COGNITIVE GRAMMAR 203
and a sense of right and wrong strongly suggests innateness to some degree.
Without slighting the growing body of research indicating that personal-
ity—and thus behavior—is largely determined by biology, we can state that
differences in behavior can be attributed, in part, to differences in parenting
(see Barber, 1996; Baumrind, 1989, 1991; Chao, 1994; Darling & Steinberg,
1993; Heath, 1983; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Miller, Cowan, P., Cowan, C.,
& Hetherington, 1993; Pinker, 2002; Schwarz, Barton-Henry, & Pruzinsky,
1985; Steinberg, Darling, & Fletcher, 1995; Steinberg, Dornbusch, & Brown,
1992; Weiss & Schwarz, 1996).
Applying this perspective to language is revealing. Formalist models of lan-
guage are problematic, in part, because they assume that all sentences begin
with the lexicon, that language exists in the mind as words. But words per se do
not exist anywhere in the brain; instead, we find cell assemblies representing
words through cortical dynamics (Pulvermuller, 2003). If we accept the argu-
ment for the lexicon merely as a metaphor, it may seem reasonable, given the
nature of language, but there is no evidence to support it. Even if words are in-
deed stored in the brain, it does not follow that language begins with words. As
Fauconnier and Turner (2002) noted, at the heart of language are the “powerful
and general abilities of conceptual integration” (p. 180).
More critical, however, is that formalist models of language treat mean-
ing as though it exists exclusively in the mind of the language producer.
Meaning is subordinated to a focus on derivations and structure, even
though “structure” per se is dismissed as an “artifact” that has no “theoreti-
cal status” (Chomsky, 1995, pp. 25–26). Lengthy discussions of structural
derivations in the MP present a view of language processing that is exclu-
sively bottom up, and it ignores the fact that a great deal of language pro-
cessing is top down (Abbott, Black, & Smith, 1985; Fodor, Bever, &
Garrett, 1974; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Johnson-Laird, 1983; Sanford &
Garrod, 1981; Smith, 1983).
Again, this is not a trivial matter. Formalist grammars cannot provide a satis-
factory model of language processing because they do not account for a variety
of factors associated with language as a communicative act that conveys mean-
ing. Consider the following sentences:
- The house had a three-car garage.
- The House approved the minimum-wage bill.
- The Louvre and the National house many of the world’s great treasures.
The meaning of the wordhousein these sentences derives from our experi-
ence with the world. Producing and comprehending 4, for example, requires a
knowledge of government that is quite removed from grammar.