topics: |  cognitive-linguistics

Even in the generative tradition, which has long and loudly proclaimed the
autonomy of grammatical structure, semantic considerations have not only
intruded but taken on progressively greater significance. 
This of course is perfectly unsuprising from the standpoint of _cognitive
grammar_, which for many years has claimed that grammar and meaning are
indissociable. 
This theory takes the radical position that grammar reduces to the
structuring and symbolization of conceptual content and thus has no
autonomous existence at all. 

Actually, this position seems radical only through the distorting lens of
formal grammatical theory.  Granted [the semiological function of language],
language necessarily comprises semantic and phonological structures and
symbol links between the two.  The central claim of CG is that nothing else
is needed.  

Lexicon and grammar form a continuum and that only symbolic structures -
each residing in the symbolic linkage of a semantic and a phonological
structure, figure in their proper characterization. 

Lexicon = fixed expressions of a language.