Transcript Construction Grammar

35 years of Cognitive Linguistics
Session 9: Construction Grammar
Martin Hilpert
your questions
• Some constructions are very abstract, some
are very specific. Can we call all of these
constructions IDIOMATIC? If not, where does
idiomaticity start and where does it end?
• Where do we draw the line between
constructions and constructs? Do some
constructs change into constructions?
• Is coercion involved in the formation of
neologisms?
• Example: sauce (n.) -> sauced (v.)
• Could Construction Grammar explain why it is
easier to acquire a language than to learn it?
• How does the dictionary and grammar model
defend its position against the arguments of
construction grammar?
• Are Construction Grammar and Generative
Grammar really that different?
• How many constructions are there in English?
• Are there Construction Grammar approaches
to historical linguistics?
• How are corpora used in the detection and
identification of constructions?
Construction Grammar
What do speakers know when they
know a language?
What speakers have to know:
• must know words
– dog, submarine, probably, you, should, etc.
– what they mean, how they sound
• must know that there are different kinds of words
– red is an adjective, tasty is an adjective as well, lobster is a noun, etc.
• must know how to put words together
– red can be combined with ball
– many cannot be combined with milk
– John saw Mary is ok, John Mary saw is not, but It’s John Mary saw is ok
• must be able to put the right endings on words
– John walk-s, two dog-s
• must be able to understand newly coined words
– festive-ness, under-whelm
• must know that sometimes more is meant than is said
– General Motors were able to increase production in the second quarter.
– I don’t know if that is a good idea.
• must know idiomatic expressions
– I'm all ears, let’s take a break, we really hit it off, …
The dictionary-and-grammar model
The totality of our knowledge of language is captured
by a network of constructions: a ‘construct-i-con.’
Goldberg 2003: 219
[…] the network of constructions captures our
grammatical knowledge of language in toto, i.e.
it’s constructions all the way down.
Goldberg 2006: 18
Constructions
•
•
•
•
•
words: cat, philosophy, sparkling, run, ...
collocations: I don’t know, you bet, see you, ...
semi-fixed phrases: keep V-ing, could you please VP
syntactic patterns: SUBJ BE V-ed, SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2
abstract phrase structures: PREP DET NOUN
• Speakers’ knowledge of language = an associative
network that connects all of these constructions
argument structure constructions
Goldberg 1995
• sentence patterns that involve a
verb and several nominal structures
• idea: these patterns have meaning
• their meanings reflect basic
recurrent types of everyday
experience
argument structure
• also called valency
yawn
send
Valency defined
• The set of participants is called the verb’s
valency.
– devour has a valency of two (transitive)
– hand has a valency of three (ditransitive)
– exist has a valency of one (intransitive)
• The participants are called the arguments of the
verb.
Traditional idea of valency
• It’s in the lexicon!
• Each verb is listed in the mental
lexicon.
• In the entry it is specifies with what
syntactic contexts the verb can
occur.
– SWEEP
•
•
•
•
intransitive
transitive
transitive plus resultant state adjective
transitive plus path
problems with lexically specified valency
• speakers use verbs ‘creatively’, in syntactic
contexts in which they have not heard a verb
before:
– John played the piano to pieces.
– He pulled himself free, one leg at a time.
– No matter how carefully you lick a spoon clean, some
goo will cling to it.
• Are there entries such as the following?
– ‘play: acting on an object in a violent manner that
triggers a change of state in that object’
alternative explanation
• The syntactic context dictates a certain
interpretation of the verb.
• coercion:
– If a lexical item is semantically incompatible with
its morphosyntactic context, the meaning of the
lexical item conforms to the meaning of the
structure in which it is embedded.
• John plays the piano.
• John plays the piano to pieces.
coercion at work
• intransitive verbs: run, sneeze, worry
• resultative uses:
– John ran his feet sore.
– Fred sneezed his cat soaking wet.
– Bob’s mother worried herself sick.
the ditransitive construction
SUBJ
V
OBJ1
OBJ2
the ditransitive construction
• central sense of the construction:
– transfer of an object between a volitional agent
and a willing recipient:
• John gave Mary a book
– several other senses
• John denied Mary a cookie (blocked transfer)
• John bequeathed Mary a gold watch (future transfer)
– several metaphorical meaning extensions:
• John gave Mary a kiss.
• John gave Mary an idea.
Why call this a construction?
• C is a CONSTRUCTION iffdef C is a form-meaning
pair <Fi, Si> such that some aspect of Fi or some
aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C’s
component parts or from other previously
established constructions. (Goldberg 1995: 4)
• John baked Mary a cake.
– Not predictable from the individual word meanings?
‘implausible’ verb senses
• John baked Mary a cake.
– bake: intend to cause someone else to receive the
product of applying hot air to an edible substance
• John sneezed the napkin off the table.
– sneeze: move something by means of exhaling in a
burst from the nose
• John talked himself blue in the face.
– talk: cause someone to become X by means of
uttering words
positing constructional meaning
instead of ad-hoc verb senses
DITRANSITIVE CX:
MEANING = TRANSFER
BAKE:
MEANING = APPLY HOT AIR
SUBJ
John
V
baked
OBJ1
Mary
OBJ2
a cake
Semantics of the ditransitive
• a volitional agent – the agent needs to carry out the
transfer willingly
– John kicked Mary the soccer ball.
– John threw the squirrels some peanuts.
– John painted Mary a picture.
• troublesome data
– John gave me the flu.
– The medicine brought me relief.
explanation: CAUSES ARE TRANSFERS
• Situations of cause and effect are understood
metaphorically as situations in which the
cause ‘brings’ the effect to a recipient:
– The report furnished them with all the
information they needed.
– The new legislation brought new controversies.
– The accident presented us with a large number of
injured workers.
– Nothing good ever came from smoking.
Semantics of the ditransitive
• a willing recipient – the recipient needs to accept the
transfer willingly
–
–
–
–
John kicked Mary the soccer ball.
John threw the squirrels some peanuts.
* John burned Mary some rice.
* John threw the unconscious patient a blanket.
• troublesome data
– John gave me the flu.
– The tabasco sauce gave the dish a spicy flavor.
– Again, explanation is the CAUSES ARE TRANSFERS metaphor
further metaphorical extensions
• the conduit metaphor (COMMUNICATION IS
TRANSFER OF INFORMATION)
– John told Mary a joke.
– John gave Mary his thoughts on the subject.
• DIRECTED ACTIONS ARE TRANSFERRED
OBJECTS
– John gave Mary a wink.
– Mary gave John a kick.
further metaphorical extensions
• FACTS ARE GIVEN OBJECTS
– I’ll give you that assumption
– I’ll grant you that much of your argument
• BENEFICIAL ACTIONS ARE TRANSFERRED
OBJECTS
– John offered Mary a ride to the airport
– John owes me many favors
Constructions = meaningful
symbolic units
meaningful units
• Clear for words and idioms
– spill the beans
• Some analysis reveals non-compositional
meanings of argument structure
constructions.
– SUBJ VERB OBJ1 OBJ2
• But very general syntactic patterns such as the
plan for a noun phrase?
– DET ADJ NOUN
Do all syntactic forms carry meaning?
meaningful constructions?
•
•
•
•
John sings.
Bob heard a noise.
One sock lay on the sofa, the other one under it.
*One sock lay on the sofa, the other one under.
Do all constructions carry meaning?
No, there are semantically
empty constructions!
All constructions carry meaning.
meaningless constructions
1. formal generalizations with fully
compositional meanings
– SUBJECT-PREDICATE CX (John sings)
– MODIFIER-HEAD CX (red ball, completely full)
meaningless constructions
2. formal generalizations associated with a
heterogeneous set of meanings
– SUBJECT-AUX INVERSION
• Will you come to the party?
• Had I known this, I would have stayed at home.
• Am I ever hungry!
– FILLER-GAP CXNS
•
•
•
•
What kind of sandwich did you eat?
How many sandwiches he ate!
I couldn’t count all the sandwiches that he ate.
The more sandwiches you eat, the hungrier you get.
meaningless constructions
3. ellipsis constructions
– GAPPING
•
One sock lay on the sofa, the other one under it.
– STRIPPING
•
John washed the dishes, and the silverware, too.
– SHARED COMPLETION
•
The South remains distinct from and independent of
the North.
If we would like to maintain that
linguistic knowlege is knowledge of
symbolic units, what do we do?
two ways out?
• There are two ways in which this issue can be
approached […]: by a prototype analysis that
takes one [meaning, MH] as basic and finds a
principled way of accounting for all other
[meanings] as extensions from this basic
prototype; or by a schematic analysis that
finds an abstract characterization.
Stefanowitsch (2003: 420)
solution 1: a prototype approach
Goldberg 2006: 177
Why would you do that?
Never would I leave you.
May he burn in hell!
Would you do that?
Does this hurt!
Neither would I.
So would I.
Had I known this…
He has read more articles than have his classmates.
solution 2: a schematic approach
Langacker 1991: 156
The construct-i-con:
a network of interlinked constructions
the construct-i-con
• a large inventory of form-meaning pairs,
representing speakers’ knowledge of language
• important addendum
– no chaotic ‘bag of constructions’, but instead:
– hierarchically structured
– links between constructions
• In what ways can constructions be linked?
inheritance
• relation between more abstract constructions
and more concrete constructions
• complete inheritance: lower-level construction do
not redundantly represent information that is
inherited
• full entry: low-level constructions have ‘rich’
representations
formal inheritance
• in prison, at school, on vacation, under water
• the PREP - BARE NOUN construction inherits the linear
order of P and N from the prepositional phrase
construction
• PP Cxn: PREP NOMINAL
• the PREP - BARE NOUN construction has idiosyncratic
constraints that are not inherited from the PP Cxn:
– PP Cxn: on a sunny day
– Prep – bare noun cxn: *on sunny vacation
meaning inheritance
•
•
•
•
The time he takes!
The amount of plastic waste!
>> the Metonymic NP construction
NP refers to an extreme point on a scale
• This meaning is inherited by NPs in more
specialized constructions, for instance in the NPcomplement exclamative cxn:
– I can’t believe the time he takes!
– It’s ridiculous the amount of plastic waste!
Kinds of inheritance links
kinds of inheritance links
•
•
•
•
instantiation links
polysemy links
metaphor links
subpart links
instance links
instance links (X IS A Y - relationship)
VEHICLE
TRAIN
SEDAN
CAR
SPORTS CAR
BUS
BIKE
PLANE
CONVERTIBLE JEEP
PICKUP
instance links (X IS A Y - relationship)
Verb Phrase
intransitive
spill the beans
transitive
ditransitive
face the music
give a hoot
polysemy links
polysemy links
• polysemy = one form mapping onto several,
conceptually related meanings
• Polysemy in the ditransitive construction
– John gave Mary the book.
– The doctor allowed me a full meal.
– I promise you a rose garden.
– They denied Bob tenure.
intended transfer
future transfer
actual transfer
enabled transfer
blocked transfer
polysemy links
• The s-genitive construction
•
•
•
•
•
•
John’s book
John’s office
John’s train
the country’s president
yesterday’s events
inflation’s consequences
metaphor links
metaphor links
• the caused motion construction
– John kicked the ball over the fence.
• the resultative construction
– Anne tied her hair into a bun.
• Same syntactic form
• Metaphor accounts for the link between the
respective meanings
– STATES ARE LOCATIONS
metaphor links
• You must be home by ten!
• You must be David’s brother!
• You may now kiss the bride!
• He may have escaped through the window.
• I can’t open the door.
• That can’t possibly be true.
subpart links
subpart links
• relate cxns with either semantic or formal
overlap
• do not classify cxns as instances of one
another
• John wrote
a letter.
• John wrote Mary a letter.
subpart links
• VP: take the train
• NP: the train
• N: train
syntactic amalgams
• John invited you’ll never guess how many
people to the party.
syntactic amalgams
• John invited you’ll never guess how many
people to the party.
• You’ll never guess how many people John
invited to the party.
• John invited very many people to the party.
syntactic amalgams
• The Smiths felt it was an important enough
song to put it on their single.
• It was an important
song.
• It was
important enough
to put it on their single.
• attributive adjective cxn:
– an important song, a red ball
• enough-to-infinitive cxn:
– old enough to know better, sick enough to stay at home
syntactic amalgams
• It’s unbelievable what he can do with the
piano!
• The things he can do with the piano!
• It’s unbelievable the things he can do with the
piano!
it-extraposition
bare complement question
It BE PREDICATE THAT-CLAUSE
SUBJ VCOMP WH-INTERROGATIVE
extraposed exclamative construction
metonymy construction
It BE PREDICATE WH-INTERROGATIVE
NP (scalar interpretation)
nominal extraposition
It BE PREDICATE NP (scalar interpretation)
multiple inheritance
normal syntax in CxG
noun phrases
•
•
•
•
•
milk
an old donkey
the big one with the two horns
all my personal belongings
my friend Amy, who recently moved to Italy
cxns vs. phrase structure rules
• NP PS rule:
– blueprint for putting together noun phrases
– presupposes part-of-speech categories
• NP Cxn
– generalization over different nominal cxns
– emerges from speakers’ perceiving similarities across
those nominal cxns
– >> parts-of-speech are not basic, they are the result of
a process of abstraction!
Croft (2001) on syntactic categories
• « No schematic syntactic category is ever an
independent unit of grammatical
representation. »
• SUBJECT is an abstraction over the agentive
roles that occur in the transitive construction,
the ditransitive construction, and in other
clausal constructions. Speakers do not
necessarily perceive these as the same.
POS categories do not exhibit uniform
behavior
• NP >> DET ADJ N
– works fine for red, hot, big, complicated, etc.
– * the awake child
– * the ready food
– * the on computer
– * the fond of children lady
summing up
Construction Grammar
• speakers’ knowledge of language = an associative
network of constructions
• constructions carry meaning and can change the
meaning of lexical elements
• the more schematic the form of a construction, the
more abstract and polysemous its meaning
• constructions are linked through instance links,
polysemy links, metaphor links, and subpart links
• constructions are the basis for part-of-speech
categories and phrase structure rules
See you next time!
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