Propositions versus construals One of the key distinctions between formal and cognitive approaches relates to their different views about grammatical structure. As we saw in Chapter 6, cognitive...

Propositions versus construals One of the key distinctions between formal and cognitive approaches relates to their different views about grammatical structure. As we saw in Chapter 6, cognitive approaches view grammatical structure as independently meaningful while formal approaches do not. An important idea that we will discuss in detail in Part III relates to the notion of construal : the idea that different grammatical forms, like different words, give rise to distinct construals or ‘ways of seeing’. Consider the following examples. (a) John kicked the ball. (b) The ball was kicked by John. From the perspective of truth-conditional semantics, these sentences both encode the same proposition and therefore express the same ‘meaning’. From what you have learned in this part of the book, (i) say what the difference in meaning is, and (ii) explain how it is encoded linguistically. How might these differences be accounted for within the formal approach? Comment on what these examples reveal in terms of differing assumptions between cognitive semantics and formal semantics.