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LRR 2023, 13(6): 131-166 |
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Davari S, Sabzevari M. Cognitive Semantics and Grammaticalization: A Case Study of xâstan ‘to want’. LRR 2023; 13 (6) :131-166
URL: http://lrr.modares.ac.ir/article-14-39689-en.html
URL: http://lrr.modares.ac.ir/article-14-39689-en.html
1- PhD. in Linguistics, Lecturer at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran , sh50d@yahoo.com
2- Assistant professor of linguistics, Payame Noor University (PNU),Tehran, Iran
2- Assistant professor of linguistics, Payame Noor University (PNU),Tehran, Iran
Abstract: (2771 Views)
Based upon diachronic-cognitive linguists, language structure is the product of our interaction with the world around us. The way we build discourse and develop linguistic categories can immediately be derived from the way we experience our environment and use that experience in specific communication. Thanks to recent works on the evolution of grammatical categories e.g auxiliaries, we now have a sizable knowledge of the main patterns of grammaticalization which allows for fairly reliable linguistic reconstructions and hypotheses on genetic evolution through main cognitive processes e.g semantic bleeching. Following the doctorines of cognitive semantics, the present proposal bears an attempt to discover and define which aspects of meaning of a lexical source are lost and which are preserved through grammaticalization. Analyzing a specific grammaticalized product, namely the auxiliary verb xâstan, the future marker, through the lexical xâstan ‘to want’ in Persian, we will suggest that the evolution of the target grammatical meaning, the future, through grammaticalization process occurs applying semantic bleaching by way of which the entire idiosyncratic semantic features are vanished but the image-schematic structure. This must mean that an image-schema is abstracted from the earlier lexical sense since it would be potentially much more immanent and pervasive than the fully fleshed-out lexical meaning.
1. Introduction
This paper is an attempt to unify our understanding of semantics change and in particular to treat the semantic change attendant on grammaticalization, the process through which the development of grammatical forms by progressive deterioration of previously autonomous words is made possible by weakening of the pronunciation, of the concrete sense of the words, and of the expressive value of words and groupings of words. The ancillary word can end up as an element lacking independent meaning as such, linked to a principal word to mark its grammatical role. We will argue that the semantic phenomenon known as “bleaching”, recognized as the core or the embryonic stage of grammaticalization, may well fall out of ordinary trends in semantic change, taken together with an independently motivated understanding of lexical and grammatical meaning domains. The main question of the present research is to find out if the senses are totally evaporated or are partially weakened during grammaticalization and what in fact happens to them as the weakening or loss of meaning is considered as a way of describing the meaning-change often seen accompanying the process of grammaticalizing a lexical item. We shall attempt to define which aspects of the meaning are vanished and which will be preserved when a lexical items transforms to a grammatical item. Far apart the concept of generalization proposed by Bybee and Pagliuca (1985), our chief claim is that, an analysis of meaning-transfer as metaphorically structured based upon a cognitive semantic approach, for the case of the Persian lexical verb xâstan ‘to want’ which is grammaticalized to the future marker, will enable us to foretell which inferences are kept across transfer of sense. Bybee and Pagliuca (1985) demonstrate that generalization is an immanent dramatization of grammaticalization sense-shifts. Their analysis would be straightforwardly comprehensible in terms of conventional “bleaching” through which and in an objectivist feature-structured theory of meaning, the lexical sense depicts more generality by losing features. However, with the xāstan-future in Persian and probably many other instances of grammaticalization as Sweetser (1988) claims, it seems that we can no longer talk about generalization in the wonted sense. In actual fact, and regarding the Persian future marker, it is hard to see the emergence of future meaning through the lexical verb xāstan connoting wanting something or even someone (here it literary means to love someone), or to wish or intend to do something, as a process of generalization thanks to the fact that the volition sense encoding through the lexical xâstan does not, in truth, embrace the future sense. Neither futurity nor volition is an instance of the other, nor is it recognizable that meaning is “lost” in the emergence of one of these senses through another. What, afterwards, gives rise to the emergence of futurity through the volition sense of xâstan? In other words, losing which semantic seeds and preserving which semantic features in the lexical form leads to the creation of the grammatical form? We will try to answer this question which was basically raised by Millet (1912) tackling the new subject of grammaticalization and which is still with us through the cognitive declarations of the words’ semantic architecture in the theory of cognitive semantics. In line with Talmy (1985 and elsewhere), we will portray that since grammatical meanings are inherently topological and schematic, the development from lexical to grammatical function accompanies projecting the image-schematic topological structure of the source lexical domain, which indeed bears schematic structure in addition to the other aspects of the rich lexical semantic content. In the next part we will turn to the specific example of the xâstan-future and will use this illustration to clarify what is meant by the transfer of schematic structure through the journey of grammaticalization.
2. Methodology
Our supported clarification will draw essentially on the work of Talmy (1985, 2000, 2003). Talmy has declared that grammatical meaning is intrinsically topological and schematic, whereas lexical meaning is not. It implies that one can anticipate to discover grammatical morphemes marking, for example, topological relations on a linear scale (A is greater than B), but not actual distances between points on the scale, or relative spatial position of the two objects, but not the colors of the objects. Lexical meaning, needless to say, can bear topological aspects as well, besides the other aspects of rich lexical semantic content, be that as it may, grammatical meaning is restricted to the schematic structuring of meaning. With that in mind, Lakoff (1987) has also asserted that metaphorical mapping hereditarily projects the image-schematic topological structure of the source domain (notwithstanding, we also reckon that, across a metaphorical mapping from one domain to another, other meaning features may be preserved). Scrutinizing the data submitted in the present contribution from the body of written texts from Old, Middle, Early New Persian and New Persian on the development of the peculiar case of the lexical verb xâstan ‘to want’ to the axillary future marker, and reviewing our 10 participants’ answers with reference to their envisaged schema of both the “wanting” and the future tense scenarios, we epitomized that the image schema for xâstan ‘to want’ which in essence inheres a displacement along a linear path from a source proximal to or compatible with ego towards a goal distal as depicted in the following cline.
Source Path Goal
It is discerned that the “wanting” storyline initiates with the source “wanter”, the one who wants something, and terminates with the goal “wanted”, the thing which is wanted, and at long last the path which implies the process of “wanting” and is undeniably stretched over time. Fascinatingly, if we take a deeper look at the whole plot of the future tense, commensurate with our participants’ future image schema, we will come across the similar image schema: the representation of a journey from a source in the time of speaking to a goal in the time later than now, or the time of speaking, expressing facts or certainty in future. In actual fact, there is a perceived partial correlation between the experience of “wanting” and the insight into the time ahead: in all probability, our experience of wanting has given us the idea that we will get to the wanted points more remote from the path-source at upcoming times than points neighboring the path-source. Therefore, logically, we can encode futurity through the image schema of “wanting”.
3. Results
In the present research, with respect to a diachronic analysis of the grammaticalization of the verb xâstan to the future marker in Persian in addition to evaluating our Persian speaking participants’ related image schemata of both wanting and futurity affairs, a novel speculation will be put forward which copes with the semantic bleaching through grammaticalization in reference to a cognitive semantics approach. Within this interpretation, the metaphorical mapping of “wanting” onto “futurity” puts in the shade any correspondence between the future time and the certain features of lexical xâstan ‘to want’ namely the animate subject or the obligatory object, rather it transfers the internal schematic structure of “wanting” to that of “futurity” predominantly. According to the hypothesis articulated in the present contribution, the inferences preserved in mapping “wanting” onto “futurity” are as follows: (1) The linearity of the interdependence between the loci: the present time that we wish for something in the time ahead and encoding the time ahead at present time. (2) The position of ago at the source of the linear path: the present is proximal in time, to such an extent that our current position is proximal with regards to our desires which are going to be embodied in coming times. (3) Resettlement away from the proximal source-path on the road to a distal goal, on the grounds that both “wanting” and “futurity” stories cast round for something far-flung. On account of this, we apprehend that the metaphorical mapping of the image schema from “wanting” to “futurity” preserves this topological structure, meaning to say, the topologically structured image schema (passing over such particulars as the animate subject or the obligatory object) is abstracted from the lexical xâstan and convincingly mappable onto the domain of futurity with preservation of the topology. In this mapping, and through what we know as semantic bleaching in grammaticalization, we lose the sense of the obligatory physical object or the animate subject of the lexical verb at the moment that a novel grammatical function of future tense arises. Accordingly, we cannot be supposed to have lost the whole particles of meaning, we have rather substituted the embedding of the image schema of a concrete space of “wanting” in an abstract domain of time.
4. Conclusion
It has long been established that independent lexical content words can change their status in sentence being reanalyzed and grammaticalized as more bound, functional, and grammatical words. Since the earliest attempts to more recently works on grammaticalization, meaning change which has been believed to be of bleached characterization has been of responsibility for the development. However, “bleaching” in meaning change, related to grammaticalization, is not as inevitable as “bleaching” if you think about dresses in your washing machine, in other words, the bleaching puzzle raised in grammaticalization does not precisely reveals why and in what sense do meanings bleach in grammaticalization? The present contribution was undertaken to evaluate the process of semantic beaching during grammaticalization in terms of the vanished angles, those causing the result of meaning change come into sight paler than the original meaning, and the preserved ones. In this paper, we have developed an account of the image schema in meaning change. Analyzing the instance of gradual development of the Persian future marker, namely the axillary verb xâstan through the lexical counterpart xâstan ‘to want’, as a typical case, we illustrated that the bleached parts of meaning are related to the detailed, concrete, physical and full content while the preserved part relates to the image schema. Evaluating the image schemata of both lexical and grammatical, (the future marker), counterparts, and the participants’ answers regarding the image schemata of the lexical and the axillary verb, we portrayed that both image schemata share similar pattern namely source-path-goal. The hypothesis built in this paper validates that meaning bleaching during the emergence of future marker through the lexical verb xâstan ‘to want’, we regard as the heart of meaning shift in the diachronic process of grammaticalization, involves bleaching of rich semantic features of the lexical counterpart namely the subject animacy, the subject volition or the obligatory presence of thing or event object. However, the source-path-goal image schema which subsists of the lexical is preserved in the new construction, the future marker.
1. Introduction
This paper is an attempt to unify our understanding of semantics change and in particular to treat the semantic change attendant on grammaticalization, the process through which the development of grammatical forms by progressive deterioration of previously autonomous words is made possible by weakening of the pronunciation, of the concrete sense of the words, and of the expressive value of words and groupings of words. The ancillary word can end up as an element lacking independent meaning as such, linked to a principal word to mark its grammatical role. We will argue that the semantic phenomenon known as “bleaching”, recognized as the core or the embryonic stage of grammaticalization, may well fall out of ordinary trends in semantic change, taken together with an independently motivated understanding of lexical and grammatical meaning domains. The main question of the present research is to find out if the senses are totally evaporated or are partially weakened during grammaticalization and what in fact happens to them as the weakening or loss of meaning is considered as a way of describing the meaning-change often seen accompanying the process of grammaticalizing a lexical item. We shall attempt to define which aspects of the meaning are vanished and which will be preserved when a lexical items transforms to a grammatical item. Far apart the concept of generalization proposed by Bybee and Pagliuca (1985), our chief claim is that, an analysis of meaning-transfer as metaphorically structured based upon a cognitive semantic approach, for the case of the Persian lexical verb xâstan ‘to want’ which is grammaticalized to the future marker, will enable us to foretell which inferences are kept across transfer of sense. Bybee and Pagliuca (1985) demonstrate that generalization is an immanent dramatization of grammaticalization sense-shifts. Their analysis would be straightforwardly comprehensible in terms of conventional “bleaching” through which and in an objectivist feature-structured theory of meaning, the lexical sense depicts more generality by losing features. However, with the xāstan-future in Persian and probably many other instances of grammaticalization as Sweetser (1988) claims, it seems that we can no longer talk about generalization in the wonted sense. In actual fact, and regarding the Persian future marker, it is hard to see the emergence of future meaning through the lexical verb xāstan connoting wanting something or even someone (here it literary means to love someone), or to wish or intend to do something, as a process of generalization thanks to the fact that the volition sense encoding through the lexical xâstan does not, in truth, embrace the future sense. Neither futurity nor volition is an instance of the other, nor is it recognizable that meaning is “lost” in the emergence of one of these senses through another. What, afterwards, gives rise to the emergence of futurity through the volition sense of xâstan? In other words, losing which semantic seeds and preserving which semantic features in the lexical form leads to the creation of the grammatical form? We will try to answer this question which was basically raised by Millet (1912) tackling the new subject of grammaticalization and which is still with us through the cognitive declarations of the words’ semantic architecture in the theory of cognitive semantics. In line with Talmy (1985 and elsewhere), we will portray that since grammatical meanings are inherently topological and schematic, the development from lexical to grammatical function accompanies projecting the image-schematic topological structure of the source lexical domain, which indeed bears schematic structure in addition to the other aspects of the rich lexical semantic content. In the next part we will turn to the specific example of the xâstan-future and will use this illustration to clarify what is meant by the transfer of schematic structure through the journey of grammaticalization.
2. Methodology
Our supported clarification will draw essentially on the work of Talmy (1985, 2000, 2003). Talmy has declared that grammatical meaning is intrinsically topological and schematic, whereas lexical meaning is not. It implies that one can anticipate to discover grammatical morphemes marking, for example, topological relations on a linear scale (A is greater than B), but not actual distances between points on the scale, or relative spatial position of the two objects, but not the colors of the objects. Lexical meaning, needless to say, can bear topological aspects as well, besides the other aspects of rich lexical semantic content, be that as it may, grammatical meaning is restricted to the schematic structuring of meaning. With that in mind, Lakoff (1987) has also asserted that metaphorical mapping hereditarily projects the image-schematic topological structure of the source domain (notwithstanding, we also reckon that, across a metaphorical mapping from one domain to another, other meaning features may be preserved). Scrutinizing the data submitted in the present contribution from the body of written texts from Old, Middle, Early New Persian and New Persian on the development of the peculiar case of the lexical verb xâstan ‘to want’ to the axillary future marker, and reviewing our 10 participants’ answers with reference to their envisaged schema of both the “wanting” and the future tense scenarios, we epitomized that the image schema for xâstan ‘to want’ which in essence inheres a displacement along a linear path from a source proximal to or compatible with ego towards a goal distal as depicted in the following cline.
It is discerned that the “wanting” storyline initiates with the source “wanter”, the one who wants something, and terminates with the goal “wanted”, the thing which is wanted, and at long last the path which implies the process of “wanting” and is undeniably stretched over time. Fascinatingly, if we take a deeper look at the whole plot of the future tense, commensurate with our participants’ future image schema, we will come across the similar image schema: the representation of a journey from a source in the time of speaking to a goal in the time later than now, or the time of speaking, expressing facts or certainty in future. In actual fact, there is a perceived partial correlation between the experience of “wanting” and the insight into the time ahead: in all probability, our experience of wanting has given us the idea that we will get to the wanted points more remote from the path-source at upcoming times than points neighboring the path-source. Therefore, logically, we can encode futurity through the image schema of “wanting”.
3. Results
In the present research, with respect to a diachronic analysis of the grammaticalization of the verb xâstan to the future marker in Persian in addition to evaluating our Persian speaking participants’ related image schemata of both wanting and futurity affairs, a novel speculation will be put forward which copes with the semantic bleaching through grammaticalization in reference to a cognitive semantics approach. Within this interpretation, the metaphorical mapping of “wanting” onto “futurity” puts in the shade any correspondence between the future time and the certain features of lexical xâstan ‘to want’ namely the animate subject or the obligatory object, rather it transfers the internal schematic structure of “wanting” to that of “futurity” predominantly. According to the hypothesis articulated in the present contribution, the inferences preserved in mapping “wanting” onto “futurity” are as follows: (1) The linearity of the interdependence between the loci: the present time that we wish for something in the time ahead and encoding the time ahead at present time. (2) The position of ago at the source of the linear path: the present is proximal in time, to such an extent that our current position is proximal with regards to our desires which are going to be embodied in coming times. (3) Resettlement away from the proximal source-path on the road to a distal goal, on the grounds that both “wanting” and “futurity” stories cast round for something far-flung. On account of this, we apprehend that the metaphorical mapping of the image schema from “wanting” to “futurity” preserves this topological structure, meaning to say, the topologically structured image schema (passing over such particulars as the animate subject or the obligatory object) is abstracted from the lexical xâstan and convincingly mappable onto the domain of futurity with preservation of the topology. In this mapping, and through what we know as semantic bleaching in grammaticalization, we lose the sense of the obligatory physical object or the animate subject of the lexical verb at the moment that a novel grammatical function of future tense arises. Accordingly, we cannot be supposed to have lost the whole particles of meaning, we have rather substituted the embedding of the image schema of a concrete space of “wanting” in an abstract domain of time.
4. Conclusion
It has long been established that independent lexical content words can change their status in sentence being reanalyzed and grammaticalized as more bound, functional, and grammatical words. Since the earliest attempts to more recently works on grammaticalization, meaning change which has been believed to be of bleached characterization has been of responsibility for the development. However, “bleaching” in meaning change, related to grammaticalization, is not as inevitable as “bleaching” if you think about dresses in your washing machine, in other words, the bleaching puzzle raised in grammaticalization does not precisely reveals why and in what sense do meanings bleach in grammaticalization? The present contribution was undertaken to evaluate the process of semantic beaching during grammaticalization in terms of the vanished angles, those causing the result of meaning change come into sight paler than the original meaning, and the preserved ones. In this paper, we have developed an account of the image schema in meaning change. Analyzing the instance of gradual development of the Persian future marker, namely the axillary verb xâstan through the lexical counterpart xâstan ‘to want’, as a typical case, we illustrated that the bleached parts of meaning are related to the detailed, concrete, physical and full content while the preserved part relates to the image schema. Evaluating the image schemata of both lexical and grammatical, (the future marker), counterparts, and the participants’ answers regarding the image schemata of the lexical and the axillary verb, we portrayed that both image schemata share similar pattern namely source-path-goal. The hypothesis built in this paper validates that meaning bleaching during the emergence of future marker through the lexical verb xâstan ‘to want’, we regard as the heart of meaning shift in the diachronic process of grammaticalization, involves bleaching of rich semantic features of the lexical counterpart namely the subject animacy, the subject volition or the obligatory presence of thing or event object. However, the source-path-goal image schema which subsists of the lexical is preserved in the new construction, the future marker.
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