Constructions and Frames - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009

Constructional analysis of corpus data can contribute to the analysis of a semantic frame, as demonstrated by a small corpus study of eat and feed. The EAT/FEED frame forms part of a taxonomy of frames including the superordinate CONSUME frame and subordinate frames of human vs. animal eating; constructional and metaphor data in the corpus shows that English covertly distinguishes human and animal eating. The EAT frame includes three phases (intake, process, and ingest), differentiated lexicogrammatically. The EAT frame also includes three domains in its domain matrix: physical, biological (nutritional) and social, all clearly differentiated by distinct constructions in the corpus. An examination of metaphors with eat and feed in the corpus demonstrate that the target domain contributes image-schematic structure to the metaphorical mapping, contrary to the Invariance Hypothesis.

This paper discusses a usage pattern with German mit ‘with’ that is labelled here as the German mit-predicative construction. The pattern has been mentioned in previous research, but a usage-based constructional account is still missing. A qualitative analysis shows that the construction is subject to a number of constraints that point to its function as a predicative construction. It is argued that its constructional meaning can be adequately captured through the semantic frames of being in a category and having an attribute. Through the application of Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis to a corpus-based sample of 356 instances of the mit-predicative, it is shown that the construction can be analyzed as a cluster of five subtypes that display different typical structural and semantic traits. Through the analysis, the paper offers a perspective on intra-constructional variation and how such variation can be exploited for the purpose of grammatical description.

The present article investigates a construction that displays a “mismatch” between form and content/function, instantiated by expressions like nice and comfy/clean/warm. This nice and Adj pattern has a “literal” transparent meaning, which corresponds to its coordinative syntax, but it is on its way to becoming a full-fledged construction with unpredictable formal and conceptual attributes, where nice (and) functions as a conceptual-pragmatic modifier. This pattern is thus an emergent construction. We argue that an adequate treatment of the nice and Adj construction requires the integration of inferential mechanisms, such as implicature and invited inference, into the descriptive apparatus of construction grammar.

This paper compares two measures that quantify lexical preference patterns in the area of Construction Grammar, namely, collostructions and (construction-internal) collocations (as conceived by Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch). Starting from a case study, inflectional variation in Dutch attributive adjectives, two diagnostic calculations will be set up to analyse to what extent both association measures identify lexical preferences in this construction. In particular, the lexical patterns yielded by the collostructional and the collocational association measures will be evaluated as a factor which determines the selection of the inflectional alternatives of the Dutch attributive adjective. We will argue that, at least in some cases, constructions are more strongly characterised by the (construction-internal) collocations that instantiate them than by the single items that instantiate them (as defined in collostructions). Consequently, the syntagmatic axis should become a constitutive dimension in a comprehensive Construction Grammar model.

Generally, construction based approaches to grammar consider constructions to be pairings of form and meaning and thus as a kind of signs, not essentially distinct from words and other lexical items. Granting this commonality, Langacker (2005) criticizes other varieties of constructional approaches for using the notion ‘grammatical form’, and for not reducing the properties of grammar to the more fundamental and minimal notions of sound, meaning, and symbolic links between these two. While such a reduction is definitely worth pursuing, if only for reasons of general scientific interest, the abstract forms postulated in Cognitive Grammar (schematic sound patterns) are so general that they represent ‘any sound’, which threatens the very basis for the assumption that constructions are a kind of signs. I will argue that a usage-based view of sign-formation (Keller 1998), allows us to understand how the recognition of an element as belonging to a particular class of elementary signs can come to function as a signal for a specific linguistic environment (a construction), and produce a level of structure (categories of more elementary signs and relations between them) intermediate between sound and meaning that has its own (emergent) properties, which can still be reduced to more basic phenomena of processing and language use.