Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 36, Issue 3, 2012

In the last few years, a particular quantitative approach to the syntax-lexis interface has been developed: collostructional analysis (CA). This approach is an application of association measures to co-occurrence data from corpora, from a usage-based/cognitive-linguistic perspective. In spite of some popularity, this approach has come under criticism in Bybee (2010), who criticizes the method for several perceived shortcomings and advocates the use of raw frequencies/percentages instead. This paper has two main objectives. The first is to refute Bybee’s criticism on theoretical and empirical grounds; the second and further-reaching one is to outline, on the basis of what frequency data really look like, a cline of analytical approaches and, ultimately, a new perspective on the notion of construction based on this cline.

As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directly from the fact that most current theoretical frameworks are not construction-based, that is, they do not assume that constructions are form-meaning correspondences. In order to meet this challenge, we present an attempt at reconstructing constructional semantics, and more precisely the semantics of the Dative Subject Construction for an earlier stage of Indo-European. For this purpose we employ lexical semantic verb classes in combination with the semantic map model (Barðdal 2007, Barðdal, Kristoffersen & Sveen 2011), showing how incredibly stable semantic fields may remain across long time spans, and how reconstructing such semantic fields may be accomplished.

This paper compares two approaches to a particular grammatical change. While Ball (1991, 1994) investigates the development of the it-cleft configuration from within the generative tradition of the 1990s, I have recently re-examined the historical it-cleft data from a constructional perspective (see Patten 2010, forthcoming). In this paper, I show how our different theoretical assumptions lead us to categorize and analyse the data differently. I conclude that a constructional approach is better at interpreting the diachronic facts.

Constructionalization (the diachronic creation of conventional symbolic units at different levels of schematicity and complexity) is a process which involves a series of micro-changes at different linguistic levels. The development of what with constructions in English is argued to be a case of grammatical constructionalization, whereby aspects of a construction become more general, productive, and less compositional. Equally, parts of the construction become more fixed (involving a reduction in variability), while other parts of the construction expand. The application of principles of construction grammar to aspects of diachronic change helps to clarify the relationship between theoretical principles of language change and the analysis of naturally occurring data; equally, the study of the what with construction reveals areas of potential convergence between formal and functional approaches to syntactic change, as well as areas of difference.

This paper explores the claim that definite expressions involve universal and existential quantification from the point of view of Word Grammar, in order to establish whether the quantificational view of definiteness is compatible with a particular cognitive theory of language, and to see how it compares with the familiarity treatment of definiteness. It is argued that the quantificational approach is superior to the familiarity approach in the analysis of a number of linguistic phenomena, and a number of Word Grammar analyses are presented. The paper concludes with an investigation into the grammaticalization of the English definite article, in order to compare the merits of the two approaches, and argues that the quantificational approach delivers a simpler and preferable account.

Cognitively oriented approaches to the study of language standardly use synchronic distributional evidence to make assumptions both about the psychological mechanisms that lead speakers to create particular constructions, and about the components of a speaker’s mental representation of their language. Yet, as synchronic distributional patterns are a result of specific diachronic processes, any assumption about the psychological mechanisms or types of mental representation underlying particular patterns should take into account the diachronic processes that give rise to these patterns. Based on evidence from different languages and language families, the paper discusses several diachronic processes pertaining to the development of various types of alignment systems and prototype effects in dependent clauses. It is shown that these processes provide no evidence for a number of assumptions about psychological mechanisms and a speaker’s mental representation that have been made on synchronic grounds in order to account for the relevant distributional patterns. It follows that this type of assumptions cannot be inferred directly from synchronic distributional patterns, and should be investigated independently of these patterns.

Structuralists and generativists define word classes distributionally (Palmer 1971, Baker 2003, Aarts 2007), while cognitive linguists take a semantic (Langacker 1987a) or semantic-pragmatic approach (Croft 1991, 2001). Psycholinguistic research, by contrast, has shown that phonological properties also play a role (Kelly 1992, Monaghan et al. 2005). This study reports on a production experiment involving English nonce nouns and verbs. The data confirm the importance of phonology, whilst also suggesting that distributional facts are involved in lexical categorisation. Together with the existing psycholinguistic evidence, the results show that both the generative and cognitive models of word classes are too restricted. However, the usage-based model can accommodate the facts straightforwardly. This was already anticipated by Taylor (2002) but is worked out in more detail here by elaborating on his notion of phonological “sub-schemas” and by bringing together insights from Croft (1991, 2001) related to discourse propositional act constructions and recent suggestions by Langacker (2008b) concerning “summary scanning” and “sequential scanning”.

How do people describe events they have witnessed? What role does linguistic aspect play in this process? To provide answers to these questions, we conducted an experiment on aspectual framing. In our task, people were asked to view videotaped vehicular accidents and to describe what happened (perfective framing) or what was happening (imperfective framing). Our analyses of speech and gesture in retellings show that the form of aspect used in the question differentially influenced the way people conceptualized and described actions. Questions framed with imperfective aspect resulted in more motion verbs (e.g. driving), more reckless language (e.g. speeding), and more iconic gestures (e.g. path gesture away from the body to show travel direction) than did questions framed with perfective aspect. Our research contributes novel insights on aspect and the construal of events, and on the semantic potency of aspect in leading questions. The findings are consistent with core assumptions in cognitive linguistics, including the proposal that linguistic meaning, including grammatical meaning, is dynamic and grounded in perceptual and cognitive experience.