Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Linguistics, Language & Linguistics, presentative sentences, reference point constructions, regional and register variation, linguistic standardization, multivariate corpus analysis

Abstract:

© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved. Since cognitive linguists believe that "fundamental cognitive abilities and experientially derived cognitive models have direct and pervasive linguistic manifestations" (Langacker 1993: 1), the core business of Cognitive Linguistics is to investigate how cognitive structure determines the syntactic surface of natural language. This chapter focuses on the hazards associated with the one-on-one relation which is tacitly assumed in Cognitive Linguistics between underlying cognitive mechanisms and their linguistic manifestations. As a case study, we will investigate the notoriously complex distribution of er "there" in adjunct-initial sentences such as In ons land is (er) nog altijd geen openbaar golfterrein "In our country there still is no public golf course". Although this distribution is reputed to be sensitive to national variation, we will demonstrate that there are no underlying functional differences between er's Belgian and Netherlandic distribution: the cognitive "motor" of both is the human reference point ability (Langacker 1993, Taylor 1996), and both are triggered by the same discursive and syntactic parameters of that ability. Since the different distribution of er in the national varieties of Dutch is not functionally motivated, we attribute divergent er-preferences in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch to the delayed linguistic standardization of the latter, which was blocked in the 16th C as a result of political and social factors, resuming its course only in the 20th C. The key concept in the evolution from unsteady Belgian er-preferences to the more balanced Netherlandic distribution of er, will be argued to be functional specialisation, viz. the progression from subjective evaluation of the functional properties of a class of elements to speaker-and-hearershared objective knowledge about the functional properties of that class of elements.