Construction Grammar Week 2: How to represent constructions

2015

This chapter discusses the concept of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), which evolved out of ideas from Berkeley Construction Grammar and construction-based Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG). The leading insight of SBCG is that the lexicon provides a model for the syntax-semantics interface. The chapter explains that though SBCG cannot be divorced from the formal conventions it uses to represent lexemes, constructions, and the hierarchical relations among types, it offers insights to construction grammarians whose work is not primarily formal. It also considers the strict locality constraint of SBCG, the avoidance of overgeneralization, inheritance, as well as the treatment of inflectional and derivation processes.

To appear in: Barbara Dancygier, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2017

To appear in: Barbara Dancygier, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The previous chapter gave an overview of the renaissance of constructions in grammatical theory and the rise of Construction Grammar approaches. Yet, while all constructionist approaches share many important tenets concerning the nature of human language, the various individual approaches nevertheless differ from each other in non-trivial ways. In this chapter, I will first provide the common theoretical assumptions shared by all constructionist approaches. After that, I will outline the major differences between non-usage-based (such as Berkley Construction Grammar and Sign-Based Construction Grammar) and usage-based approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Embodied Construction Grammar, Fluid Construction Grammar and Radical Construction Grammar). Moreover, I will discuss the controversial issue of what counts as a construction (from Kay's conservative competence-based notion to the usage-based interpretation of constructions as exemplar-based clouds) and the ontological status of meaningless constructions. In addition to that, I will also touch upon the nature of the structured inventory of constructions, the constructicon, and explore the advantage and limits of constructional inheritance in taxonomic networks. Finally, the chapter will also address the question as to how the meaning pole of constructions is analysed in the various approaches (which ranges from semantic paraphrases (Cognitive Construction Grammar) over first-order predicate logic (Fluid Construction Grammar) to Frame-based approaches (Sign-based Construction Grammar)).

Constructional Approaches to Language, 2004

Every construction is associated with more or less detailed information about its phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, discourse, and prosodic characteristics. Since such characterizations may swell into fairly large and elaborate collections of symbols when represented formally, Construction Grammar uses a box notation as a convenient way of organizing all the information needed to give an adequate account of linguistic structure. The box diagrams have become the most visible and readily recognizable trademark of Construction Grammar representations. Constructions have always played an important role in grammars and linguistics; traditionally, we talk about sentence types, phrases, formulas, and even idioms. In Construction Grammar, the notion of 'knowing a language' means knowing its constructions; the active, the passive, the reflexive, the existential sentence types can all be seen as constructions, and so can the preposition phrase, or the verb phrase. In fact, in the view of Construction Grammar, language is the inventory of its constructions. 2.2 The Case Grammar connection As noted in the introductory chapter, Construction Grammar evolved out of Case Grammar (Fillmore, 1968, 1977; Dirven & Radden, 1987) and the early versions of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982, 1984). Case Grammar was one of the first approaches that set out to search for a semantically defined 'deep structure' and its manifestations in linguistic expressions. 1 Thus, the primary reason for saying that John Smith has a different semantic role in (1a), below, than England in (1b) is not the inherent and intuitive difference in meaning between a person and a country, but the fact that the two display different syntactic behavior; in nominalizations, for example, one tends to take the s-genitive, and the other the preposition in, as shown in (2a) and (2b), respectively. (1) a. John Smith remembers nothing of years gone by. b. England remembers nothing of years gone by. (2) a. John Smith's memory of years gone by is non-existent. b. The memory of years gone by is non-existent in England. When comparing the noun God used in (3) below to either John Smith or England, we notice that it patterns syntactically after John Smith (shown in 4a), or at least more so than after England (shown in 4b), even though intuitively, based on its referential properties, God might seem distinct from either of the other two nominals. (3) God remembers nothing of years gone by. (4) a. God's memory of years gone by is non-existent. b. ? The memory of years gone by is non-existent in God. On the basis of these facts we might want to assign the same semantic role, say, 'agent', to John Smith and God, but a different role, say, 'location', to 4 England (cf. Fillmore's 1971 arguments against the need for a semantic role 'force'). Similarly, we can deduce that the word children in (5a) is, at least in principle, semantically ambiguous, since in a passive sentence with an oblique adverbial, we have to choose between using the preposition by (which indicates that children functions as agent, as in 5b) or with (indicating that children is an 'instrument', as in 5c); compare to (5d) which contains both agent and instrument roles. (5) a. Children filled the bewitched house. b. The bewitched house was filled by children. c. The bewitched house was filled with children. d. The bewitched house was filled with children by the unscrupulous witch. Fillmore (1968) explicates the regularities in mapping semantic roles onto different grammatical functions in sentences. Thus, in English, if there is an agent in an active sentence, that agent is realized as the subject; if there is no agent, but an instrument, the instrument is realized as subject; and if there is no agent nor instrument, but something that is affected by an activity, a 'patient', then the patient is realized as subject. This is illustrated in (6). (6) a. The Chancellor closed the university with a dull speech. b. A dull speech closed the university. c. The university closed. The semantic role patterning is still at the core of Construction Grammar. In early studies in Frame Semantics, Fillmore developed the notion of roles further, suggesting that grammar can be seen as a network of associations between syntactic roles (more generally known as grammatical functions), textual roles (accounting for information structure), and verbspecific situational roles (such as 'buyer' and 'seller' in a commercial transaction). These relationships will be addressed in section 6. 3. Arguments for Construction Grammar Although the physical realization of language (what we see as form and hear as sound) is what comes closest to being observable and thus empirically based, there are very few, if any, patterns in English that can be said to be purely syntactic, in the sense that their meaning or function play no role in determining well-formedness. The closest we come to a purely syntactic pattern may be what is known as the Subject-Predicate construction, since almost anything can be the subject in English. Most often, however, a construction has among its defining properties specific semantic and pragmatic features. It is not uncommon that even when the structure of two phrases seems to be exactly the same, as in the expressions Thank you and See you, the two expressions may 6 The relation between 'productive rules' and 'idioms' must be seen as a cline from relatively productive to relatively frozen. There is no sense in treating the constructions of a language as belonging to qualitatively different categories on the basis of their degree of productivity. True, there are idioms that benefit little from being integrated into the productive parts of grammar; for instance, by and large or trip the light fantastic are clearly at the frozen, formulaic end of the scale. But even so, they are not completely without tractable structure. In expressions such as What's Bill doing inspecting the car? or What's it doing snowing in August?, as discussed in Kay & Fillmore (1999), or the greener the better (Fillmore, 1989), it is not at all clear whether it is more appropriate to treat these as idioms, or as productive kinds of structures. Construction Grammar does not have to make that choice. Another area that illustrates a gradient scale between the formulaic and the productive is that of numbers. Although it may seem that numbers are to a certain extent 'peripheral', they are clearly part of our language and they commonly make up systems that are subject to general grammatical constraints and thus form an integral part of grammar. This is readily apparent in a language like Finnish, where numbers partake in concord relations. In order to say 'in 35 rooms', Finnish speakers do not say '35 room-in', as in (7c), with the number specification in an unmarked, default case, but, minimally, '35-in room-in', as in (7b), and preferably in the form kolmessakymmenessäviidessä huoneessa '3-in 10-in 5-in room-in', as shown in (7a). 2 (7) a. kolme-ssa-kymmene-ssä-viide-ssä huonee-ssa three-IN-ten-IN-five-IN room-IN b. kolmekymmentäviidessä huoneessa c. *kolmekymmentäviisi huoneessa Evidently, numbers are like other nominals in Finnish in that they are assigned case suffixes. But numbers are not entirely like any other nominals, either; they have their own characteristics that need to be captured in a full account of language. For instance, when accounting explicitly for how numbers are made up morphologically in English, we need to invoke a set of principles that are not frequently referenced elsewhere in the English grammar. In particular, speakers use addition to form sequences like seventeen: 7 + 10 ('seven plus te(e)n') or twenty-three: 20 + 3 ('twenty plus three'), but multiplication is used in forming seventy: 7 x 10 ('seven times ten [=ty]'). We can argue that in Finnish, subtraction is also at play, e.g. kahdeksan 'two away from ten', i.e., 10-2 = 'eight'. And neljätoista 'four of the second' displays a complex structure involving both multiplication and addition to designate 'fourteen'. The discussion of numbers also points to the inherent similarity between word-length and sentence-length constructions: Construction Grammar does not have to make an a priori choice of whether to consider a piece of linguistic material (in this case, any number) a word, a phrase, or a

Nordic Journal of Linguistics 36(3): 381-387., 2013

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.

In Construction Grammar, grammatical patterns are conventional pairings of form and meaning that are analogous to words. This article contrasts Construction Grammar with competing syntactic theories that are based on universal constraints and the projection properties of words. It reviews arguments for construction-based syntax derived from the following linguistic phenomena: semantic and syntactic variability of verbs, coercion, idiomatic patterns and ‘family resemblances’ among idioms, paradigm-based constraints on form and meaning, exceptions to cross-constructional generalizations, and the inadequacy of derivational rules. Verbal and nominal syntax are used to exemplify the formal mechanism that combines constructions and words, unification grammar. A concluding section outlines connections between Construction Grammar and use-based models of grammar, acquisition and sentence processing.

2016

Current research within the framework of Construction Grammar has mainly adopted a theoretical or descriptive approach, neglecting the more applied perspective, and especially the question of how language acquisition and pedagogy can benefit from a CxG-based approach. The present volume explores various aspects of the field of "Applied Construction Grammar", through a collection of studies that apply Construction Grammar (CxG) and CxG-inspired approaches to relevant issues in L2 acquisition and teaching. Relying on empirical data and covering a wide range of constructions and languages, the chapters show how the cross-fertilization of CxG and L2 acquisition/teaching can lead to new theoretical insights and improved pedagogical practices. Applied Construction Grammar can improve the description of learners' use of constructions, provide theoretical insights into the processes underlying their acquisition (e.g. with reference to inheritance links or transfer from the L1), or le...

Sign Based Construction Grammar, 2012

Few published articles in Construction Grammar (CxG) actually talk about the theory, and fewer still about its formal and logical foundations. This information vacuum has allowed misconceptions about CxG to thrive, including the claim that it is designed only to model minor idiomatic phenomena. In this chapter, I try to remedy this situation by laying out the case for CxG, or, more specifically, the formal version of CxG known as Sign- Based Construction Grammar (SBCG; Sag this volume, 2010). In doing so, I will touch on four major topics: foundations, functionality, facts and falsehoods. In describing the foundations of CxG, I will explain what it means to adopt a licensing-based view of syntax rather than one based on negative constraints (Zwicky 1994, Malouf 2003). The focus on functionality arises from the recognition that working syntacticians need a robust and elegant formalism. I will argue that SBCG provides such a formalism, by describing three benefits that it offers to practitioners of construction-based syntax: it is localist, it allows for variable-grain description and it captures shared properties of constructions without requiring stipulations about constructional inheritance relations. The facts include three major lines of evidence for construction- based syntax: the constructional basis of meaning composition, the role of constructions in the licensing of complements and the interleaving of core and periphery during production. Finally, I will attempt to counter six entrenched falsehoods about CxG: that it is nonrigorous, that it does not offer generalizations, that it is a theory of linguistic marginalia, that it is opposed to compositional semantics, that it is not constrained and that it does not provide a universal framework for syntax.

Constructions and Frames, 2024

Since its inception at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, Construction Grammar (C×G) has come a long way. It has spread from English to a wealth of different languages, and from lexicogrammar to a great variety of different language phenomena, ranging from phonology to discourse. It is being applied to different research areas such as computational linguistics, language pedagogy, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, and is employed to explore a wide range of perspectives on language, including language acquisition, language change, language processing, multilingualism, and, not least, language use. It has also grown into a quite diverse field, including different constructionist approaches such as Berkeley C×G, Cognitive C×G, Radical C×G, Fluid C×G, Sign-Based C×G, etc. (for an overview, see Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013; Fried & Nikiforidou in press). Hence, almost four decades later seems to be an opportune time for metareflection: to take stock of the field and ask where we are, where we are going, and where we wish to be going as construction grammarians. To this end, the present theme issue consists of five papers in which leading C×G researchers in different areas present their respective views on the current state and future prospects of C×G. These authors are William Croft, Adele E. Goldberg, Martin Hilpert, Laura A. Michaelis, and Remi van Trijp. There are a few questions that all of them have been asked to address (see Section 6 below), but apart from that they have been given free hands to present their views of the status and potential of C×G in whatever way they find suitable. Other recent meta-theoretically oriented papers on C×G include Ungerer & Hartmann (2023) and a special issue of the online journal Constructions (Sommerer & Hartmann 2023). In spring 2021, we conducted an online questionnaire among construction grammarians about their views and opinions about C×G, followed by a roundtable discussion at ICCG11 in Antwerp in August 2021.