Reconstructing constructional semantics
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Jóhanna Barðdal
Abstract
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.
Abstract
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.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
-
Introduction
- Theory and data in cognitive linguistics 1
- Frequencies, probabilities, and association measures in usage-/exemplar-based linguistics 15
- Reconstructing constructional semantics 49
- The historical development of the it -cleft 87
- Theory and data in diachronic Construction Grammar 115
- The semantics of definite expressions and the grammaticalization of THE 141
- Cognitive explanations, distributional evidence, and diachrony 185
- Word classes 211
- Smashing new results on aspectual framing 239
- Index 261
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
-
Introduction
- Theory and data in cognitive linguistics 1
- Frequencies, probabilities, and association measures in usage-/exemplar-based linguistics 15
- Reconstructing constructional semantics 49
- The historical development of the it -cleft 87
- Theory and data in diachronic Construction Grammar 115
- The semantics of definite expressions and the grammaticalization of THE 141
- Cognitive explanations, distributional evidence, and diachrony 185
- Word classes 211
- Smashing new results on aspectual framing 239
- Index 261
