Ramchand’s core cognitive defaults: the existence of prelinguistic

Studies such as Papafragou et al. (2006, 2008) and Papafragou (2015), among others, conclude that the way events are perceived and cognitively processed is universal. These studies contrast the possible differences in the way people observe motion and causation events while (i) memorizing and freely inspecting ongoing events and (ii) preparing and producing verbal descriptions of ongoing events. According to Papafragou et al. (2008), subjects behaved similarly in how they allocated attention in tasks requiring the memorization and free inspection of ongoing events. These tasks did not involve the production of language strings. Importantly, there were no significant differences during these tasks even if the subject’s first language was a verb-framed or a satellite-framed language. The subject’s first language was only relevant after motion had

stopped and people began to memorize events to produce descriptions thereby paying specific attention to those aspects that are not prototypically encoded in verbs in their first language. On the other hand, differences between speakers of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages were significant during the verbal description task. The eye-tracking showed that speakers allocated more attention on those aspects of the ongoing motion that are prototypically encoded in their languages; thus, different eye-movement patterns were registered during the first second of the start of the motion. Papafragou et al. (2006) elaborate further on the cross-linguistic differences between English and Greek, specifically, on the expression of the manner component, determining that, even though English speakers tend to express the manner of motion more frequently than Greek speakers, Greek speakers can also track manner information and express it in motion descriptions if that information is not inferable from the situation described.

Thus, speakers of both languages are able to pay attention to manner information and share it whenever it is considered relevant or necessary to avoid miscommunication.

Similarly, Bunger et al. (2016) expose that a speaker’s native language does not predetermine the way events are viewed and processed during non-linguistic tasks. This only changes during linguistic tasks when speakers inspect events in the order in which the relevant elements will be encoded in the sentences. They also noticed significant differences between the attention-allocation patterns of children and adults. Their behavior diverged during both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Importantly, their investigation showed that conceptual representations of events exist and can be created independently from language. As a matter of fact, children of different languages tended to pay more attention to the means component than the result component. This diverged from the behavior of adults who, consistently, paid attention first to the means component before beginning their event descriptions and only after one or two seconds directed their attention to the result component. This is consistent with the way this information is encoded and mentioned in event descriptions, even if speakers of English and Greek in this study use different strategies to encode this information in sentences.

While English speakers preferred the means first and result second pattern, Greek speakers followed a different pattern consisting of a path-incorporating verb or a two-clause description. We can explain the differences among the two subject groups, children and adults, on the basis of the interaction of language acquisition and cognitive development. Clark (2004) argues that children create conceptual representations of the

external world through perceptual inputs, involving objects, relations, and events, which are used during language acquisition, when these representations are matched to words. Spatial representations begin to emerge as soon as 6 to 7 months when children start tracking locations as goals and paying attention to the orientation of figures. These representations are available to all children but, as soon as language acquisition increments, children follow different paths since languages codify differently the external world, reflecting a community’s choice on how to organize that experience.

Children need to learn which aspects are codified in their language’s words. This process begins around 18 months for spatial relations and its completion point differs among languages. Thus, the availability of lexical items in a language can determine language acquisition and its mastery. Furthermore, it also affects second language acquisition. Lemmens & Perrez (2010) show that French-speaking learners of Dutch tend to underuse or overgeneralize when they use the Dutch posture verbs staan ‘stand’, liggen ‘lie’, and zitten ‘sit’. This is correlated to the existence of typological differences between French and Dutch, which will be discussed at length in chapter 3 of this dissertation. In spite of them, French-speaking learners are able to draw generalizations and “operate on grammaticised semantic distinctions drawn from the target language”

(2010:315), proving that, underlying language, there exists a common representational background of the external world.

The conclusions drawn in these studies tally with the ideas presented in Hinzen (2012) and Hinzen and Sheehan (2013), according to whom perception is a pre-linguistic cognitive system which allows the creation of concepts via the analysis of perceptual stimuli, that is, environmental variables that are analyzed to create structured representations. A bundle of perceptual features can receive a phonological form and be stored in our minds making its retrieval possible regardless of the existence of a stimulus. The process of lexicalization requires dissociating the percept from the stimulus, so that the concept, or lexical item, need not be triggered by an external element and may be accessible to thought and reference via grammar, an artifact only available to humans. In this sense, lexemes are a repository of “shared conceptualization”, a classification of human experience of the world, that are learnt as atoms of meaning. Along with the creation of such abstract elements, the mind is also able to create relational concepts such as agent or cause. Importantly, this conceptual system is pre-linguistic. With the emergence of grammar, a new semantics emerges

bringing with it a formal ontology distinguishing objects, events, propositions, facts, properties, and states, which is manifested in the various parts of speech. This implies the addition of a “grammatical layer of structure”, which results in a novel class of meaning organization in the form of grammatical categories. The content of a lexeme, that is, the representation based on perceptual features, is inaccessible to grammar while a derivation is created. On the other hand, atomization of grammatical chunks of structure can happen as well. This brings about the lexicalization of configurations, as shown for the verb kill (75), which implies the existence of a causative subevent that brings about a result state expressed in the small-clause.

(75) ‘kill’ ⇒ The bride [made [SC Bill dead]]

(Hinzen & Sheehan 2013:48)

To summarize, Hinzen and Sheehan put forward that:

(76) “[Grammar] yields perspectives on a reality already perceptually analysed, which are themselves not a part of this reality, but correspond to the specific grammatical way in which it is known by us.”

(Hinzen & Sheehan 2013:73)

The existence of a pre-linguistic system of causation is further supported by the research of Carey (2009). Studies testing infants as young as 6-to-7-month-old show that they are able to generate causal inferences. Causal representations created by humans require the integration of various systems of core cognition. Previous studies suggested that causation was solely based on perceptual or sensorimotor parameters; however, Carey claims that along with these systems infants can also integrate “information about the ontological status and stable causal dispositions of the interacting entities” (2009:243), thus, including inferences about the roles of agents, objects, or patients played by the entities participating in the scenario. These causal inferences do not only apply to motion events but also to change of state events. According to Carey, the causality relation is based on immediate contact of an inanimate entity by a moving object, or source of energy, affecting it in both motion and change of state events. Thus, relational concepts such as cause are brought into existence by several systems including

perception, sensorimotor, and other cognitive devices identifying dispositional roles that allow humans to create representations of the external world.

(77) “[T]he representational primitives from which the human mind is constructed are not solely perceptual or sensori-motor. Concepts such as object and agent are the output of innate input analyzers, embedded in distinct systems of core cognition.

Thus, core cognition is the source of some innate representations with conceptual content.”

(Carey 2009:215)

The important conclusion to be drawn from these studies is that there exist pre-linguistic cognitive defaults, which might be at play during language production and comprehension and, furthermore, they may be intertwined with language and unify with the syn-sem structure when the derivation is sent to the conceptual-intentional interface (Ramchand 2014). The work by Papafragou et al. (2008), Papafragou (2015), and Bunger et al. (2016) shows that conceptual representations of events exist at some cognitive representational level and can be created independent from language. In addition to the possibility of creating conceptual representations, the mind is able to produce relational concepts such as agent or cause before language has been completely acquired by infants as young as 6-to-7-month-old, as put forward by Carey (2009). For our purposes, what is important is that inferences about the external world can be obtained independently from language. The creation of a causational relation between two (sub-)events, one of means of motion and another of result, might be linked by means of one of the possible cognitive defaults at our disposal. According to Ramchand (2014), the list of cognitive defaults triggered by these cognitive systems would include caused positional transfer, locations and manners of motion, and change of location, which may be added to verbs that lack sufficient lexical encyclopedic identifiers.

Whether this is a viable hypothesis or not, requires further research beyond the limits of this dissertation.