Michael Israel
English Department
University of Maryland
This talk examines two cases in which abstract grammatical knowledge (or competence) may be seen as "usage-based" in the
sense that it emerges from speakers' experience of the dynamics of ordinary language usage (or performance).
Verbs of mental state pose a problem for language learners because they denote relations which cannot be directly
observed and which cannot even be imagined without a rudimentary "theory of mind". Negative polarity
items (NPIs) pose a problem because they are subject to grammatical constraints which cannot be
directly observed, but which speakers are sensitive to from an early age. While both these phenomena
might be partially explained by positing innate knowledge of some sort, the problem remains that
speakers must learn which lexical items denote which mental states, and which lexical items are subject
to which invisible constraints.
I argue that speakers solve these problems by paying close attention to the pragmatics of these constructions. Children
learn the meanings of mental state verbs by first mastering their use in pragmatically-rich contexts
where they mark the performance of particular illocutionary acts, and which thus highlight the
association between these verbs and the mental states they denote. Similarly, speakers are able to
learn the constraints on NPIs (and polarity items in general) by associating these forms with specific
rhetorical functions which effectively limit their grammatical distributions.
I develop a version of Mental Space Theory (Fauconnier 1985, 1997) to represent the interplay between these forms'
lexical-conceptual contents and the construals they conventionally encode. The formalism highlights the roles played by
viewpoint and subjectivity in the syntax and semantics of ordinary linguistic constructions.
Reception to follow in 1413 Marie Mount Hall.