Chunks & constituants[cognitive syntax]

adapted from a 23 Apr 1997 post by Mark Line

Chris Palmer wrote:

I think that the meanings of lexical items get chunked together during the comprehension of an utterance, and that the things some people think of as surface constituents are really just ramifications of those semantic chunks (and which are relatively uninteresting as separate entities -- the 3D surface of my desk is entirely dependent on the shape of my desk and of the objects on top of it, i.e. the things I'm really interested in).
But whether you call those groups "chunks" or "constituents" is a matter of terminology.

I don't think it's just terminology. There are many properties which chunks and constituents do not (cannot) share, the way these terms are normally used:

A surface sentence can be divided into constituents; it cannot be divided into chunks.
The meaning of an utterance can be divided into chunks; it cannot be divided into constituents.
Two constituents that look the same and behave the same in two different utterances are indistinguishable, and the task of (constituent-based) syntax is to produce a description of the kinds and behaviors of indistinguishable classes of constituenets
No two chunks are alike, because the episodic situation is part of every chunk and no two episodic situations are identical (by definition), and the task of morphosyntax is to correlate characteristics of chunks with characteristics of surface form and of the situation.

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