Petar Milin

This special issue of Cognitive Linguistics reexamines the notions of uniformity and variability within morphological systems from a cognitive linguistic standpoint. It challenges traditional perspectives that regard morphological variability as mere deviations from the norm, suggesting instead that such variability is systematic and shaped by external influences including language acquisition and processing constraints. The contributions in this issue promote a shift from isolated analysis to a holistic view of paradigms, classes, and systems, advocating for a framework where morphological structures are seen as integral to communicative and functional aspects of language. By accounting for the broad adaptive dynamics of language systems, the complex interplay between uniformity and variability is revealed as an inherent aspect of language usage.

In cognitive linguistics, grammatical structure is known to be representative of meaning. This is also true of English articles. In this paper, we argue that the choice of article, when the grammar allows it, is dependent on the wider discourse context and most importantly on how the speaker construes this context. Using survey data from 181 native speakers of English, we show that the choice of article depends on the activation of semantic frames and how speakers may choose to highlight different elements of a frame to construe the situation differently. We rely on Entropy to measure the restrictiveness of a context and to identify particular contexts in which choice is allowed or inhibited. We find that some contextual features such as the specificity of the referent are more restrictive while Hearer Knowledge is more open to construal.