Grammar and Cognitive Processing--论文代写范文精选

它是一个众所周知的事实,文字处理软件与语法检查工具并没有提供一个全面的内容型的文本，对于使用的语法结构的分析。虽然索引可能大大影响句子的选择,但似乎并不是问题的技术解决方案。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

“Phenomenological input” refers to anything that allows to establish direct connection between two reactions to sensory stimuli, of which one is caused by a physical entity (such as object), and the other by a linguistic entity (such as word). (Of course, it is understood that a linguistic entity itself is a kind of physical entity, and it certainly complicates the picture, but for the present moment this consideration may be disregarded.) “Structural input” refers to sensory (auditory) experiences generated by verbal stimuli (discourse) whereby connection is established between sensory stimuli both of which are caused by linguistic entities. Due to intrinsic circularity of language as a cognitive phenomenon, the boundary between phenomenological and structural input is not rigid or clear-cut, and this poses a serious problem for machine processing of natural language. For example, it is a well-known fact that word-processing software products with grammar-checking utilities do not provide a comprehensive content-oriented analysis of grammatical structures used in the text. Although the alternative use of indexicals may considerably affect sentence / paragraph / text meaning, there does not seem to be a technical solution to the problem of automated content-sensitive monitoring of grammar encoding in natural language processing as long as the traditional semantic paradigm prevails in the interpretation of grammar.

The two-level processing of data accounts for the difficulties software developers are only too familiar with: adequate processing of discourse (structural input) implies proper handling of categorized (and, consequently, specifically structured at the first level of conceptualization) phenomenological input, that is, the cognitive semantics of each linguistic item, which is based on experience. Unless language processing software products become capable of managing the encoding of cognitive experience, grammar checking utilities will remain what they are — mechanical tools for tracking formal errors. 

Consider the following sample text: The Statue of Liberty is standing on Liberty Island in New York Bay. It will have been built in the last century and is being a symbol of freedom to millions of immigrants going to America. Run through Corel WordPerfect Grammatik, it appears to be perfectly correct, though none of the verbs used in it are in the grammatically correct form. Ideally, a grammar checking utility should be able to yield a processed grammatically correct text such as follows: The Statue of Liberty stands on Liberty Island in New York Bay. It was built in the last century and has been a symbol of freedom to millions of immigrants coming to America. The fact that this does not happen only proves that there is no basic understanding of how grammar works in relation to knowledge representation. 

Every time we use language we, without being aware of it, process information depending on different cognitive values assigned to linguistic structures, which is to say, we speak about what we observe and we speak about what we just know. In the first case, we operate on the level of individual knowledge (phenomenological input), in the second case, we operate on the level of commonly shared (social, cf. Russell, 1963) knowledge (structural input). Commonly shared knowledge, normally, is existential experience of thousands of generations crystallized with time into a system of beliefs about the world, which define the optimal behavioral pattern of individuals. This pattern conforms in the best possible way with the biological imperative of survival of human species as a whole and has very little to do with the so-called “scientific” world view. 

A consistent account and analysis of morphological structures within a given language should be based on the assumption that linguistic world view and scientific world view are different cognitive systems, and the latter cannot be drawn upon to conceptually explicate the former. A good case study to illustrate this claim is a contrastive cognitive analysis of aspect in such morphologically different languages as Russian and English.

Verbal Aspect as an Illustration 
The general theory of verbal aspect has long been dominated by the traditional semantic account of aspect in Russian where verb stems form what appears to be classical binary oppositions PERFECTIVE (PF) - IMPERFECTIVE (IMP). However, there is a profound lack of agreement on what the actual meanings of these forms are. One of the most acclaimed interpretations of aspect meaning is that based on the notion of “boundedness” as the idea of completeness (exhaustion) of the temporal manifestation of the action as expressed by the verb (Bondarko, Bulanin, 1967). Thus, the meaning of the Russian PF is defined as the totality of the action expressed by the verb, whereby the action is viewed as a spot-like, non-continuous event that reaches its bounds and whereupon a certain result of this action is obtained. The meaning of the IMP aspect is usually associated with the idea of continuity and linearity of the action in its occurrence, without any reference to the action's bounds per se, and with its processual and generic-factive function (Xrakovsky, 1990). 

This semantic approach was adopted by Indo-European linguistics and is reflected in the classification of verbs according to different aspectual classes (Vendler, 1967), or so called Aktionsarten. However, the whole controversy about the nature and meaning of aspect seems to have been based on a fallacy. As was pointed out by Miloslavsky (1989), "the paradox of the current situation in linguistics is that aspect as a specific set of features of the verb lexeme is singled out strictly and consistently on exclusively grammatical grounds (i. e. combinability and paradigmatic relationships. - A.K.). 

However, all the efforts of scholars have been directed at presenting aspect in such a way as if it were a category defined on strictly semantic grounds”. As a result, the traditional semantic account of aspect as a grammatical category fails to achieve its goal of explaining what aspect is really about. As I have shown elsewhere (Kravchenko, 1990, 1992, 1995), rather than reflecting “boundedness” as a secondary-level superficially imposed conceptual construct, verbal aspect both in Russian and in English has to do with cognitive processing of phenomenological input, whereby descriptions of events are categorized differently depending on the source of information about the event. 

The basic aspectual distinction on which the grammar of aspect is built is DEFINITE (source of information) - INDEFINITE (source of information), and it is no surprise that the functional makeup of aspect in Russian and English is strikingly similar. Both in Russian and in English, the aspectual system is basically tripartite, reflecting three relevant modalities for knowledge acquisition depending on the kind of available evidence: events are grammatically categorized as directly observed, inferred based on observation, or unspecified as to a possible source of information (Kravchenko, 1997). A functionally comprehensive approach to grammar, when grammatical phenomena are viewed as language-specific patterns for categorizing species-specific cognitive experience, allows to find much in common between different languages as far as cognitive processing is concerned. This means that Universal Grammar (in the cognitive rather than morphological sense of the term) is not a fiction, but something feasible and attainable — as long as the traditional semantic paradigm in linguistic analysis gives way to what has been lately referred to as "cognitive semantics", or experientially based theory of meaning.

If, however, one emphasizes the interactional features of language as a joint activity (Clark, 1996) which consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices from a wide and unstable range of variable possibilities in a manner which is not rule-governed, but driven by highly flexible principles and strategies, it is only natural to ask, following Verschueren (1999), how communication in this case can still be possible. Looking for an answer, we turn again to the autopoietic premise about the connotational nature of language: communication is still possible for the only reason that it is not exchange of information in the traditional sense, it is cognitive interactions in the course of which human behavior is orientationally, and not definitively, modified. This modification can only be orientational because it relies on the degree of coincidence between representational potentials of a sign for each individual sign user. The more shared empirical (including linguistic) experience the communicants have, the less indeterminate the possible significance of a sign will be for the addressee. But it will never be identical to the possible significance of the sign for the speaker.

Conclusion 
It was not my goal to review all the current developments in the field of cognitively oriented linguistic research. I have only tried to outline a general direction in which cognitive linguistics is heading at the turn of the century, and thus suggest a revised understanding of cognitive linguistics as a methodological paradigm. In the context of what has been said above, the goal of cognitive linguistics as a science may be defined as follows: to understand what language is and what language does to ensure the predominance of homo sapiens as a biological species. This makes cognitive linguistics a biologically oriented empirical science.（essay代写)

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