Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar PDF Author: Florent Perek
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268754
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The argument structure of verbs, defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses, is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective, taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use, and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments, it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs, constructions, and argument structure alternations.

Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar PDF Author: Florent Perek
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268754
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The argument structure of verbs, defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses, is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective, taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use, and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments, it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs, constructions, and argument structure alternations.

Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics PDF Author: Ewa Dabrowska
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393808
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : de
Pages : 650

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Book Description
Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on the assumptions that our linguistic abilities are firmly rooted in our cognitive abilities, that meaning is essentially conceptualization, and that grammar is shaped by usage. The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides state-of-the-art overviews of the numerous subfields of cognitive linguistics written by leading international experts which will be useful for established researchers and novices alike. It is an interdisciplinary project with contributions from linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, and computer scientists which will emphasise the most recent developments in the field, in particular, the shift towards more empirically-based research. In this way, it will, we hope, help to shape the field, encouraging methodologically more rigorous research which incorporates insights from all the cognitive sciences. Editor Ewa Dąbrowska was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship 2018.

Constructions

Constructions PDF Author: Adele E. Goldberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226300862
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence. Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations. Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.

A lexicalist account of argument structure

A lexicalist account of argument structure PDF Author:
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101213
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
There are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations. While the authors suggest a lexical treatment of many phenomena and only assume phrasal constructions for selected phenomena like benefactive and resultative constructions in English, it can be shown that even these two constructions should not be treated phrasally in English and that the analysis would not extend to other languages as for instance German. I show that the new formal tools do not really improve the situation and many of the basic conceptual problems remain. Since this specific proposal fails for two constructions, it follows that proposals (in the same framework) that assume phrasal analyses for all constructions are not appropriate either. The conclusion is that lexical models are needed and this entails that the schemata that combine syntactic objects are rather abstract (as in Categorial Grammar, Minimalism, HPSG and standard LFG). On the other hand there are constructions that should be treated by very specific, phrasal schemata as in Construction Grammar and LFG and HPSG. So the conclusion is that both schools are right (and wrong) and that a combination of ideas from both camps is needed.

Corpus-based Approaches to Construction Grammar

Corpus-based Approaches to Construction Grammar PDF Author: Jiyoung Yoon
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266603
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories, but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch, old English, Italian, and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches, some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots, and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.

Constructions at Work

Constructions at Work PDF Author: Adele E. Goldberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199268511
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Includes selected classic and contemporary papers in four areas, this text introduces each field, providing technical background for the non-specialist and explaining the underlying connections across the disciplines.

Productivity

Productivity PDF Author: Jóhanna Barðdal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289670
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Productivity of argument structure constructions is a new emerging field within cognitive-functional linguistics. The term productivity as used in linguistic research contains at least three subconcepts: ‘extensibility’, ‘regularity’, and ‘generality’. The focus in this study of case and argument structure constructions in Icelandic is on the concept of extensibility, while generality and regularity are regarded as derivative of extensibility. Productivity is considered to be a function of type frequency, semantic coherence, and the inverse correlation between these two. This study establishes productivity as an emergent feature of the grammatical system, in an analysis that is grounded in a usage-based constructional approach, where constructions are organized into lexicality-schematicity hierarchies. The view of syntactic productivity advocated here offers a unified account of productivity, in that it captures different degrees of productivity, ranging from highly productive patterns through various intermediate degrees of productivity to low-level analogical extensions.

Construction Grammar and its Application to English

Construction Grammar and its Application to English PDF Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748675868
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Construction Grammar explains how knowledge of language is organized in speakers' minds. The central and radical claim of Construction Grammar is that linguistic knowledge can be fully described as knowledge of constructions, which are defined as symbolic units that connect a linguistic form with meaning.

The Grammar Network

The Grammar Network PDF Author: Holger Diessel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498817
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Provides a dynamic network model of grammar that explains how linguistic structure is shaped by language use.

A Constructional Account of Verb-Forming Suffixation

A Constructional Account of Verb-Forming Suffixation PDF Author: Jacqueline Laws
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027249474
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate, - en, - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective, the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint, the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions, and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives, from a constructional perspective.