Unifying Syntax and Semantics in Cognitive Concept Generation for Natural Language Expression
Li Jiang · International Journal of Humanities Social Sciences and Education · 2023
Formalist and functionalist grammars offer different perspectives on the relationship between the meaning basis and grammatical autonomy in natural language generation.Formalist grammar emphasizes the implicit syntactic form relationship between syntactic components and does not consider the cognitive, semantic, and pragmatic factors of these components.It views syntax as autonomous and self-governed, and the formal constraints of grammars can ignore the functional meaning of sentences.Chomsky (1981Chomsky ( :1995) ) explains language production through implicit selfgoverned rules of syntactic form.In contrast, Halliday (1994), the first proponent of functionalist grammar, rejects the one-sided view of language generation presented in formalist grammar.According to Halliday, the grammatical formal structure is the external symbolic representation of the functional meaning of natural language, including conceptual, interpersonal, and textual functions.This view asserts that the form of language symbols and the meaning of language functions are integrated, inseparable, and reflect each other.Cognitive syntax, headed by Langacker (1991), and construction grammar schools like Goldberg (1995) have inherited and expanded upon the functionalist viewpoint.These schools view grammar as being dominated and constrained by natural language cognitive functions such as construction or sentence cognition, function, semantics, and pragmatics.Although the differences between the formalist grammar school and the functionalist grammar school seem to be incompatible, they actually address the relationship between language syntax form and sentence function meaning from different perspectives.For instance, Xu (2002) argues that although there is no pure semantic component in formalist syntax, it does not deny the close relationship between semantics, pragmatics, and syntax.Therefore, the author of this statement believes that formalist syntax and functionalist syntax are not necessarily contradictory, but rather complementary.According to the author's cognitive function generative grammar school, the language form of natural language and its functional meaning are integrated and inseparable.