Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Verbal constructions in spoken language deviating from the norm

Reflections on the concept of atypicality

Abstract

Starting out from the consideration that conclusions as to what is atypical regarding a linguistic feature have to be drawn on the basis of language norms, the paper discusses three types of norms: those defined in authoritative grammars or dictionaries, those apparent through judgements by native speakers, and those determined by corpus-based analyses of language use in large corpora. As grammars and dictionaries are generally based on – formal – written language productions (“folk belief” being strongly dependant on school grammar), the norms defined do not cover the phenomena of verbal constructions occurring in oral language production, especially in dialogical contexts. The study of naturally occurring conversations consequently reveals a great number of syntactic, semantic and conversational features a priori deviating from the “official” norm. The paper demonstrates that rather than being atypical these forms are specific for oral language production. What is more, atypicality cannot be defined on the basis of one specific type of speech exchange system, each different genre having its own typical properties. Atypicality is consequently what does not coincide with the forms of oral or written conceptuality applied by the majority of a community of language users in a given situation.

Abstract

Starting out from the consideration that conclusions as to what is atypical regarding a linguistic feature have to be drawn on the basis of language norms, the paper discusses three types of norms: those defined in authoritative grammars or dictionaries, those apparent through judgements by native speakers, and those determined by corpus-based analyses of language use in large corpora. As grammars and dictionaries are generally based on – formal – written language productions (“folk belief” being strongly dependant on school grammar), the norms defined do not cover the phenomena of verbal constructions occurring in oral language production, especially in dialogical contexts. The study of naturally occurring conversations consequently reveals a great number of syntactic, semantic and conversational features a priori deviating from the “official” norm. The paper demonstrates that rather than being atypical these forms are specific for oral language production. What is more, atypicality cannot be defined on the basis of one specific type of speech exchange system, each different genre having its own typical properties. Atypicality is consequently what does not coincide with the forms of oral or written conceptuality applied by the majority of a community of language users in a given situation.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction vii
  4. Part 1. Atypical realization of the main arguments of the verb
  5. Verbs of pain and accusative subjects in Romanian 3
  6. Non-canonical ‘existential-like‘ constructions in colloquial Modern Hebrew 27
  7. IO realizations in Spanish reverse psych verb sentences 61
  8. Non-human agents as subjects in English and Dutch 87
  9. Part 2. Valency-changing devices and non-finite verb forms
  10. The argument-structure configuration of English middle and related structures 115
  11. Non-categorical categories 131
  12. Part 3. Variations in transitivity
  13. The semantic motivation of non-canonical predicative relations 163
  14. Atypical argument structures in French 181
  15. Split intransitivity in Lamaholot (East Flores, Indonesia) 203
  16. Part 4. Norm variation in predicate-arguments relations
  17. Geographic variation in a non-canonical infinitive structure with the modal verb brauchen 243
  18. Verbal constructions in spoken language deviating from the norm 265
  19. Index of authors 283
  20. Index of subjects 287
Atypical predicate-argument relations
This chapter is in the book Atypical predicate-argument relations
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.33.11sch

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction vii
  4. Part 1. Atypical realization of the main arguments of the verb
  5. Verbs of pain and accusative subjects in Romanian 3
  6. Non-canonical ‘existential-like‘ constructions in colloquial Modern Hebrew 27
  7. IO realizations in Spanish reverse psych verb sentences 61
  8. Non-human agents as subjects in English and Dutch 87
  9. Part 2. Valency-changing devices and non-finite verb forms
  10. The argument-structure configuration of English middle and related structures 115
  11. Non-categorical categories 131
  12. Part 3. Variations in transitivity
  13. The semantic motivation of non-canonical predicative relations 163
  14. Atypical argument structures in French 181
  15. Split intransitivity in Lamaholot (East Flores, Indonesia) 203
  16. Part 4. Norm variation in predicate-arguments relations
  17. Geographic variation in a non-canonical infinitive structure with the modal verb brauchen 243
  18. Verbal constructions in spoken language deviating from the norm 265
  19. Index of authors 283
  20. Index of subjects 287
Downloaded on 21.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/lis.33.11sch/html
Scroll to top button