Publications
Publication details [#64275]
Mauranen, Anna. 2018. Linear Unit Grammar. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren, eds. Handbook of Pragmatics. 21st Annual Installment. (Handbook of Pragmatics 21). John Benjamins. pp. 25–48.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This paper presents that a real-time view is crucial for evolving new and more realist language processing models: people must include the online experience of language into reports of its meaning and structure. It proposes a language model, Linear Unit Grammar (LUG), that tries to attain just that. LUG diverges drastically from other grammars in that it consists of two phases, which are very distinct: while the first is impulsive and ideally based on the perceptions of the segments in the speech stream by people with no linguistic training, the second is the linguist’s domain and works as an analytical system, much in the way that grammars normally do. LUG is basically a theoretical model for conceptualizing grammar. At the same time, it looks towards cognitive processes to grasp how language acts. Above all, it seeks to bridge the gap between the way language is experienced and the way it is depicted in grammars. Rather than proposing yet another grammatical system that could be applied to the delineation of a natural language like English, it begins with the flow of language as it passes into people's experience and displays how the experience links to the ravels of grammars that traditionally have been based on static, frozen language. Moreover, in line with models depicting the search for grasping objects or events, it puts precedency on the search for meaning in linguistic input.