Polysemy in the era of constructions

Earlier studies of polysemy routinely associated meanings with invariant forms. The rise of constructional frameworks, on the other hand, has highlighted the need to refine the form-meanings association by recognizing that a given meaning may be linked to verbal or noun forms at a lower level than the lemma or to specific syntactic configurations and/or discourse contexts. In the present work, I take up this issue with respect to two sets of data from Greek, namely the polysemy of challenging ela and the multifunctionality of the grammatical marker pu. For both, corpus-based research strongly supports the need to associate the relevant meanings and functions with specific morpho-syntactic and prosodic forms and with specialized pragmatic features. In this respect, the work reported here highlights the appropriateness of constructions for representing meanings in polysemy networks

Indeterminacy in grammar and acquisition An interdisciplinary approach to relative clauses

The formalist definition of relative clauses as a clearly distinct construction with two syntactically linked clauses has been recently questioned by cross-linguistic evidence. It is here further undermined by a discussion of constructions in Modern Greek, which although deviating from the structural definition conform nonetheless to a semantic-pragmatic one. Above all, acquisition data is presented as independent support for a unified approach to relatives, which can be based on conceptual integration. Syntactically underspecified relatives are shown to appear as early as syntactically-driven ones, with those based on more transparent semantic linking of clauses preceding those based on pragmatic linking. This suggests early handling of the metonymic nature of grammar but also a growing cognitive ability for more indeterminate grammatical relationships

On the importance of lexical constructions: Accounting for the distribution and polysemy of a motion verb

One line of research in constructional analysis has supported (on occasion controversially – cf. Boas 2005; Goldberg & Jackendoff 2005) an upgraded role for lexical constructions headed by verbs, since verb senses are often associated with idiosyncratic properties that are not derivable from their interaction with grammatical constructions (e.g., Croft 2003; Boas 2008, 2013; Nemoto 2005). As per Boas (2013: 191), “individual verb senses should be regarded as mini-constructions with their own frame-semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic specifications whenever abstract meaningful constructions overgenerate”. Such approaches descriptively tally with a long line of earlier (e.g., Atkins 1987; Fillmore & Atkins 1992; Hanks 1996) and more recent work (e.g., Gries 2006; Berez & Gries 2008; Jansegers & Gries 2017; Hilpert 2008, 2016), which takes verbal polysemy as inhering in, and correlating with, all kinds of syntactic, morphological, and lexico-semantic features. In the present work, we provide further evidence for enriched lexical constructions and their indispensability in describing the polysemy of one of the basic motion verbs in Ancient Greek, the verb baínō, whose most general gloss is ‘go’, characterized as denoting self-propelled, goal-directed movement (Napoli 2006; Nikitina 2013). Drawing on the behavioral profile approach adopted in several of the works above, we retrieved all instances of the verb (total of 579 tokens) in three authors (Homer, Euripides, Plato), each representing a different genre and era (8th c. BCE–4th c. BCE). The data were extracted from the Perseus digital library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/; last access April 2017) and each occurrence was annotated manually for features like sentence type, subject animacy, syntactic (e.g., prepositional phrase, infinitive, participle, zero) and semantic (e.g., source, goal, path) type of complement, lexical fillers of the complement slot, transitivity (since baínō also has transitive uses), verb inflection (showing tense-aspect and person-number), word order (of verb and complement) and discourse type (e.g., narrative, direct speech, chorus – a parameter that does not feature in earlier works). We then created separate pivot tables that allow us to automatically sort and display the data in a multidimensional chart, and most importantly to extract significant patterns. Results clearly show that particular senses of baínō are attracted to particular morpho-syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic features. We suggest that such constellations should be analyzed as distinct lexical constructions, since the idiosyncratic features do not follow from more abstract grammatical constructions or from verbal semantics. We find, for instance, that particular senses may correlate exclusively with perfective aspect (e.g., the inchoative construction), or with a specific person-number inflection, or with a particular type of complement, or with very specific lexical fillers (as in the sense ‘mount’, which mainly co-occurs with the nouns naûs ‘ship’ and díphros ‘stool’), or with particular discourse contexts (in fact, some of these lexico-grammatical combinations seem to function as formulaic markers correlating with particular text-types and contexts). Importantly, more than one of these constraints (conventionalizations) may co-exist in the same sense, strongly arguing for enriched gestalts of morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features that are necessary for an adequate account of the verb’s polysemy and distribution. References Atkins, B. S. (1987). Semantic ID tags: Corpus evidence for dictionary senses. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, 17–36. Boas, H. C. (2005). Determining the productivity of resultative constructions: A reply to Goldberg and Jackendoff. Language, 81(2): 448–64. Boas, H. C. (2008). Determining the structure of lexical entries and grammatical constructions inConstruction Grammar. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6: 113–44. Boas, H. C. (2013). Cognitive Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. OUP. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0013 Berez, A. L., & Gries, S. Th. (2008). In defense of corpus-based methods: A behavioral profile analysis of polysemous get in English. Proceedings of the 24th NWLC, 3-4 May 2008, Seattle, WA. Croft, W. (2003). Lexical rules vs. constructions: A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven, & K.-U. Panther (eds.), Motivation in language: Studies in honour of Günter Radden, 49-68. John Benjamins. Fillmore, C., & Atkins, B. S. (1992). Towards a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In A. Lehrer & E. Kittay (eds.), Frames, fields and contrasts: New essays in semantics and lexical organization, 75-102. Laurens Erlbaum. Goldberg, A., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The end result(ative). Language, 81(2): 474-77. Gries, S. Th. (2006). Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of to run. In S. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics, 57-99. Mouton de Gruyter. Hanks, P. (1996). Contextual dependency and lexical sets. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1(1): 75–98. Hilpert, M. (2008). Germanic future constructions. A usage-based approach to language change. John Benjamins. Hilpert, M. (2016). Change in modal meanings. Another look at the shifting collocates of may. Constructions and Frames, 8(1): 66-85. Jansegers, M, & Gries, S. Th. (2017). Towards a dynamic behavioral profile: A diachronic study of polysemous sentir in Spanish. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic theory. DOI 10.1515/cllt-2016-0080. Napoli, M. (2006). Aspect and actionality in Homeric Greek: A contrastive analysis. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Nemoto, N. (2005). Verbal polysemy and frame semantics in Construction Grammar. In M. Fried & H. C. Boas (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Back to the roots, 118-36. John Benjamins. Nikitina, T. (2013). Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek. In J. Goschler & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Variation and change in the encoding of motion events, 185-202. John Benjamins