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Approaches to Cognition through Text and Discourse
W
DE
G

Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 147
Editors
Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Werner Winter
(main editor for this volume)
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York

Approaches to Cognition
through Text and Discourse
edited by
Tuija Virtanen
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Approaches to cognition through text and discourse / edited by Tuija
Virtanen
p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 147)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-017791-9 (alk. paper)
1. Discourse analysis — Psychological aspects. 2. Cognition.
I. Virtanen, Tuija. II. Series.
P302.8.A68 2004
401'.41-dc22
2004018522
ISBN 3-11-017791-9
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Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>.
© Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
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Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.

Acknowledgements
The present volume contributes to bridging the gap that exists between dis-
course linguistics and cognitive linguistics - fields which share an interest in
issues of discourse and cognition but differ in the frameworks and perspectives
adopted for study. The first step towards this goal was a one-day thematic ses-
sion on discourse approaches to cognition which I organized at the 6th
Inter-
national Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, 10-16 July,
1999. Several of the studies included in the present volume are revised versions
of papers originally presented, in person or on video, in that context and I wish
to thank the participants in the very popular theme session for making it such
an inspiring event.
While the conference papers have been extensively revised and in some
cases given a different focus, other studies not presented at the conference have
since been added to extend the range of topics covered by the individual chap-
ters of the volume. It is obvious that the number of topics that could be covered
is very large; the present selection includes an overview of language, discourse
and cognition, and eight studies which explore cognitive aspects of information
structuring, coherence, foregrounding, knowledge structuring, negotiation for
meaning, and interpretation of recontextualized material. I wish to thank the
contributors both for their interesting contributions and their enthusiasm for
this project.
I am grateful to Professor Werner Winter, the series editor of Trends in Lin-
guistics. Studies and Monographs (TiLSM), Dr Anke Beck, editor-in-chief at
Mouton de Gruyter, and Birgit Sievert, the managing editor of TiLSM, for ac-
cepting the present volume for publication in the series. I also wish to thank the
anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for insightful comments and sugges-
tions.
Special thanks are due to M.M.Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest for encouraging me
to go ahead with the planned volume. I am also indebted to Nils Erik Enkvist
and Jan-Ola Östman for illuminating discussions concerning discourse and
cognition.
Last but not least, my heartfelt thanks go to my husband, Fredrik Ulfhielm,
whose unfailing support and interest constitute a sine qua non of my work.
December 2003, Turku/Abo, Finland Tuija Virtanen

Contents
Acknowledgements v
Chapter 1
Text, discourse and cognition: An introduction
Tuija Virtanen 1
Chapter 2
Language, discourse, and cognition: Retrospects and prospects
Robert de Beaugrande 17
Chapter 3
On the discourse basis of person agreement
Anna Siewierska 33
Chapter 4
The information structure of bilingual meaning: A constructivist
approach to Californian Finnish conversation
MM Jocelyne Fernandez- Vest 49
Chapter 5
Point of departure: Cognitive aspects of sentence-initial adverbials
Tuija Virtanen 79
Chapter 6
What is foregrounded in narratives? Hypotheses for the cognitive
basis of foregrounding
Brila Wärvik 99
Chapter 7
From legal knowledge to legal discourse - andback again
Lita Lundquist 123
Chapter 8
Conditionals: Your space or mine?
Anne Marie Bulov-M0ller 149

viii Table of Contents
Chapter 9
Communicative fragments and the interpretation of discourse
Martina Björklund 177
Chapter 10
Drawing the line: A contested conceptual model in
Danish 'child care talk'
Peter Harder 187
Index 209

Chapter 1
Text, discourse and cognition: An introduction
Tuija Virtanen
Linguists of different orientations, focusing on very different areas of the study
of language, regularly come into contact with phenomena that can be related
to cognitive aspects of language use. While much of the work done within
the overlapping fields of text linguistics and discourse analysis touches upon
phenomena which can be characterized as cognitive, much of the work within
cognitive linguistics is, in its turn, concerned with areas that are also familiar
to us from the study of text and discourse. The shared interest in discourse and
cognition urgently calls for discussions between these and other groups of lin-
guists, despite the present gap that exists between them caused by differences
in the perspectives and frames of reference adopted for study.
The aim of this volume is to contribute to bridging that gap, by offering a
forum for discussion with a relatively broad scope to meet the current general
interest in the area of discourse and cognition. The volume opens with an over-
view chapter on the relations between language, discourse and cognition, in
retrospect and prospect. The rest of the volume consists of another eight chap-
ters focusing on central issues and highlighting methodological differences mo-
tivated by the frameworks from which these issues are approached. While we
have recently been able to witness a welcome increase in studies which adopt a
cognitive perspective on discourse (cf. e.g. van Hoek et al. (eds.) 1999; Koenig
(ed.) 1998; Lundquist and Jarvella (eds.) 2000; Sanders et al. (eds.) 2001), it is
important to note that the individual chapters of the present volume clearly opt
for a discourse approach to cognition.
In this chapter the concern is first with basic notions in text and discourse
linguistics - a term used to refer to the overlapping fields of text linguistics,
discourse analysis/studies and conversation analysis. The main purpose of the
discussion below of 'text', 'discourse', 'context', and variation across these, is
to address issues which most clearly reflect the kinds of changes that have taken
place in the study of text and discourse over the years. Unless clarified, these
notions also constitute a threat to successful communication between discourse
linguists and cognitive linguists. Section 2 is an introduction to the individual
chapters of the volume.

2 Tuija Virtanen
Both 'text anddiscourse linguistics' - or 'discourse linguistics' forshort -
and 'cognitive linguistics' are here used in a broad sense, as umbrella terms for
a range of different frameworks. Text and discourse linguists thus focus on text
and discourse in context, while the concern in cognitive linguistics is primarily
with individual and/or distributed cognition. The chapters of this volume at-
tempt to combine the two interests.
1. Approaching cognition from the perspective of text and
discourse
Let me start this section with a brief personal note. In the 1980's when I was
working in the research group 'Style and Text as Structure and Process', di-
rected by Professor Nils Erik Enkvist in Abo, Finland, the focus was on text and
discourse as process in terms of various text (or discourse) strategies involving
parameter weighting in relation to particular communicative goals. The texts an-
alysed in terms of structure were, in the first place, considered products of proc-
esses constituting the actual purpose of the analyses; analysing structures was a
method to get at the processes which were assumed to lie behind them and the
motivations that had made particular text producers in particular contexts opt
for one set of alternatives rather than another, to give textual parameters a par-
ticular weight and value in view of particular communicative goals. Such goal-
oriented weightings of decision parameters were investigated to understand the
ways in which particular text strategies worked towards the elimination of the
interlocutors' uncertainties through the exclusion of alternatives, and how they
facilitated the production and/or interpretation of discourse. They were also
investigated to find out what they told us about the construction of textuality
through information structuring, coherence and text segmentation, what they
told us about intertextuality, and about the 'textual fit' of sentences in written
texts. Discussions thus also dealt with relations between sentence grammar and
text where these could be seen to be pullingin different directions. Furthermore,
studies focused on the relative salience of particular linguistic material in rela-
tion to its immediate context and the Figureness of a profile found in a text in
relation to its Ground, the effects of experiential iconicity detected in texts, and
the influence of perspectivization on the form of a text. Impromptu speech was
examined to understand how hesitation phenomena disclosed aspects of on-line
discourse processing, and the ways in which interlocutors negotiate meaning.
Central questions also included what inferences need to be made for interlocu-
tors to come to grips with what is left implicit in texts and discourses, what
expectations people set up in text processing, and how interlocutors cope with

Text, discourse and cognition:An introduction 3
expectations not met in the subsequent text. The interplay of the textual fac-
tors affecting the form of the actual text, i.e. the product - their 'conflicts and
conspiracies' in text processing, to adopt Enkvist's phrase - were ultimately
connected with the basic ability of human beings to make goal-oriented, con-
text-based decisions, and to the interpretability of texts and discourses. To cite
Enkvist (1989: 166) on 'interpretability':
Text comprehension and interpretability can thus be seen as a highly complex,
incremental process involving the interplayof bottom-up and top-down process-
ing, as well as zig-zagging between the text, the universe of discourse meaning
the universe at large within which the text can be placed, and the specific world
of text with its specific, usually highly constrainedstates of affairs.
The views that we held on text and discourse as structure and process were
well in line with those prevailing at the time (cf. e.g. de Beaugrande 1980; de
Beaugrande and Dressier 1981; Brown and Yule 1983; van Dijk and Kintsch
1983). In fact, as de Beaugrande notes in Chapter 2 of the present volume, "text
linguistics has always had a resolutely cognitive orientation because the text
must be described as both product and process."
Several of the basic notions of text and discourse linguistics have since
developed in ways which make them, at one and the same time, even more
dynamic but also much more indeterminate, and not necessarily grounded in
assumptions of rationality and intentionality in human communication. In light
of the relations of discourse and cognition, it therefore seems in order to pay
some attention to the primary notions of 'text' and 'discourse', their relation to
'context', and the kinds of variation that can be found across them.
To start with text and discourse, it is obvious that for many linguists dis-
course consists of text and its situational context; for others texts are primarily
written while discourse refers to spoken interaction; and for others still, only
one of these concepts is necessary to cover the field of their study. All in all,
however, both terms have acquired a more processual and interactional reading
over time, and the question that cognitive linguists might wish to ask at this
point is thus whether the two notions are needed and if so, what senses will best
be ascribed to them if we try to keep both of them transparent for the benefit of
all linguists. In what follows, the two terms will be used in the British sense of
discourse including text and its situational and socio-cultural context.
Discourse can be viewed as a cognitive process involving interaction, ad-
aptation, and negotiation between interlocutors, but it can also be viewed as a
social phenomenon in a very wide sense of the term. To fully understand what
people do with language it is necessary to take into account both cognitive and
social concerns. This raises the issue of the status and scope of the concept of

4 Tuija Virtanen
'context'. For the purposes of cognitive linguists, context is a mental phenom-
enon, included in the broad notion of 'conceptualization'. In text and discourse
linguistics context has traditionally been regarded as having three dimensions:
we speak of the textual or linguistic context (the 'co-text'), the situational con-
text, and the socio-cultural context. The different dimensions of context thus
have to be related to the notion of context as used in cognitive linguistics, since
all of them can be considered mental representations of different kinds but ac-
tivated in parallel.
Furthermore, the development of text and discourse linguistics has witnessed
a change in the relative status of the notions 'text' and 'context'. Whatever read-
ing is given to text and discourse, it is important to note that from the beginning
both have been viewed as closely tied to their situational and socio-cultural con-
texts. Recently, however, the focus of this relationship has shifted to the context
itself. Hence, while the form that a particular text takes is undeniably affected by
its context, it is also true that texts and discourses themselves mediate contexts
and in so doing contribute to constructing, maintaining or altering those contexts.
This bidirectional view of text and context has turned text producers and text
receivers into interlocutors or participants in discourse, engaged in discourse
practices, be they spoken, written, signed, or computer-mediated multimodal
phenomena. The recognition of a two-way traffic between texts and contexts has,
in turn, raised the issue of the inseparability of the two. And this view has impor-
tant implications for the cognitive notion of context as a mental phenomenon.
Much study in the area of text and discourse has traditionally been centred
around individual cognition, the inferences that people are required to make to
interpret discourse, and the assumptions they seem to be making about their in-
terlocutors' consciousness and memory constraints, as manifested in discourse.
Metadiscoursal exponents reveal awareness of context-based strategic planning,
irrespective of whether such planning is considered rational or common-sensi-
cal and what interpretation is given to the idea of intentionality. Criticism has
since been voiced of the idea of 'autonomous minds' (cf. e.g. Linell 1998), i.e.
the assumption that people communicate as individuals with ready-made con-
tent in their minds. It is, however, worth noting that even in studies of discourse
governed by the idea of individual cognition, the goal of the analyses and their
focus has been the processes that take place when people communicate with
one another in authentic situational and socio-cultural contexts.
The recent shift of interest to 'distributed cognition' has brought with it a
greater concern for indeterminacy in discourse. We can see that communicative
goals can be of many kinds: interlocutors can act in an explicitly intentional
fashion but do not do so in all contexts and for all purposes. Communicative
goals can be negotiated and adapted to, not only in impromptu speech but also

Text, discourse and cognition: An introduction 5
in the discourse shaping the ideologies of a given society and culture at a given
point in time. Further, interlocutors can be aware of and content with the fact
that the inferences they draw are not necessarily shared by others and that in-
terpretability can be a matter of several different or overlapping alternatives ac-
tivated simultaneously. The motivation for selecting a particular interpretation
in a particular context can be related to the construction of that context, in the
sense of adaptation, negotiation, persuasion and other dimensions of the activ-
ity of co-construction of discourse by interlocutors. The focus on distributed
cognition highlights the kind of intersubjectivity that emerges through interac-
tion both locally in a particular situational context and on a macro-level, in a
particular culture andacross cultures. Still, even in a globalising world - which-
ever of the many senses we choose to give to that notion - it is important to
remember that in the first instance, people do live locally.
Interlocutors are regarded as being engaged in discourse practices of vari-
ous kinds which manifest and constitute socio-cultural patterns of action and
thought. And interlocutors can show metalinguistic awareness of such shared
patterns, even though they do not necessarily conform to them in practice. This
suggests that the role of variation across texts and discourses is another central
area in the study of discourse and cognition.A burning issue here is how we can
best capture the dynamism connected with these phenomena.
Two dimensions of variation have traditionally been in the focus of text and
discourse linguistics. Tostart with, text types - or discourse types - originate
in the rhetorical tradition and have to a large extent been studied by those inter-
ested in building theoretical models of language to increase our understanding
of language use. Genres, again, have been adopted into linguistics from the
study of literature, predominantly by those whose primary aim has been to ap-
ply the notion to practical purposes such as the study of professional discourse
or learner language of a particular kind. Both notions are essentially prototypi-
cal, and they should be given a dynamic interpretation and studied in terms of
the dialectical relation in whichthey enter with contexts of situation and culture.
Furthermore, both notions seem necessary since text/discourse types cut across
genres in interesting ways. Yet, however dynamically modelled, no typologies
are as such sufficient to explain the variation that emerges from the actual use
of texts and discourses and the mechanisms that allow interlocutors to cope
with and profit from such variation in their daily lives. Apart from obvious
pedagogical purposes, text classifications are still justified precisely because
they help us to understand linguistic categorization and the ways in which peo-
ple make dynamic use of them in continuously adapting and contributing to
variation across texts and discourses, making sense of their experience of the
world, and recontextualizing linguisticmaterial in ways that have a bearing on

6 Tuija Virtanen
their participation in speech communities and professional discourse communi-
ties. Such issues have recently been the focus of studies of 'intertextuality' and
'interdiscursivity', and of the interdisciplinary field of 'genre analysis'.
Traditional typologists have argued that text/discourse types reflect the way
in which we view reality; thus even such static types would seem to have an
obvious cognitive basis. While prototypical types of text have been shown to
differ across cultures and some of them are connected more readily than oth-
ers with particular educational systems and the ideologies that these convey
and help to construct, some rather high-level distinction between narrative and
non-narrative can probably be given a primarily cognitive justification. Hence,
the way in which we construct reality through a narrative flow of time involv-
ing human beings in a dynamic series of actions that have an outcome of some
sort which is different from the situation at the beginning of the series, is very
different from the way a location, a concrete object or an abstract notion is
described or explained to other people or the way in which values and beliefs
are constructed, mediated, and negotiated through discourse of the openly ar-
gumentative kind. If people use text types as prototypical categories against
which they can match texts to detect similarities and differences and on which
they can rely in recontextualizing and creating other texts in context, then the
study of intertextuality in terms of text/discourse types should indeed also be
very much part of the core of cognitive linguistics. Idealised types emerge and
change through authentic texts, and idealised types stored in memory affect the
form of authentic texts. Finally,what people actually do in their daily lives with
and through narrative, and why, has proven to be fundamental for our under-
standing of the relations between discourse and cognition.
In this light, genres seem much more context-oriented than text types. Gen-
res emerge and are maintained or altered in particular socio-cultural contexts,
helping to construct those contexts in the first place. Essentially this takes place
through interdiscursivity, in the sense of genre-mixing and embedding of emer-
gent and established genres in one another. Hence, to a greater extent than text
types, genres appear to be in line with the socio-cultural concerns that are in
focus in discourse linguistics, pragmatics and social sciences today. While it
is possible to argue that anything in language use can be ascribed a cognitive
function and it is indeed possible to study any linguistic phenomenon from a
cognitive point of view, the very origin of genres seems to be the discourse
community and socio-cultural context which they help to construct. Genres are
thus essentially part of our distributed cognition, of our social memory, or the
shared knowledge of a particular discourse community. Perhaps we can con-
clude by placing text/discourse types in a framework where the focus is on the
first member of the text-context pair, whereas genres, as the dynamic constructs

that they are regarded as today, would rather tend to highlight the second mem-
ber of the pair. Genres would thus seem to make 'context' more Figure-like than
the actual texts representing or helping to construct or develop those genres.
Taken together, the study of text/discourse types and genres is an area which
will add to our understanding of the interplay of the cognitive and social con-
cerns and constructs. Such an interplay is manifest in discourse, and it motivates
people to use language in particular ways. Variation across texts and discourses
thus demands some consideration in cognitive linguistics at least as concerns
the mechanisms ofemergence and use - orindeed, non-use - oftext categoriza-
tions of various kinds, the distinction between text/discourse types and genres,
and their relations to the notion of 'context' as a mental phenomenon. Among
text types, an important and cognitively highly relevant area of study concerns
the status of narrative in relation to other types. Genres have been in focus in
the study of professional discourse and the interaction between professionals of
various kinds and/or non-professionals in institutional discourse. At the same
time, the study of genre dynamism in non-professional discourse seems to be
an area where models of analysis are at present lacking. This is a task where
a combination of the expertise of both discourse linguists and cognitive lin-
guists might prove to be particularly advantageous. Furthermore, another area
of growing relevance in today's rapidly changing world of communication is
multimodality, in the sense of the construction and interpretation of multisemi-
otic meaning. Hence, the dynamism of multimodal variation emergent in the
new media awaits thorough study, and this is yet another forum where cognitive
linguists and discourse linguists can profitably meet.
Text and discourse linguistics constitutes a very wide field of study in which
proponents of different frameworks and methodologies meet to investigate a
shared interest: text or discourse. Similarly,in cognitive linguisticsthe common
denominator is what constitutes the object of study, i.e. cognition. As Geer-
aerts (1995: 114) rightly points out, what people with different orientations and
methodologies refer to as cognitive linguistics is "not a single theory of lan-
guage, but rather a cluster of broadly compatible approaches." The meeting
point of discourse linguisticsand cognitive linguisticshas traditionallybeen the
individual mind, engaged in interaction with other minds. Recent developments
in the humanities and social sciences have, however, brought social cognition
very much to the fore. Hence, to cite for instance Edwards (1997: 28), "cogni-
tion is [...] clearly a cultural and discursive matter." The studies included in
this volume have the purpose of contributingto our understanding of the area in
which the individual and distributed cognition meet, i.e. discourse. In doing so,
they also forcefully testify to the benefits of communication across academic
disciplines and invite further discussions in that spirit.

8 Tuija Virtanen
2. The studies included in the present volume
The individual chapters of the present volume focus on both text and discourse,
and their textual, situational and socio-cultural contexts. The data range from
narrative to non-narrative, written to spoken, informative to literary, experi-
mental to authentic, professional genres to impromptu speech, and from public
to semi-private or private discourse. Several languages are discussed, including
discourse originating in bilingual speech communities. We also find cross-lin-
guistic data at a high level of abstraction where a certain extent of decontextu-
alization seems mandatory, and we find data originating in automatic searches
run on very large corpora of authentic texts and discourses, yet obviously re-
contextualized to appear in new formats on computer screens and printouts.
The discussion proceeds from the construction of textuality, in terms of
considerations of information structuring, coherence, and foregrounding, in
(inter)textual and interdiscursive contexts, and across languages of very dif-
ferent kinds, to examinations of negotiation of meaning, distribution and rec-
ognition of knowledge, and the recontextualization and interpretation of dis-
course in textual, situational and socio-cultural contexts. Hence, the context
taken into account expands as we proceed through the different chapters. The
volume highlights linguistic elements of relatively small size within and across
languages and cultures; it also highlights local and global discourse phenom-
ena ranging across parts of texts or entire texts. Such discourse phenomena
are signalled with the help of linguistic elements that serve important cogni-
tive functions in the use of language. The cognitive issues brought to the fore
by the individual studies range from accessibility and assumptions we make
about our interlocutors' memory constraints to information structuring, the rela-
tive salience we give to elements of discourse, prototypicality, figure-ground
distinctions reflected in language use, knowledge structure, locative concerns,
iconicity, recontextualization of communicative fragments originating in social
memory, negotiation between people or groups of people of mental spaces and
the establishment of shared conceptual models within society at large, pertain-
ing to culture and ideology. The studies thus vary in their relative orientation
towards individual and distributed cognition.
What is common to the contributions to this volume is a concern for con-
text. In light of cognitive linguistics, these studies open avenues to ways of
conceptualizing this primary concept of text and discourse linguistics which is
notorious in resisting definition but without which we can hardly hope to ap-
proach text and discourse at all. The focus of several studies is on individuals
processing text and discourse in a given situational context, making sense of
and mediating their experience of the world through discourse, constructing

conceptual models and activating mental spaces, recontextualizing elements
of earlier texts and discourses in novel ways, and negotiating common ground
through adaptation to and manipulation of what they assume to be their inter-
locutors' activated conceptual models and their possibly shared mental spaces.
But individuals form part of and help to create socio-cultural contexts that are
of prime relevance to a discourse approach to cognition. Hence, other chapters
rather focus on what can be regarded as distributed cognition, the collective
memory of a particular speech community, socio-cultural knowledge shared
by most members of a speech community, or again, professional knowledge
shared by members of discourse communities, which is, in turn, constitutive or
regulative of such communities.
Chapter 2, entitled "Language, discourse, and cognition: retrospects and
prospects", is by Robert de Beaugrande. Examining discussions of language
and cognition in the linguistic literature, the chapter opens with the claim that
while the wheel has turned a long way, the relation between cognition and lan-
guage has not, as yet, been adequately defined. A dialectical model of 'language'
and 'discourse' is then presented such that language specifies the standing con-
straints of discourse while discourse manifests emergent constraints for lan-
guage. The traditional division into 'theory' and 'practice' is thus fundamentally
called into question as the dialectics between language and discourse turn the
theory of language into 'theoretical practice', essentially 'practice-driven', and
the practice of discourse into 'practical theory', essentially 'theory-driven'. A
similar dialectical model is suggested to account for the relations between 'cog-
nition' and 'language', such that cognition generates meanings while language
determines meanings. The fundamental problem for linguists is of course the
fact that "meanings will not hold still or remain constant while we 'analyse'
them."
This chapter provides us with a number of analogies which we can use in
our attempts to understand cognition and its relation to language and discourse.
Tacit assumptions and explicit statements originating in several schools of
thought are addressed in light of current models of cognitive processing. The
chapter closes with an agenda for some of the most urgent tasks for what the
author calls 'cognitive text linguistics' - and which is what by any other name
the contributors to this volume are promoting by simply participating in this
endeavour.
The variety of methods and frameworks represented in this volume, together
with many others outside it, testify to the richness of work in this field but also
to the fact that there is no one way of accomplishing what these and other lin-
guists are engaged in doing. What is thus urgently needed is a forum for discus-
sion between proponents of the different frameworks and practitioners of the

10 Tuija Virtanen
different methodologies. Rather than adding to the fragmentation of today's lin-
guistic map, we need to create connections between text linguistics, discourse
analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics and related fields, to make explicit
the ties between this area of study and cognition. And as in this volume, we
need to build bridges between discourse linguistics and cognitive linguistics.
One way of starting to do this, de Beaugrande suggests, is to study meanings in
very large corpora of text and discourse. The study of collocations, he predicts,
can lead us to a level between 'language' and 'text/discourse' with the missing
links partly explicated, and to the content of meanings in terms of the multiple
activations in networks with other meanings of the events thus presented to us.
Chapters 3-6 deal with ways of structuring information, creating coherence,
and signalling foregrounding. Here we are focusing on the cognitive aspects of
the construction of textuality. In Chapter 3, "on the discourse basis of person
agreement", Anna Siewierska examines person agreement marking cross-lin-
guistically, addressing the issue of the discourse context for its development in
light of two diachronic scenarios that have been proposed in the literature. In
the first of these, person agreement markers originate in the third person while
the second, based on accessibility theory, postulates first and second person pro-
nouns as the source of grammaticalization of person agreement. Studies of dis-
course have often tacitly assumed that narrative constitutes a good exemplar of
discourse, and the focus has usually been on third person narratives, which may,
but need not, contribute to the discourse basis of the first scenario. The encod-
ing of discourse referents in impromptu speech, however, would rather seem to
point to the necessity of taking into account the fact that first and second person
referents are inherently more accessible in memory than third person referents.
While critically examining the claims concerning the discourse bases of the two
diachronic scenarios, this chapter argues for an extension of the second model,
based on the accessibility of referents in memory, such that (a) not only high
accessibility buta wider range - or different levels - of accessibility be taken
into account, and (b) third person pronouns, as well as both subject and object
functions, be included in the scenario. In this way, Siewierska points out, itwill
be possible to fully assess the merits of the model in terms of cross-linguistic
data.
Chapter 4 presents a series of studies by MM Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest, of
"the information structure of bilingual meaning", in which she adopts "a con-
structivist approach to California Finnish conversation". Information structur-
ing is examined in impromptu speech emerging in both monolingual and bilin-
gual contexts, using a tripartite model of Theme-Rheme-Mneme. The last of the
three concepts refers to elements following the Rheme which carry a flat into-
nation, convey shared knowledge, and receive affective modulation. Analysis

of the dialectics of bilingual meaning as the outcome of a co-determination of
discourse-pragmatic and morphosyntactic factors in American Finnish oral nar-
ratives reveals a tendency for the Rheme or the Mneme to be marked by code-
switching, from Finnish to English. In non-narrative, again, code-switching is
mainly motivated by situational needs such as the presence of a monolingual
interlocutor or the need to be exact about referents related to life in the USA.
This latter need is also shown to occasionally invite metalinguistic comments.
The second main motivation for code-switching in impromptu speech has to
do with the interlocutors' memory processes. When another piece of discourse
is recontextualized in the form of a memorized quotation or social situation
with a high degree of affect which took place in English, these tend to trigger
code-switching into the language of the memorized situation. Finally, the chap-
ter deals with the social parameters of quantitative memory in Sami contexts,
where men and women are shown to manifest different mechanisms of remem-
bering dates, estimating distances, and so forth. Applied to American Finnish
contexts, the analysis shows that the sex or gender differences here concern
code-switching at temporal signposts of a story. All in all, the chapter reveals
a high degree of creativity in the way bilingual interlocutors construct textual-
ity through information structuring where code-switching serves an important
function. Through the decision to focus on information structuring inbilingual
discourse, this chapter presents a new approach to code-switching, linking it
closely to cognitive concerns.
In Chapter 5, entitled "Point of departure: cognitive aspects of sentence-ini-
tial adverbials", I revisit sentence-initial adverbials, exploring their discourse
functions in written texts from a cognitive point of view. To start with informa-
tion structuring, sentence-initial adverbials appear in the theme position, which
constitutes the prominent starting point of the sentence: theme can be seen as
Figure in relation to the Ground of the rheme. Elements that interlocutorschoose
to place in this position are thus informationally foregrounded at the stage at
which they appear in the text. Subsequently, of course, they will be integrated
into the Ground. In terms of persuasion, it is important to note that thematic ad-
verbials can mediate information,beliefs and attitudes that the writer wishes the
reader to interpret as given even when they cannot be automatically assumed
to be so. Sentence-initial adverbials can, in fact, convey information of any
kind. The extremes of brand-new information and textually given information
are, however, less usual here than inferrable and unused information,which are
found in the middle of the given-new scale. This variation also accounts for the
efficiency with which sentence-initial adverbials contribute to the signalling of
textual boundaries. After a discussion of thematic adverbials in light of coher-
ence, text type, and iconicity of two different kinds, the chapter concludes by

12 Tuija Virtanen
claiming that the sentence-initial slot itself constitutes a rich source of discourse
meanings precisely because of its cognitive relevance for our processing ca-
pacities and memory constraints.
After three chapters on information structuring and coherence, we proceed
to a discussion of (fore)grounding in Chapter 6, entitled "What is foregrounded
in narratives? Hypotheses for the cognitive basis of foregrounding". In this
chapter Brita Wärvik explores parallels between the textual foreground-back-
ground distinction in narrative and perceptual and cognitive principles of or-
ganization. The relative foregrounding and backgrounding of elements in nar-
rative is here considered from three cognitive perspectives, i.e. those of the
figure-ground distinction, prototype, and salience. The chapter also includes a
discussion of relevant aspects of iconicity. One of the most urgent tasks for stu-
dents of grounding, Wärvik argues, is to devise a model to come to grips with
the relative weightings of the different grounding criteria so far established for
narrative. Another obvious, but similarly in no way straightforward task is to
systematically establish grounding criteria for non-narrative text. Scrutiny of
the cognitive basis of the meticulous system of grounding criteria presented
in this chapter reveals important links and networks of links between different
approaches to foregrounding in the study of discourse. It also serves to relate
principles of textual organization to corresponding phenomena in other fields
of human activity.
At this point a terminological note is in order. The use of the term 'ground-
ing' in text and discourse linguistics and the study of literature, to indicate the
relative degree of foregrounding vs backgrounding of elements in a text, does
not correspond to the use of the term 'grounding' in cognitive linguistics (mani-
fest in this volume in Chapter 10, where the focus is on the 'discourse ground-
ing' of a conceptual model). Further, when the term 'foregrounding' appears in
Chapter 8 (on the use of conditionals in interaction), it simply functions as a
metaphor for dominances of scales connected with discourse-pragmatic proc-
esses in face-to-face argumentation. Thirdly, Chapter 5 touches on the status of
sentence-initial elements as 'informationally foregrounded' at the stage where
they appear in the text. This status is, however, only related to the Figureness
of the theme in relation to the rheme. In contrast, (fore)grounding as dealt with
in Chapter 6, which is entirely devoted to the phenomenon, pertains to the sys-
tematic study of the organization of textual material in narrative in terms of its
cognitive basis.
Chapters 7-10 discuss ways in which interlocutors distribute and recognize
knowledge, negotiate meaning, recontextualize linguistic material, and inter-
pret discourse. Hence, Chapter 7 is a study of the relations between legal knowl-
edge and legal discourse, Chapter 8 is concerned with the furnishing of mental

spaces in business talk, Chapter 9 focuses on communicative fragments used
for literary purposes, and Chapter 10 deals with a particular conceptual model
mediated through discourse in a given socio-cultural context.
Adopting experimental methods for a linguistic and cognitive analysis of
legal texts, Lita Lundquist investigates expert and non-expert knowledge of
two types of legal concepts: 'contract' and 'judgement'. In Chapter 7, entitled
"From legal knowledge to legal discourse - and back again", we learn what
'knowledge' is, how specialised knowledge differs from that of laypeople, and
more particularly, what the structure of legal knowledge can look like. Through
an investigation of three types of 'qualia' - semantic notions used to analyse
the data - the knowledge structures of expert and non-expert texts are shown
to vary such that experts use a higher number of qualia than non-experts. It
also turns out that an expert rater recognizes more qualia than a non-expert
one. Furthermore, the type of qualia present in the 'contracts' and 'judgements'
produced by experts and non-experts vary in interesting ways, which supports
hypotheses concerning the existence of important differences in the knowledge
structures available to these two groups of subjects.
All through the chapter, Lundquist engages in a critical discussion of the
methods used to obtain the results, thus stressing the fundamental problem of
studying discourse and cognition through discourse and cognition themselves.
This discussion is reminiscent of de Beaugrandes's worries in Chapter 2 con-
cerning the fact that "we do not have any language-independent modality for
accessing cognition beyond the limits of what we happen to perceive with our
senses", which is also "partly pre-organized by language, so its potential for
testing language remains limited in principle." Lundquist's discussion ishighly
instructive to anyone involved in the study of discourse and/or cognition.
Chapter 8 is a study of conditionalsin context, entitled "Conditionals: your
space or mine?" Adopting a scalar view of the phenomenon, Anne Marie Biilow-
M0ller here shows that classifications based on decontextualized sentences,
which cognitive linguists often rely on to study conditionals, do not hold in
practice. This is so because authentic interaction manifests blends of such uses
of conditionals and secondly, because the idea of mapping mental spaces to-
gether, to form a shared space is too simple for the purposes of actual analysis.
This chapter shows that furnishing mental spaces, be they yours, mine,or some-
thing in-between, is what the interlocutors engaged in business talk do, and they
do so for strategic purposes. The study accounts for the use of conditionals in
authentic argumentation by postulating a number of fundamental scales, which
can be foregrounded or backgrounded (cf. above) for different communicative
purposes. The model thus also allows for interlocutors, given their stake, to
mean more than one thing at a time, which is what regularly happens in au-

14 Tuija Virtanen
thentic discourse, where interlocutors are in the process of negotiating meaning,
adapting to situations, and constructing contexts through discourse. It is obvi-
ous from this chapter that conditionals are used in argumentative discourse in
ways which cannot be accounted for without full consideration of the relevant
context and the communicative strategies of the interlocutors engaged in the
discourse.
Focusing on literary discourse, Martina Björklund sets out to explore "com-
municative fragments and the interpretation of discourse" in Chapter 9. Pre-
senting an analysis of a Russian short story as a showcase, she emphasizes the
crucial impact that such communicative fragments - prefabricated patterns, or
simply, 'recycled' linguistic material - have on the interpretation of the text. It
is evident that the recognition of recontextualized elements, present in discourse
in new or modified combinations, and in new and always unique contexts, is a
prerequisite if we are to fully appreciate a piece of literary discourse. This has
important implications not least for translators of such texts. More generally,
Björklund's study contributes to our understanding of the interpretation of dis-
course, literary and non-literary, by providing us with a tool for the analysis of
its many voices, originating in the distributed cognition related to a given socio-
cultural context. The effect of communicative fragments on the interpretation of
discourse constitutes a cognitive concern of a very central kind.
While our metalinguistic awareness may allow us to reflect on the intertex-
tual links activated in a given communication situation - in relation to literary
or non-literary discourse - the relevant communicative fragments ultimately
only pertain tothat very context - textual, situational andsocio-cultural - thus
making us see the discourse we are engaged in as new, as something unique
whose construction and interpretation we are participating in, here and now.
This separation of our automatic use of language from our metalinguistic
awareness may in part explain why so few linguistic models still reckon with
a store of prefabricated linguistic expressions in the memory which are put
into use in daily communication. As Miller (1984: 156) puts it in an entirely
different context, "recurrence is an intersubjective phenomenon, a social occur-
rence"; "what recurs cannot be a material configuration of objects, events and
people, nor can it be a subjective configuration, a 'perception', for these, too,
are unique from moment to moment and person to person." Communicative
fragments help people in the task of interpreting contexts and relating to them;
yet, not enough is known today about the uses of recontextualized prefabricated
patterns, lexico-grammatical and textual, which regularly appear in the web of
discourses of many kinds.
The final chapter of the volume, entitled "Drawing the line: a contested con-
ceptual model in Danish 'child care talk'", is by Peter Harder, who investigates

the negotiation of common ground in a wide socio-cultural context, through an
analysis of the conceptual models and norms which we construct in society. He
considers the issue in terms of a case study of a particular conceptual model in
a Danish context, that of 'drawing the line' in the interaction between adults and
the children for whom they are responsible. The chapter analyses the on-go-
ing collective discourse through various dimensions of the metaphor activated
here, showing that it is not enough to refer to the basic bodily grounding (cf.
above) familiar to us from cognitive linguistics. What we also need to consider
is the discourse grounding of the metaphorical mapping, i.e. the processes tak-
ing place in the interaction between interlocutors seeking to align the metaphor
with their own experience and to analyse the mappings of their opponents in
ways that result in a polarization of the public debate and hence a battle ground
in which even a lack of an acceptable mapping for the current metaphor is one
discourse strategy among others. We are here dealing with a mapping from
source domain, to target domain the analysis of which can only be partialwhen
conceptualization is seen as a product. Instead, Harder argues that we need
to consider conceptualization as an on-going discourse process "where men-
tal structures meet actual experience and there is a struggle to impose some
conceptual order on it." It is evident from this analysis that the socio-cultural
context in which the metaphor is activated is crucial for the understanding of
conceptual models being constructed, altered or maintained through discourse.
To sum up, the variety of frameworks represented in this volume high-
lights methodological issues concerning the study of, on the one hand, text and
discourse, and on the other, cognition - and the tacit assumptions that come
with the packages. While the methods adopted for study thus vary a great deal
across the chapters, what is shared is an awareness of the fact that discourse
and cognition can only be studied with the help of discourse and cognition.
This unavoidable state of affairs has important implications for the discourse of
discourse: scholarly discourse, too, serves to create contexts. At the same time,
what emerges from the different chapters is the uniqueness of discourse as a site
for the study of both individual and distributed cognition and their interplay in
authentic situational and socio-cultural contexts.All the chapters also show that
both discourse linguistics and cognitive linguistics profit from interdisciplinary
discussions, which have greatly contributed to bringing these areas of study
closer to one another in the recent past. It is thus hoped that in addition to the
discoveries and insights of the discourse-based approaches to cognition includ-
ed in this volume, the present selection of studies also serves to inspirelinguists
of various orientations to go on buildingbridges across academic boundaries.

16 Tuija Virtanen
References
de Beaugrande, Robert
1980 Text, Discourse, and Process: Toward a Multidisciplinary Science of Texts.
(Advances in Discourse Processes 4.) Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
de Beaugrande, Robert and Wolfgang Dressier
1981 Introduction to Text Linguistics. London/New York: Longman.
Brown, Gillian and George Yule
1983 Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Dijk, Teun A. and Walter Kintsch
1983 Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Edwards, Derek
1997 Discourse and Cognition. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage.
Enkvist, Nils Erik
1989 Connexity, interpretability, universes of discourse, and text worlds. In:
Sture Allen (ed.), Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences: Pro-
ceedings of Nobel Symposium 65, 162-186. (Research in Text Theory 14.)
Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk
1995 Cognitive linguistics. In: Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blom-
maert (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual, 111-116. Amsterdam /
Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
van Hoek, Karen, Andrej A. Kibrik and Leo Noordman (eds.)
1999 Discourse Studies in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from the 5th
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, 1997, 91—110.
Amsterdam / Philadephia: John Benjamins.
Koenig, Jean-Pierre (ed.)
1998 Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap. Stanford, California: Center
for the Study of Language and Information.
Linell, Per
1998 Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Per-
spectives. (Impact: Studies in Language and Society 3.) Amsterdam / Phil-
adelphia: John Benjamins.
Lundquist, Lita and Robert J. Jarvella (eds.)
2000 Language, Text, and Knowledge: Mental Models of Expert Communica-
tion. (Text, Translation, Computational Processing 2.) Berlin / New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Miller, Carolyn R.
1984 Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151-167.
Sanders, Ted, Joost Schilperoord and Wilbert Spooren (eds.)
2001 Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. (Human
Cognitive Processing 8.) Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Chapter 2
Language, discourse, and cognition:
Retrospects and prospects1
Robert de Beaugrande
1. Language and cognition as a (non)topic in linguistics
The status of cognition as a concept in the science of linguistics remains uncer-
tain. I recently re-scanned my survey of major linguistic discourses (in Beau-
grande 1991) and I could not find the term 'cognition' in the writings of such
avowed mentalists as Saussure and Sapir, nor (less surprisingly) in the writings
of such avowed behaviourists as Bloomfield and Firth. The first occurrence of
the term 'cognition', or 'cognitive faculties' to be exact, was found in the writ-
ings of Noam Chomsky, which at the time signified a programmatic renewal of
mentalism, as we shall see.
The long absence of the term 'cognition' in linguistics seems interesting
in view of the well-established term 'cognitive linguistics', and merits some
scrutiny. For the early mentalists, the contents of cognition, variously called
'knowledge', 'ideas', 'thoughts' and so on, seemed under-determined. For Saus-
sure (1966 [1916]: 111), 'thought' was Only a shapeless and indistinct mass',
an 'indefinite plane of jumbled ideas'. For Hjelmslev (1969 [1943]: 52), 'pur-
port' [Danish 'mening'] was 'an unanalysed entity', an 'amorphous thought-
mass'. These linguists surmised that language imposes determinacy: 'thought'
'becomes ordered in the process of its decomposition' as 'language takes shape'
and enables 'clear-cut consistent distinctions between two ideas' (Saussure);
'linguistic form' 'lays arbitrary boundaries on a purport-continuum' that 'de-
pends exclusively on this structure' (Hjelmslev). So mentalist linguistics might
assume that the study of cognition would be left with nothing.
For the behaviourists, in contrast, the contents of cognition seemed over-
determined, thanks to the notion that 'mental images, feelings, thoughts, con-
cepts', and 'ideas' 'are merely popular names for various bodily movements'
(Bloomfield 1933: 142). For Bloomfield, 'the meaning of a linguistic form' is
not a 'mental event', but 'the situation in which the speaker utters it and the
response which it calls forth in the hearer'; then he wondered if 'the situations
which prompt people to utter speech include every object and happening in
their universe' (1933: 142, 139f). If so, 'the study of speakers' situations and

18 Robert de Beaugrande
hearers' responses' might be 'equivalent to the sum total of all human knowl-
edge' (1933: 74). And 'to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for
every form in the language' would require 'scientifically accurate knowledge
of everything in the speaker's world'. So behaviourist linguistics might assume
that the study of cognition would be left with everything.
At all events, these mentalists and behaviourists did leave cognition out of
their accounts, and concentrated on the units of sound (phonemes) and the units
of form (morphemes), which plainly constitute orderly systems of 'distinctive
features'. And when linguistics and semantics eventually embarked on the study
of meaning, they predictably reapplied a conception developed in phonology
and morphology, namely the system of basic units. Parallel to the 'phonemes'
and 'morphemes', these units were variously termed 'semes', 'sememes', 'se-
mantemes', 'semantic features', or 'semantic primitives' (e.g. Hjelmslev 1957;
Katz and Fodor 1963; Greimas 1966). However, 'phonemes' can be securely
defined by articulation, e.g., a 'voiced dental stop'; and 'morphemes' can be
defined, though less securely, by the processes of word-construction, e.g., for
the Tenses or Aspects of Verbs. What could be the basis for defining the units
in semantics?
Several possibilities were aired, such as:
(a) the 'linguistic image of properties, relations, and objects in the real world'
(Albrecht 1967: 179), as in Pottier's (1963) taxonomy of chairs;
(b) the distinctive elements arising from the 'apperceptive constitution' of 'hu-
man beings in regard to their environment' (Bierwisch 1966: 98), a well-
known example being colours (cf. Heider 1972);
(c) as conceptual elements into which a 'reading' decomposes a 'sense' (Katz
1966);
(d) as elements for constructing a semantic theory (Katz and Fodor 1963);
(e) as constituents of a metalanguage for discussing meaning (Greimas 1966).
Either the units are given in advance by the 'real world' or the 'human envi-
ronment'; or they are generated by the processes of human comprehension; or
again they are purely theoretical constructs of linguistics and semantics. In all
these interpretations, the units are presumably cognitive rather than strictly lin-
guistic; they cannot be simply a set of words used for writing definitions in the
manner of a dictionary. Moreover, the catalogue of units would have to be uni-
versally applicable for all the meanings of a language, or even the meanings of
all languages. And the units would constitute a system analogous to 'phonemes'
and 'morphemes' only if a given unit is applied repeatedly and consistently
to many meanings. In the most strictly orthodox view, the units would deter-
mine the 'sense properties' whose 'sum' is the 'sense of any expression'- 'its

Language, discourse, and cognition: Retrospects and prospects 19
indispensable hard core of meaning', 'deliberately excluding any influence of
context or situation of utterance' (Hurford and Heasley 1983: 91).
An immediate problem was how to label these cognitive units of meaning.
If we use words, then the words can have meanings of their own beyond the
basic units they are supposed to label. Let us consider a seeming straightfor-
ward example I recall hearing discussed at the time: constructing the meaning
of'kill' from CAUSE + DIE (Chomsky 1971 [1968]: 188f). In authentic discourse,
this construction works for some instances like (1), and breaks down for others,
like (2).
(1) 'It would always be a heavy thought to me, if I 'd caused his death, even in
ajust cause.' 'Yes', said Phineas, 'killing is an ugly operation...'
(Uncle Tom 's Cabin}
(2) Is'(I that chase theefrom the country and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war? [...]
Whoever shoots at him, I set him there.
Whoever charges on hisforward breast
I am the caitiff that do hold him to Ϊ.
And though I kill him not. I am the cause
His death was so effected
(All's Well that Ends Welll,2, 105-108, 115-119)
The problem here lies not in the correct choice of labels for 'semantic features'
or 'sense properties', but in the orthodox aspiration to describe an 'indispensa-
ble hard core of meaning' free of all 'context'.
Whilst these discussions were in progress, the so-called 'cognitive revolu-
tion' set about transforming the human sciences from the 1960s onwards. The
most 'revolutionary' idea, in my view, was that cognition is a unifying central
faculty encompassing a wide range of human capabilities and processes that
had hitherto been studied in isolation and with narrow methods - intelligence,
learning, memory, skills, problem-solving, and, ultimately, language and mean-
ing (cf. overview in Newell 1990).
The response of linguistics was a return not merely to the mentalism of its
early years (e.g. Saussure, Hjelmslev) but to the idealist and rationalist philoso-
phy of 17th and 18th centuries (e.g. Descartes, Leibnitz). Early idealism held
the contents of cognition to be determinate, but proposed to explain this factor
at a single stroke by invoking a 'universal, language-independent' 'system of
possible concepts' (Chomsky 1965: 160). The order of meanings in language
would be pre-determined by the construction of the human mind; each language

makes its own selection out of the universal order. For philosophers like Des-
cartes, the ultimate source and creator of this order would be the mind of God.
In modern linguistics, God was dispensed with by linking cognition directly to
biology (as if to outflank behaviourism): 'there is a highly determinate, very
definite structure of concepts and of meaning that is intrinsic to our nature, and
as we acquire language or other cognitive systems these thingsjust kind of grow
in our minds, the same way we grow arms and legs' (Chomsky 1991: 66).
This renewed mentalism in effect set out to study cognition instead of lan-
guage, aspiring to construct 'a theory of linguistic structure' without 'reference
to particular languages' (Chomsky 1957: 11). Eventually, real language - now
called 'externalised language' (or 'e-language' for short) - wasdeclared to bea
mere 'epiphenomenon' (Chomsky 1986: 25). In these 'radically different theo-
ries', 'there are no constructions; there are no rules' (Chomsky 1991: 81). This
version of cognitive linguistics is concerned solely with 'the structure of men-
tal representations' and expressly excludes 'the relationship between' 'mental
representations' 'and things in the world' (Chomsky 1991: 93). The exclusion
carries ironic (and probably unintentional) echoes of Bloomfield's much earlier
exclusion, quoted above, upon confronting 'the sum total of all human knowl-
edge'.
The wheel seems to have turned a long way. Cognition has passed from be-
ing first an 'indistinct mass', then a stupendous catalogue of 'every object and
happening in the universe', then a determinate system of 'hard-core meanings',
and finally a 'universal system of possible concepts'. As far as I can tell, none
of these conceptions adequately defines the relation between cognition and lan-
guage; and I shall suggest an account that is markedly different in theory (what
cognition and meaning are) and in practice (how we go about describing them
through data from language and discourse).
2. Language and discourse as theory and practice
Applying our terms broadly, we can define a language as a theory of human
knowledge and experience (what speakers know how to talk about), and dis-
course as its practice (what speakers do talk about). Language and discourse
would thus interact in a dialectical cycle, with each side informing and guiding
the other, as modelled in Figure 1. Language specifies the standing constraints
(e.g., what the words usually mean), whereas discourse manifests emergent
constraints (e.g., what the words mean in this particular stretch of discourse).
The practices are heavily 'theory-driven' in the sense that discourse compels
its participants to 'theorise' about what words mean, what makes sense, what

Language, discourse, and cognition: Retrospects andprospects 21
specify standing constraints
theory-driven
LANGUAGE DISCOURSE
practice-driven
manifest emergent constraints
A DIALECTICAL MODEL
Figure 1.
people intend, and so on. Yet the theory is also heavily 'practice-driven' in the
sense that discourse continually tests and adjusts implicit theories about mean-
ings, senses, or intentions.
In this account, discourse is probably the most theoretical practice humans
can perform, particularly in respect to meaning. In return, language is the most
practical theory humans can devise, offering us the resources to shape and guide
almost any of our practical activities. Yet the 'theoreticalness' of language is
extremely well-hidden from most speakers who practice it. They would regard
discourse as a 'practical matter'; they would be surprised if we told them they
possess a 'theory of their language' that makes them 'theoreticians'.
All human practices produce knowledge, which is stored as the contents
of cognition. Language must have originated and evolved as a refined means
for delimiting, organising and stabilising those contents into meanings, and for
sharing the meanings among the community. The content of cognition and the
content or meaning of language are thus phenomena of the same order, differing
in degree more than in kind. By talking about what we know and sharing itwith
other people, we also build or change our knowledge in ways that could hardly
be done without the use of language.
Cognition and language would thus also interact in a dialectical cycle, with
each side informing and guiding the other, as modelled in Figure 2. Most essen-
tially, cognition generates meanings, whereas language determines meanings.
But here also, the difference is only in degree, and these dialectical processes
are inseparable.
A helpful analogy here might be cognition as the landscape and language
as the map (compare the 'cognitive maps' in Neisser 1976). We could live in
the landscape and move about after a fashion with no map, but language makes
our lives and our movements much more organised and productive. Similarly,
each of us can have a 'mental map' of the landscape, but without the language-

generate meanings
COGNITION LANGUAGE
determine meanings
A DIALECTICAL MODEL
Figure 2.
map, we could not compare and improve the goodness of fit. The meanings of
language are in turn not just names of points on the map, but directions about
how to navigate with the aid of the map. And discourse is the activity of actually
walking through the landscape by means of the map.
How accurate the map might be in any literal cartographic sense could never
be established, because both the landscape and the map are continually evolv-
ing. Indeed, just using the map can change the landscape or the map, or both.
We can only try to notice how helpful the map proves to be in practice, and hope
that we will get where we want to go and not be led too far astray.
Nor again could we establish which language is a better map of human cog-
nition; or whether cognition is the same for all humans whilst only our maps
differ from one language to another. Such questions are unresolvable because
we do not have any language-independent modality for accessing cognition be-
yond the limits of what we happen to perceive with our senses. And even what
we see, hear, and so on is partly pre-organised by language, so its potential for
testing language remains limited in principle.
The analogy to the map is inappropriate in that a map is deliberately drawn
by an explorer or cartographer, whereas language evolves both spontaneously
and communally. Somehow, the contents of cognition get organised as mean-
ings of language with remarkable precision and delicacy even though speakers
are not following an explicit plan or design. The organisation is 'delivered for
free', so to speak, and one might empathise with the 17th century idealists who
imagined it all to be the work of God.
Perhaps a different analogy than a map might be helpful here. The termite
hill on the African veldt is an impressively complex structure built by an im-
mense number of individual events and agents, each of these eminently simple
in itself. A single termite certainly possesses no knowledge of the total design

of the termite hill; such knowledge could not be justly attributed even to the
entire termite colony. Instead, the design is generated by a dynamic conver-
gence among millions of movements of termites moving tiny grains of sand
or earth.
An intriguing fact about the architecture of termite hills was demonstrated
in computer simulation by Peter Kugler when I was at the Institute for Medi-
cal Engineering of the University of California, Los Angeles. He was able to
show that the main supports of the structure correspond to the points where the
trajectories of the several termites most frequently intersect. The structure thus
emerged from the crossing of pathways - like Order out of chaos' (Prigogine
and Stengers 1984).
In an analogous manner, the complex architecture of cognition could arise
from the intersections among the trajectories in networks of knowledge repre-
senting the relations among classes of perceptions, sensations, and so on, each
one of which is simple in itself. What something 'means' or 'represents' is a
function of what it is connected to - the pathways leading toward or away from
it in the network. When some item of knowledge gets put into practice, a point
in the network, or more likely a cluster of points, gets 'activated'; and this ac-
tivation automatically spreads out along the contiguous pathways without the
intervention of executive control (cf. Collins and Loftus 1975). The relevant
pathways retain and increase their activation, whereas the irrelevant pathways
lose their activation in about half a second - a mode of processing cognitive
psychology has been able to demonstrate under the label of the 'construction-
integration model' (Kintsch 1988, 1989). A strangely counter-intuitive conse-
quence is that all meanings of a word are initially activated, and not just the
one relevant to the context, as 'relevance theory' complacently asserts without
regard for the findings of experimental psychology. The relevant one is the one
whose activation level is sustained or raised.
What is conventionally called a 'meaning', 'concept', 'thought', 'idea' and
the like is not a standing unit like an entry in a dictionary or a message in a pi-
geonhole, but an activation pattern. Each instance of activation may strengthen
its links, but may also adjust or alter them, depending on other areas of parallel
activation, which together constitute the 'context'.
In this account, the contents of cognition and the meaning of language are
products of massive parallel distributed processing (Rumelhart, McClelland et
al. 1986). They are not so much 'stored' as 'prefigured' in the cognitive archi-
tecture of human knowledge networks, which would be the psychological and
neurological instantiation of language as 'theory'; their activations would be
the instantiations of discourse as 'practice'. So language would have naturally
emerged as a 'user-friendly front end' of cognition, which itself possesses Ian-

guage-like qualities. Language is a product and process of 'higher-order con-
sciousness' that reconciles the individual and the social factors of cognition (cf.
Edelman 1992).
Now, this account could explain the failure of projects in linguistics and
semantics for describing meaning in basic units that constitute the 'hard core
of meaning independent of context or situation'. Meanings are not units at all,
but events in a dialectical process which always has a context as its cognitive
architecture. If semanticists purport to be analysing as meaning out of context,
they are in fact just replacing natural contexts with artificial ones, I cannot see
why the results could claim to be generally valid or representative. I would go
on to point out, as a logical corollary, that meanings will not hold still or remain
constant while we 'analyse' them. On the contrary, analysis necessarily entails
an increased or specialised activation, the meaning will keep on spreading and
thus gaining in richness and complexity.
We might draw here upon the tradition of 'gestalt psychology' (e.g. Koffka
1935) by modelling cognition as the ground, and a language as the figure. In a
typical gestalt, the figure is generated by receiving the central focus of atten-
tion or consciousness, whereas the ground receives only peripheral attention.
This model would be recursive in the sense that the meaning of a discourse is
also the figure set off by focused attention against the ground the meaning in
the language, which also receives peripheral attention. The participants in the
discourse understand the current meanings with the aid of the usual meanings
being, in the commonplace metaphor, in the 'back of the mind'. This model too
indicates the impossibility of describing meaning by 'indispensable hard-core
senses'; a meaning does not have such a core.
Speakers know what words mean, and how those meanings can be shared,
through the convergence of partially similar events. The meaning of a given
word evolves in a dialectical cycle between what it might mean by itself and
what other sorts of words it is likely to appear with in collocations, i.e., typical
combinations of lexical choices (Sinclair 1991; Hunston and Francis 1999). In
cognitive terms, the meaning takes on its characteristic content by virtue of
multiple activations in networks with other meanings.
A grand challenge for cognitive linguistics, I would suggest, is to analyse
meanings by examining large sets of such events as provided by very large
corpora of authentic text and discourse (Beaugrande 2000). Let us return to
examples of 'kill' and 'die'. Using my general corpus of 15 million words of
British and American writers on the WordPilot programme (Milton 1999), I
found 442 occurrences of 'killed'. In the large majority, the thing 'killed' was
indeed a person or an animal (especially a snake) being caused to die. But this
was not an 'indispensable core'. One can histrionically speak of being 'killed'

by sadness (3) or discomfort (4). Or, one can use the term to mean 'put a sudden
and complete end to' something that is neither a person nor an animal (5-6).
(3) How should I ever have borne it! It would have killed me never to come
to Hartfield any more! (Emma)
(4) The heat was excessive; he had never suffered any thing like it—almost
wished he had staid at home—nothing killed him like heat
(Emma)
(5) I'm in love with change and I've killed my conscience
(This Side of Paradise)
(6) you have killed my love. Youused to stir my imagination. Now you don't
even stir my curiosity. Yousimply produce no effect.
(Dorian Gray)
My corpus of Shakespeare plays returned some highly creative meanings, such
as cease an emotion (7), cancel one vow with another (8), outshine a light (9),
close one's eyes (10), or torment a person with misplaced kindnesses (11). This
last has become a standing collocation in English.
(7) How will she love when the rich golden shaft
Hath kill 'd the flock of all affections else
That live in her (Twelfth Night)
(8) Youdo advance your cunning more and more.
When truth kills truth, Ο devilish-holy fray!
(Midsummer Night s Dream)
(9) Arise,fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid artfar morefair than she.
(Romeo and Juliet)
(10) To bed, to bed! Sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses
As infants 'empty of all thought!
(Troilus and Cressida)
(11) This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,
And thus ΙΊΙ curb her mad and headstrong humour
(Taming of the Shrew)

Among the 789 occurrences of 'died' in my general literature corpus were a
fair number of things that could not be sensibly said to get 'killed', e.g. (12-
15). In the English of literature at least, certain kinds of things 'die' or 'die
away' or 'die out' when their continuation would have been desirable, such as
sounds, including speech (12), light (13), and warmth, including courage (13)
and emotion (14). I found no data for the opposite expressions, such as 'silence',
'darkness', or 'coldness' being said to 'die'. These are already absences or ter-
minations, and their continuation would be undesirable. The idea of a 'moun-
tain dying' (15) stands out as the least predictable collocation; Muir wanted to
portray how Mt. Hood 'varies greatly in impressiveness and apparent height at
different times'.
(12) He opened his lips to speak, but his accents died away ere they -were
formed. (Wieland)
(13) the illumination died away in afew seconds, and my heart died away
within me as it went. (Arthur Gordon Pym)
(14) Hisface was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes—like something
from which all the warmth and light had died out.
(My Antonio)
(15) Next year you return to the same point of view, perhaps to find that the
glory has departed, as if the mountain had died
(Steep Trails)
I was surprised to find from my Shakespeare corpus that only people were said
to have 'died'. No other uses of the term occurred.
It is customary in studies of language or literature to distinguish between
literal meaning and metaphoric meaning. The implication is that a listener or
reader first supplies the literal meaning and, noticing this does not fit, casts
about for a suitable metaphoric meaning. But the 'spreading activation' or 'con-
struction-integration' models of cognitive processing suggest that the suitable
meaning could be produced without such a detour through the literal mean-
ings. Certainly such could be expected if the meaning is familiar, e.g. 'sound
died away' covering a range of other things that 'died away' in my corpus data,
such as 'voice', 'whisper', 'footsteps', 'trampling', 'music', 'rhythm', and 'ca-
dence'.

3. Cognitive text linguistics?
Whereas 'cognitive linguistics' is a well-known field with an international as-
sociation, a journal, and some 8211 attestations on the Internet (returned by
Alta Vista in August 2000), 'cognitive text linguistics' is an unknown field and
does not appear on the Internet even once. The absence is due more to academic
convention than to substantive divergence. In my own work at least (e.g. Beau-
grande 1980, 1997), text linguistics has always had a resolutely cognitive orien-
tation because the text must be described as both product and process. Perhaps
cognitive linguistics originally shared a border with psycholinguistics, which
routinely chose the sentence as the main unit of language. But no comparable
restrictions persist today.
In the purview of text linguistics, the collocations we can identify in very
large corpus data represent a special phenomenon: they are more specific than
the language, yet more general than the text, like some category of 'missing
links' in between (Beaugrande 2000). In terms of cognition, the account I have
proposed would explain collocations as interactive priming loops among ex-
pressions whose probability of being chosen together is significantly higher
than the normal base state prior to activation. The links among, say, 'sleep
- close - eyes' would becloser to activation, whereas nosuch linkage would be
primed among 'sleep - kill - eyes'.
Looking at multiple occurrences of an expression in corpus data is a special
means of distributing our attention between figure and ground. Instead of just
determining the meaning of an expression in a single discourse, we are seek-
ing to assess the similarities and differences among its meanings in multiple
discourses. Some of those meanings will match our intuitions,e.g., how 'voices
died away', whilst others may not match, e.g., how a 'mountain died'. Usually
the match is a matter of degrees rather than a yes-or-no division.
Still, our knowledge of collocations is part of the cognitive and linguis-
tic ground for the meanings that figure in any single text. Quite plausibly, the
greater challenge for a 'cognitive text linguistics' would be to account not just
for the figures in the focus of processing, i.e., the expressed meanings of a text,
but for the ground at the peripheries of processing, i.e., the (possibly) implied
meanings. If activation works itself out through the cognitive architecture of
knowledge and meaning without executive control, then determining its full
breath or scope may prove difficult indeed.
Consider this brief report about someone being 'killed' in a road accident,
taken from the US news media (Cullingford 1978):

(16) A New Jersey man was killed Friday evening when a car swerved off
Route 69 and struck a tree. David Hall, 27, waspronounced dead at
Milford Hospital. The driver, Frank Miller, was treated and released. No
charges were filed, according to investigating officer Robert Onofrio.
Our cognition specifies not merely how road accidents typically occur, but also
what is typically reported about them. In this text type, we expect to learn the
names and ages of the people involved and the time and place of the accident,
even if such knowledge is totally irrelevant to our own personal situation. We
do not expect to hear that the driver's nice new suit got all messed up; or that
one passenger broke a fingernail, and another missed an appointment with her
hairdresser - even if all this actually happened. Such knowledge entails the
wrong focus and degree of detail for the text type.
In exchange, we seem to know all manner of things implied but not stated.
We know that the hapless Mr. Hall was 'killed' by the impact of the car against
the tree, rather than being bumped off just then by the New Jersey Mafia. Miller
lost control rather than deliberately heading for the tree with the plan of knock-
ing it down and carting it home for firewood. The 'tree' was a large sturdy
outdoor tree rather than a dwarf bonsai on a window sill or a Christmas tree in
a shopping mall. What was left of Hall got taken to 'hospital' by an ambulance
and not by canoe, camel, or skateboard. Miller was 'treated' by dressing his
injuries and not by giving him a fancy-dress dinner. The 'charges' would be
documents for criminal proceedings and not swift advances of mounted cavalry.
These excluded alternatives may sound rather zany or scurrilous, but how and
why we know they are excluded is by no means a trivial question. The psycho-
logical evidence I have cited for the 'construction-integration model' indicates
that large amounts of irrelevant knowledge are indeed initially activated, such
as these alternate meanings of'tree', 'treat', and 'charge'.
Now contrast this passage from a news item from the Ipswich Journal (Jan.
12, 1878):
(17) The solicitor was going to the Court, when he staggered as if in a fit,
andfell against the wall. The watchman and apoliceman, running to
his assistance, took him into a room. Some brandy was administered to
no effect, and Mr. Bond, the surgeon of Parliament Street, arriving, he
pronounced him dead.
From a purely linguistic standpoint, the Pronouns 'he' and 'him' could be am-
biguous about who pronounced whom dead. But from a cognitive standpoint,
no doubt can arise. The actions of 'staggering' and 'falling' (to say nothing of
not wanting good brandy) are nicely apropos prior to becoming 'dead'; and

Language, discourse, and cognition: Retrospects andprospects 29
a 'surgeon' is just the person who has the authority to make such 'pronounce-
ments'.
Notice that we are not actually told that the solicitor has died. Butjust to in-
troduce a modest margin of doubt would require some macabre ingenuity, e.g.:
(17a) A large draft of brandy was administered to the most amazing effect, for
the solicitor became so intoxicated and confused that when Mr. Bond,
the surgeon of Parliament Street, arrived, he pronounced him dead.
The apparent ordinariness and simple-mindedness of texts like (16) and (17)
must in reality be the effects of complex cognitive and linguistic processes we
will eventually have to account for. At present, the most promising account
might be to build the collocations emerging from very large corpus data into a
'spreading activation' or 'construction-integration' model. But thorny problems
regarding the choice of data and the methods of interpreting them must first be
resolved (cf. Virtanen 1990; Beaugrande 2000). In particular, we must show
how cognition adjusts the strengths of collocations to fine-tuned distinctions
among text types, registers, or styles, the most significant example in English
being the works of Shakespeare.
Whether we elect to call such explorations by the term of 'cognitive text lin-
guistics' is a purely academic matter. What counts will be the vast dimensions
and richness of the terrain, for which at the moment we are still struggling to
attain some cognitive map.
Note
This paper is a fully revised version of a video lecture recorded in Botswana
and presented at the Conference of the InternationalAssociation of Cognitive
Linguistics in Stockholm in July 1999.1 am deeply indebted to Ibolya Maricic
of Växjö University for the transcription.
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1999 Pattern Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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1983 Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Chapter 3
On the discourse basis of person agreement
Anna Siewierska
It is generally acknowledged (see e.g. Givon 1976; Moravcsik 1978; Lehmann
1982; Corbett 1991; Anderson 1992) that subject person agreement markers
typically originate from independent person pronouns by phonological reduc-
tion, cliticization and affixation, as shown in (1).
(1) indep Pro > unstressed Pro > clitic > affix
It is also generally accepted that the above development is motivated by dis-
course factors. More controversial is the nature of the discourse factors involved.
The hitherto most widely accepted explanation for why and how this process
comes about is the so-called NP-detachment account primarily associated with
the name of Givon (1976). An alternative explanation of the rise of subject per-
son agreement markers has been recently elaborated by Ariel (2000) based on
her (Ariel 1990) version of accessibility theory (AT). Ariel contends that while
both the NP-detachment and AT lines of development from pronoun to agree-
ment marker are plausible, her AT analysis carries the advantage of simultane-
ously accounting for the dominant form of person agreement paradigms, which
she takes to be the overt realization of first and second person markers and zero
realization of third person forms. Under the NP-detachment scenario, this per-
son asymmetry must be attributed to subsequent loss or reanalysis of the third
person forms.1
Under the AT analysis, on the other hand, third person forms
simply tend not to arise at all. Since, accordingly to Ariel, lack of third person
agreement markers is the cross-linguistic norm, she sees the AT line of develop-
ment of subject agreement as the cross-linguistically favoured one.
The present paper takes issue with Ariel's claim under her current assump-
tions with respect to the rise of third person agreement. It is argued that un-
less third person markers can be accommodated within the ATdevelopmental
scenario, AT cannot be seen as the major driving force behind the emergence
of person agreement. The discussion begins with a brief overview of the main
differences between the NP-detachment and AT accounts of the rise of person
agreement. The cross-linguistic implications of one of these differences, the
grammatical status of the person forms, are examined in section 2. The person
asymmetries which lie at the heart ofAriel'sATaccount of the rise of agreement

34 Anna Siewierska
are investigated in section 3. Cross-linguistic data is presented which reveal
that the person asymmetries in question constitute the minority rather than the
majority pattern. Section 4 considers a way of accommodating the emergence
of third person agreement markers with AT and provides additional reasons for
doing so. Section 5 concludes the discussion.
1. Two accounts of the rise of person agreement
According to the NP-detachment analysis, person agreement markers originate
as anaphoric pronouns in topic-shifted, left- or right-detached constructions
such as those in (2).
(2) a. Sally, she came early.
b. She came early, Sally.
The claim is that as a result of over-use such topic-shifted constructions become
reanalysed as neutral clauses and the anaphoric pronouns, formerly function-
ing as topic agreement markers, become subject agreement markers. This rea-
nalysis is seen to be typically accompanied by the cliticization and subsequent
affixation of the anaphoric pronoun to the verb, producing structures such as
those in (3).
(3) Sally she-came early.
The pronominal forms commonly continue to perform a referential function
which over time may be lost, resulting in forms that only redundantly express
person and number and/or gender.2
Such forms may undergo phonological ero-
sion and subsequently be lost altogether.
Under the AT analysis the development from pronoun to subject agreement
marker takes place not in topic-shiftedconstructions but rather in simple claus-
es with a pronominal subject such as those in (4).
(4) a. I arrived late.
b. You won.
The bounding of such subject pronouns to the verb is seen to be a reflection of
the attenuated encoding of highly accessible discourse referents.
In AT the coding of discourse referents is seen to reflect speakers' assump-
tions as to the degree of accessibility of the referents in the memory store of the
addressee. The more accessible the referent the less coding required. Accessi-
bility is taken to be a function of several factors, the most relevant of which in
the context of this discussion is entity saliency, where other things being equal

On the discourse basis of person agreement 35
mental entities to the left of > in (5) are seen to be more salient than those on
the right of >.
(5) a. Speaker > addressee > non-participant (3rd person)
b. High physical salience > low physical salience
c. Topic > nontopic
d. Grammatical subject > nonsubject
e. Human > animate > inanimate
f. Repeated reference > few previous references > first mention
g. No intervening/competing referents > many intervening/competing
referents
The higher the accessibility of the referent, the more attenuated its encoding, as
shown in (6), taken from Ariel (2000: 205), where accessibility decreases from
left to right.
(6) The accessibility marking scale
zero < reflexives < poor agreement markers < rich agreement markers
< reduced/cliticized pronouns < unstressed pronouns < stressed pronouns
< stressed pronoun plus gesture < proximal demonstrative (+NP) < distal
demonstrative (+NP) < proximal demonstrative (+NP) + modifier
< distal demonstrative (+NP) + modifier < first name < last name < short
definite description < long definite description < full name < full name +
modifier.
As reflected in (6), agreement markers are considered to be high accessibility
coding devices, second only to zero and reflexives. Thus, according to AT,they
should be used as the sole means of referent encoding, only in the case of highly
accessible referents. How highly accessible a referent needs to be in order to
warrant encoding solely by an agreement marker remains an open question.
It should be clear from the above that the NP-detachment and AT analyses
of the rise of subject person agreement are in fact in two important ways com-
plementary. First of all, they differ with respect to the grammatical status of
the person markers that they consider. The NP-detachment analysis seeks to
provide an account of the emergence of person markers co-occurring with cor-
responding nominal arguments, i.e. prototypical agreement markers. Ariel's AT
analysis, by contrast, deals with person markers functioning as bound pronouns.
And secondly, the two analyses make different predictions in regard to the re-
alization of the markers of the three persons. We see that the NP-detachment
analysis in (2) is illustrated on the basis of the third person, while the ATanaly-
sis in (4) on the basis of the first and second person. This is not co-incidental.
Since left- and right-dislocated topics are typically nominal constituents, under

36 Anna Slewierska
the NP-detachment analysis subject person agreement is generally assumed to
originate in the third person and then to spread to the other two persons. Ariel's
AT analysis, on the other hand, involves primarily the first and second person.
As captured in (5a), inATthe speaker and hearer are considered to be inherently
more accessible than third parties. Consequently, first and second person pro-
nouns are prime candidates for undergoing phonological reduction, cliticization
and affixation. Third person pronouns by contrast are not as their referents are
not consistently highly accessible enough to warrant encoding by high accessi-
bility markers. Thus "third persons are predicted to not often be coded by bound
pronominal forms" (Ariel 2000: 211).
The above considerations suggest that the NP-detachment vs AT origin of
agreement markers should in principle be discernible on the basis of synchronic
distributional restrictions. This is essentially the position that Ariel adopts. Her
contention is, however, that in most languages synchronic data clearly favour
an AT origin of agreement markers. My cross-linguistic investigations of per-
son agreement do not support this. Let us therefore turn to the cross-linguistic
data.
2. From pronoun to person agreement marker
The person markers found in languages may be classified into several types.
In some languages person markers occur only in the absence of an independ-
ent subject argument; they are simply bound pronouns.3
Such markers may be
treated as agreement markers only in that they agree in person/number (and/or
gender) with a referent in the preceding or following discourse. But they are
not clause internal agreement markers. A language which displays such person
markers is Retuarä, a Tucanoan language of Colombia (7).
Retuarä (Strom 1992: 218-219)
(7) a. Toma-re hose-re ia-ko?o
Thomas-TERM JOSC-TERM see-PAST
'Thomas saw Jose.'
b. Sa-ki-ba?ako?o
it-he-ate-PAST
'He ate it.'
In other languages the person markers occur both in the presence of the corre-
sponding independent subject argument and in its absence, as in the following
examples from Tauya.

Tauya (MacDonald 1990: 118)
(8) a. Fena?-ni fanu-/0 nen-yau-a-?a
woman-ERG man-ABS 3pL-see-3so-iND
'The woman saw the men.'
b. Nen-yau-a- ?a
3pL-see-3so-iND
'She/he saw them.'
The person markers are thus functionally ambiguous. In the presence of inde-
pendent lexical or pronominal arguments they function as clause-internal agree-
ment markers. In the absence of independent lexical arguments they function as
bound pronouns. In yet other languages the person markers always co-occur
with corresponding independent subject arguments; they no longer have a refer-
ential function and are fully grammaticalized agreement markers. Such markers
are illustrated in (9) on the basis of Dutch.
Dutch
(9) a. Piet zie-t Kees elke dag.
Piet see-2/3so Kees every day
'Piet sees Kees every day.'
b. *(Hij) zie-t Kees elke dag.
he see-2/3so Kees every day
'He sees Kees every day.'
The three types of person markers may be seen as reflecting three stages in the
grammaticalization of agreement as shown in (10).4
(10) bound anaphoric pronoun > referential (rich) agreement marker > non-
referential (weak) agreement marker
As noted earlier, the ATanalysis deals specifically with the emergence of bound
pronouns, i.e. with stage one of the diachronic development in (10). The NP-
detachment analysis, on the other hand, skips over stage one and begins with
stage two.5
Ariel is happy to accept that stage one is not a necessary prerequisite
to stage two (but see note 2). Nonetheless, she considers the dominant line of
development of agreement to begin with bound pronouns, i.e. stage one. A pos-
sible way of testing whether this is indeed so, is to examine the distribution of
languages with respect to the three stages of the grammaticalization of agree-
ment.
Given that grammaticalization is seen to be a continuous process ongoing in
all languages at all times, we would expect to find synchronic evidence of all

38 Anna Siewierska
the above stages of the grammaticalization of agreement. And indeed we do. It
is less clear what our expectations should be with respect to each of the stages
of the grammaticalization of agreement. Should we expect all to be equally
frequently attested or rather that some should be more common than others?
Rather than speculate further on the issue, let us consider the cross-linguistic
data.
My investigation of person agreement is based on a genetically and areally
stratified set of 332 languages. For the purpose of this discussion I will cite sta-
tistical data only on the nature of person agreement markers corresponding to
the S, i.e. the subject of intransitive clauses.6
Such agreement is manifested in
259 languages (see the appendix). These 259 languages will be referred to from
here on as the sample. In the vast majority of the sample languages (88%), the
person markers are referential agreement markers, i.e. markers reflecting the
middle stages of grammaticalization. Non-referential subject markers are very
rare. They occur in only three of the languages in the sample, namely Dutch,
Vanimo, and Anejom.And bound pronouns are also quite uncommon.7
Only 27
languages have such S forms. The relevant data are presented in Table 1.
Table 1. Type of S person agreement (N=259)
Bound pronouns Referential agr Non-referential agr
27 11% 229 88% 3 1%
How do these data bear on the two postulated origins of person agreement
markers? A result that would clearly favour the ATover the NP-detachment dia-
chronic scenario would be a high instance of languages with bound pronouns
in complementary distributionwith free arguments. This is clearly not the case;
only 11% of the languages in the sample manifest such markers. The evident
preponderance of person markers capable of co-occurring with corresponding
free forms, on the other hand, could be seen as indicative of the dominance of
the NP-detachment origin of person markers. If so, this would be highly dam-
aging for Ariel. However, I am hesitant to interpret the data in this way as such
person markers, though problematic for AT,constitute a possible later stage of
development from bound pronouns.
Ariel (2000: 207-208) suggests that the co-occurrence of bound pronouns
with corresponding free arguments depends on a high degree of fusion between
the person marker and the verb. The greater the fusion, the higher the degree
of accessibility that the person marker encodes and thus the more restricted the
contexts in which it alone can be used. She argues that such fusion discourages,
though does not preclude, a referential interpretationof the person marker. Thus
independent arguments start co-occurring alongside the person markers. This

is seen to be particularly likely in situations where the degree of accessibility
associated with the referent of the bound pronoun is not deemed high enough to
merit reference by the bound pronoun only.
While the above account of the emergence of actual agreement markers
from bound pronouns sounds very plausible, it also suggests that only those
agreement markers which exhibit a high degree of fusion with the verb poten-
tially qualify as having an AT origin. A high degree of fusion with the verb is,
however, also fully compatible with the NP-detachment origin of the markers.
Thus a consideration of the degree of fusion with the verb of person markers
cannot discriminate between the two diachronic scenarios, unless most ref-
erential agreement markers do not exhibit a high degree of fusion. Such a
situation would provide additional support for the NP-detachment over theAT
analysis.
I have not been in a position to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the
degree of fusion with the verb of the referential agreement markers in my sam-
ple.8
I do, however, have some data on the ordering of person agreement affixes
relative to other verbal affixes which, arguably, may be viewed as suggestive of
degree of fusion. Taking a very liberal and AT friendly view of "high fusion",
I treated as highly fused with the verb any person marker occurring next to or
close to the stem and preceded (in the case of prefixes) and followed (in the case
of suffixes) by at least one other major inflection affix. Two, relatively simple,
cases in point are illustrated below, both involving a third singular form fol-
lowed (11) and preceded (12) by a tense marker, respectively.
Amele (Roberts 1987: 163)
(11) SHorn uga wali-ag ho-i-a
Silom 3sc brother-3SG come-3sG-TODAY PAST
'Silom's brother came.'
Tuscarora (Mithun 1976: 41)
(12) Wi:rv:n wa- hra:-kv- ? tsir
William AORIST- 3soM-see- PUNCTUA! dog
'William saw the dog.'
In 37 languages in the sample the S person marker appears to be such an inner
marker obligatorily and in a further 51 languages in at least some circumstanc-
es. Another potential manifestationof fusion is sensitivityof the person marker
to tense/aspect and/or modality distinctions as in the Austronesian language of
New Guinea, Labu, illustrated in (13).

40 Anna Siewierska
Labu (Siegel 1984: 103,106)
(13) a. Ai yu- tutu iya ko hu
I IsGiPAST-fire dog with stone
Ί hitthedogwith thestone.'
b. Ai ngwa nda- taka ni poso
I PUT lsc:iRR-cut.with tool the coconut
'I'll break open the coconut.'
Various forms of sensitivity to the ΤΑΜ system are displayed in another 31
languages in the sample. Thus if we take the above two factors as indicators of
high fusion, about 55% (127/229) of the languages with referential agreement
markers in the sample may be seen as having markers attributable to either AT
or NP-detachment. The agreement markers in the remaining 45% of the lan-
guages, in turn, are more compatible with a NP-detachment origin.
In sum, a consideration of the cross-linguistic distribution of the three stages
of grammaticalization of person markers does not evidently favour either of
the two sources of person agreement. A small minority of languages display
person markers which can be accounted for in terms of AT but not NP-detach-
ment. These are the languages with bound pronouns in complementary distri-
bution with free forms. A larger number of languages have markers which do
not evidently manifest a high degree of fusion with the verb and thus are more
amenable to the NP-detachment analysis of the emergence of agreement. The
person markers in the majority of languages, however, appear to be in principle
compatible with either diachronic pathway. Crucially, there is no indication that
the AT origin is the universally favoured one. This conclusion will be further
reinforced by the data on person asymmetries to be considered below.
3. Person asymmetries in subject agreement paradigms
That the exponents of subject person agreement markers in the case of the third
person, particularly in the third person singular are frequently zero is a com-
monly made observation. Benveniste (1971) has even suggested that overt third
person subject agreement markers are quite exceptional. It is therefore not alto-
gether suprising that Ariel assumes that this is indeed so, particularly in the ab-
sence of any large scale investigations which would indicate otherwise. None-
theless, despite the many examples in the literature of languages which have
zero markers in the third person, a systematic study of the formal realization of
agreement markers in the 210 languages in my sample reveals that this is by no
means the dominant pattern. The relevant data are presented in Table 2.

Table 2. Zero exponents of S person markers (N=259)
All zero
1st
2nd
3rd
3
2
28
1%
0.7%
11%
Sg zero
5
3
32
2%
1%
12%
Some zeroes
1
0
25
0.4%
10%
No zeroes
250
254
174
97%
98%
67%
The "all zero" column depicts languages in which all the forms of subject agree-
ment for the person in question (irrespective of number, gender or tense/aspect/
mood) are non-overt. The "sg zero" column presents languages in which only
the sg form is zero while the non-singular forms have overt markers. And the
"some zeroes" column groups the languages which have at least one zero allo-
morph in the singular or non-singular.
Recall that according to AT,third person referents are not consistently high-
ly accessible enough to warrant encoding by high accessibility markers. Ariel's
prediction therefore is not that third person markers should have a zero expo-
nent, but rather that they should not arise at all, or only rarely. Consequently,
the figures in Table 2 directly relevant to Ariel's claim are those in the "all zero"
column. These figures confirm, in no uncertain terms, that third person zeroes
are overwhelmingly more frequent than first or second person ones. First per-
son markers (for the S) are lacking in only three (Nez Perce, Trumai and Dutch)
of the 259 languages and second person markers in only two (Nez Perce and
Trumai).9
Third person markers, by contrast, are lacking in 28 languages. The
languages in question are listed in the appendix.
The data in Table 2 do not, however, confirm Ariel's contention in regard to
the dominant form of subject agreement paradigms. Only 11 % of the languages
in the sample lack third person agreement markers altogether. Overt realization
of only first and second person markers is therefore clearly the minority rather
than the majority pattern, contrary to what Ariel assumes. It could be argued
that in some of the languages which have a zero exponent only for the third per-
son singular, i.e. those in the "3sg zero" column, the third person non-singular
marker is actually a number rather than a person marker. This is the case in the
Uto-Aztecan language of El Salvador Pipil, as shown in (14).
Pipil (Campbell 1985:54)
(14) Isg ni-
2sg ti-
3sg 0
Ipl //- t
2pl an~t
3pl 0- -t

42 Anna Siewierska
Such languages would then also qualify as lacking real third person agreement.
However, even if we make allowances for this, the number of languages lack-
ing third person agreement is not likely to rise dramatically. It is worth noting
in this context that not only the number of languages which lack third person
agreement is far lower than Ariel assumes but that the same applies to third
person zeroes overall. Only 33% of the languages in the sample have any zero
exponents for the third person. Therefore even if we were to treat all the lan-
guages in question as lacking third person agreement, they would still constitute
the minority. In sum, Ariel is clearly incorrect in her claim that overt realization
of the first and second person only is the "universally predominant inflectional
pattern" (Ariel 2000: 213).
The above findings do not invalidate Ariel's ATanalysis of the rise of person
agreement. They do, on the other hand, invalidate her claims as to the wide-
spread AT origins of agreement. If most languages displaying subject person
agreement have overt third person markers, like the data in Table 2 suggest,
but such markers only rarely have an AT source, as argued by Ariel, it follows
that AT cannot be the driving force behind the emergence of agreement in the
majority of languages.
4. Accessibility and third person markers
We have seen that though, contrary to the predictions of AT,third person agree-
ment markers are highly frequent, they do nonetheless arise less often than first
and second person ones. Whereas 99% of the languages in the sample have first
and second person markers, the corresponding figure for third person markers
is 87%. These findings could be reconciled with the AT account of the rise of
person agreement if person markers are treated as markers of a wider range
of accessibility, not necessarily only of high accessibility. In fact, I cannot see
how such a move can be avoided if Ariel's AT developmental scenario is to be
extended to other person forms, most notably object agreement markers. Since
according to the accessibility hierarchies in (5), referents coded by objects are
inherently less accessible than those coded by subjects, the bounding to the
verb of pronominal objects must involve conditions of lower accessibility than
those of subjects. Thus if first and second person object bound pronouns are
lower accessibility markers than first and second person subject ones, a similar
distinction should also be possible in the case of bound first and second person
pronouns as opposed to third person pronouns. Ariel (p.c.) is not sure whether
her ATanalysis of the rise of person agreement also holds for object agreement.
However, as the NP-detachment analysis also includes object agreement, the

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Title: The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery
Author: John R. Wise
Engraver: W. J. Linton
Illustrator: Walter Crane
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW
FOREST: ITS HISTORY AND ITS SCENERY ***

The New Forest from Bramble Hill (Sunrise)

THE NEW FOREST:
ITS
History and its Scenery.
BY
JOHN R. WISE.

Old Oak in Boldrewood
With 63 Illustrations drawn by Walter Crane, engraved by W. J. Linton, And Two
Maps.
LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.

CHAPTER
Preface
I. Introductory
II. Its Scenery
III. Its Early History
IV. Its Later History
V. Calshot Castle and the Old South-Eastern Sea-Coast
VI. Beaulieu Abbey
VII. The South-Western Part.—Brockenhurst, Boldre, Sway,
Hinchelsea, and Burley
VIII. The Central Part.—Lyndhurst
IX. Minestead and Rufus’s Stone
X. The Northern Part.—Stoney Cross, Bramble Hill, Fritham,
Bentley, Eyeworth, Studley, and Sloden
XI. The Valley of the Avon.—Fordingbridge, Charford, Breamore,
Ibbesley, Ellingham, and Ringwood
XII. The Valley of the Avon (continued).—Tyrrel’s Ford, Sopley,
and Winkton
XIII. Christchurch
XIV. The Old South-Western Seaboard.—Somerford, Chewton
Glen, Hurst Castle, and Lymington
XV. The Gipsy and the West-Saxon
XVI. The Folk-Lore and Provincialisms
XVII. The Barrows
XVIII. The Roman and Romano-British Potteries
CONTENTS.
PAGE
vii
1
7
20
39
49
60
74
85
91
109
116
125
129
145
158
172
196
214

XIX. The Parish Registers and Churchwardens’ Books
XX. The Geology
XXI. The Botany
XXII. The Ornithology
I. Glossary of Provincialisms
II. List of the Flowering Plants
III. List of the Birds
IV. List of the Lepidoptera
Postscript
Index
v
226
234
250
258
APPENDICES.
279
289
307
319
328
329

The New Forest from Bramble Hill (Sunrise),
Old Oak in Boldrewood,
View in Bushey Bratley
The Entrance from Barrow’s Moor to Mark Ash
The Stream in the Queen’s Bower Wood
The Charcoal Burner’s Path
The Cattle Ford
View in Gibb’s Hill Wood
The Millaford Brook
The Woodcutter’s Track
Calshot Castle
Norman Doorway at Fawley Church
Arches of the Chapter House
Pulpit of the Refectory
Old Barn or “Spicarium” of Beaulieu Abbey
Chapel at St. Leonard’s Grange
Canopied Niche in St. Leonard’s Chapel
View in Frame Wood
View in the Queen’s Bower Wood
View in the Great Huntley Woods
The Woodman’s Path
Oaks in Boldrewood
Rufus’s Stone
View from Castle Malwood
View in Studley Wood
View in Puckpits Wood
Yews and Whitebeams in Sloden
The Avon from Castle Hill
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Frontispiece.
Title-page.
PAGE
1
6
7
19
20
38
39
48
49
59
60
68
70
70
73
74
84
85
90
91
96
108
109
112
115
116

The Avon at Ibbesley
Tyrrel’s Ford
The Avon at Winkton
The Priory Church, Christchurch
The Norman House, Christchurch
The North Porch and Doorway of the Priory Church
Chewton Glen
Hurst Castle
View in Mark Ash Wood
The King’s Gairn Brook
Anderwood Corner
Bushey Bratley (another view)
The Urns in Bratley Barrow
Keltic Urn, Neck of Roman Wine-Vessel, and Flint Knives
Barrows on Beaulieu Plain
Wine-Flask, Drinking-Cups, and Bowls
Necks of Oil-Flasks
Necks of Wine-Vessels and Oil-Flask
Patterns from Fragments
Patterns from Fragments
Oil-Flask, Drinking-Cups, Bowl, and Jar
Boldre Church
Norman Font in Brockenhurst Church
The Barton Cliffs
Fossils from the Shepherd’s Gutter Beds
Fossils from the Brook Beds
Barrows Moor Wood
The King’s Gairn Brook (another view)
The Heronry at Vinney Ridge
Nests of the Honey and Common Buzzard
View in Buckhill Wood
The Staple Cross
Gladiolus Illyricus
The Kildeer Plover
The Cicada
124
125
128
129
133
144
145
157
158
171
172
195
196
206
213
214
218
218
223
223
225
226
233
234
244
249
250
257
258
266
276
288
306
318
328

Map of the Old South-Western Sea-Coast
Plan of Sloden Hole
Section of Hordle Cliff
Section of Beckton Cliff
Map of the New Forest
vii
to face page 149
” 216
” 238
” 241
” 276

viii
PREFACE.
Under the title of the New Forest I have thought it best to include the
whole district lying between the Southampton Water and the Avon,
which, in the beginning of Edward I.’s reign, formed its boundaries.
To have restricted myself to its present limits would have deprived
the reader of all the scenery along the coast, and that contrast which
a Forest requires to bring out all its beauties.
The maps are drawn from those of the Ordnance Survey, reduced to
the scale of half an inch to the mile, with the additions of the names
of the woods taken from the Government Map of the Forest, and my
own notes.
The illustrations have been made upon the principle that they shall
represent the scene as it looked at the time it was taken. Nothing has
since been added, nothing left out. The views appear as they were
on the day they were drawn. Two exceptions occur. The ugly modern
windows of Calshot Castle, and the clock-face on the tower of the
Priory Church of Christchurch, have been omitted.
Further, the views have been chosen rather to show the less-known
beauties of the Forest than the more-known scenes. For this reason
the avenue between Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst—the village of
Minestead, nestling half amongst the Forest oaks and half in its own
orchards—the view from Stoney Cross, stretching over wood and vale
to the Wiltshire downs, have been omitted. Every one who comes to
the Forest must see these, and every one with the least love
for Nature must feel their beauty.
In their places are given the quiet scenes in the heart of the great
woods, where few people have the leisure, and some not the

strength to go—quiet brooks flowing down deep valleys, and
woodland paths trod only by the cattle and the Forest workmen.
For the same reason, sunrise, and not sunset, has been chosen for
the frontispiece.
To the kind help of friends I am indebted for much special aid and
information—to the deputy surveyor, L. H. Cumberbatch, Esq., for
permission to open various barrows and banks, for the use of the
Government maps, as also for the Forest statistics—to the Rev. H. M.
Wilkinson, and T. B. Rake, Esq., for great assistance in the botany
and ornithology of the district; as also to Mr. Baker, of Brockenhurst,
for the list of the Forest Lepidoptera.
London, November, 1862.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Some slight alterations have been made in Chapter III. in the
arguments from Domesday, which, as also those upon the former
condition of the district, have been strengthened.
In all other respects, with the exception of some few additions and
corrections, the text is unaltered.
London, February, 1863.
THE NEW FOREST:
ITS

xii
1
History and its Scenery.
“Game of hondes he loued y nou, and of wÿlde best,
And hÿs forest and hÿs wodes, and mest þe nÿwe forest.”
Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle
(concerning William the Conqueror)
Ed: Hearne, vol. ii. p. 375.
THE NEW FOREST.

2
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
View in Bushey Bratley.
No person, I suppose, would now give any attention to, much less
approve of, Lord Burleigh’s advice to his son—“Not to pass the
Alps.” We have, on the contrary, in these days gone into an
opposite extreme. We race off to explore the Rhine before we know

3
the Thames. We have Alpine clubs, and Norway fishing, and Iceland
exploring societies, but most of us are beyond measure ignorant of
our own hills and valleys. Every inch of Mont Blanc has been
traversed by Englishmen, but who dreams of exploring the
Cotswolds; or how many can tell in what county are the Seven
Springs, and their purple anemones? We rush to and fro, looking at
everything, and remembering nothing. We see places only that we
may be seen there, or else be known to have seen them.
Yet to Englishmen, surely the scenes of their own land should
possess a greater interest than any other. Go where we will
throughout England, there is no spot which is not bound up with our
history. Nameless barrows, ruined castles, battlefields now reaped by
the sickle instead of the sword, all proclaim the changes our country
has undergone. Each invasion which we have suffered, each
revolution through which we have passed, are written down for us in
unmistakeable characters. The phases of our Religion, the rise or fall
of our Art, are alike told us by the grey mouldings and arches of the
humblest parish Church as by our Abbeys and Cathedrals. The faces,
too, and gait, and dialect, and accent, of our peasantry declare to us
our common ancestry from Kelt, and Old-English, and Norseman. A
whole history lies hid in the name of some obscure village.
I am not, for one moment, decrying travelling elsewhere. All I say is,
that those who do not know their own country, can know nothing
rightly of any other. To understand the scenery of our neighbours, we
must first see something of the beauties of our own; so that when
we are abroad, we may be able to make some comparisons,—to
carry with us, when we look upon the valleys of the Seine and
the Rhine, some impression of our own landscapes and our own
rivers—some recollection of our own cathedrals, when we stand by
those of Milan and Rouen.
The New Forest is, perhaps, as good an example as could be wished
of what has been said of English scenery, and its connection with our
history. It remains after some eight hundred years still the New

4
Forest. True, its boundaries are smaller, but the main features are the
same as on the day when first afforested by the Conqueror. The
names of its woods and streams and plains are the same. It is almost
the last, too, of the old forests with which England was formerly so
densely clothed. Charnwood is now without its trees: Wychwood is
enclosed: the great Forest of Arden—Shakspeare’s Arden—is no
more, and Sherwood is only known by the fame of Robin Hood. But
the New Forest still stands full of old associations with, and memories
of, the past. To the historian it tells of the Forest Laws, and the death
of one of the worst, and the weakness of the most foolish, of English
kings. To the ecclesiologist it can show, close to it, the Priory Church
of Christchurch, with all its glories of Norman architecture, built by
the Red King’s evil counsellor, Flambard; and just outside, too, its
boundaries, the Conventual Church of Romsey, with its lovely
Romanesque triforium, in whose nunnery Edith, beloved by the
English, their “good Maud,” “beatissima regina,” as the Chroniclers
love to call her, was educated.
At its feet lies Southampton, with its Late Norman arcaded town-wall,
and gates, and God’s House, with memories of Sir Bevis and his wife
Josyan the Brighte, and his horse Arundel—the port for the
Roman triremes, and afterwards for the galleys of Venice and
Bayonne—where our own Henry V. built
“the grete dromons,
The Trinité, the Grace-Dieu.”
[1]
Within it, once in the very heart, stand the Abbot’s house and the
cloister walls of Beaulieu, the one abbey, with the exception of Hales-
Owen, in Shropshire, founded by John. It can point, too, to the
Roman camp at Buckland Rings, to the ruins of the Norman castle at
Christchurch, to Henry VIII.’s forts at Hurst and Calshot, built with the
stones of the ruined monastery of Beaulieu; can show, too, bosomed
amongst its trees, quiet village churches, most of them Norman and
Early English, old manor-houses, as at Ellingham, famous in story,

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