Schema Theory as a Construction Grammar

Abstract

Construction grammar, recently described as “the fastest growing linguistic and interdisciplinary approach to language” (Goldberg 2013, 30) has its foundations in the psychology of human categorization and other general cognitive abilities. So does schema theory in music. In the first extended comparison of these research programs, we present six central principles of construction grammar and demonstrate their relevance and applicability to schema-theoretic studies of music: 1) grammatical constructions, 2) surface structure, 3) a network of constructions, 4) cross-linguistic variability and generalization, 5) usage-based knowledge, and 6) exemplar models. Because studies in child development have played such an important role in changing how scholars view language acquisition and grammar formation (Tomasello 2003) we have chosen to illustrate many of the arguments with musical examples drawn from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatories. An orphan at one of the eighteenth-century conservatories in Naples, the prodigy Henri Fissot at the Paris Conservatory in the 1850s, and the young Rachmaninoff at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1890s all learned the art of composition through the age-old practice of child apprenticeship. From the musical utterances made by these apprentices in response to exercises and contests one can infer much about the grammar being acquired. Extensive musical examples suggest that construction grammar can provide a model for how a large repertory of learned patterns of varying dimensions can collectively function as a flexible and adaptive music grammar.

Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process?

“…Ultimately, this case underlines the need for a theory of the musical surface. (For a recent discussion of the role of the musical surface in connection with theories of construction grammar, see Gjerdingen & Bourne, 2015. ) [20] A small group of instances corresponding to the Tamino non-literal prototype pose a special problem, being in a different key from that of the containing movement.…”

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music

“…For communicativists, such as Pinker (1997), much of the mind is naturally and innately pre-formed (top-down, deductively, a priori) at birth by natural selection, so memes, if they are implicated at all in cognition, do not do the heavy lifting; rather, they act merely as epiphenomena of more fundamental processes. Seen in these terms, cognitivism intersects partly with "constructionist" approaches to language, which assert that "[g]rammar does not involve any [innate] transformational or derivational component"; rather, "learned [memetic] pairings of form [lexemic sound-pattern] and function [meaning/concept]" constitute structures "in a network in which nodes are related by inheritance links" and in which "[s]emantics is associated directly with surface form" (Goldberg, 2013, p. 15; see also Goldberg, 2003;Boas & Sag, 2012;Gjerdingen & Bourne, 2015).…”

Developing Musical Imagery

“…Return to text 32. Some approaches already emphasize this type of learning, such as eighteenth-century schema theory-based methods, which draw analogies between the learning of meaningful musical pa erns and linguistic collocations (see Gjerdingen and Bourne 2015;Sánchez-Kisielewska, 2017). Similarly, there may indeed be a desirable level of difficulty for efficient encoding, meaning that the task should not be easy (e.g., just listening), or else encoding might not occur.…”