tant part of the social, cultural, biological, and psychological dimensions of hu-
man existence. Language processing is recognized as involving a complex
interaction among different areas of the brain—the temporal lobe associated
with receptive speech, the parietal lobe with writing, the frontal lobes with mo-
tor speech, and so forth. Consequently, language is deemed to be embedded in a
variety of interconnected cognitive operations and is necessarily influenced by
them. As mentioned in the previous chapter, we can see this interconnectivity
through brain imaging, but we don’t need to rely exclusively on technology
here: We need only consider how a person’s emotional state affects language.^1
Thus, cognitive grammar strives to explain language and its structure in terms
of both brain function and communication. Lamb (1998), for example, noted
that all cognitive activity, including language, consists of complex patterns of
neural firing and inhibition, like switches turning on and off. Attempts to de-
scribe these patterns in terms of rules and transformations, Lamb noted, seem
farfetched. He argued that the study of grammar and language should be linked
to the study of neurocognitive processes. As we see later in this chapter, this
approach lends itself to helping us understand some of the problems we
encounter when teaching language.
Determining Meaning
Recall that T-G grammar and the MP maintain that language is computational
and compositional; a cognitive mechanism performs various language opera-
tions, such as inducing grammar rules and combining small linguistic units into
larger ones. On this account, the language module is said to consist of
submodulesthat are responsible for a range of different processes. Computa-
tion is related to the idea that language—specifically, grammar—is largely in-
dependent of language use. In T-G grammar, for example, the language
acquisition device induces the rules of the grammar with minimal input; in the
MP, universal grammar is innate, and input does nothing more than set certain
parameters. Also, both T-G grammar and the MP deal with example sentences
rather than utterances. Neither addresses the fact that such sentences lack a
context that includes someone with an intention to communicate a message to
someone with the ability to understand (or misunderstand) the message, and
neither makes any attempt to examine units of discourse beyond the sentence.
The idea of independence is especially problematic for those of us who
teach reading, writing, and speaking because it does not consider issues of rhet-
oric. Chomsky’s approach to grammar always has been plagued by his ambiva-
COGNITIVE GRAMMAR 199
(^1) Emotions involve several areas of the brain, especially the limbic system and the frontal lobes.