English: LINGUISTICS

It has often been remarked that English prepositional phrases elude a simple object/complement vs. adverbial/adjunct classification. Quirk et al. e.g. suggest that it is necessary "to think of the boundaries of these categories as a scale" (1985: 1166) and Biber et al. admit that "[i]n practice it is hard to make an absolute distinction between free combinations and fixed multi-verb verbs" (1999: 403). In the following I will outline a construction-based account of English prepositional phrases which allows a precise formalisation of the various types of PPs, treating them as constructions with varying degrees of schematicity. As I will show, this construction account allows for a straightforward accounting of various, preposition-specific phenomena (do-so ellipsis, prepositional passives. preposition stranding)

A pre-publication draft of this paper can be downloaded from this site.

This paper is a first attempt at a linguistic description of the variety of English spoken by the whites in Kenya, which will be referred to as White Kenyan English (WhKE). In the following I will first give an introduction to the sociolinguistic history and current status of the variety. Since WhKE is clearly a Postcolonial English, I will frame my analysis in terms of
Schneider’s (2007) dynamic model, which has explicitly been designed for such varieties and has already been applied to Black Kenyan English (BlKE; Schneider 2007: 189-197). In
addition to this, I will explore the role of dialect contact in the emergence of WhKE by drawing on Trudgill’s (2004) model of new-dialect formation. Finally I will present an acoustic phonetic analysis of the vowel system of WhKE. The data for this analysis consists of four adults and 18 children reading an extended version of the IPA’s The North Wind and the Sun passage and was collected during a field trip to Kenya in September, 2006. Due to the limited nature of the data base, the analysis will focus on the variety’s monophthong set. This, of course, can only be considered a first pilot study on WhKE, but like all other contributions in this volume it is hoped that it will at least help to elevate the status of the variety from a lesser- to a slightly-better-known one.

Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

Recently, an increasing number of linguists have shown that both introspection and corpus data can yield interesting and valid results, if collected and interpreted via rigorous scientific methods (cf. e.g. Bard et al. 1996; Fillmore 1992; Schütze 1996). Yet, when investigating a particular syntactic phenomenon, many linguists still only draw on either
corpus or introspection data (notable exceptions can be found in Kepser and Reis 2005 and the present volume). In this article I will illustrate how an approach which treats the two data sources as corroborating empirical evidence allows a far more detailed analysis of a well-known grammatical phenomenon than would have been possible with a single data source.

Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

Whereas some scholars have tried to show that preposition pied piping is virtually obligatory with WH-relativizers in standard present-day British English relative clauses (RCs), others have stressed that preposition pied piping and stranding are both viable options. Researchers who assume a choice between the two options claim that factors such as the syntactic function of the prepositional phrase (PP) or the level of formality restrict the stranding-pied piping alternation. To test the actual influence of the various proposed factors, a GOLDVARB analysis was carried out on data extracted from the British Component of the International Corpus of English. As the results show, pied piping is by far the more frequent variant in written and spoken English, but the syntactic function of the PP, the level of formality, the type of phrase in which the PP is contained, and the restrictiveness of the entire RC have significant effects on the placement of the preposition.


A pre-publication draft of this paper can be downloaded from this site.

While McEnery and Wilson (1996: 16) argue for a combination of introspection and corpus data, many linguists still only draw on either of the two data sources. In this article I will show that treating the two types of data as corroborating evidence allows a far more detailed analysis of the categorical and variable constraints governing syntactic variation than the two types of data would have allowed individually. To illustrate this point, I will present the results of a case study on preposition placement in English relative clauses which combines a statistical corpus analysis and a magnitude estimation grammaticality judgement experiment.

A pre-publication draft of this paper can be downloaded from this site.

As psychophysical experiments have shown, human beings are not really good at making absolute judgements, e.g. saying whether a line is 10 or 15 cm long. Instead, in Magnitude Estimation studies subjects are asked to judge stimuli relatively to a reference item. Thus subjects judge whether a given line is longer or shorter than a reference line and try to express this difference in numerical terms (saying e.g. that a stimulus is half as long as the reference line). Since such relative judgements seem easier for humans to make, this approach allows gathering far more reliable results. Recently, several studies (e.g. Bard et al. 1996; Featherston 2004, 2005, Keller 2000; Keller and Alexopoulou 2005) have applied this methodology to sentence judgement experiments. Thus they asked subjects to give numerical judgement on sentences proportional to a constant reference sentence. The results from these Magnitude Estimation studies indicate that eliciting linguistic judgements via this method allows "reliable and fine-grained measurements of linguistic intuitions" (Keller and Alexopoulou 2005: 1120).
In this chapter I will illustrate how Magnitude Estimation can be used by investigating a complex syntactic phenomenon such as preposition placement in English relative clauses (cf. Hoffmann 2006).

As I will show, carefully constructed Magnitude Estimation experiments can help to distinguish semantic from syntactic violations, separate more prototypical grammatical constructions from less prototypical ones and uncover significant differences between L1 first- (British English) and L2 foreign-language (the English of advanced German learners) varieties.

Please find a pre-publication draft of the paper below.

The aim of the present chapter is to focus on the most complex and schematic end of the constructicon cline. In particular, I will look at Abstract Clausal (declarative, interrogative, imperative and relative clauses; cf. section 1) and various Filler-Gap constructions (such as topicalised clauses, e.g. [My bagels]_i, she loves_i, or wh-interrogatives, e.g. [What (books)]_i do they love_i?, in which a constituent (here [My bagels]_i and [What (books)]_i) appears in a nonargument position; cf. section 3). Moreover, I will show how in English the Filler-Gap construction interacts with preposition stranding (Who did she talk to?) and pied-piping (To whom did she talk?; cf. section 3.1), and how the complexities of the English relative clause constructions can be accounted for (section 3.2). On top of that, I will also illustrate how intonation can be an integral form feature of constructions (e.g. the English Comparative Correlative construction The X-er the Y-er; cf. section 3.3). Besides, contrary to the prejudice that Construction Grammar only focuses on peripheral and idiosyncratic exceptions, throughout the chapter, I will not only show that constructionist approaches can describe and model the most abstract and schematic of syntactic structures, but that such analyses also further our understanding of the phenomena in question.

Please find a pre-publication draft of the chapter below.

This is the introductory chapter to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar.

As the present volume will show, Constructionist Grammar approaches provide a uniform analysis of more idiosyncratic ‘peripheral’ as well as ‘core’ linguistic features. They achieve this without recourse to transformations/derivations or the employment of empty elements. Instead, the mental grammar of speakers is claimed to consist of a network of schematic and substantive constructions (‘constructicon’) and it is the parallel activation of constructions that underlies a set of particular utterances (‘constructs’). This view of grammar as a mental network of constructions has recently received great empirical support by independent research on first and second language acquisition (see Diessel, this volume and Ellis, this volume, respectively), psycho- (see Bencini, this volume) as well neurolinguistics (see Pulvermüller, Shtyrov, Cappelle, this volume). Moreover, constructional approaches have also provided important new insight into the diachronic evolution of languages (see Fried, this volume; Barðdal, this volume; Hilpert, this volume) as well as sociolinguistic (see Hollmann, this volume) and dialectal and discourse variation (see Östman and Trousdale, this volume).

Since Constructionist Grammar offers a psychologically-plausible, generative theory of human language, it has spawned a large body of constructionist research. The present handbook now provides the first authoritative overview of the theory, its applications as well as the various constructionist approaches. Each chapter is written by one of the leading researchers in the field and the book therefore offers the reader the most exhaustive overview of Construction Grammar presently available.

Please find below a pre-publication draft of the chapter.


Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

All human languages are characterised by inherent synchronic variability (Hudson, Cognitive Linguistics 8: 73–108, 1997, English Language and Linguistics 11: 383–405, 2007a) and are subject to change over time. Consequently, due to this central role of variation and change, any explanatorily adequate cognitive theory of language should aim to account for both of these phenomena. The present special issue explores how usage-based Construction Grammars can address issues of linguistic variation and change. In particular, focusing on English, we will show how constructionist approaches provide new insights for the study of variation and change in the English language as well as how data from English can help to refine construction grammar theories. This introduction will give a short overview of aspects of constructionist approaches to language which are of relevance to the modelling of linguistic variation and change. In addition to our discussion of the modelling of synchronic and diachronic variation in construction grammar, we provide an overview of the topics addressed by the seven articles in this special issue.

Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

While acoustic phonetic studies have been carried out on all types of Englishes around the world, the second language variety spoken in Kenya has so far not been investigated acoustically. The present paper closes this gap by presenting an acoustic phonetic analysis of acrolectal Kenyan English. The data presented here consist of nine male speakers of acrolectal Kenyan English reading the “The North Wind and the Sun“-passage and were analysed using PRAAT (Boersma 2001; Boersma and Weenink 2008). As I will show, a careful visual and statistical analysis of the data unearthes several features of the Kenyan English vowel system that so far have gone unnoticed (e.g. a trend towards a seven vowel system with two front and two back mid vowels). Furthermore I will argue that some of these features can be traced back to the local L1 feature pool.


Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

Recently, the idea that all grammatical, including syntactic, knowledge, is stored mentally as constructions has become immensely popular (cf. e.g. Fillmore & Kay 1996; Croft 2001; Goldberg 2003). In this article, I demonstrate how the analysis of various sources of empirical data can offer important insights into the mental organization of the linguistic knowledge of a speaker of English, concerning the number as well as the internal structure of constructions.

Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

As Geoffrey Sampson points out in his target article “Grammar Without Grammaticality”, a key concept of modern linguistics is the distinction of “good”, a. k. a. grammatical, and “bad”, a. k. a. ungrammatical, sentences. As such most linguists seem to subscribe to what I shall call the “Sheryl Crow view”, i. e., that grammaticality is a question of yes-or-no. Sampson, on the other hand, appears to take a more Hamlet-like approach in suggesting that “the concept of ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘ill-formed’ word sequences is a delusion” (p. 1). Instead he basically divides sentences into the “set of sequences which feel familiar to a speaker, and the set of sequences which are unfamiliar” (p. 11), with the latter including “sequences destined never to have a use, and those which will in due course be useful” (p. 11). In order to provide an adequate description of the set of familiar and unfamiliar sentences of a language, Sampson furthermore argues that linguists should only draw on corpus data, and not native speaker introspection.

Please find below a pre-publication draft of the paper.

As we show in this paper, football chants can be analysed as constructions, i.e. arbitrary form-meaning pairings. Beyond that, however, we also argue that they exhibit many physical as well as social contextual usage constraints that are also of great importance for usage-based Construction Grammar analyses in general.

[Please note that despite focussing on English chants, this paper is currently available in German only. An extended English version will follow later this year.]

Gebrauchsbasierte Ansätze innerhalb der Konstruktionsgrammatik betonen stets die detaillierten mentalen Repräsentationen, die aus der Begegnung mit natürlichsprachlichen Stimuli entstehen. Obwohl die Soziolinguistik immer wieder die zentrale Rolle sozialer und physischer Kontextfaktoren in konkreten Sprechsituationen hervorgehoben hat, glauben wir, dass diesen in der gebrauchsbasierten Konstruktionsgrammatik bisher nicht genug Beachtung geschenkt wurde. In diesem Artikel werden wir zum einen zeigen, dass Fußballgesänge gewinnbringend als linguistische Konstruktionen analysiert werden können. Zum anderen werden wir aber auch argumentieren, dass integrale Bestandteile dieser Fußballgesangkonstruktionen, i.e. ihre sozialen und kontextuellen Gebrauchsbedingungen, auch von entscheidender Bedeutung für die Analyse anderer Konstruktionen sind. Aus diesem Grund plädieren wir für eine stärkere Betonung dieser Aspekte in zukünftigen gebrauchsbasierten Analysen.

Comparative Correlative (CC) constructions ([the [ ]comparative phrase1 (clause)]C1 [the [ ]comparative phrase2 (clause)]C2, e.g. The higher the price is, the more interesting the product is.) are part of the family of filler-gap constructions (cf. Sag 2010). Yet, they also exhibit a number of unique, idiosyncratic properties (cf. e.g. Fillmore et al. O’Connor 1988; McCawley 1988; Culicover and Jackendoff 1999; Borsley 2004; Den Dikken 2005; Sag 2010; Zeldes 2010). While the construction’s syntax and semantics have received considerable attention in the literature, so far no in-depth usage-based Construction Grammar analysis has been provided. Drawing on English and German corpus data (the BROWN corpus family, the ICE-GB corpus and the LIMAS corpus (http://www.korpora.org/cgi-bin/Limas/), the present talk will try to close this gap.
As the data show, English CCs exhibit a greater tendency for parallel structures in C1 and C2 (with respect to the syntactic form of the comparative phrase as well as length (in number of words). In contrast to this, German, which employs more overt marking to differentiate between the two clauses (with C1 being introduced by je and verb-final positioning and C2 being introduced by desto or um so and V2 word order) has more instances of reversed C2C1 structures (with um so in the first clause and V-final word order:  [daß die Ereignisse der deutschen Geschichte … um so interessanter werden,]C2 [je näher sie der Gegenwart stehen.]C1 ‘that the events of German history become (the) more interesting, the closer to present day they take place.] LIMAS File 012 13.04 l.078). Moreover, contra Den Dikken (2005: 503) both languages allow double-bind structures (Franck 1985) such as (4) and (5) in which the second clause C2 functions as the dependent variable (cf. Goldberg 2003: 220) to C1 as well as the independent variable to C3:

(4) And [the more opaque that atmosphere is]C1,
                [the less conductive it is]C2
                [the bigger the temperature difference you need to cross it]C3 
                (ICE-GB:S2A-043)

(5) [Je sorgfältiger der Fragebogen durchstrukturiert (standardisiert) ist,]C1
        [desto besser lassen sich die Antworten zählen und vergleichen,]C2
        [desto näher kommt der Fragebogen einem exakten Meßinstrument.]C3
      (Limas File 114 08.22 l. 132)
      [The more carefully the questionnaire is structured (standardized)]C1
      [the better the answers can be counted and compared,]C2
      [the more the questionnaire becomes an exact measurement device]C3

Finally, on top of phenomena such as the relative frequency of BE-/SEIN-deletion, subject-auxiliary inversion in English CCs or the grammaticality of that-/dass-complementizer in C1 and C2, we also discuss how all these findings can be modelled within a Sign-based Construction Grammar approach that takes into account usage-based information.

 
REFERENCES
Borsley, R. D. 2004. “An approach to English comparative correlatives”. In Stephan Müller, ed. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 70−92.

Culicover, P. W. & R. Jackendoff. 1999. “The view from the periphery: The English comparative correlative”. Linguistic Inquiry 30, 543−71.

Den Dikken, M. 2005. “Comparative correlatives comparatively”. Linguistic Inquiry 36, 497−32.

Fillmore, Ch., P. Kay and M.C. O’Connor. 1988. “Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone”. Language 64, 501−38.

Franck, D. 1985. “Sentences in conversational turns. A case of syntactic 'double bind'”. In: M. Dascal, ed. Dialogue. An interdisciplinary approach. Amsterdam: 233-45.

Goldberg, A.E. 2003. “Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language”. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 7: 219-24.

McCawley, J.D. 1988. “The comparative conditional construction in English, German, and Chinese”. Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 14, 176−87.

Sag, Ivan A. 2010. English Filler-Gap Constructions. Language 86.3: 486-545.

Zeldes, A. 2011. "On the Productivity and Variability of the Slots in German Comparative Correlative Constructions". In: M. Konopka, J. Kubczak, Ch. Mair, F. Štícha & U.H. Waßner, eds. Grammar & Corpora / Grammatik und Korpora 2009. Third International Conference / Dritte Internationale Konferenz, Mannheim, 22.-24.09.2009. Tübingen: Narr, 429-49.

Football (‘soccer’) chants such as (1) clearly constitute constructional templates:

(1) FORM: [are you  [FOOTBALL TEAM]1
        are you [FOOTBALL TEAM]1
        are you [FOOTBALL TEAM]1 in disguise,
        are you [FOOTBALL TEAM]1 in disguise]_chant
MEANING: ‘our current opponent play like X1
                          and X1 is a crap football team’

The form part has the substantive elements [are you] and [in disguise] as well as a slot for the name of a football team that is repeated four times. Another property of the construction’s form, not shown in (1), is that it has a fixed tune associated with it (the religious hymn ‘Cwm Rhondda’, or ‘Bread of Heaven’; Shaw 2010: 7). Interestingly, as indexed on the meaning level of the construction, the football team that is inserted in the schematic slot is not the name of the current opponent. Thus, when Northern Ireland played Spain in a friendly match in 2009, the Irish fans sung ‘Are you England, are you England, are you England in disguise, are you England in disguise’. In contrast to this, Arsenal fans sing ‘Are you Tottenham,…’ when playing Liverpool.
Drawing on a large on-line collection of British football chants (www.footballchants.org), we shall argue that the linguistic investigation of football chants yields interesting insights into spontaneous, non-ephemeral constructional change. As our data show, many football chants exhibit signs of constructionalization (cf. e.g. Rostila 2006; Noël 2007; Trousdale 2008) with input constructions undergoing changes on their form as well as meaning level. The changes on the formal level are constrained by rhythmic, metric as well as situational-contextual, social factors (cf. Kopiez and Brink 31999). On top of that, the dissemination of chants across supporters (of the same as well as rival teams) allows for an investigation of Andersen’s (2008: 32) postulated cycle of innovation and actualization within and across speakers of a community. Moreover, our study contributes to the growing body on the role of context in constructional change (cf. e.g. Bergs and Diewald 2009) as we highlight the role of shared collective cultural knowledge (most chants derive from either church songs or pop tunes), the limited number of pragmatic speech acts expressed (such as praise of one’s own team or abuse of the opponent; cf. Morris 1981) and the persistence of cultural stereotypes (concerning e.g. the players ethnicity).

 
REFERENCES

Andersen, Henning. 2008. “Grammaticalization in a speaker-oriented theory of change”. In: Eythórsson Thórhallur, ed. Grammatical change and lnguistic theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11–44.

Bergs, Alexander & Gabriele Diewald, eds. 2008. Constructions and language change. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 194). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bergs, Alexander and Diewald, Gabriele, eds. 2009. Contexts and constructions. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. London: Longman.

Kopiez, Reinhard and Guido Brink. 31999. Fussball-Fangesänge: Eine Fanomenologie. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann.

Morris, Desmond. 1981. The Soccer Tribe. Jonathan Cape, London.

Noël, Dirk. 2007. “Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory”. Functions of Language 14(2): 177–202.

Rostila, Jouni. 2006. “Storage as a way to grammaticalization”. Constructions 2006/1. [http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/constructions/index].

Shaw, Alex (2010). Shall we sing a song for you? The good, the bad and the downright offensive - Britain’s favourite football chants. John Blake.

Trousdale, Graeme. 2008. “Constructions in grammaticalization and lexicalization: Evidence from the history of a composite predicate construction in the history of English”. In Graeme Trousdale & Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), Constructional approaches to English grammar (Topics in English Linguistics 57). Berlin & New York: Mouton

Filler-Gap constructions (Sag 2010) are usually treated as a set of abstract constructions that interact with independent lexical and Argument Structure constructions to license specific constructs. In this paper, I will look at Comparative Correlative (CC) constructions (the more you eat, the fatter you get / je mehr Du isst, desto dicker wirst Du) in German and English and show that corpus data indicate that such a view is untenable for these peripheral members of the Filler-Gap construction family. On top of that, I will address the question as to how general the mental representations of CC constructions are and what the different networks of these constructions in German and English looks like.

Schneider’s Dynamic Model (2007) predicts that it is the lexicon-syntax interface that exhibits first traces of the emergence of characteristic structural innovations during the phase of Nativization. In this paper, I will show how a Construction Grammar approach provides a cognitive explanation for this phenomenon. I will then illustrate the advantages of a Construction Grammar analysis by focussing on Comparative Correlative (CC) constructions (e.g. The higher the price is, the more interesting the product is.; cf. Fillmore et al. 1988; Sag 2010). As the statistical analysis of data from various corpora from the International Corpus of English project show, all varieties exhibit similar processing effects, but differ greatly with respect to their reliance on partly substantive, partly schematic meso-constructions.

Due to a focus of early publications on idiomatic constructions (such as Fillmore, Kay and O'Connor 1988), Construction Grammar is sometimes wrongly seen as focussing only on non-compositional aspects of language. In this talk, I show that, contrary to this view, compositionality still plays a very important role in Construction Grammr approaches. In light of usage-based research, however, I argue that it is the degree of schematicity that influences the degree compositionality of a construction.

Linguistic data are often important pieces of evidence in criminal cases (take, e.g., anonymous blackmail calls or letters). Now, for the police and lawyers alike, it would be extremely helpful if linguists were able to analyse these data and identify the unique linguistic fingerprint of the criminal they are looking for.

In this talk, I discuss the scientific background to the linguistic fingerprint (the unique idiolect of an individual) and show why currently - despite claims to the contrary made by self-appointed 'experts' - linguists can still not identify linguistic fingerprints.
As part of this, I give an overview of classic approaches to authorship and stylometry as well as modern machine-learning approaches. Finally, I present a sample study of a well-known historical case (the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932) to illustrate the applications and limits of modern Forensic Linguistics.