: Routledge.

Isac, D. & Reiss, C. (2013). I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as
Cognitive Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kilgarriff, A. & Grefenstette, G. (2003). “Introduction to the special issue
on the Web as Corpus”, Computational Linguistics, 29, 333-47.

Langacker, R.W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical
Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2: Descriptive
Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R.W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Rosch, E. (1975). ''Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories'',
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 192–233.

Taylor, J.R. (1996). Possessives in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, J.R. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 
Taylor, J.R. (2003 [1989]). Linguistic Categorization. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ross Deans McLachlan is a PhD student in English Language at the University of
Glasgow. His research is primarily in cognitive linguistics and narrative
discourse, with an interest in related fields such as cognitive poetics and
narratology.

His current research project is into the function of first-person plural
narration in autobiographies of illness. Focusing on the stylistic effects and
rhetorical functions of 'we' narration, this research aims to contribute from
a cognitive linguistic perspective to ongoing research into intersubjectivity.

His research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).





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