Typology and the future of cognitive linguistics
William Croft
University of New Mexico
ABSTRACT
The relationship between typology and cognitive linguistics was first posed in the
1980s, in terms of the relationship between Greenbergian universals and the
knowledge of the individual speaker. An answer to this question emerges from
understanding the role of linguistic variation in language, from occasions of
language use to typological diversity. This in turn requires the contribution of
discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary historical linguistics as well
as typology and cognitive linguistics. While cognitive linguistics is part of this
enterprise, a theory of language that integrates all of these approaches is
necessary.
1. Introduction: what is the relationship between typology and cognitive linguistics?
The connection between typology and cognitive linguistics can be dated at least as far
back as the 1980s, when generative grammarians debated typologists about the nature of
language universals. Then, as now, typologists emphasize that one cannot understand
language without looking at languages; Bernard Comrie published an article titled
“Linguistics is about languages” (Comrie 1978). The central concept of typology,
demonstrated by Joseph Greenberg in his seminal 1966 paper, was the implicational
universal, for example, Universal 18 (Greenberg 1966:86):
When the descriptive [modifying] adjective precedes the noun, the demonstrative
and the numeral, with overwhelmingly more than chance frequency, do likewise.
The insight behind implicational universals—an insight still not fully appreciated
even today, I think—is that few universals of language are of the form, “All languages
have X”. Unrestricted universals like these would mean that any language one is familiar
with, or any language that a child learns, exhibits X. This is of course the basis of the
generative approach to language universals: properties that all languages have are the
types of properties that can be considered part of human genetic endowment. Instead,
many if not most of the interesting universals of language are constraints on linguistic
variation, such as the implicational universal. And constraints on variation can only be
discovered by looking at languages—lots of languages, sampled from the full range of
genetic language families and geographical areas.
But as generative linguists rightly pointed out, from their point of view there remains
a major problem in typological theory. The problem is:
If Greenbergian typological universals are manifested only in cross-linguistic
comparison, do they have anything to do with the grammatical knowledge of an
individual speaker?
This, at least, is how it was put to me, diplomatically, as a graduate student in the
1980s. It is later stated more trenchantly by Newmeyer in his argument for the
irrelevance of implicational universals to generative grammar:
No child is exposed to cross-linguistic generalizations…Since typological
generalizations are not conceivably learned inductively by the child and are
implausibly innate, one must conclude that they are not part of knowledge of
language at all (Newmeyer 2005:117, 118)
The grammatical knowledge of an individual speaker is, of course, what generative
grammarians are primarily interested in. But the grammatical knowledge of an individual
speaker is also the focus of cognitive linguistics. Both generative grammar and cognitive
linguistics are focused on, or have been focused on, linguistic cognition. One major
difference between cognitive linguistics and generative grammar is that generative
grammar hypothesizes that the central principles of language structure are peculiar to
language, whereas cognitive linguistics hypothesizes that all the principles of language
structure are a consequence of general cognitive processes, and the cognitive linguistic
enterprise involves endeavoring to confirm this hypothesis (Ungerer and Schmid 1996;
Croft and Cruse 2004; Evans and Green 2006).
Many typologists in the 1980s did not consider the question of the grammatical
knowledge of the individual speaker to be central to the typological enterprise.
(Greenberg was not among those; he once told me that typological universals of language
were valuable because they were a window onto the human mind.) In fact, there was a
common view that typology is ‘theory-neutral’. This basically meant that typologists did
not see a need to couch universals and their explanation in terms of the formalisms
popular at the time (Stassen 1985:21-22), which were diverse and ever-changing—
something that is still true today. But it sometimes also represented a noncommittal view
on the theoretical implications not only of typological universals, but of the methodology
of crosslinguistic comparison and crosslinguistic generalization that typologists
developed. (Again, Greenberg was not among these; nor is Stassen.)
Nevertheless, answering the question posed above provides the link between typology
and cognitive linguistics; and answering that question has been the primary theoretical
question that I have pursued as a typologist and a cognitive linguist.
2. Variation and linguistic theory
2.1. Distributional variation
In order to make the connection between typology and cognitive linguistics, the crosslinguistic patterns of linguistic diversity—Greenbergian universals—must somehow
emerge from the behavior of individual speakers in each speech community. Since
Greenbergian universals are patterns of diversity, that is, of cross-linguistic variation, an
obvious place to look for the connection is language-internal variation. But there are
several different kinds of language-internal variation, and it is not obvious how to get
from any of those kinds of language-internal variation to cross-linguistic variation.
The first kind of language-internal variation is the type illustrated by Greenberg’s
Universal 18 above. Three language-internal constructions are referred to by the
universal: adjective-noun order, demonstrative-noun order and numeral-noun order.
Universal 18 constrains the variation in ordering among these three constructions in any
language. If Greenbergian universals have anything to do with the grammatical
knowledge of an individual speaker, then somehow the implicational universal is part of
what a speaker knows about the grammar of their language, even if the implicational
universal does not uniquely determine the ordering in the language (for instance, if the
adjective follows the noun in the language).
Another classic typological universal, the NP Accessibility Hierarchy of Keenan and
Comrie (1977), exhibits another type of language-internal variation. The NP Accessibility
Hierarchy refers to the possibility of forming a relative clause with a head referent filling
a particular grammatical role in the relative clause (subject, object, etc.). Keenan and
Comrie propose the following hierarchy:
(1)
Subject < Direct Object < Indirect Object < Oblique < Genitive < Object of
Complement
Their Primary Relativization Constraint is as follows:
(i) A language must have a primary RC-forming strategy.
(ii) If a primary strategy in a given language can apply to a low position on the
AH, then it can apply to all higher positions.
(iii) A primary strategy may cut off at any point on the AH.
For example, Basque’s primary relativization strategy applies to subjects, direct objects
and indirect objects, while Toba Batak’s primary relativization strategy applies to
subjects only (Keenan and Comrie 1977:72, 68-69).
Keenan and Comrie, and many typologists after them, used distributional variation
within a language, namely the distributional pattern of the grammatical role of the head
referent in the primary relativization strategy. That is, the NP Accessibility Hierarchy
constraints in (i)-(iii) are universals of distributional variation both within and across
languages.
In fact, many morphosyntactic universals are universals of combined languageinternal and cross-linguistic distributional variation. For example, the universals of parts
of speech described in Croft (1991, 2001) are of this type. The universals are based on the
generalization that object concept words in the referring propositional act function
(Searle 1969), property words in the modification function, and action words in the
predication function are typologically unmarked. What this means is that in languages
with more than one construction for a particular function, the different constructions will
define a language-internal distribution of object, property and action concept words; and
the words will be distributed in the constructions such that for example, action concept
words will occur in the predication construction with the least morphemes (e.g. no
copula) and the most inflectional possibilities, and property and/or object concept words
will occur in predication constructions with at least as many morpheme, e.g. with the
addition of a copula, and the same or fewer inflectional possibilities.
In fact, English requires a copula for both object and property predication, and in
addition an invariant article a for predication of countable object concepts:
(2)
a. Donna sings.
b. Donna is tall.
c. Donna is an Alabaman.
The relative amount of coding of predication in these three constructions of English
replicates the hierarchy of structural coding of the predication of the three different
semantic classes of objects, properties and actions:
(3)
Action < Property < Object (Croft 1991:130; Stassen 1997:127; Pustet 2003)
These examples demonstrate that distributional variation within a language and
grammatical variation across languages are governed by the same universal principles
(Croft 2001:107). This is central to Radical Construction Grammar. Grammatical
categories are defined by the constructions in which they occur. Grammatical categories
are construction-specific as well as language-specific—that is language-internal
distributional variation. But the principles, such as (3), governing language-internal
distributional variation also govern cross-linguistic distributional variation. In this way,
the analyses of typology and of (construction) grammars of individual languages can be
unified.
These universal principles can be represented for many typological patterns using
what has come to be called the semantic map model. Anderson 1982, 1986; Croft,
Shyldkrot and Kemmer 1987; Kemmer 1993; Haspelmath 1997a,b, 2003; Stassen 1997;
Kortmann 1997; van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). In the semantic map model,
distributional facts for grammatical elements that occur in particular roles in grammatical
constructions are represented as a grouping of the concepts encoded by those
grammatical elements. For example, the Accessibility Hierarchy represents a linear
arrangement of the participant role categories represented by Subject, Direct Object, etc.,
as in (4):
(4)
Subject — Direct Object — Indirect Object — Oblique — Genitive — Object of
Complement
The linear relationship among those conceptual categories reflects the constraints on
possible groupings of those categories in relative clause constructions within and across
languages.
Conceptual spaces can have a more complex structure, such as the conceptual space
for indefinite pronouns posited by Haspelmath (1997a). Here the conceptual categories—
different semantic types of indefinite pronouns—are arranged in a more complex network
based on whether a language-particular form groups the meanings together.
Figure 1. Conceptual space for indefinite pronouns, with the semantic maps of the
indefinite pronouns of Finnish (Haspelmath 1997a:293)
The categories of indefinite pronoun meanings and the links between them form the
conceptual space, while the semantic maps for the indefinite pronouns of Finnish that
indicate their meanings are illustrated with dashed/dotted lines; the Finnish forms are
given in italics.
The conceptual space in Figure 1 is modeled as a graph structure: the nodes are the
meanings and the edges (links) are the conceptual relations between the meanings
inferred from the patterns of grammatical distribution within and across languages. That
is, the conceptual space is represented as one of discrete meanings (for a statistical
algorithm to compute a discrete graph-structural conceptual space, see Regier, Khetarpal
and Majid 2013). It is also possible to model conceptual space as a continuous space, and
use statistical methods such as multidimensional scaling (Levinson et al. 2003; Croft and
Poole 2008; Rogers 2015; García Macías 2016) to construct Euclidean models of the
conceptual space.
Multidimensional scaling is particularly useful for large and complex data sets such
as the adpositional semantic data of Levinson et al. (2003). This data was obtained by
eliciting in nine languages descriptions of the 71 pictures of IN/ON-type spatial relations
designed by Melissa Bowerman and Eric Pederson (published in Levinson and Wilkins
2006, Appendix 4). Croft and Poole reanalyzed the Levinson et al. data; the analysis is
described in greater detail in Croft (2010a). The data demonstrates a high degree of
variation in categorization across the languages for this extremely fine-grained set of
semantic distinctions in this restricted semantic domain. However, it also revealed a
coherent conceptual space, ranging from degree of envelopment of the figure by the
ground at the IN end of the continuum to degree of a relatively small figure in contact
with and vertically supported by a relatively flat ground at the ON end of the continuum,
with varying types of support, attachment and containment relations in between. In other
words, what is universal is not a set of conceptual categories, but salient semantic
dimensions in conceptual space that constrain—or perhaps better, guide—the
grammatical categories that are defined in particular languages.
The semantic map model allows us to distinguish what is language-universal from
what is language-specific. The structure of the conceptual space is language-universal,
while the grammatical categories defined by continuous or connected regions in the
conceptual space are language-specific. (There are other universal constraints on
grammatical categories than those implied by the structure of the conceptual space; Croft
2001:159-61; 2003:140-42.) Some typologists describe the semantic map model as
simply a methodological convenience to describe crosslinguistic generalizations
(Anderson 1982:228; Croft, Shyldkrot and Kemmer 1987:186; Kemmer 1993:201; van
der Auwera and Plungian 1998:86). This stance is subject to the same criticism of
typology by generative grammarians presented in §1. On the other hand, Anderson, who
is the immediate source of the modern semantic map model, later called conceptual
spaces “mental maps” (Anderson 1986); Kortmann (1997:177, 210) calls them cognitive
maps, and I refer to the conceptual space as a cognitive structure. The universal structure
of the conceptual space must be grounded in human cognition. The conceptual space and
other constraints on grammatical categories provide a link between human cognition and
typological variation and universals thereof. Likewise, the language-specific knowledge
captured by the semantic maps is also a cognitive structure of the speaker, albeit not a
universal one.
2.2. Variation in verbalization
We nevertheless still have not described how one gets from human cognition to
typological diversity. The starting point is yet another type of language-internal variation,
one that has not attracted much attention until recently. That is variation in verbalization:
variation that occurs at the level of individual usage events. Most linguistic analysis starts
from form and looks at meaning, for example, the many analyses of polysemy in
cognitive linguistics and, for that matter, in the vast majority of reference grammars of
indigenous languages. But one can also start from meaning and look at what grammatical
forms are used to verbalize it.
The study of variation in verbalization is done most easily in experimental situations
in which one or more speakers verbalize a set of the same stimuli. In fact, cross-linguistic
elicitation tasks such as the Bowerman-Pederson IN/ON picture set referred to above, the
World Color Survey (Kay et al. 2009) and the cutting/breaking video clips (Majid and
Bowerman 2007; Majid et al. 2008) also document language-internal variation in
verbalization (e.g. Kay et al. 2009:55; Levinson et al. 2003: 503; Majid et al. 2008:23940).
Wallace Chafe published two groundbreaking papers on verbalization at the
beginning of the cognitive linguistics enterprise (Chafe 1977a,b). Chafe produced one of
the classic narrative verbalization stimuli, the Pear Film (Chafe 1980); the Pear Film was
later followed by the Frog Story, another narrative verbalization stimulus (Berman and
Slobin 1994).
Examining the Pear Stories produced by the twenty English speakers at Berkeley that
Chafe presents in his 1980 volume immediately reveals how pervasive variation is. Every
verbalization of every scene in the film is unique in the entire corpus. Even when the
verbalizations are broken down into their component parts (lexical categories, argument
structure, etc.), variation is pervasive. This variation is due to the fundamental
indeterminacy of language use. In each utterance, the utterance meaning in context is
unique and hence at least slightly different from prior uses of the constructions replicated
in the utterance. Although a speaker’s choice is determined in part by how she construes
the experience to be verbalized, there are many ways to construe an experience and the
hearer does not know which one the speaker would choose. Finally, the hearer cannot
read the speaker’s mind; this is of course why one person’s experience must be
verbalized in order to share it with another speaker. Yet speaker and hearer succeed
because most of the time, perfect precision—impossible to reach anyway—is not
necessary for the interlocutors to successfully carry out their joint actions that are
coordinated by their utterances (Clark 1996).
So variation is pervasive in language use. But the variation is constrained in ways
familiar to typologists (Croft 2010b). Two examples are given here. Second mention of
referents pertains to how referents are verbalized after they are introduced in discourse.
There are two common types of verbalizations in the Pear Stories: as possessive pronoun
or as a definite article (numbers preceding each example indicate the speaker number and
the number of the intonation unit of the speaker’s verbalization):
(5)
1,16
6,10
and he [.3] dumps all his pears into the basket,
and dumps the pears into a basket.
In second mentions of seven different referents from the Pear Film, there was
systematic variation such that more animate referents that were less likely to be possessed
were more likely to be verbalized with a definite article, and referents that were less
animate and more likely to be possessed were verbalized with the possessive. Subtle
semantic differences between the referents in the scenes governed the relative frequency
of the two variants (Croft 2010b:19-21). For example, the ladder is less likely to be
owned by the pearpicker who is using it, hence it is less likely to take the possessive
pronoun; but the bicycle is more likely to be owned by the boy riding it, hence it is more
likely to take the possessive pronoun. These subtle semantic differences are reflected in
different likelihoods of the use of the definite vs. the possessive pronoun.
These observations have far-reaching consequences for understanding the nature of
grammar. Grammar is not a mapping of discrete forms to discrete meanings, or even sets
of meanings. The mapping between form and meaning is a probability distribution of
forms across very specific points (very specific meanings) in the conceptual space.
Speakers make choices based on this probability distribution, giving rise to the most
fundamental type of intralinguistic variation: variation generated simply in the process of
communication. This is an exemplar-based model of grammatical knowledge, along the
likes of exemplar models of phonological knowledge advocated by Bybee (1985, 2007,
2010) and Pierrehumbert (2001, 2003). In some cases, the probability distribution comes
to be more categorical, and the result is the language-internal distributional variation that
was discussed above.
This essential, fundamental process generating linguistic variation is the ultimate
source of grammatical change, as argued in Croft (2010b). For example, variation in
verbalization of so-called “light verbs” such as put correlates closely with the more
contentful verbs that are the historical sources of the light verbs. The verb put was used
by at least one speaker in Chafe’s Pear Film narratives in five scenes, and in four of the
five scenes, there was variation in verbalization, with other speakers using other verbs;
see Table 1.
Scene put
C5
A5
E5
A7
15
8
8
9
Other
verb
–
2
4
13
G3
1
6
Other verbs used
drop, stuff
load, throw, toss, pour
empty, dump, tumble, drop,
place, deposit
deposit, dump, empty,
unload
Object being
PUT
singular
distributive
plural
plural
Instrument
plural
apron
hand
hand
hand
apron
Table 1. Variation in verbalization of PUT events in the Pear Stories (based on Croft
2010b:15, Table 2).
As with second mentions, there are subtle semantic differences between the scenes which
are reflected in the frequency distribution of forms, even with the low overall number of
instances in the data. What might be called prototypical PUT, with a singular object and
the agent’s hand as the instrument, is verbalized with put by all the speakers. Moving
away from the prototype, to scenes with distributive and plural objects and an instrument
other than the agent’s hand, leads to increasing frequency of verbalization with other
verbs.
When the different verbs used in the scenes in the Pear Stories are compared to the
etymological sources of the verbs in Indo-European (Buck 1949), we see that basically
the same verbs are found; see Table 2.
Pear Stories
throw, toss
stuff
place
Indo-European PUT Source/related verb in older language
verb
Modern Greek vazo
Ancient Greek bállō ‘throw’, occasionally
‘put’
French mettre,
Latin mittere ‘let go, throw’, Late Latin ‘put’
Italian mettere, etc.
Modern Irish cuirim Old Irish cuirim ‘throw, put’
English put
Old English potian ‘thrust, push’
Dutch plaatsen
Dutch plaats ‘place [n.]’
Table 2. Alternative verbs for PUT events in the Pear Stories and etymological sources of
Indo-European PUT verbs (adapted from Croft 2010b:18, Table 5).
These and many other examples described in Croft (2010b) demonstrate that
grammatical change is largely gradual change in the probability distributions of the formmeaning mapping. As some variants increase in frequency and others decrease to zero,
they come to look like the “discrete” language changes that are presented in historical
linguistics textbooks.
2.3. Socially-governed variation, language change and typology
This “discrete” language change is misleading. Language is always variable; variation is
one of the fundamental properties of language. But there is still a missing step (actually,
two missing steps) between the fundamental variation just described and the typological
diversity we observe in the languages of the world. The (first) missing step is sociallygoverned variation: the situation when two or more variants acquire social valuation. This
is the realm of sociolinguistics, a theoretical approach to language that emerged around
the same time as generative grammar (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968) but is
unfortunately often ignored by functionalists and cognitive linguists. Sociolinguistics
itself is somewhat isolated from other theoretical approaches. Variationist sociolinguistics
focuses on the social factors determining the propagation of variants through a speech
community (Labov 2001; Milroy 1992; Trudgill 1983, 2002). Sociolinguistics generally
takes for granted the existence of language-internal variation but does not offer a
mechanism by which the variation is generated in the first place.
The usage-driven variation described above can be integrated with socially-driven
variation in an evolutionary model of language use, variation and change (Croft 2000).
Language use is the replication of sounds, words and constructions. As argued above,
language use generates variation. Evolutionary models are models of change by
replication. Evolutionary models are also two-step models: generation of variation, and
selection of variants. I hypothesized that the first step, generation of variation, is driven
by functional factors, namely meaning and discourse, as in the subtle semantically-driven
variation in frequency described above; and selection is driven by social factors, most
importantly the differential social weighting of linguistic variants (Blythe and Croft
2012).
We can now describe how typological diversity is connected to a speaker’s
knowledge about her language. Speakers generate variation in language use; we can call
this FIRST-ORDER VARIATION (Croft 2010b:3). A speaker’s knowledge about her language
is usage-based: it is a probability distribution of forms over meanings in the conceptual
space, inferred from past usage events and constantly changing as forms are replicated to
verbalize new experiences in new usage events. These probabilities can change, both as a
speaker’s experience changes and also because speakers also observe frequencies of
variants used by particular social groups in her speech community, and come to associate
certain variants with their social valuation of those groups. This gives rise to SECONDORDER VARIATION. Second-order variation is socially-governed variation; it assigns firstorder variants differential social values. At this point, frequencies of variants are now
also governed by social factors. This last association can lead to propagation of more
highly valued variants at the expense of less highly valued variants. Finally, as speech
communities diverge and ultimately split, patterns of propagation of the original speech
community will become independent and possibly lead to different outcomes. As the
descendant speech communities become socially autonomous units, different variants end
up being propagated. The result is the typological diversity of languages, that is, THIRDORDER VARIATION.
This typological diversity has its ultimate origins in first-order variation. The
functional factors that drive first-order variation survive in third-order variation because
the social factors that drive second-order variation, and ultimately selection of a linguistic
variant, are independent of the verbalization process. The output of selection in a large
enough language sample will therefore reflect the frequency distribution of the
verbalization process. Hence, patterns of typological diversity will reflect the factors that
determine verbalization.
3. Conclusion: whither cognitive linguistics?
Cognitive linguistics provides an important part of the picture sketched in the preceding
section. Cognitive linguistics provides a model of semantics, and support for that model
in psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and corpus research. The usage-based wing of
cognitive linguistics provides the basis for the model of how first-order variation is
generated in language use and how language use ends up as knowledge of language
structure by a speaker.
But this is not the entire picture. Discourse theories (one variant of which is called
‘functionalism’ in a narrow sense of that term) and theories of social cognition fill in the
piece of language use that is social interaction—an essential if not the most important
piece of language use. Sociolinguistics, at least variationist sociolinguistics, plugs in
second-order variation: language in its social function. And typology, and the
documentary linguistics without which typology could not exist, gives us the
understanding of third-order variation: language diversity and language universals.
Cognitive linguistics, as it is usually understood, is about language as a cognitive
process, specifically a combination of general cognitive processes rather than a unique,
encapsulated, genetically fixed cognitive ability. But language is more than a cognitive
process. It is also a social-interactional process, in several senses of that term, including
social cognition (joint attention, common ground, theory of mind, cooperation, etc.; Clark
1996; Tomasello 1995, 1999, 2008, 2009, 2014; Tomasello et al. 2012), face-to-face
interaction, and an emblem of social groups and social identities. And it is a historical,
evolutionary process, whose ultimate outcome is typological diversity and constraints on
that diversity. A number of cognitive linguists, including Geeraerts (this volume),
Langacker (this volume), Schmid (this volume), Sinha (2009), and Croft (2009), have
argued that cognitive linguistics needs to take social cognition into consideration. But can
cognitive linguistics expand its scope to include discourse-functional linguistics,
variationist sociolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, typology and documentary
linguistics? Should it? Would it really be cognitive linguistics any more?
I think that the answers to all of these questions is “no”. Cognitive linguistics does
what it does, in particular empirically-supported conceptual semantics and usage-based
linguistics, including most of construction grammar in the latter. But cognitive linguistics
must be integrated into, or integrate itself into, a larger, comprehensive theory of
language. The same is true of course for discourse-functional linguistics, sociolinguistics
and typology. All of these approaches tend to work in isolation from each other, i.e. in
isolation from other parts of language, sharing primarily the rejection of the Chomskyan
paradigm. But it is hard to make the case that such a disjointed effort is an alternative to
the Chomskyan paradigm. The narrow focus of the latter gives it an appearance of unity
or at least conformity to a fixed set of core principles. The Chomskyan paradigm does not
embrace all of the many dimensions of language. On the other hand, it is not easy to meld
all the dimensions of language into an alternative approach. The term ’functionalism’ is
often used in a broad sense to describe that alternative approach, but there is no widely
accepted theory encompassing all of these dimensions. I personally consider the
evolutionary framework to be the best candidate for an integrated theory of language in
all of its dimensions (Croft 2000, 2011a,b). In whatever way, the Balkanization of nonChomskyan linguistics must end if we are to make greater progress in understanding the
nature of language during the twenty-first century.
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