Constructions and Frames - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2022

Construction grammar – most notably Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006), Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001) and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2008) – has been extremely inspiring in providing tools for modelling gradience in variation and change. Verbal constructions have been investigated within the paradigm of construction grammar from a number of angles including idiomaticization processes as well as argument structure constructions (Boas 2003; Engelberg 2009; Faulhaber 2011; Goldberg 1995; Rostila 2007). Usage-based approaches (Barlow & Kemmer 2000; Bybee & Hopper 2001; Diessel 2015, 2019; Langacker 1988; Tomasello 2003) have pointed out that usage is the place to look for variation and change. Data-driven, corpus-based approaches have introduced quantitative methods for analyzing constructional functionality and variety synchronically (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003; Gries 2006; Glynn 2014) and diachronically (Hilpert 2006). These techniques have given rise to detailed studies of verbal constructions, lexicalization and idiomaticization.

This volume presents papers which in their majority have arisen in connection with the workshop “Variation and Grammaticalization of Verbal Constructions”, held at the 51st SLE Annual Meeting at Tallinn, 29th August – 1st September 2018. Its focus is on verbal constructions in Germanic languages, constructional variation and degrees of polyfunctionality between lexical, idiomatic and grammaticalized usages. The major object of this volume is to investigate the conditions and interdependencies of such variations and polyfunctionalities. The theoretical and conceptual foundations of the studies united here rest upon grammaticalization theory, usage-based constructional approaches, and frame semantics, allway in combination with empirical testing. The scope of interest comprises synchronic as well as diachronic phenomena in various registers and communicative types.

This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Construction Grammar (Coussé et al. 2018). It is concerned with modal uses of the English verb get that express a permitted action, as in The prisoners always get to make one phone call. Different views exist on the contexts in which permissive get emerged. Gronemeyer (1999: 30) suggests that the permissive meaning derives from causative uses (I got him to confess). An alternative is proposed by van der Auwera et al. (2009: 283), who view permissive get as an extension of its acquisitive meaning (I got a present). We revisit these claims in the light of recent historical data from American English. Specifically, we searched the COHA (Davies 2010) for forms of get followed by to and a verb in the infinitive. Besides examples of permissive get, we retrieved examples of obligative got to (I got to leave), causative get (Who did you get to confess?), possessive got (What have I got to be ashamed of?), and a category that we label inchoative get (You’re getting to be a big girl now). Drawing on distributional semantic techniques (Perek 2016, 2018), we analyse how permissive get and inchoative get developed semantically over time. Our results are consistent with an account that represents an alternative to both Gronemeyer (1999) and van der Auwera et al. (2009), namely the idea that permissive get evolved out of inchoative uses that invited the idea of a permission.

In English, sequences consisting of the verb have, a noun phrase and a past participle vary in meaning. This meaning variation has been discussed both in the context of grammatical description and language change, mostly based on a handful of examples. This study seeks to combine theoretical and methodological approaches from construction grammar and interactional linguistics in the description of this meaning variation. Theoretically, this implies distinguishing between abstracted meaning potential and situated meaning of linguistic elements. Methodologically, this means taking both a coarse-grained view by means of a quantitative corpus-based approach that abstracts over a number of instances and a fine-grained view by means of qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction.

As in many other Germanic languages, Modern Danish combines the verb få ‘get’ and a semantic main verb in the supine form (the uninflected perfect participle). Three main types of the construction are found: an agentive type typically interpreted as expressing successful intentional action and two non-agentive types: one with a ditransitive main verb and promotion of the indirect object to subject status, and one with a non-valency-bound subject typically interpreted as a Beneficiary. Based on a functional framework, the paper presents a corpus study of the construction and an analysis unifying all three main types in a common Affactive Construction whose functional contribution is the specification of the subject as an Afficiary (Beneficiary or Maleficiary). The distinction between agentive and non-agentive interpretation is analysed as a voice distinction between active and passive.

The paper presents the results of a diachronic study of the light verb constructions containing the German verb kommen ‘come’ accompanied by a prepositional phrase containing a deverbal noun and the preposition zu ‘to’. The analysis is based on the corpus data from the DTA (DeutschesTextarchiv) between 1600 and 1900. The aim of the paper is to integrate traditional grammatical descriptions of Funktionsverbgefüge with grammaticalization and lexicalization approaches as well as with more recent usage-based constructionist approaches. In doing so, the view of composite predicates as more or less grammaticalized or more or less lexicalized constructions will be challenged by offering empirical evidence in favor of a more diversified account. It will be argued that it is often a matter of the methodological perspective as to which particular status is assigned to a structure under investigation.

Starting from the term “family of constructions”, the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by was (‘what’) in combination with expressions of irrelevance like egal (‘no matter’). 12,894 examples from the DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) are analysed manually for seven variables. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results suggest that combinations of was with an expression of irrelevance, or “[IRR was]” for short, form part of a recently entrenched constructional schema [IRR w-] of concessive-conditional subordinators which are emerging into the family of concessive-conditional constructions in present-day German.

This paper deals with different types of verbal complementation of the German verb verdienen. It focuses on constructions that have been undergoing a grammaticalization process and thus express deontic modality, as in Sie verdient geliebt zu werden (ʽShe deserves to be lovedʼ) and Sie verdient zu leben (ʽShe deserves to liveʼ) (Diewald, Dekalo & Czicza 2021). These constructions are connected to parallel complementation types with passive and active infinitives containing a correlate es, as in Sie verdient es, geliebt zu werden and Sie verdient es, zu leben, as well as finite clauses with the subordinator dass with and without correlative es, as in Sie verdient, dass sie geliebt wird and Sie verdient es, dass sie geliebt wird. This paper attempts to show a close comparative investigation of these six types of constructions based on their relevant semantic and syntactic properties in terms of clause linkage (Lehmann 1988). We analyze the relevant data retrieved from the DWDS corpus of the 20th century and present an expanded grammaticalization path for verdienen-constructions. The finite complementation with dass is regarded as an example of a separate structural option called “elaboration”. Concerning the use of correlative es, it is shown that it does not have any substantial effect on the grammaticalization of modal verdienen-constructions.