The idea that correspondences relating grammatical relations and semantics (argument structure constructions) are needed to account for simple sentence types is reviewed, clarified, updated and compared with two lexicalist alternatives. Traditional lexical rules take one verb as ‘input’ and create (or relate) a different verb as ‘output’. More recently, invisible derivational verb templates have been proposed, which treat argument structure patterns as zero derivational affixes that combine with a root verb to yield a new verb. While the derivational template perspective (...) can address several problems that arise for traditional lexical rules, it still faces problems in accounting for idioms, which often contain specifications that are not appropriately assigned to individual verbs or derivational affixes (regarding adjuncts, modification, and inflection). At the same time, it is clear that verbs play a central role in determining their distribution. The balance between verbs and phrasal argument structure constructions is addressed via the Principles of Semantic Coherence and Correspondence together with a usage-based hierarchy of constructions that contains entries which can include particular verbs and other lexical material. (shrink)

Complex-transitive argument structures have received a large amount of attention from syntacticians of both formalist and cognitive-functional orientations. To account for expressions with causative resultative meanings, construction grammar has postulated a family of argument-structure constructions whose core is constituted by the Caused-Motion Construction and the Resultative Construction, exhibiting a locative complement and a predicative complement in the form of an AjP, respectively. Argument structures with NP complements, however, have been largely neglected. The present study investigates these patterns in the International (...) Corpus of English (ICE-GB) by means “collostruction analysis”. It shows that the formal distinction between AjP and NP complements corresponds to a constructional distinction hitherto unrevealed, viz. that between the Resultative Construction and another argument-structure construction, here called the “Denominative Construction”. Apart from improving existing descriptions of the network of complex-transitive argument-structure constructions, this study demonstrates that collostruction analysis can be employed in an exploratory way to discover constructions. (shrink)

Voice mismatch between conjuncts is impossible in the gapping construction. Some recent studies explained this effect by analyzing gapping as involving the ellipsis of a category at least as large as VoiceP. One prediction this analysis makes is that mismatch of any head structurally lower than Voice should not be possible in gapping. In this study, through a series of acceptability judgment experiments examining argument structure mismatches in gapping, we provide empirical observations that challenge this prediction.

The problems of access—retrieving linguistic structure from some mental grammar —and disambiguation—choosing among these structures to correctly parse ambiguous linguistic input—are fundamental to language understanding. The literature abounds with psychological results on lexical access, the access of idioms, syntactic rule access, parsing preferences, syntactic disambiguation, and the processing of garden‐path sentences. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to combine models which account for these results to build a general, uniform model of access and disambiguation at the lexical, idiomatic, and syntactic levels. (...) For example, psycholinguistic theories of lexical access and idiom access and parsing theories of syntactic rule access have almost no commonality in methodology or coverage of psycholinguistic data. This article presents a single probabilistic algorithm which models both the access and disambiguation of linguistic knowledge. The algorithm is based on a parallel parser which ranks constructions for access, and interpretations for disambiguation, by their conditional probability. Low‐ranked constructions and interpretations are pruned through beam‐search; this pruning accounts, among other things, for the garden‐path effect. I show that this motivated probabilistic treatment accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results, arguing for a more uniform representation of linguistic knowledge and for the use of probabilistically‐enriched grammars and interpreters as models of human knowledge of and processing of language. (shrink)

The paper reconciles the sociolinguistic concept of stance and stancetaking and Construction Grammar (CxG); it shows that overlapping allostructions may differ in terms of the stances they convey. Drawing on a corpus study of Wikipedia Talk pages, the paper presents a case study of German discourse management markers such as wo wir gerade dabei sind ‘speaking of which’ or wenn wir schon dabei sind ‘while we’re at it’. By statistically comparing the observed frequencies of the filler items with the expected (...) ones (using Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis and Distinctive Collexeme Analysis), I will argue that there are two different collocational types, namely wo wir/ich gerade bei NP sind/bin ‘as we are/I am just at NP’ and wenn wir/du schon bei NP sind/bist ‘as we/you are already at NP’. Both serve as discourse management markers, topic orientation markers in particular, whose purpose it is to shift the topic. They involve the same fixed pattern, combining the same categorical slots. However, they diverge in collocational preferences. I will argue that these collocational preferences are indicative of the stances the allostructions conventionally convey: While the allostruction wo wir/ich gerade PP sind/bin seems to be neutral in terms of stance (face-less stance), wenn wir/du schon PP sind/bist is often used to express negative evaluation of a previous utterance made by an interlocutor, thus marking disalignment. The expression of disalignment seems to be related to the construction’s propensity to reference utterances made by an interlocutor. (shrink)

The idea that correspondences relating grammatical relations and semantics (argument structure constructions) are needed to account for simple sentence types is reviewed, clarified, updated and compared with two lexicalist alternatives. Traditional lexical rules take one verb as ‘input’ and create (or relate) a different verb as ‘output’. More recently, invisible derivational verb templates have been proposed, which treat argument structure patterns as zero derivational affixes that combine with a root verb to yield a new verb. While the derivational template perspective (...) can address several problems that arise for traditional lexical rules, it still faces problems in accounting for idioms, which often contain specifications that are not appropriately assigned to individual verbs or derivational affixes (regarding adjuncts, modification, and inflection). At the same time, it is clear that verbs play a central role in determining their distribution. The balance between verbs and phrasal argument structure constructions is addressed via the Principles of Semantic Coherence and Correspondence together with a usage‐based hierarchy of constructions that contains entries which can include particular verbs and other lexical material. (shrink)