COGNITIVE GRAMMAR 217
quently a matter of prosody, not grammar. Given the importance of prosody in
language production, we should find it interesting that formalist accounts of ac-
quisition give relatively little attention to this feature of linguistic performance.
Pinker (1995), for example, provided a lengthy discussion of language acquisi-
tion (almost 50 pages) but devoted only five paragraphs to prosody. Moreover,
these five paragraphs are limited to questioning the link between prosody and
grammar: Do children use prosody to determine grammar? As a strong advo-
cate of Chomskian linguistics, Pinker concluded that grammar may influence
prosody, but he then took the strange step of recognizing that the mapping
between syntax and prosody is “inconsistent” (p. 164).
More relevant is the question of how children master the rhythmic patterns
of their home language in the course of language acquisition. When we exam-
ine speech as an acoustical signal, it is continuous, yet we do not hear speech as
a continuous stream; we hear it as segments that follow a specific pattern. Nu-
merous studies have shown that infants only a few days old are able to distin-
guish the prosodic patterns of different languages, such as English and
Japanese (Bagou, Fougeron, & Frauenfelder, 2002; Bahrick & Pickens, 1988;
Christophe & Morton, 1998; Dehaene-Lambertz & Houston, 1998). This abil-
ity seems congruent with the universal human talent for pattern recognition, but
it raises interesting and as yet unanswered questions. If language acquisition
relies on a process of induction, what is there in speech rhythms that children
induce? Are there “rules” of prosody? Are prosodic patterns simply
internalized on the basis of exposure?
Cognitive grammar does not view language as being the product of chil-
dren’s mastery of grammar but rather views grammar as being a byproduct of
language. It follows that grammar is not a theory of language or of mind,
which makes the question of underlying linguistic structures irrelevant.
Grammar, from this perspective, is nothing more than a system for describing
the patterns of regularity inherent in language. The surface structure of sen-
tences is linked directly to the mental proposition and corresponding phone-
mic and lexical representations. A formal grammatical apparatus to explain
the relatedness of actives and passives, for example, and other types of related
sentences is not necessary.
Consider again the issue of passive constructions:
- Fred kissed Macarena.
- Macarena was kissed by Fred.
In cognitive grammar, how these sentences might be related grammati-
cally is of little consequence. More important is what they convey. Our intu-