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LACUS FORUM XXXII Networks © 2009 The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (lacus). The content of this article is from lacus Forum 32 (published 2006). This article and others from this volume may be found on the Internet at http://www.lacus.org/volumes/32. YOUR RIGHTS This electronic copy is provided free of charge with no implied warranty. It is made available to you under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license version 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) Under this license you are free: • • to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work to Remix — to adapt the work Under the following conditions: • • Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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The lacus “lakes” logo and Dartmouth University logo on the cover are trademarks of lacus and Dartmouth University respectively. The Dartmouth University logo is used here with permission from the trademark holder. No license for use of these trademarks outside of redistribution of this exact file is granted. These trademarks may not be included in any adaptation of this work. The English Gerund-Participle in Cognitive Grammar Patrick J. Duffley Université Laval The term ‘gerund-participle’ used in the title of this paper is adopted from Huddleston and Pullum (2002:80), who see no reason to give priority to one or the other of the traditional terms used to refer to the verbal uses of the English -ing form illustrated in (1): (1) a.He was expelled for killing the birds. b.They are entertaining the Prime Minister. The meaning of this form is generally defined as ‘imperfective’ (Hirtle 1975:20–21, Freed 1979:72–73), ‘durative’ (Kruisinga 1931:259) or ‘ongoing’ (Dixon 1984:588–89, 1995:185; Hewson & Bubenik 1997:5–6), whence the term ‘progressive’. This view of the gerundparticiple’s meaning has gone virtually unquestioned over the past fifty years of linguistic research on English. In more recent times, cognitive grammar has brought a new approach to the field, applying the tools of cognitive psychology to the study of human language. The goal of this paper will be to evaluate whether any progress has been achieved by the application of these analytical instruments to the English gerund-participle. This will allow certain more general considerations to be made about the methodology underlying the cognitive grammar approach. The fundamental concepts used by cognitive grammar to describe the meaning of the gerund-participle are those of ‘scanning’ and ‘scope of predication’. As it applies to temporal entities, scanning refers to the mental processing of an event. Two modes of cognitive processing can be distinguished in this domain. Sequential scanning involves ‘following a situation state by state as it evolves through conceived time’ (Langacker 1991b:80). This produces a dynamic representation of an event which reflects the successive transformations deriving each state from its predecessor. Summary scanning is a more complex operation and involves building up a complete image of an event by accumulating images of all of the instants actualized at each moment of the event’s development (Langacker 1991b:79–80). This is comparable to forming a still photograph through multiple exposures (Langacker 1987:73). Applied to the example of a ball falling to the ground, the diagrams in Figure 1 (overleaf ) represent sequential (part 1) and summary (part 2) scanning. In the grammatical domain, verbs are claimed to be distinguished from such classes as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, infinitives and participles ‘in virtue of designating a process as opposed to an atemporal relation’ (Langacker 1991a:5) A process is characterized as a relationship followed sequentially in its evolution through conceived time, whereas an atemporal relation, in the case of infinitives and participles, involves suspending the Patrick J. Duffley 302 a b Part 1 c d a–d Part 2 Figure 1. Sequential (Part 1) and summary (Part 2) scanning of a ball falling to the ground. sequential scanning of the verb stem, i.e. summary rather than sequential scanning (Langacker 1991b:82). This allows the -ing form to serve as a noun modifier and bars it from being the head of a finite clause (ibid:91). Several questions arise at this point. The first is whether summary scanning provides an adequate description of the meaning of English non-finite forms. For instance, from the point of view of the event itself denoted by the -ing form, the way in which the situation is presented seems clearly sequential in some uses: (2) The woman strolling down the beach is my mother. (3) I found my little brother tearing my photo album to pieces in my bedroom. A second question concerns the connection claimed to exist between summary scanning and the capacity of fulfilling a noun modifier function. If, as claimed by the theory, the bare infinitive involves the suspension of sequential scanning and the attendant conversion of the processual predication of the stem into an atemporal relation, one wonders why this non-finite form cannot modify a noun: (4) *The person see is Joe. (5) *The only person be named was Theresa. Thirdly, the application of summary scanning, as one would expect, is claimed to impose a ‘holistic perspective’ on the process designated by the verb stem (Langacker 2000:10). This does not square very well with the use of the -ing form in the progressive construction, where it always evokes the event as somehow incomplete. Indeed, Langacker bases his description of what is specific to the semantic content of the ‑ing morpheme on the impression produced by the gerund-participle in the progressive construction, characterizing it as imposing ‘a restricted immediate scope of predication comprising an arbitrary sequence of internal states (i.e. the initial and final states are excluded)’ (1991b:91–92). Verspoor (1996:437–38) elaborates this in terms of perceptual scope, proposing that the schematic value of the -ing form is to symbolize ‘an imperfective atemporal relation viewed from an internal perspective… the conceptualizer (speaker/ The English Gerund-Participle in Cognitive Grammar 303 Perceptual Scope Event C Time Figure 2. Imperfective atemporal relation viewed from the conceptualizer’s perspective. viewer) construes an event as seen from very close-by so that his perceptual field includes an event in progress, but the boundaries of the event… are not within his perceptual scope’. This is diagrammed as in Figure 2. The -ing morpheme is thus used to ‘imperfectivize the perfective process designated by the verb stem it combines with’ (Langacker 2000:226–27), construing it as unbounded within the immediate temporal scope. Hamawand (2002:65) adopts basically the same definition: ‘The ing participle designates an imperfective simple atemporal relation, which excludes its initial and final states’. The definition of the -ing form’s semantic content just described is applied only to the participial uses of the -ing (noun-like uses are accounted for by a nominalization process which is discussed below). Verifying the definition against usage reveals, however, that there are a number of uses where it does not correspond to the data. One case is raised by Langacker himself (1991a:210) in relation to the attributive modifier use of the -ing form found in (6) and (7): (6) anyone knowing his whereabouts (7) people still believing that the earth is flat Here the verb stem is imperfective (in Langacker’s sense of ‘stative’) and so the role of the ‑ing cannot be that of imperfectivizing a perfective process (i.e. stativizing an action). Langacker proposes therefore that the role of the -ing morpheme here is simply to atemporalize the verb stem so that it can be used as a noun modifier. However, since atemporality is a characteristic shared by all non-finite verbal forms, one may ask why the infinitive and the past participle would not do the job just as well as the -ing form for this purpose. Moreover, the fact that the -ing form is not semantically equivalent to the past participle in noun modifier function shows that there is more to its meaning here than the mere notion of atemporality: (8) a.a charging battery b.a charged battery 304 Patrick J. Duffley In addition the definition of the -ing’s meaning excludes the initial and final segments of the event. Counterexamples for this claim can be found in appositive function. In this type of construction, one observes not only stative events, such as (9), but also complete actions, as in (10): (9) Being a good friend of the family, John received an invitation to the party. (10) Knocking twice, she opened the door and entered the apartment. To claim in the latter case that the initial and final segments of the knocking are not evoked flies in the face of the message conveyed by this sentence. When nominal uses of the type illustrated in (11) below are treated, Langacker’s cognitive grammar analysis shifts from the word-level to that of the clause: (11) Zelda’s reluctantly signing the contract Such ‘factive nominalizations’ are held to apply to a higher-level structure: reluctantly signing the contract is characterized as a ‘processual expression that has all the ingredients of a finite clause except an explicit subject and a grounding predication (i.e. tense or a modal)’ (Langacker 1991a:32). Since this clause-like higher-level structure is processual, it involves sequential scanning and can consequently evoke a perfective event, as in (12): (12) Sam’s washing the windows was a shock to everybody, where one understands that Sam performed the complete action of washing the windows. The problem with this is that the participial uses of the -ing form are also clause-like, as they also allow adverbial modification, direct objects and perfect constructions: (13) A man laboriously dragging a heavy object came into view. (14) Having signed the contract, Zelda could now turn her mind to other matters. This should mean however that the -ing is processual here, which is in direct contradiction with the definition of the -ing participle as involving summary rather than sequential scanning. Indeed, we have noted uses such as (2) and (3) where the -ing form denotes events in progress which are followed sequentially as they evolve through time. What can be concluded from these observations? First of all, that the concepts of summary and sequential scanning are tangential to the distinction between finite and nonfinite verb forms in English: the existence of non-finite forms which are clearly processual shows that scanning cannot be the basis of the traditional distinction between conjugated and non-conjugated verb forms. Secondly, that Langacker’s approach confuses word and clause levels in its analysis of the English -ing form: if the -ing is the sign of a clause-level nominalization in uses like (11) and (12), why does this ending attach to the verb stem rather than to the higher-level clause-like structure which it is claimed to nominalize? A third conclusion which must be drawn is that the cognitive analysis of the -ing’s semantic The English Gerund-Participle in Cognitive Grammar 305 content has been unable to go beyond the traditional definition of the gerund-participle as denoting progressive aspectuality. Although this is perhaps the most frequent impression associated with the gerund-participle, there are many cases where it does not apply. On a deeper level, one might ponder over the reasons why progress has not been achieved on the definition of the semantic content of the English gerund-participle by the application of the analytical principles of cognitive grammar. Notions such as summary vs. sequential scanning and immediate scope, used as explanatory tools by this theory, have been borrowed from cognitive psychology, where they were developed from research on human perception. Their applicability to human language cannot, however, be taken for granted. A properly linguistic methodology should involve a careful observation of the linguistic items which constitute one’s object of study. This means starting with the linguistic sign as the basis for defining linguistic categories, not with notions developed in other fields which make no reference to this sign. Another example of the tendency of the cognitive approach to start with notional categories defined independently of the linguistic sign is Janda’s treatment of aspect in Russian ( Janda 2004), in which the opposition between discrete solid objects and fluid substances is taken as the source domain for the metaphor that motivates the grammatical categories of perfective vs imperfective aspect. Other authors, noting the wild diversity of prefixes producing aspectual effects on the level of the message expressed in the sentence, have observed that perfectivization by prefixation is ‘a basically lexical process’ (Brecht 1985:17). Indeed it would be surprising that such a heterogeneous collection of signs should all correspond to one homogeneous meaning. In this sense, one might tax the cognitive grammar approach with having substituted generative grammar’s universal logical categories by other categories which are just as universal, even though they are psychological in nature. The shift from the logical to the psychological is a positive step. The utilization of universal categories as the starting-point of the analysis, with the reduction of meaning to perception or perception-like phenomena, is not necessarily a guarantee of progress in the scientific understanding of human language. REFERENCES Brecht, Richard D. 1985. The form and function of aspect in Russian. In Issues in Russian morphosyntax ed. by Michael S. Flier & Richard D. Brecht, 9–34. Columbus oh: Slavica. Dixon, R. M. W. 1984. The semantic basis of syntactic properties. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 10:583–93. —. 1995. Complement clauses and complementation strategies. In Meaning and grammar, ed. by F. R. Palmer, 175–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freed, Alice F. 1979. The semantics of English aspectual complementation. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Hamawand, Zeki. 2002. Atemporal complement clauses in English: A cognitive grammar analysis. Munich: Lincom Europa. 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The story of -ing: A subjective perspective. In The construal of space in thought and language, ed. by Martin Pütz & René Dirven, 417–54. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. •