Elizabeth Closs Traugott u. Graeme Trousdale: Constructionalization and Constructional Changes.

Rezension zu: Elizabeth Closs Traugott u. Graeme Trousdale: Constructionalization and Constructional Changes, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 304 S

Towards a constructional approach to discourse-level phenomena : the case of the Spanish interpersonal epistemic stance construction

This study contributes to a better understanding of how constructional models can be applied to discourse-level phenomena, and constitute a valuable complementation to previous grammaticalization accounts of pragmatic markers. The case study that is presented concerns the recent development of the interpersonal epistemic stance construction in Spanish. The central argument is that the expanding use of sabes as a pragmatic marker can best be fully understood by taking into account the composite network of related expressions which Spanish speakers have at their disposal when performing a particular speech act. The diachronic analysis is documented with spoken corpus examples collected in recent decades, and is mainly informed by frequency data measuring the productivity, as well as formal properties of the construction and its instances

For a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar

This squib first sketches the state-of-the-art in diachronic construction grammar by tracing it back to two strands of research which it distinguishes as historical construction grammar and constructionist grammaticalization theory. It then differentiates between usage-based work in diachronic construction grammar that focuses on (frequency of) use and work that centres on knowledge. It is posited that, to arrive at truly (radically) usage-based models of change, one should separate individual knowledge, or internal systems/constructicons, from assumed-to-be-shared knowledge, or external systems/constructicons. Two usage-based models of constructional change, “Traugott/Trousdale” and “Fischer”, are assessed against this criterion. While the former explicitly distinguishes between individual and “community” knowledge, it is judged to confuse these by assigning a central role to reanalysis/neoanalysis. The latter model revolves around the role of analogy and is less confined to a semasiological account of the linear developments dictated by an external outlook.postprin

Diachronic construction grammar: A state of the art

This paper will offer a state-of-the-art survey of work in historical linguistics (mainly, but not exclusively, on English) that can be brought under the heading of “diachronic construction grammar”. As a new development in diachronic linguistics, this discipline name subsumes two big strands of research. One of these I will simply call the “construction grammar” strand. It consists of work by people who have come to diachronic construction grammar from synchronic construction grammar. The other major strand has its origin in grammaticalization theory and encompasses the research efforts of those working within grammaticalization theory who have relatively recently come to recognize that the most central theoretical concept of construction grammar is a highly relevant and useful one in the description of and theorizing about grammaticalization changes and who have now even started to use the term “constructionalization” in lieu of “grammaticalization”, distinguishing between “grammatical constructionalization” and “lexical constructionalization”. The main difference between both strands is that while the grammaticalization strand is concerned with the question of how languages acquire constructions, first and foremost lexically-specified ones, this is not necessarily the case in the construction grammar strand. Three sub-strands of the latter will be distinguished. A first sub-strand consists of work by Goldbergian construction grammarians who consider particular argument structure constructions from a historical perspective. Another thread of research is work on “constructional attrition”. The third area of investigation appeals to language contact and borrowing to explain the presence of a construction in the constructicon of a language. Returning to the grammaticalization strand of diachronic construction grammar the paper will also address the question of what the conditions are for work on grammaticalization to be considered part of diachronic construction grammar.postprin

Entrenchment inhibition:Constructional change and repetitive behaviour can be in competition with large-scale “recompositional” creativity

This paper addresses creativity as inhibition of repetitive behaviour. We argue that entrenchment and constructional change can be in competition with large-scale creative attempts of recomposition of constructions’ internal constituency. After undergoing chunking, the recurrent usage of a construction may be significantly counterbalanced with new attempts of entrenchment inhibition (viz. inhibition of entrenchment). These are cases where speakers opt for more compositional and less predictable ways to express a similar meaning of a conventionalised form. We focus on the constructionalisation of noun–participle compounds (e.g. snow-covered) in the Historical Corpus of American English. During the second part of the twentieth century, speakers increasingly inhibit the usage of conventionalised noun phrase–past participle forms in favour of more compositional strategies involving the same internal constituents. This entails that constructional change not only affects the meaning of the chunk that undergoes constructionalisation but also the way speakers creatively rediscover its internal constituency. These results additionally aim to inform research in cognitive architectures and artificial intelligence, where creativity is often merely considered as a problem-solving mechanism rather than a potential process of inhibition of automatised behaviour

From Physical Motion to ‘Come and Go’: A Spoken Corpus Based Analysis of Kata ‘go’-specific Constructions in Korean

I analyze one of the motion verbs in Korean, kata ‘go,’ and its argument structure constructions. The verb shows an extremely high token frequency and its argument structure constructions have been subject to a great degree of variation in terms of its emergent semantics and syntax. However, there have been recurring issues across the previous studies. First, there is the problem of the so-called “written language bias in linguistics” (Linell, 1982), such that most studies on kata have drawn upon mostly invented sentences or written language data. Secondly, previous studies on kata have focused on the verb itself and have made few efforts on examining the construal of kata as it relates to the argument structure constructions in which the verb appears. Considering what has been pointed out so far, on the basis of contemporary Korean spoken data extracted from Sejong Corpus, the current study aims to establish argument structure constructions focusing on the specification of components, i.e. the subject, the oblique phrase containing the suffix, and kata. Argument structure constructions where kata appears and their components are fully specified are called kata-specific constructions. The objective of this study is to outline the alternations of the argument structure constructions in the physical motion domain, and how and to what extent they are inherited by other semantic domains in accordance with semantic extensions. All the semantic domains are argued to be metaphorically or via constructionalization extended from the physical domain. Further, I aim to examine whether the Principle of Maximized Motivation works or not by virtue of two types of cluster analysis. The first one based on binary coding showed that the metaphorical extension and constructionalization starting from the physical motion domain is not limited to the semantic side, but it also influences how and to what extent the allowed argument structure constructions in the physical motion domain are inherited by other semantic domains. This advocates the Principle of Maximized Motivation. However, the second cluster analysis based on relative frequency showed that abstract motion inherits frequency patterns concerning alternations of argument structure constructions from physical motion to the strongest degree, which weakens the principle