van der Leek, Frederike (2000) “Caused-Motion and the ‘Bottom-Up’ Role of Grammar” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 301-331. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

1. Introduction

Thought has internal structure independently of language. Humans, that is, have the cognitive ability to construct frames (Fillmore 1982, 1985) or, in Lakoff’s (1987) terminology, Idealized cognitive Models (ICMs), i.e., nonlinguistic schematic conceptual representations of, roughly, objects, and events. – 301

2. Verbal and constructional polysemy: different cognitive approaches

Though Cognitive Linguistics cannot be said to form a single unified framework (yet), it seems united with respect to two points: firstly, language (words and grammar) structures nonlinguistic conceptualizations that are grounded in experience, and secondly, language underdetermines meaning. – 302-03

3. The caused-motion construction

3.1 The constructional senses of the caused-motion construction described

3.2 The caused-motion constructional subsenses: some problems

4. Arguments against additional CAUSE and MOVE verb senses

4.1 Fusing CAUSE to MOVE and basic verb meaning

4.2 The effect of linguistic presence of MOVE

4.3 Locative versus directional PPs in caused-motion constructions

5. A compositional account

5.1 Platonic concepts and senses in contact

Verbs only symbolize one abstract Platonic concept (whose content is, by definition, unpredictable) and that actualized sense is never a sense of the verb in and of itself but, again by definition, a sense in context that includes whatever other (non)linguistic conceptual elements helped create it; a sense, in other words, that gets compositionally constructed by cognition, and is predictable, given sufficiently tight contextual constraints (contextual in its broadest sense). – 319

5.2 Oblique complements s subpredicates rather then arguments

5.3 Compositionality: a narrow view and a broad view

“[a] language is compositional if the meaning of a complex expression is systematically related to the meaning of its constituents” (Coulson 1997: 3). – 332

6. Predictable or not, that is the question

The view upheld by the majority of the cognitive linguistic community is (i) that words are polysemous, with a central (essentially prototypical) sense and other extending from the central sense or from another extended sense, and (ii) that extended senses are not predictable, only motivated. – 322

7. Concepts are blind without percepts, percepts are vague without concepts