Form, Meaning, and Focus in American Sign Language

Chapter 2 Foundational Concepts

9 Chapter 2 Foundational Concepts The primary content of this book is the description of the various levels of focus with which agents of events can be expressed in American Sign Language (ASL). Before we get to the details of the ASL data, however, we need to look more closely at the direct link between meaning and form. Let us thus consider the range of impersonalization strategies that occur in English and use them as a foundation for the analysis of the ASL data in the following chapters. Because we are honing in on a particular aspect of meaning and describing the syntactic forms that native ASL signers use to evoke that meaning, cognitive linguistics, which focuses on the relationships between meaning and form, serves as the theoretical framework guiding the analysis . Within this framework, I use diagrams and terminology based on Ronald Langacker’s theoretical model of Cognitive Grammar (CG) to describe the constructions in the elicited data. The result is a cognitive linguistic–based overview of the resources available for describing events with the agent evoked at various levels of focus. FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS FOR UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Language is a systematic means of symbolizing conceptualizations through phonological forms. The linguistic resources available for describing events are highly motivated by our human experience of events themselves: [C]ertain recurrent and sharply differentiated aspects of our experience emerge as archetypes, which we normally use to structure our conceptions insofar as possible. Since language is a means by which we describe our experience, it is natural that such archetypes should be seized upon as the prototypical values of basic linguistic constructs. (Langacker 1991, 294–95) Rankin_Pgs 1-136.indd 9 10/18/2013 9:55:46 AM 10 : Chapter 2 The clause structures that exist in languages are primarily grounded in these archetypal experiences. For example, prototypical active sentences convey an event in which an agent acts upon a patient, creating some kind of change. The active sentence structure reflects events we have seen over and over again in our lives. Events evoked in active sentences therefore are coded in a structure parallel to “the canonical way of apprehending what is arguably the most typical kind of occurrence” (Langacker 2008, 357). In cognitive linguistics, expressions are understood to structure their semantic components in particular ways (Talmy 2003; Langacker 2008; Verhagen 2007). Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) posits that only three types of structures are necessary to achieve this semiological function: phonological structures (the form of the morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, discourse, and so on used in the language); semantic structures (the meanings associated with those forms, which includes denotation and connotation, as well as the discourse functions, of those forms); and the symbolic links between phonological structures and semantic structures. Within this framework, lexical items and grammatical structures, as well as items at all other levels of linguistic expression, are understood to be conventionalized symbolic structures in which form and meaning are inextricably linked. In this view the conventional units that language users control in the inventory of a given language include not just morphemes and lexical items but also the schemas for the grammatical patterns of that language. All linguistic expressions instantiate schematic patterns. For example, in the utterance “Sally made dinner,” the words Sally and dinner are instances of the noun schema, the word made is an instance of the verb schema, and the entire phrase is an instance of the schema for noun-verbnoun clause structures. As we use words and phrases, our minds process the individual expressions and abstract away from specific instances to also recognize schematic relationships between the current expression and others we have seen or heard. Cognitive linguists consider language capability to be usage based (Tomasello 2003; Lieven and Tomasello 2008). Each time an expression is used, the schema it instantiates is activated. Over the course of multiple activations, the schematic similarities between multiple uses become increasingly entrenched, allowing the schema to be used more readily in the comprehension and production of novel expressions. “The semantics Rankin_Pgs 1-136.indd 10 10/18/2013 9:55:46 AM Foundational Concepts : 11 of the clausal patterns [are] based on fundamental patterns of experience , acquired through a process of categorizing over learned instances” (Goldberg 1998, 215). In other words, the more often one has heard, seen, and used a particular type of expression, the more comfortable one will be with its use. Linguistic units...