Functions of Language - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2013

The article discusses noun incorporation in English — that is, expressions which include a noun in the verbal constituent of an utterance, as in It’s time to legacy build contrasted with It’s time to build a legacy. It concludes that noun incorporation is well established in present-day English, that it has many functions, that it is used productively as an alternative to other constructions, and under definable constraints.

The overall aim of this article is to explain why researchers working in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics would benefit from dialogue with people working in psycholinguistics, and with each other. After a brief introduction, the positions on cognition taken in the Sydney and Cardiff models of Systemic Functional Linguistics are reviewed and critiqued. I then assess the extent to which Cognitive Linguistics has honoured the ‘cognitive commitment’ which it claims to make. The following section examines compatibilities between Systemic Functional and Cognitive Linguistic approaches, first outlining existing work which combines Hallidayan and cognitive perspectives, then discussing other potential areas of contact between the two, and finally examining the Cardiff model in relation to Cognitive Linguistics. The final section presents a collaborative view, suggesting that the ultimate aim of functionally-oriented (including cognitive) linguistics should be to attempt to answer the question ‘How does the natural language user work?’, and pointing out that collaboration between proponents of different linguistic models, and between linguists and researchers in other disciplines which study language, is crucial to this enterprise. Suggestions are made for ways in which dialogue across the areas of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and psycholinguistics could contribute to such a project.

The Lexical Function Degrad is a device used in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) to select the appropriate verb for expressing ‘to become permanently worse or bad’ in combination with different nouns. For example, in English one says that fruit rots, milk goes off, shoes wear out, flowers wilt, and iron rusts; thus, the verbs rot, go off, wear out, etc. can all be considered “values” of Degrad. Comparing these verbs with their translation equivalents in Spanish shows that verbs in the two languages have somewhat different collocational possibilities. Are such collocational differences arbitrary or do they result from subtle meaning differences between the translation equivalents? In this study we undertake a contrastive semantic analysis of a selection of words in the Degrad domain, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of semantic explication. We conclude that collocational preferences are indeed semantically motivated, but at the same time we recognize that Degrad is a valuable lexicological tool for verb classification, as well as for coordinating translation equivalents across languages at an approximate level. The paper aims to encourage productive engagement between two well developed approaches to lexical semantics, while at the same time demonstrating the explanatory power of the detailed “micro semantic” analysis enabled by the NSM methodology.

This partly longitudinal study applies the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics to second language writing to investigate the use of grammatical metaphor (GM; non-congruent realizations of meaning, e.g. nominalizations) in 365 texts written by Swedish mono- and multilingual students in grades 9 and 11. According to the analysis, older students and monolingual students make greater use of GM than younger students and multilingual students. Multilingual students with early and late ages of onset use GM more than multilingual students with onset ages between these two extremes. A relation was found between the occurrence of GM and the use of the potential functions of GM, e.g. expansion of the nominal phrase, which was used more frequently in texts with a higher GM density, contributing to the construction of specialized, educational knowledge. The occurrence of GM was compared to the occurrence of L2 deviations in a subcorpus. These results are interpreted in relation to the Interdependence Hypothesis formulated by Cummins (1979).