Volume 2, Issue 1 - Volume Editors: Martin Hilpert and Susanne Flach

The paper reports on a corpus-based study investigating the impact of frames and constructions on establishing text coherence. Partly conducted in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute / FrameNet, Berkeley, the study is based on systematic annotations of so-called Definite Null Instantiations (DNIs). A DNI, sometimes also called anaphoric NI, is a syntactically non-instantiated core frame element (FE), whose identity can be inferred from the co(n)text. By analyzing forms and functions of DNIs in spoken discourse, I will argue that omitted core FEs are often found to be specified in adjacent sentences, yielding frame-triggered text coherence. The case study sheds light on the text-linguistic relevance of frames and constructions. At the same time it paves the way for further investigations of textual reference in a cognitive-linguistic framework.

This study investigates Japanese learners’ production of English relative constructions, focusing on the information preference of noun phrases in spoken discourse. The constructions of Japanese learners and of native speakers of English were extracted from a spoken corpus according to learners’ English proficiency levels. The information status (New, Given, and Identifiable) of head noun phrases modified by relative clauses were also examined. The results found that, in an attempt to keep spoken communication coherent, native speakers and learners of all levels prefer general grammatical and pragmatic configurations in their production of English relative constructions. This preference is called the Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987). However, Japanese learners and native speakers did not share the same preference of language-specific information status. The results suggest that first language information preference plays a crucial role in second language acquisition, especially during the early stages of acquisition. They also suggest that discoursal properties affect the mechanisms and motivations of relative clause constructions in second language acquisition.

In this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammatical gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003). The researchers claim that speakers associated more stereotypically female adjectives with grammatically feminine nouns and more stereotypically male adjectives with grammatically masculine nouns. We were not able to replicate the results either in a word association task or in an analogous primed lexical decision task. This suggests that the results of the original experiment were either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or a statistical fluke. The question whether speakers assign sex-based interpretations to grammatical gender categories at all cannot be answered definitively, as the results in the published literature vary considerably. However, our experiments show that if such an effect exists, it is not strong enough to be measured indirectly via the priming of adjectives by nouns.

Illnesses and their names constitute a significant indicator of cultural levels, as they reveal a lot about the convictions, healing practices as well as the general state of medicine. Besides the naming of illnesses, their conceptualizations are also present in certain genres and text sections, which are, in turn, associated with specific functions. The present paper outlines illness-conceptions in 16th and 17th-century Hungarian medical recipes by means of a qualitative analysis of seven contemporary manuscripts in a cognitive linguistic framework. The investigation takes the schema of the recipes as the analytical framework, as it was one of the most typical genre within the medical discourse domain in the 16th and 17th centuries. A recurring topic of recipes is usefulness, which is elaborated along the ‘how-to-do-it’ function. We can observe three functional units in the text construction: the initiator, the instructional unit and the persuasion. The conceptual elaboration of illnesses typically occurs in the first and third units. In the initiators, it manifests through the names and symptoms of illnesses, while in the persuasive sections through the description of how the illness departs. The present paper concentrates on this last aspect and gives a detailed description of the conceptual categories concerning the departure of the disease (cleansing, easing, soothing, stopping, starting etc.), their frequency and co-ocurrence. The research attempts to give a discourse pragmatic approach to the topic, expanding on the semantic analysis based on the names of illnesses and the symptoms.

This article contributes to cognitive semantic research on the construal of figurative meaning in noun-noun compounds. Previous studies in this field have shown a predilection towards using conceptual blending theory in order to describe the process of meaning formation in nominal compounds. Observations have largely been based on analyses of established compounds and their conventionalized meanings. The current paper explores an alternative approach and methodology. A study was conducted in which participants were asked to interpret the meaning of a set of novel noun-noun compounds. These meaning descriptions are taken as an empirical base to investigate figurative interpretations. Since previous applications of conceptual blending theory have highlighted some limitations of describing meaning construal in compounds, and since the relation between conceptual blending and related processes of conceptual metaphor and metonymy has not been clarified yet, the analysis in the current study takes a step back and relies on conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Besides providing an overview of the amount of figurative meaning interpretations given to the different test items, the paper pays particular attention to the methodological challenges of applying conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory in the attempt to capture the figurative nature of the meaning descriptions. A close analysis of selected meaning interpretations provides a first impression on how applying conceptual metaphor and metonymy can pave the way towards a more differentiated understanding of associative complexity in figurative meaning interpretations.

This paper deals with V-N-conversion in the Romance languages from a cognitive and constructional perspective. In contrast to English, the Romance languages distinguish different types of V-N-conversion on the basis of morphological and semantic properties: a stem conversion type and two types of nominalized infinitives. The critical discussion of earlier cognitive approaches to conversion leads to a comprehensive synchronic and diachronic description of all Romance V-N-conversion types, taking into account both the differences with respect to boundedness and the occurrence of metonymic meanings. On these grounds the syntactic type of the nominalized infinitive is modeled within the framework of Construction Grammar and its lexicalization as an instance of constructional change.

This paper aims to show how large-scale corpus data can be used for bottom-up modelling of semantic differences between geographical variants of one construction. More specifically, it investigates the geographic variation of quite as a degree modifier of adjectives in twenty national written varieties of English. Based on semantic classes of more than 6,000 adjectives in almost 240,000 occurrences of quite + ADJ from the Global Web-based English corpus, as well as additional data collected directly from the World Wide Web, the quantitative analyses reveal systematic geographic differences in the use of quite. In addition, a distributional Vector Space Model is created that represents the aggregate similarities and differences between the geographic variants of quite + ADJ in a clustering solution, which is interpreted with the help of a distinctive collexeme analysis.

A number of recent studies have emphasized the need for Construction Grammar to address the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of grammatical constructions. Much of how Construction Grammar incorporates pragmatic considerations of contextual factors into its descriptions of speakers’ linguistic knowledge remains to be worked out. In order to take a step towards that goal, this corpus-based study presents the just me construction and analyzes it from compositional, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. The study first delivers an in-depth description of the constrained and conventionalized composition of the construction. Then it proposes that the intricate semantic content is the result of formal and conceptual blending of the alternative question construction and the truncated it-cleft construction. Third, the pragmatic aspects of the just me construction are analyzed in terms of its hedging function, possible response patterns, and the conventionalized nature of its non-compositional meaning. All contribute to the recognition of the just me construction as a symbolic unit in the grammar of English. In conclusion, after a summary of the points made in previous sections, the insights gleaned from the present case study will be used to reflect in more general terms on the role of pragmatic considerations of contextual factors in Construction Grammar.

In German, neutral pronoun, es which corresponds to English it, is said to be used in addition to pronominal uses without any reference. In the tradition of German linguistics, non-referential es has been treated as a formal subject or an expletive that has only syntactic function and no meaning. In this paper, this view is challenged and es is regarded as a construction as a pair of syntactic form and meaning in the sense of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar. According to syntactic differences, non-referential es is classified into three types. In the analysis the semantic characteristics of these types are discussed. Type 1 expresses an objective indication of the existence/occurrence of a spontaneous event, Type 2 expresses an objective indication of the existence/occurrence of a spontaneous event for the experiencer expressed by dative, and Type 3 expresses an indication of the existence/occurrence of a new subject referent in a single episodic event. These constructions are sometimes extended to creative uses. Finally, a unitary account of these constructions is proposed and the correlation is summarized. German es with no specific reference is thus understood as a construction family which shares an objective construal.

This paper investigates certain uses of the German modal verb wollen ‘will, want’ (dubbed WILL) in which it relates non-firsthand information to a source, a function comparable to that of both reportive evidentiality and reported speech. The latter distinction is reframed in terms of a reportive-quotative opposition, and based on corpus-driven analysis the paper argues that WILL displays a combination of traits that warrant it the composite label “quoportive”. It is concluded that WILL, in its hybridity, is evidence for the existence of a category called “referral” which captures what is shared between evidentiality and reported speech.

At first glance, subject-verb-agreement seems to be straightforward in German: In the case of simplex NPs, the subject always agrees with the verb syntactically in person and number. However, with coordinated NPs in subject position, there is considerable variation in usage. If both conjuncts are singular NPs, the verb may display singular agreement - as would be expected, since coordinated structures inherit their syntactic properties from their individual components - but much more frequently, the verb displays plural agreement. On the basis of the LIMAS-corpus, a one-million-word corpus of written German, I will show that there is systematic variation between the two options. Among the determining factors are the position of the verb (preceding or following the subject), the type of NP (pronoun, proper name, lexical NP) and the internal syntactic structure of the subject (coordination of full NPs vs. coordination of partial NPs sharing a determiner, and definiteness vs. indefiniteness of the coordinated parts of the subject). I will discuss the results from the perspective of usage-based approaches and argue for an integration of semantic, pragmatic, and frequency factors in any theoretical approach to grammar.

Usage-based construction grammar needs to determine which schematizations are really supported by usage: Previous research on argumentstructure constructions with object-related complements has assumed overarching constructions with a formally underspecified component (Gries et al. 2005, 2010; Gonzalvez-Garcia 2009). These schematize over a number of formally different subconstructions. It has been shown, however, that paying attention to the formally different realisations of a constructional component may bring out the functional differential between subconstructions which are closely related within a construction network (Hampe 2011a). Based on the data used by Gries and colleagues (2010), this paper presents a fine-grained collostruction analysis of the as-predicative as a network of tightly related subconstructions and checks whether there is a functional difference between the subconstructions with nominal and adjectival as-complements. It is shown that the extended uses of the construction sketched out by Gries et al. (2005) are licensed by the subconstruction with nominal as-complement, rather than present a property of the overarching, most general pattern. Beyond this, the present paper locates the as-predicative within the network of all argument-structure constructions with phrasal object-related complements. In this context, it also discusses under which conditions the occurrence of a specific verb as a collexeme of more than one argument-structure construction can be seen as a verb-specific constructeme uniting several allostructions (Capelle 2006).

This paper discusses how collostructional analysis can be applied to the study of word-formation patterns. Drawing on a diachronic corpus study of German ung-nominalization and Infinitival Nominalization using the GerManC Corpus, it is shown that a cross-tabulation analysis comparing the frequencies of word-formation products to those of their respective bases can give valuable clues to the input language users rely on when abstracting a schema (i.e., a word-formation construction) from a quite heterogeneous array of instantiations.

This article argues in favour of dealing with valency phenomena and collocations in terms of constructions. An attempt is made to combine Goldberg’s model of argument structure constructions with item-specific valency constructions. It is argued that it may be appropriate to distinguish not only between verb-specific participant roles and argument roles, but to introduce a further level of clausal roles to account for AGENTIVITY and AFFECTEDNESS typically associated with subjects and traditional direct objects. Finally, the issue of to what extent the syntactic behaviour of verbs can be predicted from their meaning is taken up and it is shown that Goldberg’s Semantic Coherence Principle and Correspondence Principle have to be supplemented by a Valency Realisation Principle.