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GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

not his blood, son. That’s my blood». The misunderstanding between fa-
ther and son was due to the different frames evoked. The son did not yet
have the blood-sucking frame of mosquitoes like his father and hence
arrived at the interpretation that it was the animal’s blood. This little
story nicely illustrates the power of frames in constructing the meaning
of utterances, and it also reveals that meanings are not fixed but develop
in the discourse.
The three aspects of meaningful grammar outlined above share
one important aspect: They all relate to the language users’ cognitive
abilities. Language users need to be aware of the connection between a
grammatical form and its meaning(s) and solve potential conflicts be-
tween lexical and grammatical meanings, they need to relate grammat-
ical structure to other domains such as perception, and they need to sup-
ply missing information to an utterance in order to reconstruct the speak-
er’s intended meaning.
In view of the substantial role played by cognition in language it
stands to reason that grammar should be regarded as a cognitive
achievement. At the heart of the cognitive view of language are human
beings, who are equipped with mental and perceptual faculties, who
have emotions, bodily experiences and the power of imagination, and,
most importantly, who have had the ability to develop language as the
most efficient means of communicating meaning. In what follows we
will illustrate the cognitive under pinning of language in two closely re-
lated areas: time/tense and modality.

2. Time and tense in English

2.1. Lexicon-grammar continuum
There is no sharp dividing line between the lexicon and grammar —
they much rather form a continuum. Let us consider the italicized no-
tions of time in the sentences below:

Lexical forms:
(4a) I teach every day.
(4b) I teach from 8am to 12am.

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