Plenary Lectures

Setting, Virtual Reality and Cognitive Experience: On the Relation of Conceptual Content to Higher-Level Structures in the Meaning of Impersonal It Katherine Hrisonopulo Saint-Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences Russia It has been established in cognitive grammar that all linguistic expressions are structured by pairings of phonological and symbolic poles (Langacker 1987; 1990) and that, consequently, there are no meaningless items. As mentioned in Langacker (2000: 347) with reference to previous research (Bolinger 1973; 1977), this assumption holds true for the pronoun it in a number of its impersonal and/or non-referential uses (see also Hamilton 2011; Kaltenbock 2003). Langacker’s further analysis of the pronoun’s meaning along several cognitively relevant parameters (Langacker 2007: 179 – 180; 2008: 451 – 453; 2011) shows the following (a) the conceptual content of it is highly schematic and can generally be described as “abstract setting”, or the relevant scope of awareness for apprehending the clausal process; (b) the pronoun represents the extreme case of vagueness and non-delimitation in the current discourse space; (c) the use of it invokes a generalized experiencer or conceptualizer. This paper takes up the above mentioned points on the semantic import of impersonal it and aims to reveal those facets of the pronoun’s meaning that motivate the choice of it over other possible alternatives in three interrelated, and yet distinct, types of constructions: (1) constructions with demonstrative it: It is a picture of the city; (2) clauses with impersonal it: It was blowing; (3) clauses with anticipatory it that introduce a conceptualizer’s interpretation of a situation (based on perceptual, communicative, social or other kind of experience): It was as if everything was forgotten. The study draws on 573 examples culled from English-language fiction. The analyzed corpus has included both the listed usage types of it and correlative uses of function words or lexical items that occur in precisely the same syntactic structures and serve to describe identical or similar situations. The grouping of linguistic data has brought into focus the following three types of alternations: (i) It vs. That was a picture of the city; (ii) It vs. The wind was blowing; (iii) It was as if vs. He had an impression that everything was forgotten. The proposed contrastive analysis of the mentioned types of alternative uses has revealed that the choice of it over other correlative expressions is motivated by factors pertaining to higher-level structures in the pronoun’s meaning, namely, type of reality that the pronoun invokes, as well as type of cognitive experience that it activates as an item which points to a clausal trajector, the latter in turn being conceived with respect to the corresponding landmark (designated by the clausal proposition). Specifically, linguistic data reveal that the pronoun it places its conceptual content in the plane of virtual reality (as understood in Langacker 1999), whereas the pronoun’s counterparts invoke the plane of actuality. On the other hand, as evidenced by the analyzed data, it conjures up the cognitive experience of identifying the invoked conceptual content, whereas the pronoun’s correlative expressions tend to activate the experience of direct reference in the plane of actuality to the content in question. Results of the study suggest that different uses of one and the same pronoun may represent instantiations – at higher levels of cognitive processing – of one common conceptual framework shaped, on the one hand, by the type of reality (actual or virtual) in which the pronoun’s referent is placed and, on the other hand, by the type of cognitive experience which provides mental access to the activated conceptual content.