Constructions and Frames - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015

This study considers sarcasm as a linguistic genre, and explores the use of constructions to capture conventions of sarcastic speech. It does so by examining the English Split Interrogative (SI), e.g., What are you, a senior?, What is this, Spain? We argue that lexical, syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies of SI require us to recognize it as a distinct grammatical construction with two related conversational functions. In its basic, or sincere, function, SI is a collateral-track signal in terms of Clark & Fox Tree 2002: it comments on ongoing performance by (a) indexing the user’s effort to attach the right value to a property variable in a contextually salient open proposition and (b) proposing the result of that effort. In its secondary, or sarcastic, function, SI expresses a dissociative Doppelurteil, or double judgment. Just as topic-comment utterances involve two communicative acts — acknowledging a particular entity as a locus of inquiry and attributing a property to that entity — sarcastic SI makes a judgment about the present situation — it’s the inverse of the expected one — and offers an assessment of what makes it so: the value of the wh-variable (a variable over people, places, things, reasons, etc.) is extreme on some contextually available scale. We postulate that the sarcastic function is a conventionalized (or short-circuited) conversational implicature (in terms of Morgan 1978). Certain divergent syntactic properties support the view that SI is ambiguous with respect to sincere and sarcastic senses. We thus view SI as a case in which what started as a rhetorical gambit has become conventionalized into a rhetorical figure (Kay 1997).

This paper investigates two tense-based constructions in English and Greek and one complementation construction in Greek, whose import is to effect a deictic shift and allow narration to proceed from the point of view of the narrated events and a participant therein. In addition to the individual formal and discourse-pragmatic properties of the patterns at hand, I focus on properties of the embedding context, showing that these unrelated constructions impose similar formal and interpretational requirements. This, in turn, supports the statement of generalizations at the level of genre, in this case empathetic narration as a special kind of narration that departs from the default past narrative which is deictically anchored to the narrator and the conversational coordinates. While the analysis adopts a bottom-up, language-driven approach to genre, it also refutes its exhaustive equation with linguistic conventions, arguing that a Bakhtinian view of genre, which includes both linguistic and socio-cultural dimensions, is more appropriate for the data at hand.

The distribution and frequency of individual heterosemes of a hyperlemma in basic communicative types, which are distinguished according to their primary expression of dialogicity (i.e. their factual communicative immediacy/distance), is shown to be dependent on the interplay of i) the heteroseme’s basic word class function, ii) its degree of grammaticalization, and iii) the presence of secondary (embedded or simulated) communicative situations (i.e. conceptual immediacy/distance) in the linguistic material. The items investigated are denn ‘then’, ruhig ‘quiet’, ‘silent’, ‘peaceful’ and vielleicht ‘maybe’ in German, which as hyperlemmas incorporate a number of distinct heterosemes (denn, for example, is used as conjunction, comparative particle, modal particle etc.). The focus of this corpus-based investigation is on the modal particle functions of the three hyperlemmas. The corpora used are distinguished according to primary degree of communicative immediacy/distance.

This paper addresses the conditions under which knowledge of situation-specific language use should be part of a construction grammatical representation and under which it should, rather, be part of a frame semantic representation. Using child-directed speech as an example, which has been suggested to constitute a good candidate for a register, it is shown that a conventional association between grammatical form and situation is implausible. Instead, the relationship between grammar and situation is mediated by speakers’ understandings of the functional affordances of the respective situation, to which the communication partner may contribute considerably. In the case of the so-called baby talk register, situational knowledge is thus stored best in semantic frames as a set of functions that can be demonstrated to be commonly attended to, whereas construction grammar remains an inventory of general form-function pairs.

Building on the seminal work on grammar and frames (e.g. Fillmore 1982), in addition to recent studies that apply a construction grammar approach to the description of genres (Antonopoulou & Nikiforidou 2011; Nikiforidou 2010b; Östman 2005) and spoken discourse (Fischer 2011; Fried & Östman 2005), this paper highlights the importance of extending the analytical boundary of grammar to include interactional frames, e.g. genres and social interactions. Using as an illustrative case the stand-alone noun-modifying construction in Japanese, a grammatical construction that is genre-sensitive, this paper suggests that grammatical constructions and interactional frames are in partnership in the construction of meaning. It is argued that this partnership is mediated by the proficient language users’ knowledge, which is socially and culturally inculcated and fostered, and therefore it is important to keep the theoretical model flexible enough to acknowledge fluidity in grammatical understanding.

This article examines how the two Swedish modal particles ju (approx. ‘as both you and I think/know’) and väl (approx. ‘this is an appropriate description of the circumstances’) are used to index different aspects of common ground (Diewald & Fischer 1998; Diewald 2006; Fischer 2007). It addresses the question of what aspects of common ground are indexed by these modal particles and how the indexical information about the argumentative situation is stored: Is it encoded in some kind of construction (Goldberg 1995) or is it organized in frames (Fillmore 2006 [1982])? By analyzing the indexical function of modal particles in terms of different aspects of common ground (Clark 1996) in two different registers, namely caregiver–child interaction and teenager interaction, we suggest that these aspects can be thought of as a sub-frame common ground within a communicative background frame (Fischer 2006); the aspects of common ground to which the speakers appeal to in different situations are organized and stored in the sub-frame.

The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed a discourse pattern, the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract topic. The paper discusses findings from various studies that characterize usage of lexical and clause-level constructions in the course of producing texts based on the two discourse patterns, and contrasts these findings with quantitative and qualitative analyses of clause combining in the same texts. The study relies on a corpus of 40 texts collected from Hebrew speaker-writers, who each produced a narrative and an expository text following a semi-structured elicitation controlling for the components of field, tenor, and mode. The distributional and functional findings of the study suggest that discourse patterns, like other constructions, occupy a cline of idiomacity/schematicity. In its conclusion, the study considers the tangential and intersecting points between Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, on the other.