Constructions and Frames - Online First

Two structurally unrelated constructions can affect each other’s realization through a process that has been called constructional contamination. According to this effect, lexemes participating in a grammatical alternation will deviate in their stochastic preference for an alternant if they appear frequently in a contaminating construction that is formally similar to the alternant in question. In the present article, we evaluate whether such contamination effects can also be found between two constructions in Dutch which share the same form, including the verb krijgen ‘to get’ and a past participle, but have distinct meanings (a “receptive” vs. a “resultative” meaning), and, if so, whether these effects occur in both directions. We zoom in on word order differences: if krijgen and the participle appear in a verb cluster, both word orders are possible in the receptive krijgen-construction, while, for the resultative krijgen-construction, the order with krijgen preceding the participle is reported to be ungrammatical in the grammatical literature but is not altogether absent from real-language corpora. Logistic regression analyses, based on data culled from the SoNaR-corpus, show that the word order in both constructions is indeed affected by constructional contamination, thus showing that this phenomenon can be bidirectional. Additionally, we demonstrate that these contamination effects differ between two national varieties of Dutch, viz. Belgian vs. Netherlandic Dutch, and we argue that contamination can sometimes also result in a disambiguating reflex. These results suggest that subtle differences in the organization of the constructional network can result in (partly) different contamination effects.

This study proposes an extended FrameNet approach for the description of connectives. The meanings of connectives are described with respect to the two frames evoked by each of the conjoined clauses, whose combinational patterns are termed “frame valences”. Taking the English polysemous connective while as an example, features of each meaning were statistically analyzed based on the frame valences using correspondence analysis. The correspondence analysis has revealed that in the contrastive use the same frame tends to be evoked in the conjoined clauses. To test this result, this study has further examined the contrastive connective whereas, which has firmly supported the results of the correspondence analysis and shown that frames that are closely related via ‘frame-to-frame relations’ can be evoked in the contrastive uses. These findings, in turn, corroborate the validity of the frame-based approach for the description of connectives.