Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 34, Issue 1, 2020

The German Constructicon Project (www.german-constructicon.de) aims at documenting grammatical constructions in contemporary standard German on the basis of annotated corpus examples, including relations between constructions and between constructions and evoked semantic frames. So far, the research focus has been mainly on the development and computational implementation of a constructicographic workflow (including a parsing pipeline) that allows for addressing any kind of constructions on varying levels of schematicity, idiomaticity, and abstractness. However, such an exemplar-driven procedure precludes us from systematically identifying constructional candidates. In this article, we scrutinize ways to operationalize and implement data-mining procedures to inductively identify construction candidates.

The present contribution summarizes findings on the understudied area of Italian valency coercion – i. e. the interaction of verbs and argument structure constructions in novel and creative ways – from four different studies. It highlights their innovative character, theoretical significance, and crosslinguistic implications for Construction Grammar. The paper suggests that valency coercion resolution involve different phenomena, such as distributional properties of constructions and compatibility between verb and construction. Sociolinguistic factors such as age and diatopic variables are also suggested to be relevant.

We develop the notion of pattern of coining found in some complete-inheritance models of Construction Grammar (Fillmore 1997; Kay 2013), which are processes used to coin new units based on analogy with an existing one. Unlike constructions, they cannot be considered systematically productive in synchrony. After providing measurement methods, we assess the productivity of three patterns (‧whelm, ‧licious and ‧holic). To do so, we carried out a statistical analysis using two web corpora. Unlike Kay, we show that the difference between constructions and patterns of coining is not so clear-cut, since patterns of coining may undergo constructionalization, and that qualitative aspects should be taken into account along with quantitative data when trying to assess the status of a word-formation pattern.

This squib discusses the question whether Construction Grammar can account for the assumption of universal grammatical categories (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994) that are prone to language change, e.g. tense. Most publications in Construction Grammar tackle individual constructions, such as the way-construction (Jackendoff 1990). But it remains unclear how grammatical categories as a universal phenomenon can be described in constructionist terms. We propose that there is a way to (a) describe grammatical categories, which per definition are encoded paradigmatically, as constructions themselves and (b) to thereby strengthen the assumption of a set of universal grammatical categories.

This squib applies and extends insights from (Diasystematic) Construction Grammar to the code-switching and loan-translation of English verbs (and verbal constructions) in US-German dialects. After presenting recent findings about the nature and interaction of language contact phenomena, I introduce the constructional principles guiding the analysis and the data sources. I then present a wide array of data and formulate hypotheses regarding the processes and motivations underlying each type, appealing to a constructional and usage-based view of the bilingual’s mental lexicon.

This squib briefly explores how contextualized embeddings – which are a type of compressed token-based semantic vectors – can be used as semantic retrieval and annotation tools for corpus-based research into constructions. Focusing on embeddings created by the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer model, also known as ‘BERT’, this squib demonstrates how contextualized embeddings can help counter two types of retrieval inefficiency scenarios that may arise with purely form-based corpus queries. In the first scenario, the formal query yields a large number of hits, which contain a reasonable number of relevant examples that can be labeled and used as input for a sense disambiguation classifier. In the second scenario, the contextualized embeddings of exemplary tokens are used to retrieve more relevant examples in a large, unlabeled dataset. As a case study, this squib focuses on the into-interest construction (e.g. I’m so into you).

This paper presents a frame-based constructional approach to argument structure satisfaction via unselected adjuncts, by focusing on one such case in Japanese. It points out an intriguing constructional phenomenon whereby causal adjunct clauses marked with node ‘because’, as used with main-clause predicates that evoke communication frames (such as Telling and Warning), serve to satisfy main-clause argument structure. The node clause precedes the main-clause speech act of telling/warning, and can be interpreted as a speech-act causal (Sweetser 1990). The node clause at the same time conveys the content of informing or warning, i.e., the core Frame Element message, which is absent as a main-clause complement. This analysis of argument structure satisfaction via unselected adjuncts provides evidence for a Frame Semantic approach to argument structure that incorporates Construction Grammar.

This study seeks to gain a better insight into the origin and expansion of the construction <va a ser que sí/no> (lit. goes to be that yes/no) in Peninsular Spanish. We argue that this construction derives from the use of the periphrastic future construction <ir a ‘go to’ + inf> in a pseudo-cleft sentence whose subject is a deictic element or an element that conveys the speaker’s attitudinal assessment of the propositional content expressed in the attribute, a complement que-clause. The etymological structure evolves through a process that formally implies the suppression of the explicit subject and the fusion of the components va a ser que leading to the conventionalization of refutative and assertive values. To demonstrate this directionality, we examine recent stages of change and develop syntactic and semantic-pragmatic arguments grounded in a data-based approach.

This article explores the possibility of identifying mentally stored constructions in writing process data, that is, data that reproduce the process through which a text is written. The unit that serves as a basis for the identification of constructions is the burst of writing, which corresponds to a chunk of text produced between two pauses. Bursts are examined in L1 French and L2 English keylogging data from the Process Corpus of English in Education and their potential constructional status is considered.

This paper suggests two possible ways in which cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar, and Embodied Construction Grammar) could enhance the explanatory power of constructions. First, the anatomy of a construction should spell out how the morphosyntactic realizations of arguments are specifically mapped onto their inherent semantico-pragmatic properties, while also including detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, register, politeness, etc. Second, it is argued that coercion should be best understood as a continuum allowing for varying degrees of (in-)compatibility between the verb and the construction taken as a whole. Moreover, parameterization and linguistic cueing prove useful to handle the dynamic interaction of the morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic, and discourse-functional hallmarks of constructions, including those which invite metonymic inferencing.

When communicating across closely related languages or varieties (e.g. in interdialectal communication or in regions such as Mainland Scandinavia), speakers have to learn how to decode words that show partial phonological differences from the equivalents in their L1. Although contact situations like these are rather common, interlingual decoding has scarcely been addressed in the CxG literature. As a contribution to this field of research, the paper discusses how (a particular stage in) emerging receptive multilingualism can be modelled from a CxG perspective. Specifically, it deals with the idea that repeated interlingual decoding generates partially schematic cross-linguistic constructions mirroring the speaker’s knowledge about sound correspondences, as suggested by Diasystematic Construction Grammar (Höder 2019).

In Construction Grammar theory, constructions are generally described as form-meaning pairings. It will be argued here that the formal specifications of some abstract constructions are so vague that the notion of form needs to be discussed rather critically. We aim to demonstrate how, in the English predicative and intransitive-motion constructions, the slots of more general constructions can be seen as being specified indirectly through sets of mini-constructions.

One of the hallmarks of scientific theories is their falsifiability, i.e. the fact that they make predictions that can objectively be proven wrong. Thus, it is paramount that researchers, including linguists, are able to state what kind of evidence would lead them to abandon their scientific theory. Yet, researchers just like all other human beings are susceptible to confirmation bias, i.e. the fact that they only seek evidence that supports their existing views. In this squib, I will raise the question whether Construction Grammar can become a falsifiable theory.

We provide a practical step-by-step methodology of how to build a full-scale constructicon resource for a natural language, sharing our experience from the nearly completed project of the Russian Constructicon, an open-access searchable database of over 2,200 Russian constructions (https://site.uit.no/russian-constructicon/). The constructions are organized in families, clusters, and networks based on their semantic and syntactic properties, illustrated with corpus examples, and tagged for the CEFR level of language proficiency. The resource is designed for both researchers and L2 learners of Russian and offers the largest electronic database of constructions built for any language. We explain what makes the Russian Constructicon different from other constructicons, report on the major stages of our work, and share the methods used to systematically expand the inventory of constructions. Our objective is to encourage colleagues to build constructicon resources for additional natural languages, thus taking Construction Grammar to a new quantitative and qualitative level, facilitating cross-linguistic comparison.

Japanese mimetics, and its psychomimes (e.g. gakkuri ‘disappointed’), in particular, are usually accompanied in speech with bodily movements, including gestures and postures. I have already argued that certain patterns in co-speech gestures and postures that accompanied psychomimes showed a relatively high rate of concord across speakers (Kanetani 2019). Taking the co-speech bodily movements as metonymic representations of embodied metaphors of emotion, this paper suggests that these kinetic features may be stored as part of the speaker’s knowledge of the words and argue that Japanese psychomimes are multimodal lexical constructions. I also show how such multimodal constructions are represented in the mind and how they are expressed in actual use. In particular, I describe and examine two-dimensional form-meaning pairings (based on Kita 1997) and show that one of the two dimensions may be selectively expressed in a given context.

In this paper we use corpora of four monolingual German-speaking children at 2 years of age to analyze the effect of input on the activation of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. For this purpose, we first investigate to what extent chunks and patterns can be traced back to the direct input compared to input which is not part of the immediate discourse situation. Second, we take mean length of utterance (MLU) into account to see how the level of proficiency influences the amount of priming in each child. Results indicate that children with a lower MLU rely more on priming than children who are more proficient. This conclusion is consistent with the usage-based assumption that children’s linguistic development starts with a strongly item-based reproduction of input patterns that gradually gives rise to increasingly creative and productive uses of constructions.

Syntactic amalgams are innovative phrasal constructions that combine otherwise incompatible subparts of other constructions (Lambrecht 1988; Brenier and Michaelis 2005). We describe pleonastic formations like flavorize in English and ψηλαφ-ίζ(ω) [psilafízo] ‘palpate’ in Modern Greek as functional amalgams at the word level. We examine these formations through the lens of (function-oriented) Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012), arguing that once we see derivational morphemes as signs, and sign combination as construction-driven rather than head-driven, we can describe such words as coercive combinations that serve a variety of semiotic functions.

Despite recent advances in Construction Pragmatics, a systematic way for delimiting coded pragmatic information has yet to be offered. This squib provides a step in establishing such an account by assessing what kind of pragmatic information speakers generalize from various usage-events. Drawing on findings from Conversation Analysis, I propose a distinction between pragmatic functions as speakers’ actions, and interactional patterns as discourse-information sequences. A synchronic examination of the Hebrew multifunctional discourse marker ′at/a yode′a/′at (′know.prs.m/f.sg′) demonstrates the consistent use of the construction in an interactional pattern across numerous usage-events. A qualitative diachronic analysis of ′at/a yode′a/′at suggests that speakers may associate forms with interactional patterns rather than with functions. This preliminary evidence provides support for the generalization of interactional patterns.

This squib provides a theoretical discussion on the use of the terms semantics and pragmatics in Construction Grammar. In the literature, the difference between semantics and pragmatics is often conceptualized either in terms of conventionality or in terms of truth-conditionality (Huang 2014, 299). It will be shown that, even though constructionists claim that there is no semantics–pragmatics distinction, both these underlying concepts are central to the study of constructions. Therefore, the aim is twofold. First, in keeping with Cappelle (2017), it will be argued that constructionists should make more explicit the distinction between the two types of (encoded) meaning. Second, it will be shown that constructionists need to be more terminologically consistent and agree on how to use the terms semantics and pragmatics. Following Depraetere (2019), I will argue that the terms semantics and pragmatics are most explanatory when defined in truth-conditional terms. In this way, finer-grained understanding of the meaning of constructions can be achieved.

This squib sketches an approach to concessive conditionals (CCs) from the perspective of Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). It brings earlier functional-typological work on CCs to bear on language-particular constructionist analyses of CCs, using the notions of ‘family (of constructions)’ and ‘prototype’ as the bridge. After suggesting how these notions can be applied to CCs under a functional-typological approach, the structure of the CC sub-constructicon in German is discussed, and directions for future research are offered to round the squib off.

This squib focuses on two main issues. Firstly, it examines the ways in which constructionist approaches to language can bring about an improved theoretical understanding of Double Modals (DMs) in dialects of English. DMs have proved to be a long-lasting, notorious puzzle in formal linguistics, and have not received any general solution today, with much analysis devoted to their constituent structure and their postulated layers of derivation, especially in generative models of language. Usage-based strands of Construction Grammar (CxG) appear to naturally overcome such problems, while conveying a more cognitively and socially realistic picture of such dialect variants. Secondly, and more importantly, we argue that such an improved, constructional understanding of DMs can also contribute to advances in the modeling of dialect syntax in CxG, both theoretically and methodologically. In particular, DMs constitute an interesting case of relatively rare and restricted syntactic constructions in the dialects they appear in, and they are likely to exhibit different rates of entrenchment and network schematicity cross-dialectally. Moreover, the empirical challenges surrounding the measurement of DM usage invite us to refine the methodological concept of triangulation, by sketching a two-step approach with a data-driven study of new types of corpora on the one hand, and a hypothesis-driven experimental account of acceptability in relevant geographical locations on the other.

In the typological literature, a distinction is often drawn between reduplication (as a morphological process) and repetition (as a syntactic process) (Gil 2005). This squib reconsiders this distinction from the perspective of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010, 2018; Masini and Audring 2019). Drawing upon previously understudied phenomena in Tagalog, an Austronesian language of the Philippines, this paper demonstrates that the Construction Morphology approach provides a suitable framework for analyzing reduplication and repetition. It makes it possible to account for both similarities and differences between reduplication and repetition: both processes create a lexical unit with an iterative form and a conventionalized meaning, although they differ in the size and complexity of the lexical unit they create. Furthermore, this paper makes a strong case for the basic tenets of constructionist approaches, including a hierarchical lexicon and a lexicon-grammar continuum.

Constructions are abstractions of resources we have available as ways of expressing ourselves. The study argues for the feasibility of seeing constructions as flexible prototypes in terms of which we categorize the world: constructions have few if any necessary and sufficient conditions that are always applicable. As support for this view, an analysis of the correlative TatT-construction in English is carried out, indicating that even if we can set up a dozen characteristics of the construction, none of them are necessary for an expression to be characterized as an instance of the construction. Furthermore, for constructional analyses to be truly usage-based, variations within prototypes have to be explicated. A Construction Discourse approach is used to show how pragmatic and discourse factors can distinguish and afford particular meanings and functions to non-prototypical instances of a construction.

An important subset of the empirical research conducted within usage-based construction grammar is formed by alternation studies. Still, it is not always clear what exactly qualifies as an alternation. This paper takes stock of six possible ways of defining an alternation. Three of these definitions are argued to be particularly suitable for the research program of usage-based construction grammar. The paper zooms in on those and discusses their practical consequences and (dis)advantages.

The presence of strong resultative constructions in Romance languages is largely debated. In this paper, we provide evidence of strong resultative constructions with adjectival predicate in Italo-Romance. Data from Southern Italian varieties spoken in the area of Cosenza, in Northern Calabria, are discussed. The usage and distribution of two types of adjectival resultative are accounted for in relation to both structural and functional properties, and sociolinguistic variables.

Explanations of language change in terms of Diachronic Construction Grammar generalize over gradual adaptations of the linguistic behaviour of individual speakers and communities. Presenting a diachronic case study of the pattern (the) (Adj) thing (clauserel) is (is) (that), I argue that the time course of formal, semantic and pragmatic changes, of changes in frequency and of changes regarding dispersion over speakers and choices of lexical items offer a glimpse of the gradual individual and communal adaptations underlying processes such as constructionalization and constructional change. I interpret data extracted from various corpora from the perspectives of Diachronic Construction Grammar and the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2020) and discuss how the latter perspective might enrich the former.

This squib revisits the phenomenon of ‘Multiple Inheritance’ (MI) and discusses reasons why many usage-based, cognitive construction grammarians seem to be avoiding it when modeling the constructicon and linguistic knowledge. After a brief discussion of the concept and some examples from the literature, the paper examines potential reasons for the apparent disinterest. Finally, the author points to some open questions regarding MI by discussing a specific example, namely modified NPN constructions like day after hellish day or hour after hour of dominoes. It can be argued that these strings inherit their characteristic features from several different abstract templates.

This article aims to encourage a discussion of how evaluative morphemes conform to the principles of iconicity and Construction Grammar through the examination of English Adj+ie/y nominalisations (e.g. brownie, softie). Our analysis of the Adj+ie/y paradigm investigates conceptual processes that employ these evaluative morphological forms. We propose a Bidirectional Conceptualisation Model (BCM) to demonstrate a templatic correlation between iconic morphological components and evaluative connotations, by means of which the suffix -ie/y is employed to instantiate a specific iconic value of the [[x-]A ie/y]N construction. The BCM incorporates the Diminution: Pejoration ↔ Endearment scale, which accounts for the semantic duality of appreciative and depreciative values realised by the morphological concept of diminution. The results of the study support the idea that superficially different functions realised by one and the same morphological form are related through interaction of Idealised Cognitive Models.

While the concept of extravagance, used to describe speakers’ use of imaginative and noticeable language, has seen a surge in popularity in recent constructionist work, researchers have not yet converged on a set of common criteria for identifying extravagant expressions. In this paper, we discuss a variety of existing definitions and combine them into five main characteristics of extravagant language. We then present the results of a small-scale pilot rating study in which speakers judged extravagant sentences and their non-extravagant paraphrases. Our findings suggest that different constructions vary in their degree of perceived extravagance, and that certain features (e.g. stylistic salience) apply to most extravagant examples while the role of other factors (e.g. the speaker’s emotional involvement) may be restricted to a subset of extravagant patterns. We conclude with some open questions concerning the further demarcation and operationalisation of the concept of extravagance.

Construction Grammar was founded on the promise of maximal empirical coverage without compromising on formal precision. Its main claim is that all linguistic knowledge can be represented as constructions, similar to the notion of constructions from traditional grammars. As such, Construction Grammar may finally reconcile the needs of descriptive and theoretical linguistics by establishing a common ground between them. Unfortunately, while the construction grammar community has developed a sophisticated understanding of what a construction is supposed to be, many critics still believe that a construction is simply a new jacket for traditional linguistic analyses and therefore inherits all of the problems of those analyses. The goal of this article is to refute such criticisms by showing how constructions can be formalized as open-ended and multidimensional linguistic representations that make no prior assumptions about the structure of a language. While this article’s proposal can be simply written down in a pen-and-paper style, it verifies the validity of its approach through a computational implementation of German field topology in Fluid Construction Grammar.

This squib discusses empirical challenges incurred by assuming cognitive reality as a defining feature of constructions and the constructional network, as done in most usage-based, cognitive construction grammar approaches. Specifically, it zooms in on the methodological challenges in identifying cognitively plausible constructions in historical data, in particular when taking a highly exploratory, bottom-up approach with very little pre-selection or pre-analysis. I illustrate this issue with the example of a current project on PPs in the history of English, and the various functions these have in combination with verbs (from prototypical adjuncts to complements). I argue that the constraints of historical data make it necessary to find different, new ways to determine which abstractions and distinctions are likely to have been represented in minds of historical language users, and to furthermore identify changes in constructional networks over time.